"What?!" Mira finally managed to gasp.
The brunette met her eyes directly as she repeated, "There's no country of New Avalon. The Death Eaters just took over Britain, but—" She kept talking, but Mimi stopped listening, caving to the instinct to project herself into the other girl's mind, desperate to find the answer to the question that popped into her head: What the fuck?! Yes, Ronald had projected that thought about kicking out the Death Eaters, but she'd thought, she didn't know, that Britain and New Avalon were still engaged in active hostilities, or something! Not that there was no New Avalon at all!
It wasn't difficult, all three of them were completely open — Harry more self-contained, but barely more self-aware — and sitting here only feet away from them for...however long her explanation had taken, she'd already started to... Thom called it cozying up to another mind, letting her awareness spread through the surrounding area in tune with the ambient magic until she reached another mind, and unconsciously adopting the necessary frequency to slip past their defences to sort of lurk on the edges of their consciousness, even when she was trying to respect other people's privacy and mental autonomy. (He did it, too. It drove Sev nuts.) Consciously diving deeper into Hermione's thoughts and memories, following associations from one memory to the next, pursuing the information giving them context, more than the specific experiences, was the easiest and most natural thing in the world. She just...stopped deliberately holding herself back.
It only took a few minutes to sift through the muggleborn's understanding of recent history, working backward from the association between New Avalon and the Death Eaters to "Voldemort" and then forward from Lily blowing him up in Eighty-One — apparently the point of divergence was before then, since New Avalon would already have been founded at the time — through Britain's ridiculous hero-worship of Harry; through the adventures and encounters these three had had with "Voldemort" at Hogwarts; through what Harry had told her and her own experiences with the Death Eaters; through the whole ridiculous prophecy thing and Sirius and Dumbledore's deaths; and their current mission — to destroy Thom's horcruxes and kill him, bringing an end to the tyranny he had apparently recently imposed on Britain.
She flitted into Ronald's memories to examine his understanding of the "First War" — he was a pureblood, a Weasley, and his mother was a Prewett. His family had been intimately involved in the war in the Seventies (on the wrong side, of course, there was a boatload of false propaganda floating around in his mind). It seemed that rather than taking Mann in Nineteen Eighty, Thom had, in this universe, decided to continue the terror campaign, which had eventually resulted in his (temporary) destruction and his followers' dissolution, many of the most loyal Death Eaters consigned to Azkaban (including Bella, though Cissy and Lucius managed to pull off an Imperius Defence, apparently — if and when Mimi ran into her, she'd have to congratulate Narcissa on that one).
His sister (who wasn't here, when from what Mimi had seen of her she really, really should be — the first word that came to mind to describe her was feisty) had been possessed by Thom's first horcrux (Tam) years ago, and Harry had destroyed it after fighting a basilisk with a sword — so obviously she wouldn't be looking up Tam as a potential ally, and there was really no telling where Ari would be. When they'd run away from home in a fit of teenage rebellion in Mimi's world, they'd come to New Avalon, but since it didn't exist here, she had no idea where they'd go. They could be anyone, anywhere in the world in this timeline.
Damn it!
The idea of Harry fighting a basilisk with a sword was so absurd that she'd had to take a quick peek into his mind as well — she took back her initial assessment of him as sort of useless (throwing a fucking expelliarmus at her, honestly), because that was the most insanely reckless thing she'd ever seen anyone do (Had he actually died for a second, there? She thought he might have...) but it was also awesome and surprisingly effective, so full marks there, Potter. She caught a flash of Ron's sister much more recently, enough to determine Harry wasn't completely bent, but he pushed the memory away quickly — he wasn't aware of her, he just didn't want to think about Ginny, at Hogwarts without him. Instead she followed Hogwarts to Dumbledore to Harry's childhood.
