harry potter is gnomeface, king of gnomes (bravestheart) wrote in flippedrpg, @ 2012-04-13 20:46:00 |
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Entry tags: | ch: can: harry potter, p: annalisa |
Who: Harrycan
What: creating an anti-obliviation code for himself.
When: Friday
Where: his room, Beta 013
Warnings: paranoia, if that counts.
Status: Logged, closed, complete
The feeling of having lost time-- not a small amount of time either, but two whole days-- was one that Harry found deeply unsettling. Worse than that was the fact that he was fairly sure something else deeply unsettling, or at least upsetting, had happened during that time. The memories were gone, but the emotions remained, confusing and nearly impossible to identify. Sadness, perhaps, but not grief. He was intimately familiar with grief; if someone had died or otherwise been lost, he would have had no trouble identifying that.
No, this was different. Longing, without loss. A deep, painful longing, or perhaps yearning, for something he didn't have. Or someone, maybe, but not one of the people he usually yearned for-- like his parents, or Sirius. He knew what that felt like, too.
If it had just been that, perhaps he could have focused on it and figured it out. But it was confused and muddled by another emotion, one that seemed different and yet was inextricably entangled with the first. He would have said that it felt like heartache, only it wasn't quite that simple. Distrust, definitely, but was that just distrust of the scientists who had stolen his memories? If he could just grasp the information that should have been in his mind, that felt just out of reach, he would have been able to sort them out completely, he was sure. He did not feel confused about the emotions, except for their causal origins.
There was information out there about why he felt this way, but he hadn't the faintest idea how to go about finding it. He didn't know if it was even possible. He would have to trust his instincts, and hope that he might catch the scent if whatever it was... came up again. But until then, there was probably nothing he could do.
Except, he could possibly try to keep this from happening again. He might not be able to prevent his memories from being stolen, but if he could figure out a way to leave clues for himself the next time something happened that he thought might be taken away from him-- and he was very vague on exactly what kind of thing that might be-- then he might have a fighting chance of figuring it out next time. Of course, he hoped there wouldn't be a next time, but until he and the others figured out a real way to fight back against the scientists controlling them, there was every possibility that his memories would be stolen again.
Writing things down obviously didn't work; the absence of any writing in the journals from the last few days told Harry that those had probably been wiped as well. Anything else too obvious would probably be taken away from him as well, but if he came up with something subtler, maybe they wouldn't realize what it was for. Or maybe if they did, they would let him get away with it anyway; one of the scientists, at least, had seemed to like his ingenuity.
He had to try, at least. Now that it had occurred to him, there was no way he wasn't going to try. But how could he possibly manage to create a system that would remind him of something that would no longer be in his mind? He would obviously have to improvise and come up with new details in the moment, but there had to be somewhere he could start.
It was entirely frustrating, not being able to bounce ideas off his friends; he felt sure they would have been able to help him. But the moment he voiced any of this aloud or wrote it down, whether to someone else or to himself, the secrecy of it would be gone. He wasn't sure he could even trust that the thoughts inside his head were not readable by the scientists, but if he didn't think about it at all, it would never be created. He would just have to hope that his mind was still secure in that way, even if it wasn't in others. He really, really wished that he had actually managed to learn Occlumency; it would have come in really handy right now, would have made him feel a lot more secure to know that his thoughts were secret. But there was nothing to be done about that now.
Right. A place to start. Well, the most obvious place to start was probably with people. His emotions were currently deep and personal; there were people he would want to talk to if he could remember what they were about. If he could remind himself who had been involved in something that had happened, that might put him on the right track. And he needed something to represent the kind of things that had happened. Death, torture, Imperius (or something similar), poison or other drugs... the possibilities there were endless, but he could try to come up with as many as possible. Maybe he could use spaces-- the corners of his room, the bed, the bedside table, the lamp-- to represent large categories of events, and place items in them to represent people or items.
Although, he should probably make it subtler than that. Placing something on top of his lamp, for instance, had no real logical reason behind it except to send himself a message; the scientists would probably catch on to what he was doing. Maybe he could create something, make it look like a game that he used to entertain himself... a chess board, or a deck of cards...
Merlin, he had so little available. He couldn't use his clothing, he had very little of that available. He probably should not mess with his bed, either, nor the lamp. A proper place to sleep and a source of light were important. He might be able to spare the bedside table, and put the lamp on the floor; he could probably spare one of his pillows. Maybe he could figure out a charm to duplicate the pillows, and then he would have more of them to work with-- more to spare to transfigure into something else. And he had the disgusting, bloody pelt that he had tried to magically quarantine in one of the corners of his room so that it wouldn't start to smell. If he used that, it might still smell even when transfigured, but at least he wouldn't have to look at it. And smell might actually be a good thing, in the case of triggering a memory; it would remind him to look for his clues. It would also serve as a decent reminder of something awful, like murder or torture.
If something like that happened, he decided, he would tack the pelt somewhere in plain sight and add any other clues as they were applicable. But again, death and torture were fairly obvious things to remember. Those were not the things that he really needed to work on.
An image came to mind, of a muggle board game. Maybe-- maybe he could create his own boardgame, similar to Candyland. Part of it might look like the compound, maybe he could create other miniatures of locations, things that would jog his memory and remind him of more than just the place. For instance, a miniature Burrow-like structure might remind him of the Weasleys in general, and there were plenty of things that he could associate with each of them specifically. There were things he associated with Hermione, too, and the other versions of himself, and even with the Malfoys; people he knew less well would be more challenging. But perhaps, as things continued here, he could form associations and create new game pieces or parts of the board.
It was going to take an awful lot of work. His mind hurt just thinking about all the magic involved, to create something so complicated out of so little. Hopefully soon they would have a new world, and he might be able to collect materials, or might be provided with some, the way he had been given the clothes.
At least it would keep his mind from continuously wandering down the impossible path of trying to figure out what had happened to him this time, a path that led absolutely nowhere. He might as well get to work.