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Shadows in St. Mungo's: The Mind Burns Last - Chapter 02: The Other Greengrass
🕑 Added 2025-05-02 23:10:02 +0000 UTCThe message hadn’t come through official channels. No owl, no interdepartmental memo. Just a folded slip of parchment that appeared on Harry’s desk in the late afternoon, resting on top of the Rowle file like it had always been there, though he hadn’t seen anyone enter. The handwriting was delicate, clipped, unadorned. Come to St. Mungo’s. Ward 49. She asked for you by name. There was no signature.
He nearly threw it away.
By the time he reached the hospital, the city had dipped into that narrow grey window between day and night, where the sky stopped pretending to shift and simply hovered — not dusk, not full dark, but an unfinished thought. He passed through the hospital’s reception unchallenged, barely acknowledged by the harried witches and overworked medi-wizards who bustled from one glowing file to another. Ward 49 wasn’t listed on the main directory. It never had been.
He found her near the end of the corridor, standing just beyond a frosted-glass door with a brass handle that hummed faintly under his touch. Daphne Greengrass hadn't changed in the way people usually meant. Her posture was still perfect, her robes still tailored to hide the stress lines in her shoulders, her hair still drawn back in a clean, almost clinical knot. But something about her was sharper now — as though grief had honed her, not softened her. Her expression, when she saw him approach, was unreadable. Not cold. Not warm. Just distant. Like looking through glass at someone you once thought you knew.
Harry slowed as he neared, but didn’t stop until they were standing within arm’s reach. Close enough to see the shadow under her eyes, the faint discoloration near her right temple suggested too many sleepless nights. She didn’t speak first. That, too, hadn’t changed.
“It’s been a long time,” he said, not because it meant anything, but because silence felt like a game she was better at.
Her reply came after a beat too long. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”
“I wasn’t sure either,” Harry admitted. He glanced at the door behind her, then back at her face. “You said she asked for me.”
“She did,” Daphne said, voice quiet but precise. “Three days ago. Repeatedly. She doesn’t say much that makes sense anymore, but your name was… persistent.”
The hallway’s overhead lights buzzed faintly, their glow tinged with that sterile warmth that never reached the skin. Harry shifted his weight, uncomfortable without knowing why. “What exactly does she think I can do?”
“She thinks you’re already involved.”
That landed heavier than it should have. Harry looked at her fully now, letting the familiarity sting. They hadn’t spoken in nearly five years, not since the last of the war commissions had wrapped and the Ministry had buried everything inconvenient. He remembered Daphne seated across a long table, eyes unblinking as she gave testimony about the experimental units, the closed-door trials, the “rehabilitation” of those too valuable to punish. She hadn’t lied, not exactly. But she hadn’t said everything, either. After that, she disappeared into hospital life — and if they crossed paths again, it hadn’t been in a way he chose to keep.
“Daphne,” he said, tone shifting slightly, “why me?”
She didn’t answer immediately. Instead, she looked past him, toward a window that opened onto a brick wall. “Because she described the body before the Prophet printed it. Because she talks about an alley in Clerkenwell she’s never been to. And because yesterday she asked me, ‘Did he keep the photo?’”
Harry’s breath stopped short. He hadn’t mentioned the photo to anyone.
Daphne met his gaze, and this time there was something beneath the surface — not pleading, not trust, but urgency twisted into restraint. “I know you don’t want to do this,” she said, and there was no accusation in her voice, only fatigue. “But you’re going to see her anyway.”
The door behind her clicked once, not from touch, but from recognition. The ward had sensed him. Harry stared at it, then back at Daphne.
“She’s not what you remember,” Daphne said softly. “But something in her remembers you.”
He nodded once, not to agree, but because there was nothing else to do.
Then he stepped inside.
~HP~
The room didn’t look like a psychiatric ward, and Harry suspected that was intentional. Gone were the peeling enchantments and flickering ward lights of the hospital’s older wings — in their place stood a polished chamber lined with soft-glow lamps and conjured windows that showed a perpetually calm garden. The illusion was expertly crafted, but not foolproof. If you stared too long, the foliage began to repeat. He noticed the same butterfly tracing the same lazy figure-eight behind the same patch of fake lavender every few seconds. It was the kind of detail you weren’t meant to notice unless your mind had been trained to expect patterns to lie.
