FRIDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2017 - LEARNING LEGILIMENS Who: Adrian Pucey, Ariel Singleton and Sal Staunton-Perksmoore What: What is a legilimens anyway? When: December 22nd Where: Adrian’s office Warnings: Language
Ariel was really stressed, and that probably wasn’t helping the present situation of being stuck in Sal’s body. She was happy and surprised that Sal had stepped up to bat for her, and really told Jack that she was still capable of working and helping, even with an ability that wasn’t her own. She’d been taking a lot of hits at work lately that affected her confidence.
But still… Jack had suggested that Sal, in Ariel’s body, still couldn’t fully assist her as well as Healer Pucey could. So with what time they had left before they had to finish final preparations for the President’s Ball… they were heading to the Healer’s office so they could figure this out. “Do you think Healer would even have an idea of how to switch us back without me having to learn how to be a legilimens?”
“Fu-” Sal cut herself off, because the offhand remark, while lacking in venom, was probably a bit stronger than the situation really warranted, and the last thing she wanted was for Ariel to think it was directed at her. Their relationship was odd on the best of days, and this absolutely was not the best of days. “I honestly don’t know. At the very least, I think he can help with guiding you on the ability. I mean, I know I could talk you through it, but you need practical help, not just theoretical.”
Ariel had no idea what Sal was going to say before she cut herself off, but it was still weird to hear Sal talk through her voice. And well, when Ariel spoke as Sal as well. This was just… the worst timing. The worst day. Well… no Ariel had worse, but this was definitely competing for the title. “I just don’t know if I’m going to be able to go without the potion. That’s hard enough for you and you were always this way.”
“It’s-” she was about to say ‘not so bad,’ but that was- well, it wasn’t a lie, exactly, but comparatively. It was hard, if not impossible, to explain it in the narrow window they had before the ball tonight, so she tried a different tact- “difficult, sure, but I meant what I said in Jack’s office. Miles and I will be with you every step of the way. We’ll get you the basics with Adrian now, and then get you out before there’s any damage, yeah? You might be feeling it now, but that’s my head up there, and I’d kinda like to walk away from this without it going to goo.” She shot herself (so weird, SO WEIRD) a sideways smirk. “No pressure or anything.”
“Right. No pressure,” Ariel said. And while Jack hadn’t come out and said it, Ariel knew she wasn’t even supposed to be doing field work anyway. At least there was so much going on and what she had to deal with that she couldn’t even think about Wilkes being out there.
Since apparating had worked out fine earlier, they had gotten to the hospital easily enough, and were let in for their ‘emergency appointment’ with Healer Pucey. They were let into Adrian’s office, which Ariel had already been in earlier that week for the first time. Who knew she’d be coming back in Sal’s body instead… “Thanks for seeing us on such short notice,” Ariel said. Again odd in Sal’s voice. “We really hope Director Duvall explained the situation of us… switching bodies already.”
"I have the memo," Adrian said. "Has anyone fed you two tea? Good heavens, sit down and tell me the story from your end of things." He fussed with the tea, which seemed to be sort of a ritual for him. Over the kettle, he added, "If we have a lead on how you got in this position in the first place, we might have a head start on undoing it."
Ariel took her seat and while tea wasn’t the strongest drink she would have liked today, while being in Sal’s body there probably wouldn’t be any alcohol until she was out of it. “Our theory right now is that there were these Christmas crackers which were cursed with this… transfiguration spell or whatever, since everyone who swapped had shared a cracker yesterday. But the change wasn’t immediate but overnight,” Ariel explained. She didn’t really want to get into the personal detail of waking up somewhere else in bed with someone they weren’t supposed to be with.
“It’s less transfiguration and more transference, I think. Otherwise, we would have woken up as each other in the same place we fell asleep- me in my-Sal’s house, and you in Mile...your place.” She gave Ariel an apologetic look for the slip of her tongue. “But otherwise, yeah, it was those stupid crackers. We’ve got teams scouring the building for the remnants to see if Spell Damage or Mysteries can work out what the spell actually was. Experimental magic fucking sucks.”
