She knows the Heimlich she won't choke, not Daphne (farsick) wrote in caged, @ 2013-10-13 13:32:00
Who: Tracey Davis & Daphne Greengrass. What: Practice makes perfect. Where: SOMEWHERE IN HOGWARTS. When: Sunday 13 October. After lunch. Status: Complete.
“I think that perhaps my wrist isn’t loose enough,” Tracey observed.
They had been sitting on the floor for what felt like hours, and she shifted her seat, trying to get the circulation going again. “It’s ironic that this spell requires you to be happy in order to cast it,” she added. “If it were frustration, well, that would be different…”
She shared a smile with Daphne. Albeit a somewhat strained one.
“We’d have this down in no time at all,” she agreed, thinking on the string of frustrations behind her already this week, this term.
Daphne chuckled and switched her wand to her left hand to give her fingers a stretch. This was her second day in a row of this, and while she hadn’t expected it to be so exhausting again, perhaps she should not have been surprised. Meeting with Susan early yesterday morning had been a promising start. Susan was a good teacher. But being forced to concentrate on the same memory again and again for a few hours was mentally taxing. Daphne had ended up at breakfast after, wanting nothing more than to fly and clear her head. She assumed the end of today’s session would be no different.
At least she was rather more well-rested today, having enjoyed a bit of a Sunday lie-in. “I spent a good bit of time last night reviewing some old travel journals,” Daphne said. “Something to bolster my general outlook on things, you know? It seemed like a practice that may help strengthen the specific memory.”
“Mine’s how I felt when I got my OWL results,” Tracey admitted. Switching her wand from her right hand to her left, she flexed the former, hoping to get some of the stiffness from it. “Mum was so pleased. She said that she would buy me a rare copy of my favourite Scrivobene work if I got nothing below an ‘Exceeds Expectations,’ and I didn’t.”
She tried to visualise that morning once more. Her father had been outside tending to his herb garden, her mother smoking and cussing up a storm in her study upstairs - her manuscript had been causing her trouble yet again - when the letter had arrived. Was it sunny, or cloudy? It felt like it ought to have been sunny.
“I don’t think it’s quite the right memory though,” she added.
Daphne nodded respectfully, the corners of her mouth curling up into a smile as Tracey recounted her memory. It seemed a very private matter, and Daphne wasn’t sure if one was meant to share it. Did it cheapen it, the power it had in the spell, to make it known? It seemed a silly assumption to make, but then magic had all sorts of peculiarities to it that even Wizards didn’t understand. Yet thus far keeping it to herself hadn’t seemed to help or hinder her progress.
“Perhaps not,” Daphne offered, her right shoulder shrugging up. “I always found it a bit disappointing, in the accounts I’ve read of the spell in the past, that the authors rarely detail the nature of the memory used beyond it being a happy one. Which I suppose make sense. Everyone has a different idea of what a happy memory actually is. ” She scratched at her chin. “I’ve been calling up my first trip with my father, when he said I was old enough to come supervise a dig with him. I felt so grown up and everything was so vivid. I could taste the heat in the air. It seemed a good bet, you know?”
“It just doesn’t feel strong enough.” Tracey returned the wand back to her right hand, giving it an experimental twirl. “I don’t know what would be though. My life’s been pretty… bland, really. I was considering using when Ernie asked me to the Yule Ball, how excited I was to be one of the first people in our year to have a date. But that seems rather - I don’t know - juvenile? I feel as though a memory for a Patronus should be deeper, somehow.”
Spiraling her wand into increasingly smaller circles, she was finally contented with her efforts. “Expecto Patronum,” she said, and her brow furrowed. A moment or so later, and nothing. “I feel as though I’m back in first year trying to learn how to make that bloody feather float in Charms,” she admitted.
“Swish and flick!” Daphne said loftily, moving her wand in an unenthused imitation of the levitation charm.
That had been long ago. She smirked impishly at Tracey and stilled her arm to assume the position more appropriate for the patronus incantation. Expression growing serious, Daphne let the motion come with as little thought as possible beyond the memory. Heat, the way grains of sand sometimes hit you in the face, that weird dry dusty smell, people laughing. At least she’d done this enough times now that the wand strokes were coming more naturally.
Yet, nothing from her wand. She’d been staring at the end of it, hoping and waiting for a sputter of silvery something, and mildly annoyed when no such thing appeared. “Ugh.” She sighed heavily and wound a thick coil of hair around her finger.
“I think I understand what you mean, about bland,” Daphne said belatedly. Not that she thought of her life as bland, in the sense that it was boring. But it was awfully…easy. There was a glut of moments that qualified as happy, and comparably less of strife. It was hardly something to be ungrateful for, but it certainly made it more difficult to know what a truly happy memory was, when there was little to contrast it against. “At least…when one has a good deal of happiness in their life, there’s not much perspective.”