Astoria Greengrass sat in a high-backed armchair near the far wall, a blanket draped over her legs and a steaming cup of something herbal resting untouched on a tray beside her. She looked better than expected — cleaner, calmer, even elegant in that effortless way the old families carried themselves, like they’d practiced poise since birth. Her blonde hair was shorter than in the photos he remembered from the Prophet, cut close around the jaw, as if someone had trimmed away the parts of her that belonged to someone else. She turned to face him before he spoke, before Daphne even stepped through behind him.
“I thought it would take you longer,” she said, voice light, almost amused.
Harry blinked. “To do what?”
“To come.” She smiled, and it was the kind of smile that didn’t belong in a room like this — not warmth, not flirtation, not even irony. Something deeper. The calm of someone who already knew the punchline. “You’re always slower in this version.”
Daphne said nothing, but her breath caught just slightly behind him.
Harry crossed the room with careful steps, not like approaching a threat, but not casually either. He’d seen enough broken minds to recognize the dangerous ones weren’t always the loud ones. He stopped about five feet from her and studied her face. She looked directly at him, and her gaze didn’t falter.
“Do you know why I’m here?” he asked.
“I dreamed about you,” she replied. “But not the normal way. Backwards. It started with your flat — the window with the cracked frame, the coffee cup with the moth inside it, the ashtray that’s never emptied. Then it went outward.”
Daphne moved to stand at Harry’s side, posture taut, arms crossed like armor. “She does this,” she said under her breath, more to herself than to him. “Spins things. Builds images out of nothing.”
Astoria smiled wider. “Don’t listen to her. Daphne still thinks reality is linear. It’s adorable.”
Harry kept his voice calm, low. “You mentioned a photo. Do you remember what was in it?”
Her eyes gleamed. “He’s still beautiful, isn’t he? Rosier. It doesn’t matter which side he’s on. They always send him in first.”
Harry didn’t respond, but he didn’t need to. She had his attention now, fully.
Astoria reached toward the teacup but didn’t lift it, only traced a finger along the rim. “They’re rewriting it again. You’ve noticed, haven’t you? The names change first. Then the photos. Then you stop being sure whether you were ever there at all.”
Daphne stepped forward, eyes narrowing. “Tori. Stop. You said you’d be clear today.”
“I am clear,” she replied brightly. “Clearer than either of you. You’re just still inside it.”
Harry tilted his head slightly, searching for something — a pattern, a crack, anything he could follow. “Inside what?”
But Astoria didn’t answer. Instead, she leaned forward slightly, voice lowering into something almost conspiratorial. “You should stop writing on your case file when you’re not awake. It’s dangerous. You’re not always the only one holding the pen.”
The words landed like a stone in still water.
Harry’s spine straightened, blood rushing colder. He hadn’t told anyone about that. He hadn’t even written it down. And yet here she was, smiling like it was a shared secret.
Daphne inhaled sharply, stepping between them now, her voice sharper than before. “That’s enough. He’s not here for the theater.”
Astoria leaned back into her chair, serene once more. “I liked you better when you had less control, Harry. You were easier to reach.”
The room fell still again. The butterfly resumed its figure-eight behind the lavender.
Harry stared at her a moment longer, but the look on her face told him there would be no more clarity today. Not now. Not unless she wanted to give it. He turned without a word and walked out.
Daphne followed a moment later.
The door closed behind them with a sound that felt too final.
~HP~
The door clicked shut behind them with a muffled finality that seemed to hollow the air around them. Harry didn’t speak. He leaned back against the wall, arms crossed, gaze focused on some fixed point down the corridor, a scuff in the marble that had no meaning but which his eyes clung to like an anchor. Daphne remained upright, hands tucked beneath her sleeves, her expression unreadable but simmering just under the surface — the exact expression he remembered from that final Ministry hearing, when she’d held her composure for four straight hours before walking out without saying goodbye. That, he thought absently, was her talent. Holding the line until everyone else broke first.
He waited, but she spoke before he could formulate anything useful.
“She’s been like this for months. Lucid and incoherent at the same time. As if she’s in two places at once — one of them real, one of them... not.” Her voice was low, measured, but Harry heard the weight behind it, the strain of too many nights spent in this corridor, too many brief glimmers of recognition that faded into riddles and delusion. “You think she’s insane, don’t you?”
Harry shrugged, still watching the floor. “I think she knows things she shouldn’t.”
