章 15: 15
14.
Severus approached the broad, strong wall in the forefront of his daughter's mind. He could feel Bellatrix's signature radiating off of it, but he could feel, also, traces of his daughter, places where her own power had been laced into its construction. He sought out the place where he had burst through before, and couldn't believe his luck.
As he expected, the hole had been repaired; but it had been hastily patched with a bit of psychic energy that was weaker, even flimsy, compared to the rest of the iron-strong wall. It would not have been overly difficult to break through in the same spot again, but he didn't need to. The hole had been filled in with Calista's magic, not Bellatrix's. He could see, now, when he passed a psychic tendril over the spot, that Bellatrix was slowly adding her own strength to fortify it; he had returned just in time, then.
He reached out with a thread of thought, brushed against the glowing, multi-coloured patch in the wall, the spot that felt strongly of Calista. He felt her recognise him, and then he felt her panic; a thread from the cluster of magic latched onto his own psychic tendril: help me help me help me.
He summoned another tendril, crafted it into a filament that echoed the golden wall he had built in her mind once, long ago, to keep her nightmares at bay, and let her sleep, for once, untroubled. He hoped that she would recognise it, would be soothed by it, so she would rein in her panic enough to help him ease through the wall, without having to use force. The more strength that he could save for his final confrontation with the malign presence in her mind, the better. He reflected, briefly, on the irony that both of her parents had now erected walls in their daughter's mind; but he had done it to protect her. Bellatrix was doing it to control her.
It seemed to be working; he felt the edge of panic dull, as the golden filament intertwined with the panicked thread of her own thought. He wanted to communicate to her a reminder of what she was supposed to do, to let him slip through, but there wasn't enough of her here to really speak to; instead, he had to depend on a baser form of psychic communication. He sent another tiny filament out, echoing again the way that he had blocked her shadows in the past. And then, a gap appeared in the patched spot on the wall. Severus took his chance, slipped through the first barrier.
The fog beyond it had thickened since he had last been here; crossing it was more like wading through water. He looked down, checking on the state of the net that supported him, the web of woven multi-coloured threads of words that Calista had been repairing last time. He felt a jolt of fear; the net was impossibly sparse, with gaping holes large enough for his foot to fall through scattered everywhere. Even the threads that remained were thin, fine, stretched devastatingly tight. When he reached down to touch one, a delicate, gossamer blue thread, he barely heard a soft echo of words. His name is Yellow.
He pressed through the fog, watching his footing carefully. Icy sea-spray came up from below, burned his ankles like acid when it splashed on him. Twice, he had to backtrack and find another route across the delicate net, because the gaps ahead of him were too large. At last, he reached the second barrier. There was no sign of his daughter here, but he did see, where they had stood before, together, that there was a section of the web beneath him that looked stronger, in better repair than the rest of it. Thick green ropes reinforced all of the junctions in this section.
Underneath him, a thread snapped; he stumbled, and shifted over to the stronger section of the web, watched a hole open up where he had been standing that was easily large enough for him to fall through. He was running out of time.
'Calista,' he called, and he fixed his gaze on the wall that she had come through before, but there was no tell-tale shimmer, and, even though he could feel her presence nearby, he couldn't see any sign of the ghostly embodiment of her self that he had seen before. He stepped up to the wall, pressed his hand against it, feeling for her in the lacy patterns that were entrenched in the wall. There was a faint pulse of her; and then, her hand, small and translucent, came through the wall, curled fingers tightly around his own.
She was trying to pull him through the wall, pull him to her, but it wasn't working. The thick, sturdy barrier between them was still blocking him from following her. He felt along the wall, with his hands and his mind; it was quite as strong as it looked. He would be able to get through, but if he had to resort to force, he would be substantially weaker than he was now, once he got through.
He had an idea; he remembered their legilimency lesson, from when she was younger, recalled the little bubble he had created to contain the knowledge he wanted her to have. He made a similar bubble, enclosed a flash of memory that showed the page of her journal where they both had written, the instructions he'd given her to help him through. He pushed this bubble out through his hand, much as Calista had pushed out the words that she had used to repair the net; he saw the bubble touch the skin of her own hand, and she absorbed it.