“True.” Tracey gave a sigh of her own, then tilted her head to one side, feeling her neck give a satisfying crack. “I feel as though I’m possibly too young to have enough significant milestones in my life, to give this spell what it needs. Although does it have to be a memory of a specific event? Can it not be… a person instead?”
“I don’t see why it couldn’t be,” Daphne opined after a moment’s thought. “Most of how we know a person, and feel about them, well, it’s based so much in memory, isn’t it? It could probably be adequate, depending on the person. There doesn’t seem to be any hard and fast rules as far as the memory bit goes. It’s like the kindling for a fire, but every person’s is made of something unique to them.”
Before she could go on making it sound as though she fancied herself an authority on a subject she’d been studying seriously for all of a week, Daphne looked down and rolled her wand between her hands. “Who are you thinking of?”
“Marcus Flint. The love of my life,” said Tracey drily, then shot Daphne a wink to make it clear - absolutely clear - that her comment had been in jest. “I don’t know. Perhaps my parents or something. Or - if we’re talking specific memories - the day I got my Hogwarts letter.” Not that it had been any great surprise. Tracey’s family was full of wizards and witches; she had begun showing her first signs of magic at an adequate age. Still, there had been butterflies the morning of her eleventh birthday, the eager waiting at the kitchen window for the owl to arrive…
“Do you think it’s also important how well I visualise it?” she asked. “That’s possibly something I could stand to work on.”
Daphne was still shaking a little with quiet laughter at the Marcus Flint claim when she began to answer Tracey’s question, trying very hard to put her serious face back on. Casting back for what Susan had told her yesterday morning felt a bit like searching out the best answer for an exam question when she’d overstudied.
“Probably,” she nodded, idly turning her wand in the small circles of the charm. “It’s likely assumed a stronger memory is more readily called up visually. Even if there’s only a few key images? Clearly, my memory hasn’t proven particularly successful yet, but even if I need to try a different one, I think there’s something to the fact that there are specific markers that are always there when I think of it. Makes it more real, right? And part of the aim is to feel that happiness, like you were reliving it?”
Daphne supposed that if this was the case, it was a good thing she’d always had a strong imagination.
“Markers?” Tracey gave her a pensive look. “You mean, like bringing in a tangible object that you associate with the memory? I suppose that can’t hurt, at least while we’re learning. I’m sure my mother still has a copy of my OWL results somewhere,” she said with an amused quirk to her lips. “What would be your object?”
“Hm? Oh, well, I meant, more mental markers, like things that always jump out at you when you think of the event, or the person. For me it’s the feel of sand and the smell of heat. With this memory anyhow. Which I’m beginning to question the power of…”
It was likely too soon to deem it unusable, but it was difficult not to feel discouraged at the lack of results.
“But I think physical markers might help, at least to recall something initially? I think that having a look at my old photographs last night had to have helped. Sometimes there are things you overlook until something triggers the memory. Tastes or smells, even. It probably doesn’t have to be physical, if you were going that route.”
Pausing, Daphne tilted her head, brow slightly furrowed. “The person who showed you – “ She assumed it had to have been a person demonstrating the spell, it was a necessity she and Tracey had both acknowledged early in the week. And she had a good idea of who it had been, but didn’t want to assume. “—did they have any suggestions about what might help with the memory part? It seems like it’s the most complicated bit, really.”
“They said that it needed to be a strong, happy memory,” Tracey said, cycling back over what Theodore had told her. “Something that you’re emotionally connected to, which makes you feel happy just to think about. Dementors feed off human happiness, so it needs to be something which is so… integral, I suppose, that they couldn’t take the memory from you even if you tried.”
“I didn’t ask what their memory was,” she added. “It’s a bit personal, you know?”
“Oh, of course,” she agreed.
Perhaps that was part of the problem after all. It was quite easy to tell Tracey about the dig memory. It was something Daphne had probably told people of countless times, in some permutation or another. Yes, it was personal and special, but not enough so that it was a struggle to articulate it to an outside party, and certainly not so much that she hadn’t exhausted it with retellings.
“Merlin. The more I think about this, the more I suspect I might need to rethink the memory I’m using after all.” Yes, Daphne also wondered if she wasn’t overthinking this from its roots. Maybe it just needed more time. But it was hard to shake the doubt, and doubt was going to weaken the power of the memory. It had to. “It’s happy, sure, but…”
It also made her want to be far from Hogwarts and how things were now, and that wasn’t very happy at all, was it? It sowed nostalgia, which yielded dissatisfaction. She shook her head. “Maybe not the right sort.”
“That’s it, exactly,” said Tracey with fervour. “Mine is happy too, but not really all that personal, you know? I mean, if you asked other people with marks similar to mine what their reaction was, how their parents reacted, those memories at their core would probably be very similar to mine. Only a few superficial details would be different. What exactly their parents said, perhaps, but not what they meant.”
