The Mote In Thy Brother's Eye

Part Two: The Mote In Thy Brother's Eye

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

Matthew 7:3

---

The Janus Thickey ward was almost always quiet now that Mr Lockhart had been discharged. Yvonne had not realised how active he made the ward seem until he had left. On that day, she and Archer had watched him stride away like he owned the world, after shaking both their hands vigorously and flashing his perfect teeth at them. He had been particularly positive towards Archer, as he had been told it was Archer who brought a new order to his mind through his expertise in Legilimency and memory-altering magic; Archer had regarded him with the same distance he put between himself and every other person, although he didn't refuse Mr Lockhart's handshake.

"It's a little sad to see him go, isn't it?" Yvonne had said in the following quiet. Archer remained still for a moment, as if searching for the right way to begin, before he gave an answer.

"My wife once told me about something that happened to her." It was Yvonne's turn to be still and quiet; Archer very rarely spoke of his wife. She knew only that she had been an Auror and that she had died in the War.

"She had followed a wizard when he broke into a Muggle house that must have been temporarily empty, and she followed him inside. A duel ensued in the dark, destroying many of the Muggle family's objects in the process, and the wizard ran. My wife, who had many collections of things – animated figures, china plates – chose to repair the ruined room before following the man. He managed to escape, and she blamed herself, and told me it was only because she had thought a collection of beautiful things like hers had been ruined that she stayed to repair everything. She was furious that she had remained to repair a room full of what was, in reality, tacky and cheap. She told me in anger that she wanted to go back to that house and destroy the room again herself, since it had looked better that way. Mr Lockhart's mind was like that room. Full of broken objects, it was fascinating and full of possibility. When restored to its original state, he is just a greedy and dislikeable man. I do not feel sad for him."

"He's whole now, though. You fixed him. That's got to be good, right?" Yvonne had not been sure if she was explaining her own viewpoint to Archer, or arguing with him.

"Good for him, perhaps," Archer had responded. "But not so good for a world already filled with men who are greedy and dislikeable."

This insight into Archer's mind had fascinated her, rather than make her dislike him completely, although she had made an effort to avoid him a little for the rest of that day. It was so unlike the way she thought of people, yet it interested her in the way it was so absolute. Surgical, almost, if one could use that word in a context like this. Yvonne had become a Healer because she wanted to help people; she got the impression Archer could have been something like a watchmaker, if his interests lay in physical things like clocks and not the mind. She could no more see him having an attachment to an individual gear in a dismantled clock than to a person's thoughts – he only cared about the way in which they all fitted together.

While working together, it seemed he had developed a deep well of respect for her. Like Elizabeth had joked, they rarely spoke about their personal lives, but they discussed their work often. Archer had long been developing a magical technique of memory extraction similar to siphoning memories for viewing in a Pensieve, but much more powerful: it ensured the mind would not eventually reconstruct the memory after enough time. His explanations about the mechanics of memory re-growth, on the workings of memory charms and how they left the original memories in the mind, still hidden, had been interesting, and he in turn had seemed similarly intrigued by her explanations of how what he was attempting was similar to deleting a file on a computer – almost any piece of data could be recovered, even to the point of physical destruction of the drive, unless it was removed in a very specific way that left behind no traces of the file. His understanding of how magic and the mind related to one another had prompted her to do a little amateur research into psychology, to discuss with Archer ways around the mind that didn't involve magic. At first, he had compared Muggle psychological principles to well-established magical theory of the mind, but after a few separate discussions, he mentioned less and less the magical theory that corresponded to Freud or Jung or whoever and instead did a lot of listening, only interrupting to ask for clarification about something Yvonne was saying. She couldn't be sure, but she thought her information, clumsy and second-hand though it might have been, was a missing, integral piece to Archer perfecting his memory extraction technique. He had not told her this outright, but he had made it a point to tell her personally how he would be presenting his research on the charm to an international panel of Healers and would be away from St. Mungo's for a couple of days, and she understood this to be Archer's way of thanking her for her help.

