Disclaimer: I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).
ooo
When Mary wakes in the middle of the night, it is with the thought: Nature asserts itself. The dream was much clearer; she could almost make it out. There was the flash of green light, and the falling figure; there was the shout, and the other one…
… against that London square, with its rain-slicked pavement, its lights, its passing buses: a city scene, oddly detached from the action in the foreground. Unreal, as if it didn't belong to the same world, as if the action were happening somewhere else, but that was the nature of dreams.
Only this dream doesn't feel like a dream but a memory.
She wakes, and the room is still, except for the sleeper next to her, who mutters and twitches in her sleep. An active-duty soldier or whatever it is they call it. Those people across the border don't have armies, exactly; all along she's been steering by metaphor.
In sleep, in autumn moonlight – the moon high, and it will be higher in winter - the sleeper is only human. Her hand reflexively closes, a gesture that Mary understands by now; it's the grasp on a weapon that isn't there. Do these folk do their magic in their sleep? Or is there an inhibitor on that as on walking about or striking blows in one's sleep?
Nature asserts itself, whether because of her proximity to the original maker of the seal on memory, or because such measures must wear through in dream; she doesn't know. She knows what that pantomime of shadows must be: the falling figure is Jackie, the one who whirls about is Addie, the dark figure behind the burst of green light - the murderer. She can't see his face, of course; she can't see any faces. They're suggestions only, the outlines left once all the details have been erased.
She sighs, for this won't do. She sits up, and watches Addie sleep.
"You don't want that memory back," Addie had said. "It will put you on the other side of that door." Dr. Rosencrantz's door. And would that be such a bad thing? Better to know than not to know. And on the other side of the border, they have their distinguished consultants as well; might there be a reciprocity agreement of some sort? For she's most certainly a survivor of their war, even if it's not acknowledged.
No, it was acknowledged, by that boy in the waiting room: Blaise. Blaise Zabini, he of the antic quips and cranks, conversing with her under the disapproving eyes of his friend Daphne. Blaise and Daphne are friends—not lovers, she's quite sure of that—for Daphne's look is all too clear-sighted. Half the time she's disapproving of her friend, as if he's within inches of going too far.
And the other, the Distinguished Consultant, what was her name? Peculiar name: Boudicca. Boudicca Derwent. A healer named after an ancient warrior queen, whose grave (so it's rumored) underlies King's Cross Station.
Her own hands close impulsively—what is it she seeks to grasp? As if one could grasp anything…
She will talk to them tomorrow, at work, the liaison officers. Granger and Longbottom, barely out of their teens-heartbreakingly young, like all soldiers, and carrying themselves like adults. She remembers their faces: Granger's is serious, strong-boned and intense, under her mop of thick, frizzy hair; Longbottom looks younger than his years, almost schoolboyish with his still-round cheeks, until you see the scars over his cheekbones, where something sharp, but not too sharp, tore furrows in the skin and (on the right side) came perilously close to the eye-socket. She remembers someone whispering that they had both been tortured in the course of the guerrilla war…
What they have in common is kind eyes, much too old for their faces of course, but kind. It's that observation that makes her cry, that she's feeling reassured by a kind look from children, who are demobilized soldiers.
Addie shifts in her sleep, rolls over, an arm flung over her eyes to shield them, as if the moonlight coming in through the Venetian blinds were too much to bear, as if it were—green spell-fire, the bolt that struck Jackie and dropped her in the street, on the wet pavement, in the rain…
Daphne Greengrass has eyes that exact color. Curious that the color of her eyes is captured in her name as well: the color of light coming through living foliage, but in that dream, green of the intensity of lightning.
Mary does not remember Jackie lying on the pavement, staring up at the lights with empty unseeing eyes, though that must have been… neither does she remember the gesture of the astonished bodyguard, nor the face of the murderer. Addie's kinsman, she'd said.
