---

“Merlin, where are my sunglasses!” Lawrence mocked patting his person and his surroundings for a pair of non-existent sunglasses. “Seriously though, how is a wizard meant to sleep over such noise?”

It was late evening, to all intents and purposes, bedtime. Across the hospital, the lamps were dim, and patients were tucked in. The night shift ready to see things to morning. Inside the four walls Lawrence had occupied since late August, the winter sun had long since set from the enchanted window. With Yavin Morgenthau’s outfit, it might well have just re-entered.

This nocturnal visit was not their norm. By day with somewhat regularity, Healer Misslethorpe and Morgenthau occupied the room’s three armchairs with Lawrence. They spent a lot of time in and out of their patient’s head, and talking. Lawrence wondered if he had talked as much as a Gryffindor teenager as he might have the past three or so months. He’d been staggered by the number of memories that had resurfaced. The dementors had put locks upon all his dearest, happiest memories - one way he had thought of it. Then with more thought, perhaps that they had feasted upon them, and left him the scraps. Revisiting, reclaiming and reuniting with these replenished them.

He dreamed vividly now. His mind employed a night administrator, filing the day’s newly dug turf, reorganising it amongst the older territory. In the morning he would recount them to the dream diary as best he could before they took flight. One dream, or nightmare, recurred. This was the reason for Yavin Morgenthau’s presence in boldest pyjama print.

Sipping a Valerian tisane as he joined Lawrence in the room, Yavin’s eyes danced with good humour at his patient’s dramatic reaction to this evening's sleeping attire. They had become much better acquainted over time - to the point of friendliness, or what passed for friendliness under these circumstances. He was pleased with their progress. Unlike Miranda, Yavin exercised an even-tempered attitude towards the problem at hand; he was in no hurry to see Musgrave cured and installed in Azkaban.

The more time they had, the more ground they covered, the better. And tonight they were treading new territory. Tonight they were dreading the dreamscape.

“You’re, aha, you’re welcome to picture me in something different once we’re into it,” the older wizard laughed as he lowered himself into an armchair that was positioned next  to the hospital bed. “But we’ll have bigger fish to, hm, to fry, won’t we?”

He drank more deeply of the tisane before setting it aside. Dream magic was a curious thing: by and large the more unpredictable aspects of the art because it was the true domain of the subconscious. In his travels he had met practitioners who were afraid to enter dreamscapes - but then he had also come across entire villages of wixes who dabbled in it with alarming frequency, places where to cross the threshold from awake to asleep was nothing but a common traipse.

“Are you feeling sleepy enough for bed,” Yavin eyed his sleeping companion, “or would you prefer some, that is, some inducement?”

Valerian root was his own preference but there were other methods, all natural and gradual. As a rule, he intended to avoid sleeping draughts.

“Well, your pyjamas have been a bit of a wake up,” Lawrence agreed. He pushed himself up, lifting both legs onto the bed before folding them beneath him. “But I have done my best to wear myself out.”

Despite his age and the toll of Azkaban and his months outside it, Lawrence reckoned he was in better physical shape than ever. The St Mungo’s healers dictated his diet, and without a wand he did everything by hand. They encouraged him to do what he could to exercise. It was good both for the body and the mind. Old habits from his auror days were easier to slip into when two wizards spent hours in your head pulling those memories up to the surface.

It made those momentary fantasies of escape all the more possible. Just fantasies though. At least that’s what he told himself while he had head-visitors.

“Unless you’d like a bedtime story?” He gestured to the modest pile of books on the bedside table which came from the St Mungo’s lending library. He’d finished Kaleidoscopic Nunneries some point around new year, but there were still copies of Yavin’s own book, and Extraordinary Trials in History underneath an unauthorised biography of Harry Potter. (Lawrence had scoffed numerous times of the historical accuracy, having lived through that turbulent time.)

“Well,” he exhaled, “I suppose we’ll see each other in my dreams. I apologise in advance if you meet my dear sister. Good night.”