Ariel shot Sal a look. Oh great, she didn’t drop Alistair’s name, but she did drop Miles. Ariel hadn’t even talked to Adrian about Miles yet… but she did know that Miles had a conversation with Adrian about their relationship. Though there were enough problems going on today that it wasn’t a concern. Today. “Right. It was an actual switch. There were four other people on our team that switched too.”
"And you two were sent because of the question of the body swap on legilimency and because you--" Adrian gestured at Ariel-in-Sal's-body "--Auror Singleton, are about to get a hard lesson in walking a few miles in Auror Staunton-Perksmoore's boots." The tea was now steeping in cups and Adrian gestured to the two of them to sit down. "I've got your files and since I've got some baseline measurements for both of you, it'll be interesting to see what we see. I wish we had time to get an EEG from both of you."
He began the spellcasting with Ariel (in Sal's body), occasionally calling out some numbers that a quick-quill was scribbling in various forms in their files. At the end, he frowned. "I really wish we had EEGs on both of you because there's no doubt in my mind that you'd each register as the other.
"I wish you had one of those crackers because this is a nontrivial magic, in fact an extraordinarily difficult one, and I'd really love to find out how whoever did this did it. Enough so that I suspect they don't know either and somehow used the crackers to target an existing curse." Adrian found himself scowling.
“The team back at the office was going to look and see if anything was left from yesterday. I’m sure Duvall could send you anything they find,” Ariel suggested but she knew most of it would probably go to Mysteries first.
Ariel took her cup of tea and had a few drinks of it while Adrian had been casting spells and checking to see what was actually going on with them. “So, what exactly are we going to do? For me to get a handle on Sal’s abilities?”
Adrian made a face, because he'd run through what he thought he could do given what Sal had told him and the other information he had about her from various sources, like Audrey, and none of it suggested anything easy. "I keep heavy spell-shielding on this office in addition to everything else and I, personally, am an advanced occlumens. Given the time frame we have to work with here, probably the easiest thing, if not the easiest on you, might be to jump in headfirst by downing the potion. You need control and the only way for you to get it is to practise."
Ariel nodded. Great. She barely even remembered what happened this morning because she nearly passed out from the intensity of all those voices. But she needed to do this. This wasn’t about proving she could go back into the field, this was just something she had to do. This was her job, and this was fucked up, but they had to deal.
“Alright,” Ariel sighed and she looked into her bag. She’d taken all the potions Sal had of course, and she found the other vial. “At least this won’t be all the voices of New York in my head,” she said as she uncapped the vial so she could take the potion and let the fog clear away.
“Hang on.” Sal put up a hand to stop her, then looked around the room. It wasn’t nearly big enough for her to get some distance. She chewed on her lip for a moment, thinking fast. “Look, I’m gonna step out for a moment, but I’m calling you now, so go ahead and put me on speaker phone. I’ll be just out in the lobby. If you’re doing this, the best bet is for Adrian here to be the first mind you encounter; if his Occlumens is as good as he thinks it is, you should be okay.”
She tossed a lopsided smile towards Ariel. “Besides, I really don’t think singing ‘Shake It Off’ on repeat is going to help matters while I’m trying to keep my own thoughts focused. You have no idea how hard it is to get that song out of your head.”
Sal was already dialing Ariel’s number as she stood and nodded to Adrian, and then left the office.
Well that at least cleared up one worry of having Sal’s thoughts in her head. After taking the potion and letting it settle in, she felt the effects from the first potion wear off. It felt like it did when she woke up that morning in Alistair’s bedroom, also reminding herself thank god she hadn’t heard his thoughts. So Ariel took her phone once Sal started called her, and turned it on and onto speaker and put it aside. “Okay. Clear headed again.”
Adrian's occlumency was well-practised and he drew it on the way he would a well-made suit jacket, by reflex but with attentive care to the small details. It was a firm wall against the intrusive nature of legilimency, built up under the study of the Austrians, who had believed in teaching you the hard way. You were ready to graduate in occlumency when they stopped announcing your embarrassing secrets in lessons. Sal's native gift wouldn't be so aggressive, Adrian reckoned. More a slip-between-the-bricks kind of thing.