'Like before,' he urged her, 'It is just like before, only in reverse. Remember how I reached out with my mind, and guided your towards mine; I need you to do that, Calista. Reach out to me, with your mind, show me the way through.'
He sent her another little bubble, with pieces of his memory from that day enclosed in it. He was afraid, for an instant, that he had overwhelmed her, because her hand began to fade in his; her fingers became insubstantive, and his own clawed at air, trying to reach her again. But then, the wall in front of him shimmered, and he thought perhaps she was coming through again. But she didn't - instead, a thick, strong tendril of her mind snaked out; it was silvery, glimmering. It was beautiful, familiar, and inside it, he could see that it was not truly silver, but was made of many fine, colourful threads twisted together. It wrapped itself around his wrist, and he could feel it trying to pull him through the wall.
'The weak spot, Calista,' he said, 'Show me the weak spot, where I can slip through.'
There was a pause, and the silvery glow of the tendril began to fade; she was losing strength, wasn't going to be able to help him through…
'You have magic,' he reminded her, 'It's not all hers. Find it, use it. You're strong enough; I know you are. I see it in your eyes all the time. Don't let her win, Calista. Fight her, take some of yourself back, and bring me through the wall.'
He sent another tendril out, a thick thread of gold again, another piece like the wall he had once sheltered her with. The silvery rope uncoiled from his wrist, reached out to meet the seeking gold thread from his mind; they twisted together, and even though it was technically different, it felt as if they were holding hands again; but this time, her grip was sure and strong. She pulled the two tendrils, twined together, along the wall a short distance, and then a piece of the diamond-netted pattern of colours on the surface of the wall began to melt away, dissolving the iron wall behind it like acid.
The effort cost her, because the silvery thread began to fade again, dissolving rapidly into the darkness around them; but it didn't matter, because she had done it, she had managed to pull him through the second wall. The rest of him followed the gold psychic thread through, even as the wall sealed shut again behind him.
And here, beyond the second wall, was utter chaos.
Memories swirled around here, whirling and flapping like crazed birds; he heard the echo of a scream, felt the press of fear breeze by his ear. Through it, finally, he caught a glimpse of his daughter's avatar, the image of herself that represented the core of her soul. She was crouched in a defensive position, while the darkest and vilest of her memories swooped around her, retreated, and came crashing back. She was thinly there, less than a ghost, but that didn't make sense, because he could feel her here, all around him, and there was still more to her than these horrors. He ducked beneath a screeching, howling scrap of memory that was Bellatrix in a murderous rage; slipped past an image of a dark room where Calista cried, alone.
He approached her spirit-form, reached his hand out to her, but she wasn't solid enough to touch, anymore. And then, he noticed something that he had not seen at first, something that gave him hope that she was still here enough to save. Tiny, fragile threads of silver, each no wider than a human hair, were coming out of her in all directions, stretching far away into the shadows around the edges of her mind. He followed one at random, floated along it, avoiding the wild, screeching, flying things that darted around them both. At last, he came to the thread's end, saw that it led to a small, silver bubble of a memory. When he reached out to touch it, the memory played itself back to him.
She was sitting up in her bed; her eyes darted around the room. Was the sitting room gone? Was she back in the safe place? Someone else was here, in the room with her, but who was it? The someone leaned forward, and it was a man, a man with a long nose, dark eyes like hers. His mouth was moving; he was saying something, but she couldn't hear it over her own screams. Were they her real screams or just the memory of old ones? She didn't know… and then he was reaching out to her, and what if it was a trick? What if it was really her? Warm arms around her now, and at first she tried to slip out of them, but then she realised that it didn't feel scary at all, didn't feel anything like the cold memory of her mother, felt instead like a place that she could hide, if she chose to. She leaned into him, and finally she could hear what he was saying. 'You're safe", over and over, and the more he said it the more she remembered; things had changed. She lived in the safe place now, and this man was her father, and he never hurt her.
