Waverly resisted snapping back with some smart-ass answer because for the first time since Virgil had arrived here, they were finally talking about the same thing. So Waverly nodded. She hadn't meant to defy the vampire's simple rules, and she hadn't, at least, in the way he'd thought. She'd told Virgil who'd kept the secret. She'd not told her parents who'd done what they do best: flipendo'd a table.

Then a gust of wind came from the wrong direction carrying with it a bright flash of color. Red paisley.[1] The silk scarf danced along the worn wooden floor, hooked around a desk leg, then freed itself again to glide and come to rest between Waverly and Virgil.

Waverly stood up and looked around, her eyes wide. She didn't say anything as she moved around the empty classroom in a halting time-defying shudder. She ended up at the classroom door fussing ineffectually at the many locks, all of them stuck open, sticky, blunt, and unmovable.

"You let him in," she said without a voice.

1.	"He was wearing a black suit, unbuttoned - and a red paisley neck scarf, which he undid and left carelessly on her nightstand." -- 12 Feb 2012 - Some Blood in the Cut [M]

He didn't understand the significance of the scarf until Waverly went to fuss at the door locks. Oh.

            "You let him in."

"Not actually him." Virgil corrected, slipping off the chair to stand with the umbrella in one hand - he gestured towards the door with his free hand, and the door suddenly transfigured into a part of the wall beneath Wav's fumbling fingers. "And I can get rid of him, here, for tonight. I could even make you forget, if you wanted."

This last part he said more quietly, like any unadvisable offer. Virgil's face was sombre but soft. "Would you, given the chance? Banish the memory of it all?"

They offered it in St.Mungo's, he knew that. Obliviation of traumatic memories. He knew that he was capable of doing that too, though it would be rather... Not Good.

The door turned to stone under Waverly's hands. She turned around to see Virgil there, then tossed her wand to the side like the useless twig it was. Her dream wasn't even hers when Mr. Fixit came calling. He really did think he was helping, coming here with his secret mind magic.

"You're capable of that, aren't you," she realized. Obliviation was difficult magic but they let foul-ups like Bevans do it so it couldn't be that hard. "Of course you are."

Waverly answered her own question and stood up taller and taller with a sigh and roll of her neck. She'd been trying to forget in all the ways that wouldn't actually work because there was a part of her that was afraid to forget. The fear kept her safe but at a terrible cost, this dream a demonstrative Exhibit A. She let her self imagine it, shedding all this drama, the world being hers again, never hearing Hooker's name again. Oblivion was the perfect answer.

"Yes," she said looking into Virgil's eyes and nodded. "That's what I want."

He pressed his lips together, a thin and serious line. Fool of him to offer. Fool of her to accept.

Virgil closed the umbrella, allowing it to dissipate into mist - the rain, too, appeared to dissipate just before touching him. The wizard sat back down. He needed to think seriously about this. In the Brain Room on Mysteries, the Unspeakables performed all manner of mind magic involving human memory; there were colleagues whose minds were patched together with memories that did not belong to them. Some memories were centuries old.

Doing this to his friend, though? He would need to be especially careful not to mess up anything in Waverly's head.

"Alright." Virgil was nodding to himself slowly, eyes lifting back to Wav. "It should take a week. You have to tell me exactly what you want banished and I will need time to tailor the memories to replace them."

Of all people, Waverly was the most likely to see something like this through to the end. He touched his neck. "Use that time to have the bite marks removed."

"A week?"

Waverly scoffed and let her arms drop to her sides. "I'm not going to spell it out for you, V! If you want to help, just do it.  The whole point --"

Why was everything so complicated, why did even under-table oblivion require paperwork? She took a breath and sat down in the nearest desk. The red scarf was still there, quiet on the floor, moving a little in the wind, so out of place. She proceeded more gently.

"The whole point is to not have to think about it. Ever again. Not ... pick it apart, analyse it."

She found his eyes again, looking up to him from behind her curls. Her voice was blank again. "I know you can do it."

He just didn't want to. He offered but now he was hesitating.

He sighed heatedly, narrowing his gaze at her. What she wanted wasn't lasting peace of mind - what she wanted was a quick fix. Virgil didn't blame her. If he were terrified all the bloody time, he would want the terror to end posthaste as well. Except he knew better.

"Wav, do you know what trauma does to the mind?" he folded his legs up on to the chair, crossing his arms over his middle as he hunched forward. "It changes the way we think and feel. It creates emotional patterns which become emotional habits, a complex series of instinctive decisions made by the subconscious brain over and over again."

Trauma wasn't a blight or a burn on the mind. Wiping the mind clean wouldn't solve it. Strong memories motivated structure. The blonde licked his lips, trying to think of how to explain it to her...

"If I cut out the memory now and replaced it with something mundane, you'd have a new set of problems." Virgil lifted a hand, a vague shadow of his mentor's mannerisms. "Like, if you went back to your flat. The habit of fear would still exist. And because your mind would be unable to grasp why you're getting heart palpitations, why you're sweating like an Erumpent, it will become paranoid."

His voice had been gaining a sense of urgency, and he quickly reined it in. "We need to convince your mind that the false memories are real and to do this, they need to be credible. Hooker's attack could be the memory of a harmless break-in, or a breakdown, whatever. There is no quick fix."

