Two in the morning.

He was cheating again.

If he wasn't meant to use his Legilimency, then why in Merlin's name was he born with it? Waverly hadn't replied to yesterday's owl[1] nor was she at her flat when he went to ring her up in the days prior to that. He was starting to wonder if she had changed addresses. His last resort would, of course, be to approach her mothers... but it truly was the last. He was going to try the Dreamscape first.

Which was cheating. Cheating because, generally speaking, it was better to abide by the boundaries people throw up: if Wav didn't want to see him, he should respect that. But he was worried. Genuinely worried.

This is how, having gone to sleep with purpose, Virgil Carstairs left the grounds of his own mindscape - which much resembled Stardust Theatre - by means of a glossy red door conjured in thin air. It is how he found himself back at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Many people dreamt about Hogwarts but everyone remembered it differently. Bigger, smaller, darker, brighter, more peaceful or chaotic.

Tonight, Waverly's Hogwarts lacked walls. Not the walls between rooms but the walls that separated the castle from the its outside. It was twilight. The sky was warm and orange, threatened by tinges of purple blue. Dusk or dawn, he wondered? He had emerged in the Great Hall, which was now open on three sides to the sprawling grounds.

Something like nostalgia touched him. He lingered as the red door dissolved and the feeling settled, comfortable. Then he turned around and went in search of the Dreamer, barefoot in his periwinkle pyjamas.

It was never difficult to find a Dreamer; all he had to do was focus on where the details of the dream were more clear. The further he got from a Dreamer, the more everything looked like a rough sketch and the less potent the sensations. He found Waverly in their old Transfiguration classroom. Virgil hesitated at the doorway, looking past her first at the view of the grounds.

"Do you miss it?" he asked, his voice crisp and clear. "I can never make up my mind."

1.	22nd February - Your Eyes Turn Away

Waverly was in her childhood bed. Posters of musicians, WWN stars, and models watched over her. Her parents had started to move in some of their stuff, treating her old space like a second office or junk closet. She actually didn't mind. It made her own mess - clothes and magazines - seem less bothersome. Her room was in transition just like she was, one foot in childhood the other out in the world. All she did now was work and sleep. A sleeping potion here and there to quiet the mind, gillyweed to take off the edge. Muse once.

She was asleep tonight by one and dreaming by two. She dreamed of school, her desk on the edge of a precipice and outside it had been twilight forever as if the sun could never rise or set. Transfiguration class was happening around her, something absurd. She was unprepared but unbothered. 'What are they going to do,' she wondered. 'I don't even go here.'

And then a voice, more clear and direct than anything that had happened in the dream so far, indeed, in any dream she'd ever had. It was Virgil and he glowed almost imperceptibly, a pale yellow like his hair.

"Sometimes," she admitted, resting her head in her hand, her fingers laced into her thick curls. Thoughts of her waking world were vague at the moment but she was aware that she'd been avoiding him. Avoiding everyone.

"You just invite yourself in, then." Never any questions from Waverly.

He wasn't himself particularly enthusiastic about dreams that took place in school, even though it hadn't even been a year since graduation. Virgil glanced at the faces around him as he approached Waverly's desk - faces that were familiar but not precisely. That was something else he noticed when he went dreamwalking.

Everyone saw people differently. And so Almasy, for example, as her dream self crossed his path, did not look like the Almasy in his mind; the features weren't quite how he imagined them. Virgil blew in her direction and the redhead suddenly dissolved.

As did the others, one by one, turning into mist and being carried away through the stuff that dreams were made of.

            "You just invite yourself in, then."

"I'll try knocking next time," he murmured with an effete shrug, watching as a dream version of Theo Whitman dissipated. "Although it would be nice to know if I will receive the courtesy of a response."

Virgil turned his lucid gaze to Waverly and smiled wryly. In the dreamscape, her beauty was more muted than in real life. Possibly because Wav didn't see herself as the great beauty he thought her to be, possibly because his own perspective awarded her the prettiness of close friends. She still looked like herself though.

He walked up to the precipice, next to the desk. "How are you? And don't say fine," the blonde added archly. "I've lost touch with so many other Slytherins, Wav. Don't you drift away as well."

Gracie, Eli, Theo. They all went their own way after Hogwarts and even though he believed he was better for it, Virgil didn't want to lose all his connections to his time at school. And he liked Waverly.

Virgil was a more powerful wix than Waverly suspected anyone knew. He put on such a lackadaisical affect, always above it all, always looking effortless. But he'd found her in the dream and dissolved her characters so breezily like he'd done it many times before. At least he didn't shatter it and steal it like her Muse.

""Although it would be nice to know if I will receive the courtesy of a response."