The Old Goat hadn't done any better by him than he had by Mimi (though Harry inexplicably didn't seem to see that), and then to more recent Dumbledore memories: his death (a short tangent on Harry's hatred of Severus, who at least seemed sane, albeit even more bitter than he had been when they'd been at Hogwarts in her world — he'd resigned when she finally left), him telling Harry certain things about Thom, showing him memories in a pensieve; Bella's trial, seen in a pensieve; the "Voldemort" she was so faithful to, his resurrection in a graveyard, his abuse of his followers, wondering how anyone could possibly be loyal to that lunatic; the shite Harry had somehow pulled out of "Voldemort's" mind; his anxiety about having to kill or be killed; their plan to go steal a second horcrux—
Enough!
She pulled back to her own mind, letting her head fall to the table with a groan, interrupting...whatever Hermione was still talking about.
"Mira?" Harry asked, clearly concerned. "What's wrong?"
"Aside from the fact that my home country doesn't exist in this timeline, and the main resources I was planning on tapping to deal with an alien invasion are all insane or dead? I don't know, you're pants at occlumency?"
"I— You— Did you read my mind?"
"Yes. All of you, actually. Sorry, patience is a virtue of which I might actually possess a negative degree. Sev's words." She weathered the storm of their fear and disapproval and mistrust for a few seconds before throwing a general calming and acceptance suggestion at them. "Again. I'm sorry. If it helps, you all have my word that I will never use mind-magic to harm you."
"Swear it," Ronald demanded immediately, fear spiking as she raised an eyebrow at him.
"Beg pardon?" she said, slightly offended that he wouldn't take her word alone, but not really surprised. They didn't know her, and mind-magic was sort of a terrifying concept for a lot of non-mind-mages. Especially the ones who grew up hearing horror stories about the Morrigan and fae-tales where glamourie and mind-magic were used to prey mercilessly on the hapless human protagonists.
"If—" He had to stop and clear his throat. "If your word means anything, swearing it as a magical vow shouldn't make a difference to you."
Mimi was pretty sure that was a line from The Nine Lives of Cat Crandon, a children's book about an animagus who got lost in Faerie. (Adventures Ensued.) "'On the contrary, Curious Cat, those who are untrusting are untrustworthy in turn, would you not agree?'" she quoted, smirking. Ronald, who apparently hadn't intended to quote the storybook, but now that she'd pointed it out, suddenly realised exactly where he'd gotten that idea, went very pink, his face clashing spectacularly with his hair. Harry and Hermione just sort of stared at her like she'd lost the plot. "But, fine. I give you my word, Ronald Weasley, that I will not use mind magic to harm you, or Harry Potter, or Hermione Granger. By my honour, upon my wand, twice and thrice-sworn before Magic Itself." A sliver spark rose from the tip of her wand, vanishing as the oath was acknowledged by Magic.
"Er. Thanks," the redhead muttered, clearly feeling a bit silly for having insisted when she did indeed agree so easily. Sure, swearing on her wand wasn't quite as serious as swearing on her magic, but it was still a hell of a lot more than he'd had any right to expect.
She nodded, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. It wasn't like it was a particularly binding vow, since neither of them had defined harm and manipulating them was still on the table. As was any form of physical or magical harm other than mind-magic. (Real vows tended to be a lot less dramatic and a lot more specific than those in storybooks.) "It's fine. I know mind-mages are scary, and you three are already so far out of your league dealing with Alternate Thom, it's not even funny." She paused for half a beat, considering. "Okay, that's a lie, it is kind of funny, in a this is exactly the sort of shite I'd expect from Dumbledore, actually way."
"Don't talk about Dumbledore like that!" Harry snapped, apparently more upset about that than having his mind casually invaded (though that was partly due to her calming suggestion, and partly because he had no idea the sort of damage she could do with unfettered access to his mind). "He was a great man!"