Despite the slight excitement of a child going to sleep the night before a birthday or Christmas, once Lawrence had settled to sleep, he felt his eyelids growing heavier. He wondered if he’d even see the dream that night, or if it would stay away. Maybe they’d navigate a teenage adventure with Sandy from their NEWT days, or relive the sporadically romantic Andy from their young adult lives. Perhaps a young Hannah critiquing yet another of Lawrence’s ex-girlfriends who came long after the Head Healer. He wondered fleetingly if Yavin could hear all these considerations from the armchair beside. He wo-...

Sleep delivered him into the void of the unconscious mind, and Lawrence began to dream.

The auror office on Level One was empty and dark. Lawrence looked about himself, his dream-self unaware he had fallen asleep and the dreams had begun. There was instead, a nagging feeling that he was meant to be somewhere. An underlying current of anxiety with the location.

Sensing a source of light, he turned to his right, and observed his cubicle. Familiar battered chair that he reached out to touch the back of. He could feel the threads and the tears in the material from rough handling. The desk had the easily recognisable stacks of auror casefiles piled up, four empty mugs, a dead potted plant (one of the ones a young Hannah had gifted him along the way). The cubicle wall was adorned with a calendar, just out of focus as was the case in dreams, and a dark blue Watling Warriors scarf.

Despite being reunited with his desk from his auror heydays, there was still that nagging feeling he should be somewhere. So he turned, and made in the direction to leave, instinctively patting for his wand in a favourite black zip-up leather jacket.

Where was his wand? He felt like he was walking through treacle. He must have left it on his desk.

But as he turned back, the auror office was no longer in darkness, his sole desk lit, but it was daytime. Red-robed colleagues asking him from a distance where he’d been. Why he didn’t come.

“Come where?” He kept asking, over and over. “To what?” Frustration grew over not knowing what or where or when. As Lawrence slept, his hands formed fists against the mattress. This was not the dream, and not a memory either, but something in between.

To access the dreamscape was always a matter of balance, if you were not naturally inclined to it as his protege was. Yavin himself had to painstakingly find that place between dream and waking - that place in which Peter Pan claimed to wait for Wendy Darling - where he could most naturally slip into the dozing minds of those in the vicinity. So he kicked off his bright red bed slippers and leaned back into the armchair, fingers interlaced over his middle.

The wizard closed his eyes and welcomed drowsiness; a warm, heavy blanket settling itself on top of his busy thoughts. When he was certain that sleep was near, he reached out with his mind….

Two men in the room, one on the bed and the other seated. To the untrained eye, they were simply asleep. A peculiar pair perhaps.

            “Come where? To what?”

Yavin opened his eyes, though his ears had clearly arrived ahead of him. His pyjamas were even brighter here, somehow, stark against the ordinariness of the auror office and the spotlight above what could only be auror Musgrave’s desk. Hands in the pockets of his dressing robe, he appeared quite casual as he looked around for the dreamer in question.

“There you are.” Yavin’s circumlocutory way of speaking did not appear in this place, as it never did between minds. “Ready, Lawrence?”

“There you are.”

At once, the indistinct red-robed colleagues vanished into smoke at the periphery of his vision. Lawrence pivoted on the spot and recognised the taller wizard in his loud pyjamas.

In the bed on the fourth floor, Lawrence’s brow furrowed and eased against his pillow without stirring.

In his dream, Lawrence had lost the white hair from his temples, the extra lines around his eyes and his hair had grown back. Several brown curls escaped a ponytail above the collar of the leather jacket. Not dressed in his robes, but jeans and boots, more reminiscent of nineties British fashion. Most noticeable of all were that he had both hands.

Yavin’s presence and those pyjamas brought Lawrence’s consciousness back to the present, recalling at once why the wizard was there, in his dream. It was rather like the pull out from a deep dream towards waking state where decision and direction could be made in a dream as it began to lose its grasp.

“Ready.” Lawrence echoed, left hand closing around his wand. It was back in his pocket as if it had been there all along.

This was not the man he had left behind in St.Mungo’s. Yavin would liked to have known this Lawrence, once upon a time, though they were slowly inching towards a persona that harked back to this particular version. A version that could still feel and conceive the more divine of emotions. He smiled mildly and placed his hands behind his back. They were ready.