He tore himself away from the memory, searched in the whirling, seething mess of memories for another silver bubble. He found one, connected to the end of a fine silver thread, which undoubtedly led back to the center, where Calista's ghostlike inner self was here/not here with each flicker. He touched the next silvery bubble, saw the memory inside.
She was walking, and she had a bag of candy in her hand. Every Flavour Beans, it said on the package, and it certainly seemed to be true; there were beans of every colour imaginable. She took a few out and examined them, sniffed them experimentally. Some of them, she could tell by the colour and the smell what they were likely to taste like, but others, she couldn't. She bit one, and it tasted terrible, like vomit. She couldn't help but make a face, but she looked up sidelong at her father. Had he seen her expression? Maybe not… she bit back a grin. 'Here, try this one,' she said, holding the other half of it out. It would be funny to trick him, to see him make the same face she must have done. 'What does it taste like?' he asked, and she'd invented an answer. 'Er, something fruity.' But he didn't believe her; he smiled wryly. 'What does it really taste like?" and she had to tell him the truth, didn't get to see him make a funny face. But it was okay, she was still having fun with him. She thought that, even though he was now teasing her about getting a job tasting vomit-flavoured beans, he was still her favourite person she had ever met.
Both of the silvery bubbles felt the same, on the outside; they felt, purely and truly, like Calista, and he realised that she did still have control of part of her magic, of part of the pool of potential that lived in her mind. The bubbles were, in fact, tiny little pockets of memories, her favourite memories, and they were shielded by delicate, fragile skins that were no more substantive than the meniscus of a real bubble, but they had been shaped by occlumency; once more, her magic had shown itself when it was most needed, creating tiny psychic shields for her good memories, so they wouldn't be swept up in the storm that raged around them, wouldn't be taken and twisted by Bellatrix.
He traced his way back to the center of all the threads, where they joined with the fading, flickering image of Calista. She was even more faint than she had been before; she couldn't keep herself steady much longer, and now there was a rumble of psychic thunder, a blinding flash of rage, and he knew that Bellatrix was coming. Her good memories had anchored her here, to her own mind, but Bellatrix was a full-grown witch, with a fair measure of talent for both occlumency and legilimency, and Calista was no match for her, truly.
Working quickly, the threat of Bellatrix imminent all round them, he reached into his own core, to draw more of his energy into Calista's mind. Since part of his mind was here already, it was easy to draw more power. Using a portion of this energy, he created a great golden sphere, something like Calista's bubbles, only infinitely more substantive, more intact. He gave it thick, strong walls, precisely like the one he had given her before, to block the shadows out.
He reached out with a sweeping tendril, followed each of the silvery threads to Calista's favourite memories; there were hundreds of them, things he couldn't imagine would matter to anyone else; a small smile they shared over breakfast, the half-hostile, half-playful back-and-forth they seemed to find themselves engaged in whenever they disagreed; his hand settling warmly over hers on the wooden handle of a knife while he showed her the correct way to split dandelion stems lengthwise; the sound of his voice, echoing dark and velvety off the stone walls of his study while he read to her.
The vast majority of the memories she had kept protected in silver bubbles were of the two of them together, but there were others, too: the rough tongue of her cat, trying to lick every last bit of treat from Calista's fingers; the surprising light sweetness of pumpkin juice the first time she had tried it; the feel of summer sun warm on the crown of her head. and then, one of the last ones he came to: Calista sitting on an an unfamiliar overstuffed sofa, while someone read aloud to her, someone that wasn't Severus. When the man in the memory glanced up from his book, Severus recoiled involuntarily; it was Remus Lupin, the very same one who had nearly murdered him in werewolf form, once.
He was tempted, sorely, to neglect this memory, to leave it, solitary and forgotten, in the maelstrom that swirled around them, the chaotic whirlwind that was part Bellatrix, and part Calista, the darkest memories and worst fears she had. For an instant, he held all of the other silver memories gathered, left that last one out; but he couldn't. There was no telling how important or unimportant it was; it could have been as casual a memory as any of the dozens of times she'd tried a new Bertie Botts' bean flavour, or it could have been the first time she was around another person without feeling threatened, could be the cornerstone for her ability to trust him, Severus, now. There was no way of knowing. He swept it up too, and now he held all of her good memories, poured them all into the golden bubble he had created.