She sighed exaggeratedly, sinking down onto her back with a half-chuckle at just how melodramatic the gesture was. “I don’t know, what are some things that generally make people happy? First crushes? First kisses? First trip to Diagon Alley to get their Hogwarts supplies? The Sorting Ceremony? First pet? Making their house’s Quidditch side? Getting their Apparation licence? Their first ‘Outstanding’?”
Perhaps that was the problem. She was all out of firsts.
“It’s all so subjective, isn’t it?” Daphne puffed up her cheeks and held the breath before exhaling slowly through pursed lips.
She had had a lot of firsts, too. Some of them still held very fond associations, others not so fond and better forgotten. Stretching her neck back, she stared at the ceiling and let her mind wander. Traveling was one of Daphne’s greatest joys, and the learning that went with it. Yet any happiness it called up in her was countered by the desire it always inspired for something absent. What if she was approaching this from the wrong side? The problem wasn’t necessarily the memory, but the angle. Could Daphne invert it? So that it was no longer the being away, but the coming home after. The feeling of a successful first adventure behind her, the thrill of being a newly seasoned woman of the world at age eight and the high she’d ridden for weeks after.
That was a different sort of happiness. The sort she never tried to put to words for others, because it was much more intensely hers than anything captured in a photograph or memento.
“I think I’ve…is there something you wouldn’t be able to explain to someone else? Not just because you don’t want to, but because it’s too much yours for someone else to really grasp properly? I don’t want you to tell me what it is, if there is, but that’s what I’m trying to work out for myself, and I’ve an idea.”
“I don’t know,” admitted Tracey. “I have an idea that it’s something to do with one of those, but something deeper. Intangible, like you said.”
This was tough.
“At least this is possibly cleansing our wands, if you believe in that sort of thing?” she ventured. “After all the dark magic spells we’ve been casting. Even attempting to cast a Patronus might restore the alignment, perhaps.”
Daphne nodded. They were overthinking this, she was positive. But it was something she didn’t mind wracking her brain over.
“There’s certainly been a slant toward the dark this year,” she said, a little resigned. “And wands remember, don’t they? If there’s any way to bring about a bit of balance, I’d say giving some heavy light magic a whirl would be a step in the right direction.”
Rotating her wand again, getting the feel of the spell without the benefit of a memory, she bit her lip and considered. She thought Tracey would understand more than many. “It’s the sort of thing we ought to be learning as part of the curriculum.”
“When you consider what we’re sharing the castle with this year, you’d think as much,” concurred Tracey, examining the tip of her wand rather fixedly. She still gave a mental shudder at the thought of the Dementors descending during that match in third year, getting so close to the rest of them. The chill, the sense of heaviness and despondency that came with it.
“That last lesson, it made me a bit uncomfortable,” she conceded, still studying her wand. “Slicing off someone’s fingers, I can see how that might help in a fight. Especially if it’s their wand hand. But modifying someone else’s memories? I’d rather spend the time on a shielding charm, personally.”
“Hmm.” Daphne rested an elbow on her knee and planted her chin on a closed fist.
There was a reason people had Obliviators - memory magic was tricky and dangerous, and certainly not something one used casually. She couldn’t foresee herself ever wanting to use that noxious brain business. Every time they talked about this, the more she felt they were being cheated out of a wealth of useful lessons.
“Well, the omission of ‘Defense’ makes it seem unlikely we’ll be spending much time on shields,” she said drily. “Unless there’s a particular breed of shields that includes…” She waved a hand. “Assailing the other person with nightmares and mutilating their limbs.”
Honestly, there probably was such a shield spell out there. If so, Daphne had little doubt they’d be seeing it soon enough.
“Probably,” agreed Tracey. “I want to learn how to best protect myself in a fight, and in dueling, sometimes attack is the best form of defense. And if someone’s determined to hurt you, you can’t keep throwing up shielding charms willy-nilly. You have to make them… indisposed, in some way or form. So I can see the merit in some of the things we’re learning, but…”
Noxious brain. It was a tad too far.
“Oh well,” she shrugged eventually. “To cleansing our wands’ auras. If nothing else.” She raised her own in a mocking salute.
Daphne smiled crookedly and returned the gesture with a flourish. “To that, and our long-suffering Buddies.”
Noticing the numbness in her legs for the first time, she stretched them out in front of her and grimaced as feeling began to return to them with the tell-tale pins and needles tingling. It didn’t seem like to much to hope for some time for a fly later. This was proving a mental and emotional exercise more than a physical one, and it never felt right to let a day pass without a good bout of fresh air.
“Shall we give this another go for a while, or are you feeling like a break?”
“I think that I’m all Patronused out for today, alas,” Tracey replied. “Let’s come back to it another time.” Hopefully by that time, she would have a strong enough memory.