“Which isn’t the same as saying she’s sane.”
“No,” he admitted. “It’s not.”
Daphne turned toward him fully, her voice sharpening. “She described your flat, Harry. Not just the moth, not just the ashtray — she mentioned the book on your kitchen table. The one with the broken spine. Are you going to tell me how she’d know that?”
He didn’t answer immediately. Part of him wanted to lash out, to accuse, to turn it back on her — some old reflex from the war, when every conversation was a duel and every question a trap. But this wasn’t that. Daphne didn’t strike him as a liar. Not today. Not about this.
“She said my handwriting isn't always mine,” he said finally, voice quieter now, more resigned. “She said I was easier to reach when I had less control.”
Daphne’s face twitched — not surprise, exactly, but the flinch of someone whose worst fear had been repeated aloud. “She’s said that before,” she murmured. “About others. That they’re not the ones moving their mouths. That they’re repeating something too old to be language.”
He looked at her, then — fully, not just the surface of her features but the layers beneath. The exhaustion. The fear she hadn’t named. The fact that, for all her sharpness, she’d reached out to him. That wasn’t nothing. “And you brought me here,” he said slowly, “because she mentioned my name? Or because you already knew there was something wrong and you just didn’t want to say it out loud?”
Daphne’s eyes narrowed, but her voice didn’t rise. “I brought you here because three people are dead in ways that shouldn’t be possible, and my sister is quoting facts she has no access to while slipping further into whatever this is. I brought you because I don’t know where else to go.”
“You could’ve gone to the Ministry.”
She gave a quiet, humorless laugh. “You know better than that.”
He did. The Department was too full of silence and smoothed-over records, too busy retroactively sanitizing the war to bother with subtle decay like this. Mental instability, magical contamination, and psychic bleed didn’t fit the new narrative of order and peace.
“I’m not sure I can help her,” he said, and this time there was no bravado in it — just truth.
“I didn’t ask you to fix her,” Daphne replied. “I asked you to listen to her.”
They stood there a moment longer, side by side in the sterile hallway, the silence thick and oddly companionable in its discomfort. Neither reached for resolution. Neither tried to soften the edges. It wasn’t friendship. Not yet. But it was something — recognition, maybe, of a shared gravity they both felt pulling at the corners of their lives.
And for the first time in years, Harry didn’t feel entirely alone inside his own confusion.
~HP~
The corridor gave way to the lift, and the lift gave way to the wide tiled entrance hall of St. Mungo’s, where the late evening lull had settled over the staff like a shared breath no one dared disturb. Harry walked ahead, his pace measured but tight, jaw set in a line that suggested he wasn’t interested in being followed, and yet made no move to dissuade it when he heard her footsteps behind him. Daphne didn’t call out, didn’t announce herself. She simply kept pace, her heels striking the floor with muted precision, her coat drawn tight despite the relatively warm air outside. When they stepped out into the street, the sky was sliding deeper into dusk — not the false dusk of magical clocks or illusioned windows, but the honest one, the slow darkening of a world too large to stop for anyone’s grief.
They walked in silence for several blocks, past old buildings that bore the pitted faces of bomb damage and new scaffolding alike, and neither spoke until the Thames came into view, its surface rippling with dull amber from the lamplight above. Harry paused at the edge of the embankment, leaned on the stone railing with both hands, and stared out over the water as if the river might contain a version of himself he could still believe in. Daphne came to stand beside him, not close enough to touch, but near enough that he could feel the shape of her presence in the space between them.
“I almost didn’t send the message,” she said finally, eyes forward, voice low. “I wrote it twice. Deleted it the first time.”
Harry didn’t look at her. “Why send it at all?”
There was a long silence. Then: “She’d been improving. Or… she seemed like she was. The night she got worse — truly worse — she was alone in her room. No visitors. No books. Nothing that could’ve triggered her. But when I went in the next morning, she was sitting on the floor. Crying. Holding a photograph.”
That caught his attention, but he didn’t speak yet. She went on.
“She said it had his name on the back. Rosier. That it was old, but still warm. She said it didn’t show anything until she touched it.”
Now Harry turned to look at her. Her eyes stayed fixed on the river, but he could see the fatigue in her face — not the physical kind, but the exhaustion that came from holding something together long past the point of structural failure. “You saw the photo?” he asked.
Daphne shook her head. “It was gone. Burned to ash, according to the medi-witch on rotation. No flame. No charm. Just… ash.”