Another blinding flash of rage crackled in the air around him like lightning; and now he could see a glimmer, like he'd seen when Calista first came through the barrier towards him, but he knew in an instant that it wasn't Calista.
He wrapped his searching tendril of thought around Calista's flimsy avatar, gathered her like she was one of her memories, and certainly she felt as fragile as one of those tiny bubbles. He encased her in the gold shield, too, slipped her into it like a caterpillar into a cocoon. He didn't have any more time. He had to hope that, protected from the chaos around them, and bolstered by her happiest memories, she would be able to keep herself, her soul, intact.
An image of Bellatrix materialised in front of him. He had expected her to appear as she had the last time he had seen him, but something had changed. She looked disheveled, gaunt, and there was something different about her eyes; they seemed to rage and froth, much like the sea that had churned below his feet in the previous chamber of whatever Bellatrix had turned Calista's mind into.
She lifted her chin haughtily, managed to look down her nose at him, even though he knew that, in the physical world, at least, he was taller than she.
'Hello, Severus,' she said, artificially friendly. He wasn't fooled by the syrup in her voice… not as he once had been. 'It's been a long time, hasn't it?'
'What do you want, Bellatrix? Why are you here?'
Bellatrix stepped closer, raised an eyebrow. 'What do I want? Well, I should think that were obvious, even to you, Sevvy. In case you hadn't heard, I've been in Azkaban for some time now, and it's awfully dull.'
Severus began sending out psychic tendrils, slowly, while he faced Bellatrix. There were two things he needed to find out: Firstly, he needed to know precisely how she had gotten in, so he could force her back out the same way, and secondly, he needed to know where she had anchored herself in Calista's mind. In order to force her permanently out, he'd need to remove that anchor point as well.
Bellatrix smiled, a cold, dark thing. 'I want to be free, of course. They won't let me out; so I decided to let myself in.'
She threw her head back and laughed, as if she had made the most marvelous joke.
'How did you do it?' he asked, trying to sound as if he were merely impressed; he suppressed any thoughts about why he wanted to know, and he was glad he had done so, because Bellatrix leaned forward, looked him right in the eye. He kept searching, sending threads out in all directions. As long as he kept her focused on their conversation, and as long as he was careful, he thought he could find the anchor point before she knew what he was doing.
'It was very clever of me, wasn't it?' she said, 'I thought of it when a dementor made me relive, over and over, the memory of the night I lost Calista, to that fool Dumbledore's cronies. Imagine the humiliation… and then, you know, I couldn't track her, some sort of perimeter spells wherever they were keeping her… and I was so very vexed, because I knew I had been so careful to ensure that I would be able to track her, if she was ever taken.'
'The Dark Mark,' he guessed. It fit with what Calista had written: she made me have the knife dream she was real she looked in my eyes and climbed in
'Oh, so you did see it, then? What do you think, Severus? Is it a good replica?'
'Not really,' he said, because he didn't trust himself to say anything else.
Well, I was never very artistic,' she said, mock-ruefully. 'But Tom wouldn't give her a real one, yet.'
'What a surprise,' he mused sarcastically to her, 'I recall how fond he was of children'.
Bellatrix's eyes flashed, and she narrowed them into a glare. 'You haven't told me why you're here.'
'Well, we've never been very good with communication, have we, Bella? I don't believe you ever told me that I was a father, for instance.'
Aha. One of his searching tendrils had uncovered a cluster of memories that reeked of Bellatrix's psychic signature.
'You can't possibly be upset about that, Severus? What would you have done if I'd told you? Would you have asked me to marry you, bought us a puppy?'
Derision dripped from her words, and her lip curled.
Severus had found the anchor, and it had answered his other question, too. She had anchored herself inside of Calista's memory of the night that Bellatrix had carved the Dark Mark into her skin; and the memory of it was how she had gotten in, too, just as Calista had tried to tell him. He examined the memory, forcefully tamped down any emotional response to it; he couldn't betray himself to Bellatrix. If she knew he had found her anchor, she would know what he was trying to do.