Mimi felt her eyes narrow. She'd talk about Dumbledore in any damn way she pleased. Yes, she'd benefited immensely from being raised at Hogwarts, with dozens of ghosts willing and eager to teach her everything they could, but if Bella hadn't sent her familiar to start teaching Mimi magic when she turned seven, helped her sneak out to acquire a wand, and told Sev that she was locked away in the non-school part of the Castle and he should get his arse over there and start teaching her mind-magic, she probably wouldn't have been allowed to learn any wizardry at all. She'd asked when she'd turned eleven if she could have a wand and attend lessons with the other children, and Dumbledore had put her off with waffling blandishments, which said pretty much all she needed to know about his regard for her (as though their regular conversations wherein he attempted to convince her that she should be afraid of her own magic hadn't).
Plus, he'd kept her almost entirely isolated from other living humans for eight and a half years. There'd been Sev (though Dumbledore hadn't known that he knew Mimi was at the Castle), and Uncle James, and Dumbledore himself. Ghosts, house elves, and the illusions Bella projected through Nemain. That was it. Which maybe didn't seem like she'd been deprived of anything, she hadn't thought so at the time, but keeping an empathic legilimens from interacting with other minds was a cruelty she hadn't been in a position to appreciate until she'd finally left the Castle. To say nothing of preventing a child from interacting with other children. Even with the benefit of legilimency, she'd never quite gotten the hang of socialising with her peers.
And quite honestly, the Old Goat didn't deserve Harry defending him, either. "He left you with abusive muggles for sixteen years; failed to teach you a damn thing about how to even defend yourself at any point in the six years you were at the school with him despite his certainty that you have to kill Thom; and died leaving you a task you're not remotely prepared to complete, with no explicit instructions or direction, and the implication that you can't ask for help, it's got to be you, because you're the hero of the story in his twisted little world and heroes walk bravely into the darkness to fight it alone.
"Telling a sixteen-year-old who's never been anywhere other than Hogwarts, Diagon Alley, and his abusive muggle aunt's home to go out into the world with little more than a sense of righteousness and hope in his heart, find Voldemort's remaining soul-anchors, destroy them and slay the evil monster like the absurd Boy Who Lived character he built around you would, is one thousand per cent a thing I would expect him to do."
"He– He didn't!" Harry protested weakly. "I know what I'm supposed to do..."
"Right," she scoffed. "So you polyjuice yourself to sneak into the Ministry and steal the one horcrux off Darling Dolly's toady neck. I guarantee Thom put coercive enchantments on his horcruxes to compel anyone who finds them to keep them close, keep them safe — makes it easier for the horcruxes to get in their heads and possess them — and it's a giant, gaudy necklace, I'm sure she's wearing it. And then what? Did he teach you how to use sympathetic tracking charms to narrow down the locations of the others? No. Did he leave you some way to destroy them if you actually do manage to find them? No. Did he tell you that you should be working with Severus to—"
"No! He trusted that bastard right to the end, and he fucking killed him! I watched him do it! And they rewarded him for it! Gave him Dumbledore's job!"
"Um, yeah. Exactly. I know you saw the same scene I did, since I saw it through you. What I don't know is how you didn't see an old man suffering progressive, irreversible curse damage begging a man he trusted to end his suffering and carry on with their cause."
"He was begging for his life!"
"He was sacrificing his king to raise a knight to a queen, because let's be honest: the king's a bit useless."
"What the hell sort of chess do you play?" Ronald asked, almost as though he couldn't help himself, though Harry was glad for the distraction from his rising doubts.
She smirked at him. "A more realistic sort, where the game's not over until the last piece falls. A country is more than its king — so long as a single pawn has the will to fight, a nation is not truly conquered. One would think a man attempting to overthrow the people who have recently established themselves as the legitimate rulers of this nation, in spite of absolutely overwhelming odds, would appreciate the sentiment."
Ronald's mouth, which had been open, on the verge of telling her that wasn't how anything worked, snapped shut.