"What have you got?" Adrian asked Ariel.
As Ariel had never really done this before, she closed her eyes to think and concentrate. But really, she didn’t hear or sense anything. Ariel didn’t know if she should push it farther to try to hear something but mostly it was nothing. “I don’t hear anything.”
"That's as it should be," Adrian said, sounding not so much pleased as satisfied that things were working as he expected them to. "Now what I'm going to do is, as it were, pull down the window, and let you in a little. Tell me what you get and what I'm thinking about, and I promise you it won't be Taylor Swift even if someone did just try to earworm us both."
There was a short bubble of laughter from Ariel’s phone (that sounded suspiciously like Ariel), before the line was muted.
What Adrian was doing was unusual and not something he was extremely practised at. You normally didn't try to reduce the strength of your occlumency, just build it up, so there was no trained routine for this. It was something he'd had to figure out how to do on his own.
He concentrated on what he wanted to let Ariel see, and relaxed his occlumency a little. "What are you getting now?" he asked. "Anything?"
Ariel did smile a little ironically at the Taylor Swift comment but mostly nodded that she understood that Adrian was going to be loosening his control to help Ariel control her abilities instead.
It was a bit more than gradual, but there was suddenly another mind there. Thoughts that weren’t her thoughts, and people she’d never seen before. “I am getting… your family?” Ariel said and did keep her eyes closed. Since she was dealing with an extra sense, it seemed easier to close off another one. “A young girl… your daughter,” Ariel said sensing that one the most obviously. Adrian was thinking of another woman and man too, who were not young but around his age instead. “Your sister and brother?”
"Yes. My brother. And my sister." The emotions that went along with those two were more complex than the flood of paternal affection that Adrian clearly felt for his daughter. His feelings about the latter were similar to those for his daughter, and as the image coalesced in Adrian's mind and her own, Ariel could sense that she was younger, and that drove some of the protective instinct. The brother wasn't quite as young, and while Adrian's thoughts of him were coloured with affection, there was also sorrow, regret, anger. "I thought that would be easy to start with: strong thoughts, strong memories, strong emotions. Do you find this overwhelming?"
Ariel sat and let the feelings Adrian was sharing flow into her mind. The feelings with the daughter were not something Ariel was familiar with, but it wasn’t something to question or get confused with her own thoughts. That protective instinct with Adrian’s siblings though, that was something that was familiar to her with her team… and did remind her that she had no family to compare those feelings to. The sorrow, and negative feelings was something a bit… surprising. “No… I wouldn’t say overwhelming. I can separate it from my own thoughts.”
"Compare for me what you're getting now versus what you were getting when you woke up as Sal for the first time, without the protection," Adrian suggested. He picked up his pen and noted some things about her reactions to the file.
“I didn’t hear anything when I woke up this morning,” Ariel admitted when asked. She was embarrassed about what happened that morning, but she was trying not to focus on emotions in case that did weird things with the legilimency. She was realizing now that Sterling probably had a similar set up in his building that Adrian had in his office. How convenient for Sal to find herself an occlumens. “It was basically just as clear as it was when you put your wall up. I didn’t even consider I had those abilities until I apparated outside.”
"Realllllllly." That was a long drawn-out word that made Adrian sound even more British than he usually did. Ariel didn't need the raised eyebrow to get the satisfaction Adrian was feeling about something almost radiating off him. "That's useful to know. But of course if you were in a place too far from other people to get their mental input, that could also do it. All right, then, tell me about outside, what it was like. When you started getting other people's input."
Ariel felt that satisfaction and that did not match up to what she was feeling at all. So yes, she could tell what Adrian was thinking. “Manhattan high rise. And the only person around was also an occlumens,” Ariel explained and that’s as far as she was going. “It was horrible. It was just too much at once. Like… to physically describe it, it felt like I was in the middle of Time Square and I was getting bumped through a crowd. Except I could feel and hear what they were thinking. That was overwhelming.”