Wow. Waverly sniffed and sat back in the well-worn school chair. She couldn't tell if he was genuinely hurt or just being snarky, funny Virgil. She hadn't wanted to hurt him; he was probably the closest friend she had. But she just didn't have anything left for other people. She should have expected this from him, though. He was a caretaker and went wherever he pleased.

He blocked her from blowing off his inquiry. 'Fine,' had been her go-to with her parents until they stopped pressing and just let her be.

"I'm trying to forget," she said, her voice coming out raspy but her face a stony indifference. "I haven't been home. Just to get the mail."

A classroom chair materialised as he lowered himself to sit across from her, so that they were both poised above the vista of school grounds. His brow wrinkled when she answered. He ached a little to hear that Waverly was avoiding him because she wanted to forget what happened to her with the vampires... because he was a part of those memories. In fact, he had led her down the path towards them.

Drew a map and marked a great big X at Hooker's.

"Forgetting won't help," he said as he crossed his legs and looked her in the face, searchingly. "I know that's trite, Wav, the kind of thing they tell you in self-help books, but I mean it."

It was hard to reach her in real life and he wasn't sure if being inside her head would make it any easier. "Where have you been staying?" Virgil asked, glancing down at his hands for a moment.

He had to resist the urge to do as he had done[1] when she came to him earlier that month. People needed to deal with trauma in their own ways, he couldn't care for her the same way he had wanted himself to be cared for.

1.	12th Feb - These Bones, They Walk Around

"My parents'," she answered lifting her eyebrows. After all that drama moving out, there she was, back where she started. She'd considered for a second asking to stay with Virgil but she'd be a guest there which was intolerable right now. Then Virgil's earnestness signalled something.

Waverly groaned a little and scratched through her head and neck.

"You feel fucking guilty. Oh my god. You feel guilty."

She looked at him with such disappointment, suddenly convinced he must be here for himself, to assuage his feeling of culpability. Her intensity, however dulled it was, came on quickly more than if she'd been awake. Waverly didn't doubt Virgil cared, but if she felt better then maybe he'd feel better and everything would be fine. In the distance dark clouds crept in from the west.

He was a little surprised to hear she had been staying with her parents, and just about to make a comment when--

            "You feel fucking guilty. Oh my god. You feel guilty."

This came more as an accusation than as a statement. His eyebrows went up in surprise, then down in irritation. Virgil looked into minds but he did not like it when people could guess what was in his; Waverly was making an assumption and the assumption landed, generally speaking, in the right area. His gaze flicked towards the sky, then back to her.

"I do, but this isn't about me now is it?" he snapped, mistaking the accusation as a distraction from the matter at hand. "Don't change the subject. I'm not here to self-flagellate."

Much as he thought about his own well being - they were all the protagonists of their own lives - Virgil kept from talking about himself. He ran a hand through his hair, shaking golden glitter off its strands. "What have you been doing to forget, Waverly?"

Waverly tilted her head to the side. Virgil wouldn't dare be cross with her. Shouldn't dare. Pissy about her not smoking gillyweed with him, hounding her like some therapist. She hadn't asked him for anything and he'd strolled into her head like he was entitled to her attention. She wanted to literally shove him. The twilight darkened the landscape and a west wind gusted. Waverly was aware of it and felt bolstered by the shift of the dream to lucid.

"I am not changing the subject," she said firmly. "Your motivations for coming here? Seems relevant."

She crossed her arms. The wind whipped around her head and scattered papers from the teacher's desk.

"What do you want? Want me to tell you that I smoke, drink, sleep, work, stay out of my flat, stay away from everybody just so you can be all wise and shit?" She twiddled her fingers in the air.  "Tell me I'm doing it wrong? I don't need more of that."

She'd done so well, so so well, not thinking about it. Something would remind her, her stomach would turn, her head would buzz, and she'd bundle it up into a knot and cast it away. But it wasn't working here. Nothing was hidden in the subconscious. Instead a storm was swelling.

The weather picked up, suddenly upon them in the exposed classroom - this wasn't Waverly as he knew her outside of the dreamscape, the Waverly who tried to tamp down her emotions and reactions and convey herself as entirely unbothered. This was Waverley very much bothered. He kept the air around him as stagnant as he could; so that the wind did not sweep his hair or ruffle his pyjamas or blow the whirling papers into his face.

            "Tell me I'm doing it wrong? I don't need more of that."

"Why does everyone need to have an ulterior motive?" Virgil demanded, though he spoke in a soft voice that seemed to ignore the turmoil around them. "I came to check on you because I was worried, friends do that."

It was a lot: the castle, the stormy wind, Waverly's anger. He didn't want to manipulate her dreamscape, didn't want her to feel any more out of control than she already felt... he simply kept the sphere around his chair from being agitated. Like clinging to a rock, Virgil held on to his own calm.