The sheets tangle around Addie's body, like the drapery of the Winged Victory, as if she were in flight in the skies of dream. The moonlight makes white marble of her arms and the curve of her right breast, carves deep shadows in the folds of the sheets, glints on Addie's teeth as her lips open and she murmurs something unintelligible.
She's on the uncanny boundary between worlds. There's a witch sleeping in her bed. Over candlelight and wine, a bargain was made… and sealed in an embrace that took her instantaneously from one end of London to the other, as if by magic. No, not as if. By magic.
What followed, of course, was ordinary ecstasy… but she supposes that some things are the same, no matter what kind of human one is.
ooo
It's the lunch hour, and the waiting room is relatively empty. The liaison officers are on duty as usual. Longbottom has just stood up to tell his colleague that he's going to step out for some take-away from the café down the street, and would she care for something…?
Granger smiles up at him, and nods. He smiles back at her, radiantly, and says, "The usual, then?"
As the door to the hallway closes behind him, Mary sighs; the decision has been made for her. She clears her throat, and then says, "Miss Granger." A pause. "It is Miss, isn't it? You don't have military rank."
"No, we're not an army," she replies. "Not strictly speaking, no." She frowns, reading the expression on Mary's face. "Is there something I can help you with?"
Mary finds herself nodding, and the tears coming unbidden, professional veneer or not. No, she's taking off the mask of the one who knows best, who's there to help with the healing of the others.
"I… I've been told that I… that my friend…" Pull yourself together, she thinks. Just spell it out. "My friend was Jackie Bones. Niece to Amelia, the head of your Dimly." (She still doesn't know for what those letters stand, but she's reciting this to a native who presumably knows.) "She was killed by someone named Lestrange, so I'm told." Granger flinches, which Mary doesn't miss; that name must be notorious. "And I was Obliviated, by the bodyguard. Addie McConnell. You know Addie."
Granger nods, with an unreadable expression.
Mary says, with professional crispness, "You did well, you know, to intervene when she was mistreating that boy."
Granger nods. "Thank you for backing me up."
"Tell me… do you know… about memory charms?" Quite unexpectedly, Granger bites her lip. "Do they wear thin after a bit? I'm having dreams, you see…" Granger frowns and hesitates a bit before replying.
"I'm not an expert on Obliviate, actually. What I did was something quite different." She adds, "But I've read a bit about it, since the war. It's not a question much studied. Though Healer Derwent would certainly know." She looks Mary in the eye for the first time. "You're looking for a referral, aren't you?"
Mary nods.
Granger runs a hand through her hair, sighs, and says, "Yes. Yes, I suppose there are people on this side of the border as well." She squares her shoulders and says, "I'll talk to Kingsley directly. Do you know of anyone else who's having problems of this sort?"
Mary shakes her head. "I wouldn't know myself if I hadn't been told."
Granger narrows her eyes, as if drawing a bead on someone or something she decidedly doesn't like. "Well, something will have to be done about that." She reaches into her pocket and extracts a baton like the one that Addie showed her, closes her eyes for a moment as if in meditation, and then flicks it. The tip glows, and then a misty nimbus appears, out of which solidifies a ghostly otter. The apparition hovers in midair and looks at them both with its round shining eyes.
Granger says, "Kingsley, could we have a talk at nearest opportunity? About Obliviate and some of our Muggle casualties." The ghostly animal swims off into the wall—and disappears.
"So this hasn't been an issue heretofore?"
"Oh no, but it's going to be an issue now, if I have anything to say about it." There's a satisfied half-smile on her face. "All sorts of things are coming into question in the post-war, and it's high time they did."
ooo
"I wouldn't know myself if I hadn't been told," Mary repeats.
It's a mere three days later, and she has a personal audience with the Minister for Magic. The man she knew as Mr. Kingsley, whose actual name is Kingsley Shacklebolt, is sitting across from her in one of the conference rooms in the clinic. Strings have been pulled, or pressure applied. The force responsible is sitting in the room with her, Mary would suspect, along with the Distinguished Consultant.