"If you'd like me to spell it out for you: Severus is a spy. In my world, he was firmly on the side of New Avalon, but in my world, Thom isn't an openly sadistic loony bin escapee with a snake fetish. He's a very shrewd and rational politician who keeps his sadistic tendencies and snake fetish to himself." Cheap shot, but she couldn't resist. (Thom — or, as Sirius liked to call him, Mister Sparkly Lamia Princess — was in many ways very mockable.) And it got a startled ha! out of Ronald, so hey, there was that. "I guarantee, if Thom hadn't already lost Severus's loyalty by turning into a fucking caricature of himself, he lost it when he killed Lily. Which is not to say that he was loyal to Dumbledore, but the enemy of my enemy is a potential ally, and Severus could almost certainly be trusted to do everything in his power to destroy this Voldemort."
"Maybe your Severus could, but Snape can't!" Harry snapped. "You just said it yourself! In your world, Voldemort's sane. How the hell can you think you can expect Snape to be the same as your version?!"
"Because you're still alive," she said flatly. "Severus is at least as good a legilimens as I am." Well, at least with occlumency and classical thought-divining — there were a couple of different directions the talent could initially manifest, and Mimi was definitely better at the aspects of the art which were closer to straight subsumption (emotional manipulation, compulsions, direct possession, and so on). "Granted, Thom's apparently lost much of his ability in this universe, it's theoretically possible Sev has too, but if his mental faculties had degenerated to anything near the extent necessary to affect his ability to do mind-magic it would be obvious in his daily behaviour, and your memories show that not to be the case. I'd bet every galleon in the Black vault that if he wanted to pick you out of a crowd of polyjuiced Potters, it wouldn't take him two seconds. The fact that you were all flying in different directions would just mean he'd have to get close to any one of the six other pairs of idiots who knew which one you were, and steal it out of their minds, rather than identifying you directly."
Harry seemingly had no response to that. She could feel that he wanted to believe that Dumbledore had been right about Snape, he just still couldn't get past seeing him cast...definitely not an actual Avada, a proper Killing Curse wouldn't have blasted Dumbledore off the Tower. But Harry probably couldn't be expected to know that.
"They found themselves in a position where Dumbledore was dying anyway, and where Severus, by essentially giving him a mercy stroke, could strengthen his own position, render his 'loyalty' to Voldemort unquestionable and earn him a degree of independence. He leveraged Voldemort's newly assured trust in him into taking over as Headmaster, from which position he can now orchestrate the resistance to whatever the fuck they're doing here in London from an actual fucking fortress. The longer he can keep up appearances of being a loyal Death Eater, the better, because he'll be able to gather intelligence on Voldemort's plans, but in the meanwhile, he'll be free to undermine the other Death Eaters' attempts to indoctrinate the children of Britain — I did see something about all children being forced to attend Hogwarts, did I not? — which he will do because he might be a ruthless bastard when he has to be, but he wouldn't willingly lead a kid into enslaving themself to a madman.
"Yes, everyone on his side also thinks he's firmly on Voldemort's side, including all the professors in the Castle, but if you think that means he can't manipulate them into doing whatever he needs them to do without breaking character, you're severely underestimating him."
"I think you might be giving him too much credit," Hermione said, choosing her words carefully. "He really is a terrible person."
Mimi snorted. "He's a terrible Potions teacher, but no one has ever died as a result of an accident in his lessons, and both OWL and NEWT scores have gone up under his tenure." Hermione knew that, Mimi had gotten it from her. "He appears to favour the Slytherins, but only to the extent that the rest of the professors disadvantage them. He wasn't the one who gave Gryffindor a hundred and seventy points at the Leaving Feast your first year," she added, as her words sparked a guilt-tainted memory from Ronald. "He seems to hate Harry, but he's clearly trying to protect him, and Harry manages to get into potentially fatal situations at least once a year. If I were him, I'd hate Harry, too."
