A/N: Italics paragraphs in the first section contain descriptions of child abuse. Italics paragraph in the fifth section contain sexual assault. Skip them if they make you uncomfortable, they do not contain major plot points beyond establishing a history of abuse.

Flower of Life

As with Johnny before him, Morgana hadn't received any real blame for Mr. Everett's sudden condition. As far as suspicion went, it was really just the same people that had already suspected she might have something to do with Johnny's death that had suspicions of her. And really, what were they going to do? Accuse her of magically wiping Mr. Everett's mind? They'd be declared mad, and the doctors had already declared it some sort of unexplainable sudden brain failure from what she'd seen in the mind of a few of the other adults at the orphanage. Either way, with the last two years lacking in suspicious activity beyond the other children's aversion to her, the worried glances she'd caught from people like Ms. Pierce began to die down. She planned on keeping it that way and so she went about her life as per usual, doing things like going to church and going to school.

Morgana hadn't known what to expect as far as school went in her second life, but it turned out to be compulsory for children between five and fourteen, incredibly boring, and very behind when compared to her own knowledge from her first life. In short, she learned very little and ignored quite a lot. Naturally, she put in enough effort to achieve slightly above average grades and focused her actual effort in learning elsewhere, as she was doing at the moment. Unfortunately for her, what she was trying to learn had not yet been adopted in the west, and books on it were more or less entirely impossible for a poor orphan like her to find.

With this unfortunate reality, she was forced to rely almost entirely on what little she remembered from her previous life about the practice of meditation and mindfulness. She had figured that it would be a good step towards learning occlumency, and she turned out to be right as she could now get a better feel for what she recognized as being her own mind. This practice had taken her far longer than she had expected it would and was far more challenging to get a feel for than its sister discipline of legilimency had been. What she had expected to take maybe a few weeks or months had stretched out to require over two years of practice with meditation before she could finally get a good mental view of her own mind, over two years of catching little glimpses of what she knew was her own mind before it would slip away from her grasp.

She'd learned from her observations so far that her mind wasn't much different from the various minds she'd taken a look at in the past, though it was oddly more similar to the minds of some of the orphans she'd peered into rather than the minds of people like her teachers, orphanage workers, or Pastor Peterson. Their minds had been relatively whole webs of memories, thoughts, impulses and emotion. Most of the children of the orphanage were like that as well, thankfully, but sometimes their minds had holes where the connections to certain memories were frayed or broken. She tended to avoid looking at those after what the first one had led her to do. It wouldn't be good to draw attention to herself with another impulsive action, she wouldn't be lucky forever. Her mind was more like those minds than the more whole ones she had seen.

Now, these memories that lacked connections or had damaged connections within her own mind… They could really be anything. They weren't from this life, she was fairly certain of that much, they were from her first. There were dozens of them. With all that she'd seen in other minds, she knew they wouldn't be good and she really would prefer to just avoid them. Unfortunately for her, she was nearly entirely sure that she would need to fix the connections in her mind in order to effectively learn occlumency, a skill she would definitely need. She would start with one of the frayed, partially disconnected memories rather than one of the fully disconnected ones, she decided. She grit her metaphorical, and possibly physical, teeth and repaired the connections the first memory had to those around it before being unwillingly drawn into it.

She was four, and she'd upset her mom. She was physically picked up and thrown bodily into the trailer they had lived in at the time. She sprawled across the floor, disoriented and afraid at the sudden physical action from someone she loved. Her mother stomped in after her. The woman came over to her and picked her up, yelling about something she didn't comprehend with how overwhelmed she was in the moment. She was spanked, hard enough to make her cry and scream, hard enough that it would bruise badly. She didn't even really know why.

She was eight, not four, and her mother abandoned her at birth. That didn't stop her from crying again about the long past memory of abuse. She took a deep breath, and calmed down. "That wasn't that bad. I knew about that one, I even already remembered the first part of it. It's fine." She closed her eyes and took another deep breath. "Okay, the next one? The next one." She focused inwards and looked for another suppressed memory. It took her significantly longer to find the construct that made up her mind this time as she worked through the turbulent emotions from the recently retriggered memory. One she had, she found another memory and repaired its connections to the memories around it.