"So we don't know whether you can focus on what's in one mind while you're dealing with multiples." Adrian was pretty sure the answer was going to be that she couldn't, but they had to try nevertheless. "The party is going to be more like your Times Square experience than it is like this office, unfortunately, so let's see what you can do with two of us in a moment here."
Having heard her cue, Sal slid back into the room, but practically on the opposite side. She was having a succession of rabbit-hole thoughts- it was weird being in Ariel’s body, but she was just barely starting to get a little used to the way it moved, how it felt things- players gonna play play play play play- this had to suck so much for Miles- her head felt so light, though- gonna hate hate hate- she hoped Alistair would still want her around, for all that he’d been kind that morning- God, poor Ariel- my ex-man told his new girlfriend- who the fuck kept doing this to them?
When Sal came back into the room (which was so weird looking at Sal and seeing herself…) her head was suddenly filled with the other woman’s thoughts. That was starting to take over the few thoughts that Adrian had offered up to her. Ariel reached up to rub her head, as if that was going to help fight off a headache. She was hearing Taylor Swift, seeing thoughts about Miles… Sterling… pity for her… All of Sal’s thoughts getting to her at once.
So weird to see her own pain play out from the outside. I’m on the ocean. Everything is blue and flat. I’m alone on the ocean. This became her mantra, recalling a tiny snatch of her earliest days in the institute- they had been pain-filled and terrifying, but the calm blue ocean had been introduced in those days. She didn’t visit it all that much anymore, but it had helped at the time. Clear, blue ocean. “Is this better?”
With the sudden tone shift, hearing Sal’s repeated thoughts of the ocean and description, it pushed all the other thoughts out. Ariel nodded and breathed a sigh of relief. “Yes, better.”
Adrian wasn't reading anyone's mind--it took a positive effort for him to perform legilimency--but he could guess what was going on from what Sal and Ariel were saying and from the look on their faces. If Ariel was going to do this, she'd be taking a huge risk; there was no way she could be trained to the level she'd need to do the job she was going to try in the time they had. All Adrian could do was try to show her what she needed.
"All right, next attempt." Adrian went to his desk, found a notepaper and wrote something down on it, which he passed to Sal-in-Ariel's-body. "Ariel," he told Ariel-in-Sal's body, "you're going to have both of us unwarded for a time; see how long you can take it and whether you can pick up something unusual from either one of us. Maybe I wrote down what Sal was to think of, and maybe I kept it to myself and I'll be thinking of it. You don't know and you have to find out. All right?" He looked to both women to be sure they understood.
Sal took the page and nodded, glancing at it. For right now, the clear blue ocean was at the foremost of her mind, but there was an undercurrent. Subtle words were forming nebulous pictures; impossible creatures that roamed an imagined savanna: the pink elephants were on parade.
Adrian, on the other hand, was pondering exactly the sort of things he ought to be pondering at a moment like this: how badly his schedule had been thrown off, was his tuxedo in shape to be worn on short notice, portkey arrangements for his daughter for Christmas and the gifts he had yet to acquire for her, plus the ones he had (games, clothes, a stuffed pink elephant), and whether it was safe to take her to New Year's Eve in Times Square.
“Got it,” Ariel nodded that she understood. She had to figure out what was on the paper, basically, or if Adrian told Sal nothing and it was a thought from him. She closed her eyes as she braced herself through the crowd of voices (that seemed to be the easiest way of thinking of it).
Mostly from Sal it was still the ocean, and that was still easier, but Adrian was giving her more. She felt the feelings of having a stressed schedule and planning. Ariel had been feeling like that herself lately… thinking about what she and Miles would do for Christmas. It was something she could relate to so it didn’t bombard her as much. But it did make her get lost in it and Ariel wasn’t focusing on what she was looking for but….
Pink Elephant
That took Ariel back to Sal who didn’t have as many thoughts as Adrian but they had a thought in common anyway. “Pink elephant,” Ariel said as she opened her eyes again to look at Adrian and see if she was right.