Ooh, that struck a nerve. She skimmed through the memory of the last time he'd seen Severus, brought to the front of Harry's mind by the conversation, enjoying the simmering anger and outrage building behind his furious glare. She liked feeling secondhand anger. It was warm, like infatuation, but less cloying, and the outrage made it more tingly. Exciting. (She was well aware that if Sev were here, this would be the point where he'd think, There is something very wrong with you, Mira Calytrix..., but she really didn't care.) She continued before he could get a word in edgewise.
"In your last interaction with Sev, he tried to goad you into learning to cast silently and keep your mind closed — which you will note are the same two glaringly obvious weaknesses I've pointed out in the brief period I've been here — because if you don't, you're going to get yourself killed the first time you fight someone who knows what they're doing; saved your life from the other Death Eaters; and put on a show of being a hot-head who can't take a few schoolyard insults from a traumatised child for the Death Eaters who were still within sight, while managing not to actually hurt you badly enough you couldn't stand up two minutes later. I'd be willing to bet he also turned around and used losing his composure as an excuse to not have thought to take you prisoner for Voldemort to kill himself." She'd also be willing to bet, based on the few snippets she'd seen of him in Harry's mind, that the Dark Lord had severely punished Severus for failing to do so.
A hint of doubt finally crept into the idiot boy's mind, thinking back on the interaction. Did he really... No... He couldn't have meant...
"If he were that volatile, he wouldn't have survived spying on Voldemort, from what you've seen of him. Which is exactly why he wants the Death Eaters to think he is that bad at controlling himself. And he wasn't sabotaging you trying to learn occlumency, by the way. Straight mental assault is the quickest way to achieve an awareness of the boundary between yourself and the outside world, even if it's also the most painful. It's just, you're a legilimens, too—" ("I—") "—so trying to learn the most basic occlumency actually started to spur on your development of the talent and picking up more from Voldemort—" ("But I—") "—not sure how on that, yet — and you quit before you actually managed to learn any occlumency to speak of. Or, more likely, Sev engineered an excuse to stop teaching you because he was afraid you'd draw too much attention to yourself with your developing legilimency—" ("I'm n—") "—before you learned enough occlumency to keep a single damn secret. Which would be a perfectly valid concern because, I cannot emphasise this enough, you're utter shite at occlumency."
"Will you shut up a second?! I'm not a legilimens!" Harry practically shouted.
"Don't be thick, of course you are."
"No, I'm not!" he protested, like being a legilimens wasn't a fantastic advantage that he should be celebrating, actually.
"Yes, you are." She tugged at the memory of him (entirely accidentally and instinctively) performing reciprocal legilimency on Sev. "That, right there? That was you doing legilimency. Sort of like legilimency with training wheels, but still. Attuning your mind to the frequency of another directly. Non-legilimens can't do even that much without the charm." With the exception of Dru and Bella, but they didn't count. Mimi didn't know what Dru was, but she agreed with the general consensus that the seer couldn't possibly be human. "If I had to guess, I'd say he was afraid that trying to dig more deeply and figure out what the hell is going on between you and Voldemort would give away that he's working against the madman, and teaching you to develop your legilimency properly while whatever it is is still going on would make the situation much worse before it got better, and while you'll probably be good at more advanced occlumency, closing yourself off from the world doesn't come naturally to most legilimens, and again, trying to learn more advanced techniques would also help you develop your legilimency, so. Just not teaching you anymore was probably the best option."
Harry fumed silently for a long moment, his friends waiting on tenterhooks to see which way his reaction would break. Apparently baby brother had a bit of a temper. "Even if you're right, it doesn't matter! He still killed Dumbledore, and he's still in charge of Hogwarts, now. What the hell is he going to do to find horcruxes while he's stuck minding every non-muggleborn kid in Britain?"