Yvonne had hoped his technique was approved for use by Healers. All the time she and Archer had discussed it, she had been thinking on some level of her mind about the Longbottoms. They were St. Mungo's longest residents, and she knew that even Archer would be happy to see them discharged. She had put her foray into Muggle psychology to some use by trying to use some of the techniques she had read about: creating a very regimented structure for Frank and Alice to follow each day, for example, and making sure there was something more mentally stimulating than an old chess set in the Janus Thickey ward. Although they had shown some small degree of improvement, and she had been fiercely embraced by their son who, almost at the point of tears, had sought her out to tell her his mother had recognised him, had called him by his name, even, Yvonne still felt somewhat like a fraud, an actor only pretending to understand the lines she was saying. The Longbottoms had been tortured to the point their minds had shut off, and while a real psychologist might have been able to repair the damage, Yvonne knew it was out of her power to do so. Archer, however... she had thought that perhaps if he was able to extract from their minds all the pain that had come from the Cruciatus Curse, maybe they could begin to heal and be whole again.

Her ritual in the mornings with the Longbottoms consisted of making sure they were awake when she came on the ward, reminding Frank to Charm his stubble away and helping Alice select a hat from the stand that stood empty in the corner until someone approached and directed it to put an array of brightly-coloured hats on display, telling them about the book she was currently reading, asking them about their breakfast if they had eaten or their dreams if they hadn't, and then playing several hands of Go Fish (a simple game, but heavily reliant on memory) until one of the Healers-in-Training took over. This morning was nothing out of the ordinary – Alice selected a broad yellow straw sunhat that had its own internal light so her face wouldn't be in shadow, and Frank managed to steal away the collections of twos and sevens Yvonne had been building in her hand.

Before leaving the ward, Yvonne checked on the other occupant of Janus Thickey, hidden behind a curtain and lying motionless on her bed. The young woman looked to be around Yvonne's age, but acted as if she were in a trance, barely blinking and breathing shallow. She could eat if given food and could move about, although she had to be led by the hand, but seemed incapable of initiating any sort of action on her own. Yvonne did not like to think of this patient of hers – of what might be in her mind, of what she might see through her fixed, glazed eyes – as it tended to make her terribly upset if she dwelled on it too long. She vanished the plain bowl of porridge that sat on her lap and the spoon she held limply in one hand, checked that none of the porridge was left on the sheets, then stood for a moment at the foot of the bed, her back lightly touching the curtain. It was always drawn shut, that curtain, and its meaning couldn't have been more clear: out there was the place for the living. The Longbottoms, broken as they were, were still whole in some way this figure in the bed was not.

Here, behind the curtain, was a place to visit with the dead.

Yvonne turned and pushed these thoughts deep into her mind, refusing to let them surface. Thoughts like these were like weeds, she thought, in that you couldn't allow them for a second to put down roots, or they would spread and take over the whole garden before you knew what was happening. She started for the door. She was done with the Janus Thickey ward for today.

---

Archer's office was much like the man himself: well-ordered and highly impersonal. It had two desks (one for paperwork and one against the side-wall with an array of magical instruments laid out on it), and a large, old cabinet in the corner that looked like a poorly-Transfigured turn-of-the-century boiler, and while these might have been mistaken for personal affections by another person, Yvonne knew both the boiler-cabinet and the second desk had been in this office while Healer Strout was head of the ward, and both had been covered with a constant rotation of notes, letters and little animated doodads that tended to make noise whenever a person got too close to them. Under Archer's command, however, it seemed nothing in the room would make noise unless Archer permitted it to.

He was not sitting at his desk like Yvonne had expected him to be; he was instead standing and inspecting the Pensieve that sat on his desk. He looked up from it as soon as Yvonne entered his office. He had obviously been waiting for her.

"Sit," he said, indicating the chair in front of his desk. "Please." He moved around his desk and sat as Yvonne shut the door behind her and went to take her chair. They were now sitting at almost the same eye level, which was rare, as Archer was so much taller than Yvonne.

"This morning a man has been admitted to Spell Damage in a fugue state. He was dressed in robes and carried a wand on his person. The person who brought him here left before being questioned about his condition, so further information about his injuries must come from our investigation. He appears unresponsive to traditional, simple methods of waking a person from a trance." Archer paused and rested his fingers lightly around the rim of the Pensieve. Yvonne remembered the two people Angelica mentioned had been there just before she came in and was about to ask if this was the same man, but Archer spoke first.

"I have been granted a trial basis for my memory extraction technique, over a..."

"Really? That's fantastic." Yvonne couldn't help interrupting; this had been his focus for months, and she was almost as eager as she knew he was to see it get a proper trial.

Rather than look irritated, Archer merely continued with his thought, as if he had anticipated Yvonne's response. "...over a three-month period and have judged this patient, fortuitous as his arrival is notwithstanding, to be an ideal test candidate. I performed the memory extraction at roughly 7:08 AM, and at 7:45 AM the patient began to show signs of responding to outside stimulus."