She was seven, and her mother had married a man named Jack over the previous summer. Jack was a cop, and he had a taste for control and power. He didn't like and had no patience for when children misbehave, as she and her older sister sometimes did. She talked back to him, and now he was beating her with his belt. She cried out with each blow, begging for the man to stop, but he did not. When he'd worked out all his anger on her, he left. Her sister came to carefully help her to her room with a guilty look on her face for not having tried to help sooner. She understood, it would have only gotten her hurt too.

She was crying again, but she was also shaking uncontrollably now. Is every memory going to be like this? I can't do this, not right now. She laid on her side and cried until she fell to sleep, feeling every bit like the child that had once truly been, not understanding why she was being abused.

~FoL~

Morgana only took a few days to come to terms with the memories she'd restored in her own mind. They didn't really change that much when she really thought about it, she had already known and accepted that she had been abused as a child, she had just been of the belief that it was primarily emotional abuse, verbal abuse, and neglect with only a bit of physical abuse added in once in a while. With how many more of the memories there were… she wasn't ready, she never would be if she was honest. Maybe she hadn't come to terms with them, actually.

She didn't really have a choice, unfortunately. Her gaze hardened as she looked across the church at Pastor Peterson from her place on the church pew. She would have to do it anyways, she really couldn't afford to have a man like Dumbledore peer into her mind and pass judgement on her for her actions. He had condemned Tom Riddle for bullying and the murder of a pet from what she remembered, he would not take kindly to what she had done or what she planned to do regardless of whether he might agree with the outcomes she wanted. Supposedly the ends don't justify the means, after all.

She shook her head, before locking eyes with Pastor Peterson again to get her usual weekly practice in on the man's mind. His mind was, unlike a few years ago, now completely whole once again. A year back she had grown comfortable enough to try her hand at repairing the parts of his mind she had damaged with her earliest uninvited intrusions into the man's mind, and it had gone fairly smoothly. The first few times she had accidentally damaged other connections in the man's mind while fixing the ones she had frayed previously, but it didn't take her too long to get to the point where she could fix his mind without simultaneously damaging it. He'd just had to deal with a few weeks of being forgetful about varying new topics instead of the ones he'd been forgetful about before. He'd thought he was in mental decline, the poor man, he'd even gone to the doctor about it. It had actually served as great practice for when she had started repairing her own memories.

She remained fond of her first practice dummy for legilimency, not out of any sentimental reasons, but rather because the man's life was so entertaining to her. It was like watching a soap opera. Around the same time period she'd been learning how to repair the man's mind, he'd accidentally mentioned Ms. Pierce to his wife, and that had led to all sorts of drama. She wasn't sure whether it had been the fault of her meddling with his mind that had made him slip up or not, but either way it was entertaining.

His slip up led to a rollercoaster of a few months while she'd been finishing up fixing his mind in which he'd been certain his wife was going to break up with him, and Morgana had certainly thought so too, but in the end that hadn't been what happened at all. Instead his wife had asked to meet Ms. Pierce, and now the younger woman was a frequent 'guest' at their home. Honestly, Morgana wished she could more reliably look into Ms. Pierce's mind to live vicariously a little bit through her, but the woman generally avoided looking at her or being in the same room as her so that was a rare occurrence. She sighed, to be an older couple's little scandalous little secret, if only. Would certainly beat being a perpetually bored orphan, at least. Maybe in a decade or two when she wasn't an eight year old, she was sure she'd have better options by that point though.

When Morgana smiled as she thanked Pastor Peterson, she really meant it once again. The man's scandalous life had really cheered her up.

~FoL~

The next several weeks of Morgana's life were hellish. She was resolved to work her way through her suppressed memories by her ninth birthday, but reliving her most traumatic memories from her previous life had shaken and broken that resolve until December came and went, leaving her birthday behind. Morgana stared hatefully at her bedroom ceiling for what felt like the thousandth time in recent memory. She was only halfway done and she'd already taken more than twice as long as she'd intended to.

What was worse was that she could feel herself changing with each memory she fixed, growing more angry and filled with hate at the unfairness of the world. She'd tried to be good in her first life, she remembered, and tried to take the best path she could even when she knew it would be easier to just manipulate other people and damn the consequences. It worked just fine for other people, she knew, but she had decided to be better than that after everything she'd been through. After everything that people like that, people like her first mother, had put her through. The world had rewarded attempts at altruism and goodness by heaping more abuse on her until she died… Which she couldn't actually remember happening, now that she thought of it. She closed her eyes forcefully, it would come up she was sure.

