A word on paranoia: everything becomes related. A straight line can be drawn from this thing that happened that many days ago, to this thing now. Everything takes on the same form, the same weight of other, unrelated events until the mind cracks and is paved over with this residue. Someone knows. Someone is pulling the strings. Someone is making a fool of you, watching and laughing and waiting.
The training for this had been the most difficult of anything the aurors learned or practiced and found that that it was difficult for several reasons. People left crying or teary eyed. There were days where a session would leave someone gasping for air. Dorcas was in the first group, the first where their minds were being opened up like a small shell with a big knife, she tried to be mindful when she was in the second group to not make a mess of it herself. But that's not how that works, one can be a mindful but unkind legilimens. One cannot be mindful and use the imperius curse. Especially not the latter because it is an imprinting of one's will on the other. It's not a suggestion; it's an insistence. So outside of training, she had not known that she was unprepared because everyone was so bad at it. They weren't a weak class per se but they were different. That lessons had been odd. It was coincidence that this lesson was moved or had to be changes the expert in this thing called out sick and then there were reschedules… No one had been adequately trained (not like there was adequate training for it) and anyway it was so rare. Most aurors, let alone non-aurors of wizarding England, back then had not even heard of legilemency until they were in training. And one so closely related to a curse? All the unforgivable curses, to do them were so difficult. Even more difficult was to do one quickly. You had to call on all of the foulest parts of yourself and who in all of England could really use the imperius curse elegantly enough to not make it appear as if they weren't using it?
They had left training lying to themselves and knowing they were lying to themselves because when it was used on her, when it happened, she had hardly even realized it was happening at all. In fact, with someone who knew what they were doing, it could be quite pleasant. She felt like someone was pouring a warm bucket of water over her head and had a faint, very far away thought that she might have gone to the bathroom on herself. She hadn't, but she wouldn't have known to look down at herself because the thought was already gone. She started to walk and thought how strange it was until she realized she hadn't told herself to walk. When she told herself to stop, she kept walking. It was a very strange sensation, indeed. Some part of her recognized she was and wasn't thinking simultaneously and these thoughts were happening in mere fractions of a second from one another. And where was the panic that she and so many other people had felt in training? Where was the feeling that aided in shaking the other person out of their mind? Where was the feeling? If she could feel it, she could push whoever it was out of her existence. But she wasn't even thinking that, not really, because another dangerous idea started to form, to cement itself. It was easier to let someone think for her. But this was far away still. She felt herself smiling vaguely, dumbly. She kept walking and walking until she was brought face to face with a smiling man with a grey bowler wearing a blueish grey suit, a woman in a smart navy skirt suit at his arm. Dorcas shook his hand and now she could feel the panic. It was the woman in the suit or or the man or both of them or neither of them or. He dropped his voice as they were on a busy street, he gave her information she needed, information she would have willingly gone to collect of her own free will and then information she would not have.
"Ah, that's why," she said, still smiling.
"I hope you understand. It was faster this way.", the man said out loud or in her head.
The woman stood there looking at and past Dorcas at the same time. Dorcas shook her head as a gesture she would have done naturally anyway. He tipped his hat and they walked off. When her mind was free, the temperature dropped and the wind picked up where it left off, where it had always been though it seemed sudden. Dorcas stood still until it did not make sense to stand there anymore, until it would have been suspicious to stand there any longer. She stood so longer that it would be pointless to feign having dropped something or that she might have missed the bus, she started to walk of her own volition.
She hadn't had to think of her training in a long time. What it had taught her and what it obviously hadn't. Until now she had believed to be proficient at occlumency. As the first group gained composure, they were asked to switch. She would be in group B now. She had had to wander around someone else's mind and the familiar roadmap she had built for herself over time was unusable with someone else. These training sessions were familiar and legendary in the worst way. Some people, known legilimens were only allowed ever to work with highly, highly gifted occlumens. But like many gifted people in a new setting, some people learned they too were gifted when given the chance. How many time had the tape deck of other people's minds unspooled in these very same sessions was anyone's incorrect guess. The highest estimation could still have been doubled. All sort of disgusting, horrible things unwound during those sessions with the unspoken rule to never speak of them to anyone else, which made it worse. They were brothers and sisters in training and in the field. They were to defend one another before anyone else, before themselves. If one of them went down, that represented a measurable net decrease in the safety of the wizarding population at any moment and all of humanity in the long run. Whatever you saw in someone else's mind, you did not, even as it became part of your own mind. It was for everyone's own good.