He let the words settle. The image of Eloise Rowle flickered through his mind, the photo she shouldn’t have had, the one that vanished from the evidence box without a trace. Something inside him shifted — not fear, not yet, but the uneasy sense that whatever was happening had already moved two steps ahead of them.
“I need more time,” he said.
“I didn’t ask for a deadline.”
“No,” he admitted, “but someone else might’ve.”
She didn’t respond, but the quiet between them changed. It grew heavier. Not hostile, not impatient. Just honest. They were two people who didn’t trust the world around them and didn’t entirely trust each other — but something in that distrust was mutual. And strangely stabilizing.
He straightened, adjusting the collar of his coat, and began to turn away.
“Harry,” Daphne said softly, and he paused mid-step.
She didn’t follow it with anything else. Not a question. Not a plea. Just his name. Not cold, not warm — just his name, spoken with the same cadence she’d used five years ago across a table of war survivors and bureaucrats trying to make peace look procedural.
He didn’t turn back. But he didn’t keep walking either. For a few seconds, they stood like that — facing different directions, sharing the same stillness.
And then he said, “I’ll look deeper.”
She nodded once, and it was enough.
They walked away from the river at different paces, neither looking over their shoulder.
~HP~
The flat was as he’d left it — dim, dry, and thick with the faint scent of smoke that never fully dispersed, no matter how many cleansing charms he pretended he meant to cast. The ashtray on the desk was full again, though he didn’t remember smoking more than one. His coat hit the back of the chair without grace. The kettle sat untouched, as cold as the tea bag waiting beside it. The quiet was too total. The kind that wasn’t peace but vacuum. His wandlight cast long shadows that bled upward over the wall, brushing against the ceiling as though trying to escape the corners.
Harry sat heavily at the table, the folders spread out before him like ritual implements — crime scene reports, autopsy summaries, forensic logs, and the still-unsettling file from the Rowle case. The photo sat near the top of the stack, not the physical one from the alley — that had been lost, or more likely removed — but a duplicate from the Ministry’s internal archive. It had been taken on-site by the junior investigator, time-stamped and catalogued for the records. The image itself was static, as all official crime scene prints were frozen to preserve integrity. But there was something off about it now, something that hadn’t registered the first three or four times he’d stared at it.
He leaned forward, angling the light. The victim — Eloise Rowle — collapsed beside a storefront, her face turned slightly toward the glass. It wasn’t a dramatic shot. Just a body in profile, a wand lying six inches from her hand, her coat slightly askew. But behind her, in the glass, something caught his eye.
A reflection.
It was faint, easily missed unless one was actively searching — a blur in the upper-left quadrant of the glass panel. Not a perfect shape, not defined, but distinct enough to suggest a human figure. A woman. Blonde. Standing half-turned, as if she had just begun to walk away. Her face wasn’t visible, but the profile of the shoulder, the shape of the hairline, the line of the neck — it was enough. It looked like Daphne.
He sat back slowly, the air in his lungs caught between two thoughts — the rational dismissal, and the intuitive certainty. He grabbed the duplicate from the Ministry records envelope — the one Olander had handed him earlier in the day — and placed it side by side with the current copy. He narrowed his eyes, lit the wand again, adjusted the angle, and stared.
Nothing.
The reflection was gone.
The same photo. Same timestamp. Same angle. But now the glass behind Eloise was empty, clear of any shape, any blur, any presence.
Harry didn’t move for a long moment. He just stared at the image, as if it might shift again under the weight of attention. Then he set it down with deliberate care, like it was something living that might react if jostled, and reached for the case file notes.
He flipped to his own handwriting. The margin notations looked the same as always. No new phrases. No mysterious lines. Still, he turned the page slowly, almost ceremonially, scanning every inch for some trace of what had been altered.
Nothing revealed itself.
But something had changed.
He pushed the files away and stood, pacing once around the room with no destination, no logic to the motion except to keep his limbs from locking. His eyes swept over the room automatically, scanning for anything out of place, though he knew it was futile. Whatever was happening wasn’t in the objects. It was in the space between them.
When he sat down again, he didn’t reach for the files.
He just lit another cigarette and watched the smoke rise.
And rise.
And rise.
Until the room blurred at the edges and the air began to hum with the quiet, nagging rhythm of a pattern not yet named.
He didn’t sleep.