“I like the look. And here I wondered what Miranda saw in you,” Yavin’s eyes glimmered with humour even as he turned around to nod at a door that had suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

A bright, mustard yellow door with a brass knob. It stood by itself and logically it could lead nowhere. In the dreamscape, on the other hand, they knew this door could lead them anywhere at all: anywhere the mind wished to take you. Yavin liked this trick. He had taken the door from Angkatell but discarded the restrictive walls of that metaphor.

“Hm. I want you to think about what we are going to see when you open this door - and it has to be you opening it by the way,” his forehead creased back in the hospital room as he exerted some effort, sensing the edges of Lawrence’s mind and the subconscious running beneath them like an endless waterfall. “You can break the laws of reality here but don’t think too hard about it. A dementor here is what a dementor means to you, which shouldn’t be very different from its manifestation in the physical world.”

Yavin stepped back to give his patient some room. “At your leisure. And remember, I’m right here. I got you.”

The crease of slight concern was replaced by a satisfied smirk at his dream companion’s assessment. In his auror days he’d had all the swagger and better luck with the ladies. His waking self hadn’t considered itself attractive in a long while.

His dreaming self did not think past a smug reaction to the words, instead focusing on the mustard yellow door in the middle of the auror office. A door that was most definitely not painted by his memories. It was a shade he could see Yavin wearing.

“I want you to think about what we are going to see when you open this door…” Lawrence averted his gaze from the door to Yavin. Every movement in the dream felt sluggish. “A dementor here is what a dementor means to you..” His hazel eyes dropped their gaze down the loud nightwear. The corners of his mouth downturned at the understanding of what must lay beyond the dream portal. He turned to face it.

The persistent nightmare. Not the nightmares of the inmost fears belonging to those who dwelled close by as he slept. Belatedly his own.

It had plagued him for days, if not weeks. In one form or another. Each time, back where he’d first summoned them. Without a colossal dragon patronus to warm his back and Shufflebottom’s caution. When they had partnered together, he and the dementors, they had taken all he had left that was good. It was what he lost to control them. When they had taken all they valued, and exposed him as what they wished to obey - a dark wizard, lacking in morals and self limitation - they had worked with him. Joined with him. His mind sewn into their minds, a set of eyes that they lacked. That’s why he had heard them, and why they had protected him. They were singular.

But now it had been a whole summer, and they’d feasted on pentrals without his help. He was just their observer, their eavesdropper. A redundant weight that could offer them nothing.

Nothing apart from the fresh reunion with his memories, to which he so desperately wanted to cling. A path once found could be easily found again. A wizard once inhabited… inhabited again.

“I’m right here. I got you.”

He swallowed down the lump forming in his throat and nodded. Once so stiffly he felt unable to move, but again as the reassurance of a friendly presence in his dream. If he couldn’t break out of it alone, at least there might be another door to escape it. There’d be someone there at his bedside when he woke himself screaming again.

“Will they see you?” Lawrence asked. The mustard door ahead of him showed no signs of what lay behind.
     “Not if you don’t want them to”

More soft nodding. He inhaled noisily through his nose, wriggled his legs on the spot, flexed his fingers against the syrupy feeling of sleep. A preparation. This time he would be prepared. Slowly, his left reached into his jacket pocket, and brought out the wand they’d snapped when they sentenced him to Azkaban. This was just like any fight he’d faced as an auror. He knew his enemy, he’d picked his backup. He had to face them. Now not never.

“Ready.” Lawrence repeated, more assured this time, and reached for the door.

As Lawrence passed through the door and into the dark beyond, his ponytail vanished into unruly, bedraggled curls, his leather jacket into a longer, dirty seaweed green winter coat, and his blue jeans into a slimmer black pair splattered to the knee with clay mud.


He gripped the brass doorknob in his right hand, his left still behind him in the auror office, clasping the wand.


He looked back at his lost left hand, glanced at Yavin in his ridiculous pyjamas, clasped the wand tighter and stepped over the threshold into the December night.

In his sleep, Lawrence gave a faint wail, and turned away from Yavin in the armchair. He gripped the pillow tight to his shoulder with remaining hand. They had come.