'I must say,' Severus said, partly to keep her distracted, and partly because it was something that had caught his interest. 'I'm surprised that losing Calista affected you so deeply that it became a memory the dementors could exploit.'
Dementors could not work with memories that didn't have emotion ingrained within them; did this mean, then, that in her own twisted way, Bellatrix did truly care for her daughter? Had she missed the sound of the child's footfalls on the stairs, the sight of her dark head bent low over her journal?
'Of course it affected me,' she said, 'I've invested so much in her; the Dark Mark is only a piece of it. She was supposed to be a gift, the ultimate gift, to the Dark Lord. Imagine a servant loyal from birth, raised from earliest breath to love Him. And if she was talentless, or witless… well, a sacrifice is also a very good gift.'
'So that's all she was to you,' Severus wasn't certain if he was successful in concealing his disgust, wasn't even certain if he wanted to be successful. 'A valuable trophy you'd lost.'
Severus redirected the threads of his mind that he'd sent searching through Calista's mind, wrapped them instead in slow, concentric circles around where Bellatrix had manifested her psychic core in Calista's mind.
'A trophy?' Bellatrix questioned, raising an eyebrow. 'A trophy is a spoil from something you've already won; no, the trophy would have been if He had sired her.' she smirked. 'Perhaps I will earn a trophy though, soon enough. Now that I am free, I will find the Dark Lord, and help him return to power. As soon as He breaks his servants out of Azkaban, I can return to my own body, and I still have this one to offer as a sacrifice...'
Severus began feeding more and more of his own energy into the circles he'd placed around Bellatrix.
She tilted her head, and a note of regret entered her voice. 'I wish I could still offer her as a servant. It seems such a waste to kill her, now that I've seen she did have potential after all; but once I'm gone, she'll be mad or she'll be a husk. I must remember that it is all for the greater good.'
At last, Severus thought he had gathered enough of his strength into the trap he'd set around Bellatrix; it was one of her flaws, to become so engrossed in her own grandiose plans that she missed what was happening around her, and he'd counted on it.
'Aren't you forgetting something, Bella?' Severus taunted, tone light.
'Oh, how ungrateful of me,' Bellatrix said, 'Of course, I should thank you for find her, and keeping her alive for me. You've proven a most useful lover, Severus, even after the fact.'
He spring the trap then, and the coils of thought snaked around her, binding her. Seeing, too late, what he had done, Bellatrix screamed with rage, struggled against the gleaming mental cords that held her tight; but he was stronger than she, and he had not weakened himself getting past her barriers, as she likely expected he would have.
Severus used one tendril to cover her mouth. It was critical that she heard what he said next, because it was the only thing that might protect him, if the Dark Lord did return, from incurring punishment for interfering with Bellatrix's plan.
'You forget, Bella. Calista does have two parents,' Severus said silkily, 'And I'm afraid we disagree, one one point. I think she'll make a better servant than a sacrifice; and now, you see, I'm the one who's made an investment. I've been training her in the Dark Arts, and it seems she's quite a willing student, when she isn't being tortured out of her wits. You should have been patient, Bella; but you weren't, and I am, and that's why, when the Dark Lord returns, it will be my daughter that he seeks to recruit.'
Bellatrix writhed with rage; he could feel it radiating off her, echoing off the boundaries of Calista's mind.
He didn't know if his bluff would be enough to explain away, if it ever came to it, why he had done what he was about to, but it was the best one he had come up with, and plausible enough that he hoped it would suffice.
He reached for the cluster of memories where Bellatrix had anchored herself; there was the original memory of how Calista had gotten the scars on her back, and then countless others where Bellatrix had reminded her of it, or forced her to relive it in dreams while she slept. He tore the fabric of the original memory open, forced Bellatrix through it the way she had come.