"Good job," Adrian said, because it was, even though it had taken her a long time to sift through the chaff to get there. That was unsurprising given her newness with the gift and her lack of control; in fact it was something of a miracle she could do it at all. That she might not be as fast as it needed to be for the business tonight was irrelevant. "You pulled out the common thought. Now the question is whether you're going to be able to do that in a room full of people. Want to try it with a third?" He glanced at Sal-in-Ariel's-body to see what she thought of that plan.
It took too long, but Ariel was glad she was at least able to find the thought. They didn’t have a lot of time for this, and she’d just have to do better next time. “I want to try with a third person.”
She was genuinely pleased when Ariel was able to correctly identify the thought, and nodded her assent to both Adrian and Ariel. “Being in a crowd won’t be the same as this. I know you get that already, but maybe this will help. It’s usually down to concentration and sifting through the thoughts as they come to you. Like listening for one voice in a chorus by looking directly at an individual singer.”
"Which is why I want to have three of us, to bring it up to something closer to what you'll be experiencing in a larger group," Adrian added. "I'll be right back with our third." He stepped outside to recruit the receptionist into the scheme. There was no way that he could talk a determined Auror out of doing something that could burn her mind out--Adrian knew this from bitter experience--but he could at least give Ariel a small taste of what she'd be up against. And this time, because he could, he let her write down the secret and took it to hand to Sal-as-Ariel when they went in for the third try.
Clear, blue ocean. It went through her head as she glanced at the word she’d been given, but suddenly her mind was filled with random images and ideas. A breathtaking sunset, a bunch of wildflowers set in a vase, a woman walking on the sidewalk in a figure hugging dress, a man smiling down at her as he leaned in to kiss her. She felt a tiny flare of annoyance, because why on earth would someone write down such a nebulous thing like ‘beauty’? How could Ariel be expected to pick up on something like that?
But Sal’s thoughts were still filling with memories and ideas of the things she found beautiful.
Once Adrian came back into the room with the receptionist, it didn’t hit her hard but just made her head feel… more full. There was newness being added to the clear blue ocean, and other random thoughts about paper work that needed to be done, and filling out the appointment books. How things were getting busier with the Aurors coming in more, which was just another reminder of all the other problems Ariel had been dealing with…
And this was all getting laced into the thoughts and images that Sal was giving her. Sunsets, romantic couples, flowers… and how she was annoyed about it? And Ariel’s eyes closed tighter in frustration because she was taking on that feeling of being annoyed… yes it kind of matched her own.
Adrian, who hadn't had the cue (and had in fact handed it to Sal without reading it so he was a genuine control) was also thinking about annoying things like scheduling and shopping and the tuxedo, which was apparently a real preoccupation of his, and whether the packages he'd sent home by International Portkey Post were going to get to Bath and London on time, and so on and so forth. He caught the receptionist's eye and gave her her cue. To the extent that she hadn't been already, the receptionist started thinking of what she considered beautiful: the most recent issue of some gossip magazine with gorgeous celebrities, mostly magical, in it.
A sort of constant stream of ideas were rolling around in Sal’s head- two older gentlemen holding hands at a Pride parade, a tiny little girl with dark skin and a toothless grin and braids done in purple being pushed by her mom in a sunny park- so that when she wrote down a note and handed it to Adrian, she made sure that those were the most prominent. The page simply read: home.
Adrian picked up the other note, looked at it, and frowned, then turned to Sal-in-Ariel's body. "May I?" he asked.
“Um, sure?” a spike of confusion and uncertainty from Sal. And now her thoughts were spinning toward what Adrian had in mind, various scenarios playing out lightning fast, each more outlandish than the last.
Ariel was so confused. She didn’t know what she was looking for. But one thing she was being forced to settle into is the multiple amount of thoughts. Her head was swimming. “Can I get a hint here?” Ariel asked but her eyes were still closed as she tried to concentrate on… something.
Adrian made eye contact with Sal and cast the spell silently and and wandlessly; it was an old, familiar friend to him now. His touch on Sal's mind was very gentle; he'd been doing this for a long time and he knew how to read minds and memories without hurting people. He riffed through her recent thought-memories like a deck of cards, keeping his own mind open so that Ariel could read him; he was not upset so much as curious and disconcerted, feelings that gave way to a bloom of satisfaction as he comprehended the commonalities that Ariel was seeing between his own thoughts and Sal's.