"I'm trying to help!" The wizard met her gaze, tense. "The only thing I want is for you to talk to me, and if you'd like to do that by yelling or bringing down a bolt of lightning I suppose that's just how it's going to be, isn't it?"

Waverly's distrust shocked him in spite of his equanimity. He didn't know why - in her position, he might have felt the same.

It made Waverly deeply sad that Virgil said he was her friend and this reaction surprised her. She couldn't stop her eyes from watering up. She couldn't cope with someone relying on her. Lean on me at your own risk, was the threat. She could only hold up so much. She sat and suffered the admonishment as the storm outside roiled and lit up with internal lighting all without her thinking of it. Waverly wiped a thumb under her eyes to clear out the chance of tears in that way one did to preserve the careful application of mascara.

"I'm afraid all the time," she whispered. A louder voice would crack. "My words are curses. If I say anything, it'll wreck ..."

She thought of her parents, her friends, her life, herself. "Everything."

Inside, competing feelings of abject self-centeredness clashed with the shame of having so dramatically messed up. At how Virgil had come here to check on her like some child. It would all be better to petrify it all into stone and let it sink sink sink into a deep lake.

His anxious gaze flicked to the horizon, the storm clouds closing in on them with flashes of lightning and booms of thunder.

Virgil was keenly aware that he wasn't helping the situation - that his manner was too brash, somehow. He wondered how the hell Yavin managed it with him all those years ago; the patience necessary to calm anguish inside the mind where everything happened without the buffer of the physical world. The older Legilimens would admonish his behaviour right now.

Waverly was speaking. Barely, her low voice beneath the rumble around them. His expression softened and his chair soundlessly dragged itself closer to her desk.

"Wav..." Virgil perched on the seat now, crouching on his tiptoes and reaching out to gently push aside a stray curl. "You won't," he said and then his thin mouth twitched into a dry half-smile, "well, not everything."

Perhaps it would have been better if she cried. Even here, though, Waverly did not let herself weep. "You can wreck everything here, though," the blonde added, cocking his head at the grounds. "If you wanted."

The prospect of letting herself lose control, it seemed weak. Having a juvenile tantrum, allowing hysteria to take over, her rage and sadness and be laid bare for someone to see - nothing felt more intolerable. Waverly couldn't even imagine it, what that would feel like. She folded forward to hold her head in her hands. Her hair fell down. Rain started to fall, sprinkles of cold pinpoints gusting in from behind her.

She erupted, loudly swearing, but going no further. The booze, the gillyweed, the Muse, even that damned bite, that was her control. Virgil. Fecking Virgil.

"If I tell anyone, he'll kill me," she said into the floor, her voice waking. Waverly swore again, then sat up and looked at Virgil with the blank eyes she'd practiced so well. There was a wand in her hand now. "What good would do, flailing around in a stupid dream? I'll still wake up."

Rain. He looked up on instinct, drops of water cold on his flushed dream-face.

Virgil made a gesture, as if opening an umbrella, and thus one manifested itself into his hands while he held it over them. It was the same colour as his pyjamas, with pinpricks of golden stars and a rough silver handle. His eyes fell back to Waverly - searchingly, more than in pity. She was miserable and wound up so tightly, unable to be picked loose by any hand besides her own.

            "What good would do... I'll still wake up."

"I don't know," he settled down on the seat, hugging his knees with his free arm. "What happens inside our heads is important too. We live in our heads before we live in a house or city. Or even a body."

There were, after all, people whose dream selves looked so radically different from their real selves. Virgil knew the power of the mind, even if he was born fumbling his way through it all. "If dreams didn't matter, we wouldn't dream at all."

Waverly curled her lip.

"Great load of Department of Mysteries bullshit," she said. "Nothing in the handbook about just dropping in, then? That's very handy."

It felt like Virgil was speaking someone else's words, like some platitude from some book. He really didn't know, did he? He was here guessing just like she was, just as clueless about trauma as anyone else. Waverly knew what happened to him last year and all the others and that it had wrecked them. Is that where he'd learned his tricks? Is this how he'd dealt with it, head on in a dream? Waverly was still torn between feeling grateful and offended at his intervention.

"I'm still going to wake up, and he's still going to be there," she clarified, same blank stare.

A quiet sigh escaped him but he didn't snap back - simply shook his head slightly.

It wasn't right, obviously, for him to have just dropped in like this. But Waverly's skepticism ran deep and he didn't know if anything he said could reach it; if showing his oldest scars would strengthen his advice in her eyes or simply cause her to throw out another scathing remark. And he really didn't want to make this about himself.

"Hooker?" Virgil spoke the name into existence, reluctant.