For a moment, Virgil's first question returned. Right now? Yeah, she did miss Hogwarts. It was simple and reckless and nothing mattered. Oh, it had felt important at the time, but it hadn't been. It had been a stage play. The villains were shadows. The stakes were nothing more than social capitol and the threat of lost N.E.W.T.S. Now she and Virgil were meddling once again where they had no business going, to probably more peril.

Where was that carefree Virgil from school? This Virgil was getting too comfortable lecturing her. The storm outside was quieting to a simmer. Waverly sighed.

She could suffer the immediate stress of going through Virgil's gauntlet or continue haunting her own life indefinitely.

"Alright, fucking fine. I'll drop something by later."

Then she lifted her wrist where two little puckered scars lived even in a dream. "Do you know anyone?"

He felt a pinch of relief when she conceded - it made him feel older than he was, to talk about these things. Virgil did not like to talk about them, in fact, but life at the Ministry had forced his hand on multiple occasions now. For better or worse, this was his life now. The part of his life he had been able to ignore at Hogwarts.

            "Do you know anyone?"

Marrowbone was out of the question. But perhaps...

Virgil made an odd motion with one hand, fingers splayed and turning. A tall wizard suddenly appeared in the classroom: blonde, bearded, nordic in appearance. It was a model of the wizard who had pierced him last year. Dietrich Eisenberg. "Owns the Inkwell on Knocturne, does healing jobs under the table. If he can't do it himself, he'll know someone trustworthy enough."

His gaze slid from Eisenberg's frozen image to Waverly's tilted wrist.

"You want to erase both of the bite memories?" he frowned slightly as the gaze rose to her face. "Even the one that went alright? What if your mums bring it up?"

"I don't know. Will you stop showing off," Waverly said with a new weariness. Virgil, Virgil, so theatrical with his puppet show in a place that was meant to be hers.

"I don't know," she repeated and kicked out a chair to prop up her long legs. She crossed her arms and let her gaze drift. "Might be better if I never knew him."

She furrowed her brows and tried to sort out the cross-talk in her head. There was a massive calculus to it, a web woven in the dark and any small move caused the whole thing to shudder. Somewhere in the dark were her protective mothers like paladins, and somewhere immediate but just out of sight was the imminent Terrence Hooker.

But the thought of giving up her bite because of him, it made her angry.

"It was mine, though, you know? That first one, I did that on my own and it was incredible. Day turned to night in my hands. I went looking and I got what I came for. Fuck him, that's mine. He can't have it."

With sudden clarity, Waverly stood up again even though she'd just sat down. She pulled her hair up into an elastic, starting to pace a bit.

"Leave the warning. I'll need that. But make it a visit. Just a ... tense, bullying, sort of ... house call."

What the hell where they doing?

"Will that do it?"

With a guilty smile, which would have brought the pink to his cheek in the physical world, Virgil repeated the gesture with his hands and the manifestation of Eisenberg promptly melted away. Yes, he was showing off. That's how he did things in the Brain Room, on Mysteries.

To infuriate the other Leglimency trainees, to impress the Unspeakables, to stretch the body of his mind like a self-satisfied cat who did not need any other reason except that it felt good.

Waverly was having some kind of conversation with herself, which he wisely chose not to interrupt. He was pleased she chose to keep the initial bite. Getting rid of that memory would have too many implications in reality. The only problem her neck bite might incite was the involvement of one Athena Marrowbone.

             "Will that do it?"

A quick nod, Virgil's mind already fully alert and awake to the logistics of what he had set out before him. There was a little thrill running through the wizard now; he liked this, the challenge of it.

"Yes. I also want to plant a subconscious reluctance to see Healer Marrowbone. Will you allow it?" he had walked over to the teacher's desk and sat on the ledge of it while Wav paced the room. "And I'm going to enter your mind one of these nights, to have a look at those memories while I make new ones. You won't feel anything but you should know I will be in there."

Virgil bit his lip thoughtfully, eyeing his friend. "I promise I'll do my best."

Waverly took a look at Virgil. He seemed eager to solve her problem like a puzzle or an assignment at work. This was the third time now that she'd thought he was done, that he was out of questions and caveats and complications, but he again he had more.

She shrugged an acquiescence. "Whatever."

The eagerness, if that's what it was, was earnest. He wanted to help. He wanted love for that. Waverly tried to smile at him, smile a thanks, then continued her pacing, taking herself towards the windy edge of the open-faced classroom.

"I know you will. Time to go, V."

With that, she began to walk backwards off the ledge. She didn't fall, though, she just kept walking, three tall stories above the wet rolling Scotland hills below. Her smile broke genuine, her hair lifted in the wind.

"Bye, V." She waved.

If Nicholas took things too seriously when it came to Virgil's Leglimency, Waverly didn't take things seriously enough. He knew a dismissal when he heard one, however, and lingered only a moment while the Dreamer walked in the air of her dream - she looked better than she had before, which gave him some comfort.

Perhaps she didn't have to take things seriously. Perhaps that was his job, for now.

             "Bye, V."

Virgil sighed, though he was also smiling in that dry and amused way of his. He bowed in her direction: a theatrical, Stardust-calibre bow. And then he twisted around in time to open a glossy red door; it had materialised in the middle of the room without prompt. The wizard opened it on to a different scene - a night sky - and shut the door tightly behind him.

The door disappeared, as if he had never been.