Kingsley nods, and Granger narrows her eyes, and the Distinguished Consultant taps quill on parchment and asks her about her symptoms.
Mary tells the whole story, the part she remembers and the part she doesn't, the odd foggy feeling she's had for over two years, no, now that she thinks about it, more like three years, and the way that something in her chest says no when she turns her feet to walk to that square where Jackie's flat was, and how she can't even remember where Jackie's Aunt Amelia lived, because things go strange when she tries to think about it.
Something is not right, and she's known that it wasn't right, because as a professional she has watched people go through shock and grief and, yes, post-traumatic stress, and her symptoms do not match. And yet, all this time, some piece of her has known that Jackie isn't there any more, that she will not find her if she does persuade her feet to go to that square and to ring the bell.
She tells how, when Addie commanded that boy to show the emblem on his arm, she did remember that smoky green firework of the skull and snake, leering over the rainy square.
She squares her shoulders and tells how Addie did not want her released from the spell, how she said that she wishes she could forget, and would not wish that memory on anyone.
And then she looks Kingsley in the eyes—and it's a hard face to confront, not because of his power but his personal charm—and asks just how often his people destroy the memories of innocent bystanders, and (what's harder yet to ask) if Addie McConnell is hiding something with that memory charm. If there is any possibility…
… that the woman with whom she spent the night four days ago is hiding something.
Kingsley frowns, and says that to his knowledge that report was completely in order, but there was no question that McConnell had taken it hard, very hard, because that bodyguard detail had been her first assignment after the completion of her training.
Granger looks at Kingsley, and then slides a glance at Derwent, and raises her chin a bit before she adds, in that faux-naif way that only a brash young outsider can pull off (and she perfectly well knows it, Mary thinks), that she wouldn't doubt the report was well-gone-over, because Jackie Bones was the niece of the Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, after all. The Squib niece. Might that make a difference…?
Kingsley favors Granger with a look so bland that Mary has no doubt that he's dangerous.
Granger, on the other hand, is not in his chain of command, as she pointed out to Addie, and she knows it. She says, "The Squib Question has come to the fore of late, with the Malfoy case, and there's been talk of outlawing the sort of marriage contract that requires destroying any Squibs at age three." There's more than a trace of indignation in her tone as she adds, "This on the cusp of the third millennium of the Common Era."
That comment is clearly not for Kingsley, who no doubt knows the particulars, but for her. Mary shudders at the thought that someone would have considered Jackie expendable, bright and vivacious and heartbreakingly talented as she was.
Someone did consider her expendable, because they killed her.
Derwent says, with blandness to match Kingsley's, that theoretically a clean Obliviate done by a professional can be reversed. The difficulty is that the spell isn't always done to professional standards. The cases she's handled show marks more of the sledgehammer than the scalpel, to use a Muggle analogy. In practice, it's worked out to salvaging what one can.
She adds that the memories, or fragments, so recovered sometimes cast doubt on the humanitarian motivations of the spellcaster.
Kingsley says that McConnell was one of the best in her class, and he'll vouch for her as one of his own trainees. Not all Pureblood Aurors are ill-intentioned or incompetent, merely by way of being Purebloods.
Granger smiles slightly, the way La Giaconda might if she were holding a switchblade. Mary is emboldened to ask, "So do you have records of all of the times that your people have done this… Obliviate?"
Kingsley looks uneasy, briefly, and then he says, "According to regulations, yes." Mary reads between the lines that those regulations might be more often honored in the breach, particularly in wartime, and by people who considered Muggles and Squibs as… incidental. She wonders briefly what the diplomatic implications will be.
Derwent ignores both Kingsley and Granger, and looks Mary in the eye. "Miss Esmond, I think I would feel confident to take on your case." She adds, looking at Granger, "With appropriate cooperation from my colleagues in your world."
It isn't until Mary exhales that she realizes that she's been holding her breath.
ooo