Now, as the scene of Bellatrix's invasion played out in reverse in Calista's memory, he saw precisely how she had done it; saw how she had forced Calista to revisit the memory, over and over, in her dreams, when she was vulnerable to psychic suggestion, then how she had exploited and exaggerated Calista's vulnerability through repeated exposure to the memory, over months and months; how had he not known that the sudden uptick in "the knife dream" had been so critically important? And then, when Calista's mind was weak, Bellatrix had used an astral form of legilimency, and when she looked into Calista's eyes in her dream, it had somehow enabled her to invade her mind entirely, possess it for herself.
Bellatrix had entrenched herself well; it took a tremendous amount of effort, of energy, for Severus to force her out. She was strong, even after her time in Azkaban, and it took most of his energy; he pushed her core out of Calista, and he knew that as soon as he had forced Bellatrix beyond the edge of Calista's mind, the psychic cord that connected her to her own body would take over, would snap her back to herself.
But he wasn't done; as the last waves of her outrage faded, and the whirlwind and thunder with it, he set to combing through the remains of Calista's mind, seeking all traces of Bellatrix's presence. He couldn't risk leaving anything behind that she could use to reach Calista again, to damage her further.
He knew the instant she was gone, because her barriers melted away; bits of her remained, tangled in the tapestry that was his daughter's mind, her own pool of magical potential. He would have to separate it out, banish the bits that belonged to Bellatrix, hope that he could repair the bits that did not.
It didn't require a great deal of psychic energy, but it was tedious, to search through every scrap of memory that remained in Calista's mind, sorting those that felt like her, belonged to her, from those that did not. And although it didn't cost a lot of his energy to search out and discard memories that did not belong to Calista, it was a different sort of difficult. He had already sealed Calista's core in a protective shield, and with it, all of her happy memories. what remained were the fear, the anger, the shadows. He had given Calista all the best of herself, to let her try and recover, and he was left now with the darkest scraps.
When at last he was satisfied that he had removed all of Bellatrix's presence from her mind, he gathered the memories that Bellatrix had used to anchor herself; they were all Calista's, but they had been exploited, could be exploited again, in precisely the same way.
He gathered these memories, sealed them in another protective bubble; this was a silvery shield, but it had none of the luminescence that Calista had given the ones around her favourite memories. This was the dulled metal of manacles, of prison bars. He pushed this to the very forefront of Calista's mind, and then he set about repairing the rest of it.
(¯ˆ·.¸¸.·ˆ¯)
Bellatrix was gone, but the holes she had created were not; The tapestry of Calista's mind was still weak, stretched too thin. Where Bellatrix had merged their talents together, Calista was left with great tangled knots of magic and memory, mangled senselessly together. Severus untangled these as best he could, separating the multicoloured threads of her mind with his own, and releasing them.
They should have reformed, woven themselves together in the right pattern, but without a strong Self, a fully sentient soul, they could not. All Severus could do was leave the ends of all of her mind-threads free, so that they could be reformed, if she returned fully to her mind.
Beneath the tattered net of her consciousness, the sea of madness still existed, as it exists in everyone, beneath layers of reason and comprehension. But without Bellatrix's heightened influence, it was calm and still as glass. It could be covered over, completely, if Calista chose to return to the landscape of her mind. Now that Bellatrix was not there to drain away all of the girl's energy, she would be able to repair the damage rapidly; but first, she had to return.
He remembered, suddenly, the conversation they had had, once, about modifying her memory. It seemed so long ago, now.
"Would you do it you were me?" she had asked him, "Do you want me to forget?"
"Calista, those are two different questions," he'd told her, and then he'd told her the truth, the way he always tried to. "If I were in your place, I would choose to remember, because knowledge, no matter how awful it is, is power...and there is a kind of strength you can gain only by overcoming terrible things. Some people are lucky, and they never need that strength, nor do they have cause to find it, but I have never been a lucky man, so I would want it, just in case."
He'd smiled sadly pushed her hair back from her face, allowed himself to imagine for a moment what she might have been like, in another universe, if things had gone differently, for both of them. He'd taken her hands, looked into her eyes.
"But my answer to your other question contradicts that, I'm afraid. I do want you to forget. I want you to smile, and laugh, and sleep through the night, without needing to worry about how strong you are. When I tell you that you are safe, I want you to believe me, the first time."