~FoL~

The Girl was staring at her again. Alice Pierce sighed, closing her eyes and rubbing her temple in irritation before directing her attention to the other children under her care. The children that actually needed it. As she tiredly kept an eye on the orphans in the little playroom, Alice let her mind wander back to the Girl.

Working at an orphanage was a draining job to have, and as a consequence she was the only worker of the five that worked at St. Elimine's that had been there to experience all the oddities that surrounded little Morgana Fata. She shivered, remembering the day poor little Johnny had passed on. It had haunted her ever since, the memory of seeing Morgana crying in shock several steps above the still-warm corpse of a ten year old boy. She had been sure it was an accident in the moment, but…

The girl had always had an unnatural air around her. She was too smart, she knew too much. She still remembered looking into baby Morgana's eyes as she was held in the arms of old Mrs. Smith, the awareness in the tiny girl's eyes had been uncanny. As she'd noticed more and more oddities about the girl over the years, she'd grown less and less confident about Morgana's innocence in Johnny's death. Her suspicion had grown to the point that when Mr. Everett had mysteriously lost all brain function in an afternoon, her first thought after some light feelings of grief at her boss' death had been about how little she had seen Morgana that evening. But no little girl could give someone brain failure without a trace, could they?

She shook her head, clearing her mind of doubts as she noticed a commotion going on. "Jim! Jim, stop that this instant!" She moved to intervene in the conflict between the orphans, and as she did so Morgana watched with a too-mature look of amusement on her face.

~FoL~

She was twenty-five, and she was visiting a long distance internet friend that she'd originally met in a Halo Reach lobby nearly a decade before. She drank with him and pounded jagerbombs like they were going out of style in his apartment. She drank far too much, too hyped up on energy drinks to realize just how much alcohol she had been drinking. By the end of the night she was collapsed in bed, the world blurred and feeling like it was spinning around her and her limbs feeling like they were made of lead. She heard her friend stumble into the room, stop for a second and then stumble towards her. She felt his hands roughly land on her breasts and give them a squeeze and she let out a groan, "noohh…" She couldn't move though, and she felt his hands move to pull at the waistband her pants. As she felt her pants begin to slide off, her vision faded further and blacked out. When she woke up, she was in a baby's body in another world.

Her eyes snapped open to the usual view of her bedroom ceiling she got when she was working on these memories. Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes, and she blinked them away before staring back up at the ceiling. Well, that's certainly not how I would have wanted to go. It wasn't even worth being angry about, and the emotions involved had been fuzzy and muddled in the first place. Her former friend was several decades from being born at this point anyways. She sat up in bed and reached her hand out, pulling a ball from across the room into her hand with her magic. She looked down at it, before tossing it back across the room. She'd taken to experimenting with her magic when she was recovering from the reassertion of her trauma from these memories. Other forms of magic came more easily to her when she was emotional as it was, so she had chosen not to waste her time too much in between working on her mind.

With another flex of her will, she raised her hand and pulled a few books from beside her bed to hover around her. She glanced at each of them, before sending them back to where she'd left them before. Yes, she didn't need to get too upset over her first death. She would just have to make sure it couldn't happen like that again. She closed her eyes and smiled as she easily slid back into her mind. Finally, she was done. Her mind was whole once again, no longer full of holes where she'd suppressed painful memories. She would be better than that this time, stronger than that. She would be the one in control.

It had taken her nearly half a year to complete her work on her mind, around six times longer than she'd originally planned for it to take, but she was finally done. Well, done with the painful part anyways, she would still need to work on actual occlumency over the two years she had left before she would need to keep out the likes of Albus Dumbledore. She frowned, that was a rather tall order wasn't it?

~FoL~

After a few weeks of practice Morgana had come to the conclusion that making a shield, or a sort of wall, around her mind wasn't as challenging as she'd thought it might be. It was actually rather easy to do, it was more that it was difficult to keep up at all times and was prone to failing when she got distracted. Further practice might help with that, but it just felt so… inelegant? Mind magic had been all about finesse and precision with legilimency, it didn't make sense to her that occlumency would just be 'big wall, strong wall'. It was just so boorish. She had to be missing something.