He broke contact with Sal and turned back to Ariel. "The answer is that you read something from me and her and it wasn't what we expected. Which doesn't make it wrong but illustrates a different concern that we'll discuss in a moment here."
On that note, Adrian thanked the receptionist and saw her out, handing Ariel's note to Sal so she could read it and see what Ariel had thought she was supposed to find.
Honestly, Ariel was very confused. All of those images in her head… they didn’t seem to say on specific thing to her. It seemed too subjective to come back to one specific thought. “So the idea is that I might be looking for one thing, but the thought might not be clear because people think differently?”
"That wasn't supposed to be the point of the exercise, but I think it's been demonstrated anyroad." Adrian resisted the impulse to roll his eyes at the entire business. "But I assume you'll be looking for something more concrete than 'beauty' or 'home'. I don't pretend to know what you're looking for but I should add that there's no way any evidence you get this way would be presentable to the Wizangamot, and I assume it wouldn't be to your own courts, but you'll know that better than I do. The whole idea of setting you loose in the short term with someone else's ability no better trained than you are right now is, to use a technical term, bugfuck."
Adrian did give in to the impulse to sigh and roll his eyes. "But if I know Aurors, and I do, you're going to ignore my recommendation that Auror Singleton decline this duty and that Director Duvall forbid it. On your heads be it, and I'll do my best to put you back together when it's over.
"And before you go, Ariel, I need a brief word with you."
The snort that left Sal-as-Ariel was decidedly un-Ariel-like at the healer’s word choice, and she really couldn’t help the smirk that caught at her mouth. She’d been working to re-establish her clear blue ocean, but a spike of defiance broke through it easily. “Takes a certain… elasticity of sanity to do our jobs, Adrian. I’m pretty sure that’s the same, regardless of which side of the pond you hail from. Take the potion, Ariel. No sense in wearing yourself out before we even get to the shindig. I’ll be outside whenever you finish up here.”
Oh that was certainly a comforting thought. It’s a bad idea, but I know you’re going to do it anyway. Beauty and home, really? Anyway, Ariel stayed seated when she realized that Adrian had something else to talk about, so after Sal made her exit, she settled back into her chair because her mind was clear again now anyway. “What did you need to talk about?”
This was a sit-down conversation, so Adrian did. He really didn't want to be an authority figure about this kind of thing. "Where you woke up, or rather where your body woke up without you. Look, I'm not here to police your romantic life, but I can add two and two and come up with four. And if you're doing what, and who, I believe you're doing, you need to consider the physical and psychological impact on both yourself and him. I'll have some literature for you the next time I see you--whatever body you happen to be in--but in the meantime, two rules: Muggle-style barrier contraception and no biting, all right?"
Circe's tits, this was not the most embarrassing conversation he'd ever had with a patient, but it was up there.
Fucking Sal and her big mouth because of name dropping Miles… Ariel sat there, and listened to the awkward safe sex lecture. It’s not that she didn’t think they were going to avoid the topic, but she at least wanted to prepare before having to be told as an adult to wear a condom and not get bitten by your werewolf boyfriend. Oh and get the literature. And think of more physical and psychological impacts than she was already dealing with right now in her life…
“Thank you for the advice,” Ariel kept it short and didn’t argue it because he was the Health Professional, she was not. And she really didn’t want to talk about her blossoming sex life when the morning after got ruined by waking up in the wrong man’s bed. “Is that all?”
Christ I hope so Adrian said, but the words came out as, "I think that should cover things for today. I'll be at tonight's event so if--" when, Adrian did not say "--there are problems, ring me on my mobile." He stood up to indicate that they were finished and that Ariel could flee with the tatters of her dignity intact.
“See you tonight then,” Ariel said and quickly took the potion out of the bag so she could drink it before leaving Adrian’s office. As quickly as possible. Awkward.