That confirmed what the emergency was this morning, at least. "So it worked, right? Or is there more that needs to be done?"

"The patient has yet to emerge from the fugue state, although it is my prediction he will be ready for waking within an hour or two. What I require of you is an analysis of the extracted memory."

This Yvonne had not been expecting. She was about to ask why her, when Archer explained.

"You have told me about your studies into non-magical Healing methods for the mind, and I believe your knowledge will be invaluable here. The extracted memory is likely to be disorganised, corrupt, or subject to any number of stresses to which the ordered mind is not receptive. I have done what I can to remove the abnormal thoughts from this man's mind, but I cannot be sure his mind will be whole again until I wake him. Should I need to remove further abnormal thoughts, I must be familiar with their cause and what they may relate to, and time will be of the essence. I must watch over the patient while he leaves the fugue; you must examine his memories to find the cause of the injury to his mind."

"I'm not sure I can do that," said Yvonne, suddenly worried that her lack of proper psychological knowledge – since most of what she had relayed to Archer had been pieced together from crime thrillers built around serial killers and an Introduction to Psychology textbook she had picked up second-hand – would fail her.

"My faith is in you," Archer said. He stood and made to move towards the door.

Yvonne looked from Archer to the Pensieve then back to Archer. "Alright," she said.

"There is something further," Archer said, his hand on the door's handle. "This man is a Ministry representative whose memories may be subject to high levels of confidentiality."

"An Unspeakable?" Yvonne asked.

"A Ministry representative," Archer repeated, but Yvonne knew she had guessed correctly. "What is in his mind is for discussion between us only."

"I understand," Yvonne said, feeling slightly more anxious than before. Making a mistake at work would be bad, but making one that involved the Ministry – the Unspeakables, of all things – would be the worst.

Then Archer told her something she could not have imagined him saying before that moment. "Good luck, Healer Brzezicki," he said, and left his office.

Yvonne watched the closed door for a moment before she was sure she had heard him correctly. Archer was a constant source of surprises for someone so regimented. If he believed she was capable, then Yvonne had to believe it. She turned to the desk, feeling somewhat farther from anxious and closer to confident.

The Pensieve sat in the centre of Archer's desk. The desk, like the rest of Archer's office, could be described as 'clean' – but the word that came to Yvonne's mind first was 'sterile'. Not a single personal item besides the Pensieve was visible anywhere, and how personal was that, when you got down to it? She knew Archer didn't use it to keep his own memories in. His own mind was probably alphabetically sorted.

She sat at his desk and inspected the Pensieve. There was just a single memory container with it, although there were places for several others. Pulling out the little vial, she saw it wasn't rounded as she imagined it would be, like a test tube, but tapered to a flat point so it could slide into the slots around the edge of the Pensieve in only one direction. A bit like a blade fitting into a scabbard. This suited Archer perfectly; there were times she thought he wasn't really human at all, but something sharp and steel like a sword that had somehow figured out how to masquerade as one.

She pulled the stopper from the vial and emptied the not-gas-not-liquid of memory into the mists of the Pensieve, which spun and swirled a little more vigorously now that they were filled with something. For no reason she could explain, she suddenly felt nervous. Felt watched. It was like the feeling she got in the mornings outside of Purge and Dowse, except it came with the absolute certainty that this time there was someone behind her, some ominous figure that only appeared as a pursuer and persecutor in nightmares, and that this figure would lay its hand on her shoulder, and that if she did feel that hand there, she would start screaming and not be able to stop.

She spun around in the chair. Nothing. The room remained empty. That's what was doing it to her, this room and its weird echoing emptiness. She took a moment to centre herself and breathe in deep, telling herself she was being foolish, when she heard something bang behind her. She spun around again, her heart rate spiking and one hand grabbing for her wand, ready to hex whatever it was that was there, when she realised it was the door to Archer's office, which had been open an inch or two, blowing shut as a breeze went through the building. She laughed a little, then realised she may have actually screamed a little too when the door shut – maybe you couldn't call it a real scream, but it was some kind of vocalisation – and she laughed harder. This was ridiculous! She was going to tell Elizabeth how Healer Archer's office was at least a dozen times more intimidating than Archer could be at his best. Thinking about that – about treating Archer's office like it was some sort of fire-side boogeyman, the kind that had a hook for a hand and killed teenagers that sat around campfires – took away most of the ominous presence the office had, and with that she placed her face into the brewing clouds in the Pensieve and fell down, down, deep into the mist.