He had answered her question, but she had never chosen, one way or the other. As he surveyed the wreckage of her mind, he thought that perhaps now he could give her the chance to make that choice.
Severus had set the rest of her memories, the rest of her mind, in order to the best of his ability, but her mind would not return to normal until her psychic core returned to it, and directed the pattern to reweave itself. Of course, Severus wanted her to return to herself immediately, to begin repairing the damage that Bellatrix had done.
But it was Calista who had been through Bellatrix's nightmare of control, who had always suffered at her mother's hands, in the physical plane as well as the psychic one; it was Calista's decision whether she would return.
Severus approached the cocoon he had made for her, looked inside. Surrounded by her best memories, and protected from all of the chaos around her by his shield, her avatar was beginning to grow solid once more, was regaining energy; but something was still wrong - her eyes were not her own. They looked happy, blindingly happy - they shone with a light that he couldn't even have imagined there, but, when he looked closer, it was an empty happiness; it was a false happiness.
But it was still happiness, and Severus thought that he didn't have the right to take that choice away from her; so he sealed the cocoon back up, except for one small spot. In this spot, he created a tiny psychic window, where she would be able to see just a glimpse of what was happening beyond the protective shield.
She would see the darkness, would perhaps make out flashes of the shadowed memories that still existed in her mind, but that he had not encased with her soul, in the cocoon. She would see the tattered, multicoloured net, the slow, undulating wave of the loose ends of her mind, the pieces that waited to be set back into place.
She would know that there was a world beyond the protective bubble, but she would not have to live in it, if she didn't want to. He pulled a set of threads from her own mind, one in each colour that he could find. A blue one, that spoke her own words, a green one, that held some of his. A red one, that carried Bellatrix's voice, because it was only fair that she have all of the information, before she decided. An orange one, a yellow one, and one for every shade in between. He gathered these, twisted them into a tight, small sphere.
And he crafted just one more bubble from his own mind; in it, he tried to capture precisely what he had meant, when he'd whispered in Calista's ear, both here, in her mind, and in the physical world, where he sat by her sickbed. It was good, he thought, that he could show her precisely how he felt, because he didn't think three words could possibly do it justice; how could they possibly explain what it felt like to build a family, for instance? A tiny, fractured, broken, and shadowed family, with big noses and glittering black eyes, and more sarcasm than the seas had water? He couldn't tell her, so he showed her, wrapped it all up in the bubble that he now used to encase the sphere of coloured threads.
He attached the whole lot to the inside of the window, fashioning a kind of mental latch. If she looked through the window, decided she wanted to risk the heartbreak, the deep shadows, the drifting, aimless threads that needed her to tell them where to weave themselves… well, then at least she would know, before she opened the window, what she was doing it all for.
Or… if she chose, she could ignore the rest of her mind, beyond the cocoon. She could leave the window closed, keep only her happiest memories, and live among them. If she chose that, eventually, the rest of her mind would decay, without the soul sustaining it, shaping it. She would, essentially, be in a coma in the physical world, would never respond to voice or touch again - but inside her mind, inside the protective shield, she would know only of the best things that had happened in her short life.
Severus had always thought that, if he had asked her again to make a choice, she would have chosen the same thing that he had admitted he would have, in her place. He judged that she was enough like him that she would rather have knowledge than relinquish it, that she would want the ability to become the best, the strongest, that she possibly could. He thought that she would have chosen, had he presented the options again, after their conversation, to remember.
But things had changed; she had changed. And there was evidence, all around him, that her mind had been changed in many, many ways, in a very real sense. There was really no way to know what she would decide, until she had done it.
Exhausted, and knowing he had done everything he could, Severus began the slow, careful ascent out of the depths of her mind. A large portion of his mind had left his body for quite a long time, fighting the intrusion in hers; he would have to take his time, or he would be in for quite a shock when he sprang back into himself. It was tiring, and he knew there was still one thing left to do, before he could lose himself in sleep to recover again.
He had to deal with one more bubble: the one where he had encapsulated the memories that Bellatrix had exploited. He had to deal with those, and quickly, before Bellatrix recovered enough to use them again.
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