The frosted grass was still muddy beneath his boots. The chalk circle barely visible in the gloom. Without seeing them clearly, their presence was evident. The rattle of their amortal breaths and the merciless cold and desperation.

Feast, feast…

They surrounded him like bullies on a playground, tattered cloaks hanging just above the ground, rippling in the breeze that was barely there, hoods empty, rotting hands outstretched.

He had seen Dementors in dreams before but this - this was something else entirely. The creatures manifesting in Lawrence’s mind were by far the most accurate Yavin had ever witnessed in a dreamscape, according to sight and feeling. Even he felt something dip in his gut, a cold and unmistakable chill. The hairs on his arms stood on end in the corporeal world and a shiver went straight through his gangly shoulders. His mind was convinced of the reality.

Yavin stepped out onto the grass, mud and moisture seeping into his bed slippers. Oh, you had to hand it to Lawrence. Nothing in halves.

His gaze lifted just then. He stood outside of the circle of Dementors: the other man looked small, towered over by the hooded figures and their fluttering capes. This was the Musgrave he knew best, weathered and cornered and desperate and always trying. That was how Yavin knew they had the right patient. Knock him down, he kept trying.

“Lawrence!” he called out, his voice carrying well in spite of the winds. “You have to remember!” Yavin wanted him to be able to do it himself - to drag out those positive recollections, the brightest memories pieced together. “They can’t hurt you if you remember!”

Permission to be kind to yourself.

Somewhere, outside of this ragged circle, was Yavin Morgenthau in his utterly ridiculous nightwear. The moment the dementors surrounded him, he could have easily forgotten.

The dementors in his dreams were as vivid as they had been in person. He’d spent several months close to them. Sharing a proximity like a pack of friends. Dementors were terrible friends. All take and no give, at least on the emotional front. They might argue they had saved his sorry skin more than once in return, only they didn’t have mouths.

Without realising, Lawrence descended to a crouch on the cold, damp ground. His dreaming mind contemplated fighting the dream to force a hole in the ground to swallow him up.

“You have to remember!”

The gloom was encroaching, the chalk circle almost imperceivable beneath the edge of spectral tatters. He drew a shuddering breath, remembering how the nightmare had been the same before. How the darkness had overcome.

“They can’t hurt you if you remember!”

His dream companion’s voice was as bright as his fashion. At that very moment it was the antidote to the situation. Enough of a contrast from the gloom and pending doom. Yavin Morgenthau was as good as the sun in this situation - though you’d not want to stare too long at either.

His heart lifted in his chest. The legilimens was his stand in for an auror partner, for Willy’s colossal dragon patronus.

This was just a dream. A dream. They weren’t here. He wasn’t in a field, he - he had a left hand and a - and wand!

The realisation that his dream-self was clutching the familiar wand of his auror days lifted his heart like a helium balloon. He would not have been surprised to find it tied to his coat, as it felt as if weight had fallen from him.

Within the ragged maelstrom of hungry demons, Lawrence found his feet. Emboldened by his control of this dream.
“Has anyone told you, you make awful friends?” He sneered at the dream dementors, establishing his footing.

The dementors did not reply.

“Hah!” He asserted, “You see, I can’t hear you - you’re no longer there!” He thrust his right hand up to his head, fingers splayed over his mess of curls.

The dementors did not reply.

“See, there’s nothing you can do!”

His own subconscious doubt must have fuelled them. The ones ahead of him moved in, and as he half-stepped backwards, the ones behind moved in, like the jaws of a crocodile slowly snapping shut. Shit.

Yavin stood at a distance, tall and thin, like a lighthouse in a storm looking out across the mercurial sea. He watched: Lawrence Musgrave crouching and then standing and then speaking and shouting and recoiling. This was, in effect, his role to play in the other man’s internal battle. Sometimes you can't step in to fight somebody else's war for them. All Yavin could do right now was to observe the conflict as an outsider.

Ah, and one more thing that lighthouses also do. He could shine a light.

“Come on, Lawrence!” the older wizard called almost angrily, words echoing like a clap of thunder across the damp and grey landscape. “What the hell are they! They’re mirrors!”