And really, what would Dumbledore think if he came to visit some random orphan girl and he ran into a fucking wall instead of easily glimpsing into her mind? That would definitely raise some concerns too, though probably significantly less than what he would have if he actually saw what was in her mind to be fair. No, there had to be a better way.

Morgana looked out the window, tapping her leg in thought as she watched beautiful Ms. Pierce leave the orphanage for the night. She wondered if the woman was heading for another scandalous rendezvous with her secret lovers, hidden away from the rest of the world.

Wait… hidden away?

That was perfect, simple and elegant, just as mind magic should be. Rather than making some clunky shield, what if she could simply hide all the memories and thoughts she didn't want anyone to see? What if she could simply make them invisible? That's genius, if Dumbledore looks and just doesn't see anything amiss, he won't be inclined to look any further. With one last tap of her finger on her thigh, she stood and headed up to her room to begin experimenting with her new idea.

~FoL~

Her idea was fucking garbage. It was impossible, how the hell was she supposed to make a thought or a memory invisible? They were already invisible! It didn't make any sense at all! She threw her ball at the wall in frustration. She'd been bashing her head against the wall that was this idea for weeks, and she was so done with it.

Morgana collapsed backwards onto her bed. She'd just have to work on other things. She remembered something about organizing your thoughts for occlumency? Maybe she could try that?

~FoL~

Organizing her memories was much easier and much more rewarding than trying to make them invisible had been. Every memory that she sorted she found easier to recall when she needed to later, and as someone who had an incredibly poor memory in her first life she was loving every second of it. It was like night and day, her mind felt like a well oiled machine after just the last couple months of work.

Of course, some of the memories were, well… She was seventeen, and she was sitting in the DMV. She'd been a bit late getting her license because she just hadn't wanted to take her driver's ed course, but now here she was, waiting to get her license. 'Wow, what an incredibly irrelevant memory. What am I ever going to use this fo-' She paused, surprised. The incredibly useless memory of waiting in the DMV had faded slightly in her mental view of her mind. 'Really? Is this my great breakthrough on making memories invisible? The DMV?'

She sighed, and then focussed in on the memory, willing the concept of irrelevance into it. It faded further, before disappearing entirely from the web construct that made up her mind. She paused as a thought occurred to her. 'Wait, what if this erases the memory? What was that one about? Oh, right, the DMV. So I still remember that, but…' She mentally poked around where the memory had been.

She was seventeen, and she was- She cut the memory off, not wanting to pay attention to it again. 'Okay, it does indeed work how I wanted it to I think. I'll have to keep an eye out for side effects, but this is perfect for now I think.' It was a shame that she had thought this idea a lost cause, now she would have to reorganize huge sections of her mind so that it would still look natural once she made over half of them invisible.

Now that she thought of it, making her other memories invisible would have a nice side effect of making her mind actually resemble that of a child's. A mass of memories three times the size of one any child her supposed age would have would've been rather suspicious now that she thought about it.

She smiled. Yes, she would be ready when Dumbledore came, she believed.

~FoL~

Albus locked eyes with the orphan boy in the small room with him. The boy, Tom Riddle, was significantly more magically powerful than your average eleven year old wizard and would likely continue to grow into a truly exceptional wizard. Normally he would avoid such an invasion of privacy, but he peered into the boy's mind and effortlessly avoided what little instinctual barrier to his entry there was. Peering at the night sky that made up the boy's mind with his mind's eye, Dumbledore willed the memories he was looking for to come forth, and watched as several stars lit up more brightly than the others within the field of stars.

With little effort, Albus made his way through the boy's memories, painting a picture of the boy in his mind that Albus wasn't particularly fond of. The boy was a callous bully to his fellow orphans and took joy in the suffering he inflicted on them. True, much of what he did was motivated by retribution for what he had experienced from them, but the boy often took his vengeance much too far. He would have to keep an eye on the boy, and maybe… He should give the boy an example of how he made other children in his orphanage feel by abusing his power over them. He turned and set the boy's dresser alight with illusory flame. Tom Riddle would need to learn a better path, and Albus Dumbledore wouldn't have time for a gentler approach with the rumors he had been hearing about what was occurring on the continent.

Tom Riddle would not go on to take this experience in the way that Albus had hoped that he would.