Hannah and Cho - St. Mungo's
Who: Hannah and Cho Where: St. Mungo's When: Monday, January 7th, 1999 (two weeks ago) What: Hannah runs into Cho at St. Mungo's on her first day as an Obliviator.
The ladies' room on the fourth floor seemed as good a place to hide as any to Hannah. At least Frost--Holden Frost, the senior Obliviator in charge of her--wouldn't find her there. Neither would Quinn's father. Every time Hannah turned a corner in the hospital, she was afraid she'd run into Mortimer Chambers.
The door shut behind her, bouncing against its frame in a three-beat rhythm that echoed off the white tile walls. She went straight to the sink and, as icy water rushed out of the tap, bent down to splash water over her face. Turning off the tap, she looked up into the mirror. Her skin was pale, paler than usual beneath the water running in rivulets down to her chin. Her yellow robes--chosen that morning because she'd hoped they'd be cheery against the background of the hospital--gave her face a sickly cast, and her eyes glowed a bright, feverish blue.
The day had started out bad, and then gotten worse. First, Frost had taken her on her cautionary visit to the Janus Thickey ward to visit the victims of botched Obliviations. Following Mr. Chambers' advice--and trying to ignore the spirit it was given in--Hannah searched their brains for the flaw, for the place where the Obliviator who'd put them in the ward had failed. She started with Lila, a young Muggle woman who spent her days staring out the window from a wooden rocking chair, her dark hair lying in clumps against her neck. Hannah watched her vacant eyes as Frost explained how Lila had been Obliviated after witnessing a Dementor attack her younger sister, a Muggle-born bound for Hogwarts. Of course, she hadn't been able to see the Dementor, just what it had done to her sister.
After apologizing to Lila, Hannah raised her wand and followed the first chain of memories she caught the end of--a door opening, a Healer entering in a swish of lime green robes, a potion vial, and then...darkness. Cold, overwhelming darkness, and a sense of hopelessness, of...
Hannah snapped herself out of it, feeling the ghost of a gasp in her throat as she came back to the present. Frost told her to try again, and after a deep breath, she forced her way back into Lila's mind. This time she managed to trail several memories in a row--an older woman who looked like Lila only a little softer reading a thick book, a library, a tall stone building, a field of grass cut across by cement paths and dotted with flowering trees, a lecture hall, a young girl running across the grass toward her--and then she fell through the gap and into the black hole again.
It took several tries before Hannah was able to follow a thread to the glitch that caused it all: one single image of that same young girl writhing on the ground, her eyes wide with horror, and her mouth gaping. And then Hannah was thrust back out of Lila's mind, winded as if she'd been punched in the chest.
Frost made her sit down and got her a glass of water. He was a good teacher, she supposed, but unlike Will, Frost was attentive and polite without actually being kind. He sat stiffly, waiting for her to recover.
"Why don't they just remove the last trace of the memory?" she asked when she found her voice.
"It was too late when the mistake was discovered," he explained with a look at Lila. "Her mind tried to heal itself, but in doing so it ripped holes in several of her other memories. Now it protects the flaw as if it were the only truthful memory it has left, which very well may be true."
Hannah stared at Lila, the water turning sour on her tongue. One tiny mistake. Just like Mr. Chambers had said.
She'd repeated the process on the other Obliviation patients in the ward, each mind in a different treacherous state to navigate, until she'd found each flaw and analyzed it to her satisfaction, just as Mr. Chambers had told her to. The smaller the mistake had been, the worse the landscape inside the person's mind seemed to be.
After lunch, during which Hannah hadn't been able to eat a thing, she'd met Alan Collins, a middle-aged wizard in tattered robes. He'd watched his wife and son die. The Death Eaters responsible had been brought to justice, but that hadn't brought him peace, and so he'd volunteered to be Obliviated by a trainee, just to have those last tortured moments erased from his mind. According to Frost, this was an easy Obliviation. For one thing, it was voluntary, and thus she could ask him questions in order to make sure she took away the right memories. For another, he would be left knowing that he had been Obliviated by choice, so she didn't need to also modify memories to cover up the missing ones.
It had been bad enough listening to him describe what had happened, but between her nerves about getting the Obliviation exactly right and the memories she encountered inside his mind, by the time she was finished she was shaking, on the verge of being sick. She saw the woman and the young boy die, feeling powerless to save them even though she knew it was in the past. Every time he reached for his wand, he was hit with another round of the Cruciatus curse, and his memory of that singular form of pain jarred her own memories of being cursed awake. Gritting her teeth, she reminded herself that they weren't her memories, and that she was doing a good thing taking them away from him, and that she had to be calm because she absolutely could not make a mistake. With this determination coursing through her, she cast the charm to Obliviate the memories she'd located, and then waited, listening to her heart race away from her as Frost inspected her work.
"Good job, Abbott," he said at last. "Clean as a whistle. Your dad will be proud."
Hannah closed her eyes and let out a shaky breath. She didn't feel any pride at those words, just relief, and when Mr. Collins thanked her, she could only nod and give him a weak smile.
Now, three Oblivations later and staring at her reflection in the mirror, she didn't feel any more at ease than after the first one. If anything, it got harder to keep her composure with each new tortured mind she encountered.
But she couldn't stay in the loo forever. What she really needed was some chocolate. She dried off her face and fixed her make-up, and then walked out the door, intending to head up to the tearoom. They had to have chocolate there.