Mimi opened her mouth to respond with a sharp retort about how it might just possibly be useful to know who your potential allies were, but paused. "Actually, you're right, you knowing that Sev's on your side would do you approximately zero good, and would probably hurt him in the long run, because you, or the students, or the other professors not putting up a convincing resistance to his leadership would hint to the Death Eaters that he's still playing both sides. I take back that particular criticism of Dumbledore's utter lack of foresight, this is probably the only way to get all you Light idiots to play your parts properly. I probably shouldn't have explained to you, actually, if there's a chance Voldemort can pick shite out of your mind, but I suspect if he could, he'd already know that you're trying to capture his horcruxes, and there would've been Death Eaters waiting for you the first time you went out to spy on the Ministry." Cold fear swept over all three of them. Apparently they hadn't thought of that. "It's probably fine.
"But for my purposes, Sev being sane and on your side means he can help me figure out exactly what the hell happened to drive Thom and Bella insane. I need to reverse that, if possible, because the Death Eaters — assuming they've picked up anywhere close to where they left off in the Eighties — represent the largest and most cohesive military force in Britain, and even if they don't outnumber the Aurors and Hit Wizards anymore, they're currently running the government — they're going to need to cooperate with muggle forces and any other allies we can scrounge up to deal with the DAPs, which they are certainly not in any condition to do at the moment — and he needs to be prepared to lock down the school when the rifts appear. Every magical schoolchild in Britain is currently housed in that castle, with the exception of muggleborns who are already in hiding or on the run, and hopefully keeping well away from major population centres which will immediately attract the DAPs' attention. If he can hold the Castle, that's a good thing — they'll be safer there than they would in their own homes. But if he can't, Britain may lose an entire generation of mages in one fell swoop.
"So, unless any of you have any other pertinent information to add, I think my course of action is clear. I need to go talk to him."
Harry scoffed. "Oh, yeah, just waltz up to Death Eater -controlled Hogwarts and tell the fucking Death Eaters that you need to talk to the Headmaster about an impending alien invasion. Then come back and let us know how it goes."
Mimi sniggered. "Don't be thick. I'm going to waltz up to Death Eater -controlled Hogwarts and tell them that I'm a previously-homeschooled sixteen-year-old who needs to enroll, apologise profusely for having missed my portkey from Brittany yesterday, and get myself escorted up to the Office of the Headmaster to be Sorted, whereupon I will use legilimency to pique Sev's interest in a private conversation, he will dismiss everyone else in order to have a Very Serious Talk about Discipline and Punctuality, and we'll have a nice long chat about what the fuck happened to this Britain." By which she meant, they'd use legilimency to exchange relevant memories, because that was much faster than actually talking, and would almost certainly be the only way to assure him that she wasn't taking the piss. "You all can come, if you like. Just polyjuice yourselves as random muggle teenagers, like you were planning on polyjuicing as Ministry employees. Should be a lark." Not that she thought any of them would. Harry seemed a bit shell-shocked, while Hermione absolutely mistrusted her. Ronald was more open to the idea of trying to recruit her to help with their Dark Lord problem, since she clearly knew what the fuck was going on with the horcruxes as well if not better than they did (she knew what horcruxes were, and that Thom had made several, but she didn't know what they were or where he'd hidden them, so she couldn't just tell them, but if they captured one, they could almost certainly find a spell to locate the others), but did not like that she'd casually used legilimency on them, and thought the alien invasion thing was mad.
"Wait, what?" Harry said, as she pushed her chair away from the table. "Like, right now?"
"Well, no, right now I'm going to use the loo, and possibly find Kreacher and see if I can get him to tell me what the fuck is wrong with the Family Magic." The elf had woken and slipped away while she was talking, presumably because his master was clearly no longer objecting to her presence and she didn't appear to be an active threat. "I was trying to tactfully give you a few minutes to discuss the revelations of the morning in privacy, but since you've drawn attention to it." She shrugged. "Certainly within the hour, though. Mabon is only three weeks away. I kinda think a sense of urgency is warranted, don't you?"
(They didn't, of course, but they would. Twenty-two days and counting...)