She was expecting to see a scene – maybe at the Ministry, maybe somewhere else – form out of the smoky haze, but when the smoke cleared, there was nothing. Just an endless white plane. She turned a full revolution. Nothing but white. Looked down at her feet, and while they seemed like they were resting on some kind of ground, it too was a pure white. She clapped her hands together and didn't hear any echo come back; the sound just meandered off into the endless white nothing. She had begun to wonder if perhaps Archer's Pensieve was broken, when she turned to see a figure off in the distance that had not been there before. She went to approach it and found she closed the distance quicker than she had anticipated – it had looked like a speck in the horizon (if you could call it that) to begin with, but came visibly closer with each passing step. The figure wore pale green robes. It had its hair pulled back in a sensible ponytail. It stood at her height, had her broad shoulders, her thick nose and thick eyebrows that came from her father, her sun-freckled skin from her mother. The figure was her.

"What in God's name..." she said to herself. The figure – the other her – copied her.

"What...?" she said, and the figure mimicked her again. To make certain, she stood facing her doppelganger and asked it, "Am I the only one speaking?" and heard, clearly, that she was. The other her, despite copying her exact movements, was silent.

Was this in the John Doe's memory? Couldn't possibly be, she thought, and then reconsidered. Maybe he'd had an accident with some kind of time-based magic. But that wouldn't explain how this event – what she was doing – had ended up in his memory. Maybe there was some clue in the doppelganger, since it wasn't a perfect version of her; she could speak and it could not.

Yvonne raised her left hand. The copy did the same, which was slightly off-putting since what seemed natural would have been for it to raise the opposite hand like a reflection would. She circled around the copy and it circled around her in turn.

"Doppelganger..." she mused aloud and immediately wished she hadn't. The word put a chill up the back of her neck. That word, loaned from the Germans: didn't it also have something to do with death omens? Were you supposed to be saved from death from seeing your body double, or was it supposed to foreshadow it? Jesus, what was this?

She moved her head this way and that, studying the copy and trying to push the word doppelganger as far from her mind as she could, looking for any difference between it and what she knew herself to look like. She made a face at it, and it made one back, but it was... wrong somehow. She stepped in closer to inspect the copy's face as she screwed it up into a grimace, but still couldn't quite place what it was that was wrong. She leaned in closer, face-to-face, almost nose-to-nose, and stretched her mouth and childishly furrowed her brow, looking for what was missing from this thing that wasn't a reflection.

The eyes. It was the eyes that were wrong. They weren't... right. They weren't the eyes that looked back at her when she brushed her teeth or combed her hair or checked if what she was wearing looked right. They weren't similar to eyes that looked back when she looked at any other person, either. They were glassy, waxy, vacant. They were dead, mannequin's eyes. Corpse-eyes.

Window to the soul, Yvonne thought, unable to stop herself. Guess this thing, whatever it is, doesn't have much of one.

But there was something in those eyes, wasn't there? Some little flickering flame, almost a physical thing that she could barely make out while she was inches away from the copy's face. She thought she might be able to see if she got closer and manoeuvred her head so that her right eye and its were exactly level, close enough that she should have had to concentrate to keep it in focus. She found she didn't, though – she could see perfectly into what looked like endless, black space inside an iris the size of a golf ball.

Something else borrowed from a German dredged itself from her memory: When you gaze into the abyss, beware that the abyss also gazes into you.

Yvonne leaned in closer, trying to see what it was that flickered in what seemed like an infinity of space in the copy's eye. It felt like looking down a street where the streetlights had failed, and ground, surroundings, and sky blended together into formless ink. The iris looked the size of a dinner plate now. She could sink her entire hand into that black, blank space and grab that little dancing light that sat in there, that little taunting hobgoblin that was just itching to be caught. She reached into the darkness. Pain exploded in her own eye, but that was distant and irrelevant information. She plunged her hand in farther and farther; her arm followed, sinking in more, up to the elbow and now her shoulder...and it was then Yvonne lost her balance and fell into the blackness as the blackness fell into her.

She stood now not in pure white but in pure black, except it wasn't exactly pure...was it?...there were tiny points of light here, there, everywhere, all around. The lights were stars, the galaxies, and she could see them – all of them – all at once. Infinity – a concept beyond what a simple eight-letter word could ever convey – entered her. Time slowed and sped. The end and beginning of the universe touched. Her scream was eternal.