Dementors pulled out every bad thing inside your head and reflected it back to you. That’s how they get to people: not just the bad memories but the memories every single person considered to be negative, the ones that brought out the most hurt and shame and self-recrimination. Like any reflection, though, this image was always two dimensional.

It was not a reality though it felt like one - and even the unrelenting Yavin Morgenthau had to tell himself as much, working against instinct, in the presence of Musgrave’s imaginary Dementors.

“They don’t know what it’s like to be you! They don’t have the faintest!” he yelled, free of meandering stammers and repetitions in this realm. Unfettered by a physical tongue. “You know you can do this, and you know they know it too!”

Lawrence needed to believe it. He needed to believe that the Dementors, deep inside their amortal consciousness, were afraid of a man who would not fear himself.

The hairs on the back of his neck were stood on end. Dementors didn’t ‘breathe’ but something still tickled the back of his neck. A cold sweat broke out across his body, both here in the dreamscape, but also back in his bed in London. His sleeping form curled inwards into foetal position. The blankets wound tight about his feet, and in his dream, the frozen ground climbed his boots and anchored him in place. This was it.

Out of sight, but brightly present in Lawrence’s dreaming mind, Yavin’s voice brought counsel.

Mirrors.

They had oft talked of mirrors in the wake of mind magic throughout the research. Magic of words, or metaphors, smilies and stories. They had talked about the magic of conviction and confidence, how one could trick the imposter within. To cheat the truth, one had to narrate a new story. It was just the same as breaking the rules of reality in this dreamscape. He was capable. He was more than skilled and he had everything on his side at long last.

In his dream, Lawrence closed his eyes.




All this time he’d been without a happy memory, a joyous thought. Now they were fresh, bright and bold at the surface of his memory. Morgenthau and Misslethorpe had helped him fish them out from the bottom of a murky lake, dry them on the bank and catalogue them back where they belonged. Back where they’d been long before the war. Before he’d taken the wrong path.

Memories of his childhood, his father, his auror triumphs, of friends, of lovers. They were fresh, crisp and golden as a bright autumn day. But he focused on one person in particular, the only person who had never given up on him. That last glorious, endless summer before she’d gone to Hogwarts, when she’d taken the train on her own and eloped to his London flat. When she’d stayed for days, planting his herb garden as he told stories of his auror exploits that she was too young to really know, and celebrated her eleventh birthday all over again because Cynthia couldn’t interrupt.

He lifted his wand aloft, opened his eyes and yelled out, both in dreams and in the waking world. Bright blue-white light filled the air around him, bright as those summer days in his memories. The frost beneath his feet sparkled and crackled as the grip gave way on his feet. The dementors recoiled with their ragged cloaks and skeletal hands. The suffocating ring scattered in all directions as he turned on the spot, laughing at them.

The green of the grass began to grow from his feet outwards to the chalk circle beneath him as they retreated, fleeing the bright light and warmth of his patronus spell, which although did not take corporeal form as it once had, was far greater than he ever recalled making in his heyday.





When the dementors had dispersed into the distant night, the light from his wand tip faded. It was then he noticed something new. Where shuddering breaths had been, a new sound replaced it. Lawrence’s right boot met an object at his feet which gave a dull but hollow noise as he collided with it. It was a wireless set. Not any wireless set, but the one that had been on the shelves of his London flat the very summer he’d brought to mind. It fizzed, popped, hissed, the sound of a voice obscured by interference.

With a twist of his fingers, he switched it off.

Yavin Morgenthau opened his eyes to the dimly lit room in St. Mungo’s, and allowed himself a moment to recover. His bed slippers were wet with moor mud. A chill had set into his bones. The old wizard wiggled his toes and stretched in the armchair next to the bed before rising, accompanied by a chorus of creaking bones.

His gaze settled thoughtfully upon the sleeping patient. Lawrence was peaceful in rest now, though his clothes were damp with sweat. The worried crinkle between those dark eyebrows had somewhat eased.

If he dreamed, he did not dream of fluttering cloaks under a grey sky in the middle of nowhere. Yavin smiled and enjoyed, for just a moment, the gratification of being able to help another human being.

And then he thought of the report he would need to write for Miranda Storm.