No one ever notices the flaws in a miracle. When people come back, when they don't die, when they are snatched from the brink of tragedy by fate or mercy or luck, they never stop to acknowledge what's wrong.

He came back wrong.

The few insights that sporadic legilimency has gleaned have been frustratingly empty. Meaningless thoughts and observations skitter across what little conscious mind I can reach. Reading his mind is like reading a blurred work of Shakespeare annotated with comments like "He's insane" or "This is where they hang the fool". The words don't give the actions meaning, but create a smokescreen designed to shadow the true intent and turn it into nonsense. Facts, not knowledge.

It's frustratingly akin to trying to reach an object that has fallen behind a piece of furniture. No matter how hard you try to reach it, all you manage to do is scrape the surface with your fingertips. A constant veil behind his eyes, even when he is asleep and dreaming, trying to wring any decent piece of information from his wretched mind is blood from a stone.

Occasionally, you get lucky. But only if he's feeling pedantic or sadistic or malicious or lascivious, or even playful, all common emotions in his grey eyes since he was dragged from the depths of hell, kicking and screaming to go back.

"You're supposed to be his godfather for goodness' sake!" snapped Mrs Weasley to him one day. And then I caught it.

A brief spark of rage that flitted across his aristocratic features, one miniscule expression that contorted his face into scorn as he let his derision break free of his carefully constructed cloak of invisibility and charm. He caught my eye as he felt my hurried intrusion, hesitant of a counter attack or being rudely kicked out with a sharp flick across the inside of my skull. Instead of throwing me out or constructing a wall or probing back or even breaking eye contact, he allowed me to see a very small flicker of his thoughts.

A second was all it took for the fantasy, of Molly Weasley's blood spraying across the kitchen whilst Padfoot ripped her throat out, to be ingrained in my memories forever. Horror and triumph fought for equal ground in my head as I was ripped unceremoniously from that particular fantasy and plunged directly into another of silk sheets and dark corners, pleasure and pain mingled in a hoarse cry of ecstasy rattling through an empty house. This time it was me who forcefully yanked me out of his perverse longings and back into a world where everything was normal and safe. Where the table-top was not sticky from blood and the echoing cry of ecstasy was not reverberating through the wretched house that took an innocent man and broke him.

I winced as the volume in the kitchen sunk to silence as he held my gaze with a look of gleeful triumph on his face and utter evil in his eyes. There was a pause before the canvas of his face was wiped blank and replaced with a slow easy smirk of grace and charm, classic diversion from his manipulative words.

"So sorry Molly, I'll try and curb the schoolboy humour next time hmmm?" The honeyed words were accompanied with the right amount of contriteness and mischievousness. What woman wouldn't giggle slightly and turn away with a quick "oh don't you worry about it dear"? I'll tell you who: The woman who had to excuse herself to throw up from the remnants of a fantasy that wasn't hers. The woman who knew he had followed her upstairs and was now suppressing a shiver at having to leave the bathroom again.

Biting the proverbial bullet had never felt so literally life-threatening. Now I see a certain black humour in the way we use our language today, we don't make words seem pale with colloquialism and hyperbole, but we make our world seem a little darker with the way we laugh at expression that once meant danger and death. There's always a subtext.

But of course, this train of thought is simply procrastination. The minute this brief muse is over, the proverbial bullet hits its target, accompanied by the click of the bathroom door opening.

Upon my exit, I see him leaning against the wall lazily, still smirking with the arrogant ease that seems to have been gifted to all purebloods (except maybe the Weasleys) on conception.

I make to walk right past him, careful not to make eye contact but he has different ideas, and I find a solid wall of man blocking the hallway.

Still I say nothing.

"Care to share the reason why you decided to snoop around my head Princess?" the question is accompanied by a smug arch of his eyebrow, the playful gesture concealing the discreet undertone of warning in his voice.

His fingers grasp my chin and force my eyes to his. I shut my mind stubbornly, just in case, erecting walls around every millimetre of my subconscious, just on the off chance of an attack.

His fingers squeeze painfully and I realise he wants an answer.

"I.." My throat feels too dry to speak, and I have no idea what the right answer to his question is. "I wasn't snooping."

A snort of disbelief is my answer, and I reach up to rip his hand from my face crossly, swallowing the brick in my throat hurriedly.

"I wasn't" I snapped taking a step backwards, finally annoyed beyond fear. "I didn't need to; your thoughts weren't exactly shrouded in subtlety." The hallway feels as if the walls are closing in.

He laughed humourlessly and took another step forward, seemingly oblivious to the hard plaster that was now digging into my back.

"That still didn't give you the right to look, Princess". All traces of his former lethargic playfulness were gone, suspicious anger clouding his face. Not the heat of righteous rage, or irritation, but the cold hard fury of an uncontrollable wrath.

"Tell it to a judge." I retort in a low voice, not quite as defiant as I wanted, still focusing on keeping the mental shields up. "How about we agree that I won't look again, and you won't accost me in a hallway?" I smile weakly, the prolepsis of his earlier fantasy telling me nothing good will come of this. "It's not like I particularly wanted to see any of that anyway."

He chuckles, somehow making it into a growl. "I'm more interested in why you keep feeling the need to check on my thoughts actually". His arm is beside my head, forcing me to keep eye contact with him.

Suddenly, a blinding pain hits right between my eyes, as if someone has thrown a spear straight into my frontal lobe. Then I realise that's what he is doing, stabbing at my reflexive shields viciously, trying to find a gap, making no attempts to be subtle or merciful.

After all – who would believe that the rescued is slowly tearing the rescuer apart from the inside out?

And when did he learn legilimency? An art for the subtle and the disciplined, a crafting of the subconscious, the tool of a spy, not a soldier.

It was getting harder to keep them closed, the temptation being to give in and stop the random bursts of pain along the front of my mind. I close my eyes, and my mind solidifies itself, the pain getting less as all my energy goes to fortifying the battlements of my thoughts.

Just as I begin to relax, I yelp as I feel a sudden pinch on my hip and that's all he needs. He's in through the tiny gap that appeared in a flash, searching through my memories frantically, I can see random pieces of my life flash before my eyes frame by frame, blind to the real world as he searches for whatever it is he wants.

My eyes are watering and I've got his bicep in a death grip, trying to throw him out, grappling with his own thoughts as I try to expel what he can see from the front of my brain. I can see doors slamming shut as I lock away private or indecent or potentially flammable thoughts and experience's behind stout walls of titanium thoughts, shadowing poignant emotions behind the inconsequential nonsense of a teenage girl. Then he freezes and I know he found what he wants, I can hear my own voice echoing through my head as his mental images from earlier flash behind my eyes.

"He's come back wrong. He's come back wrong. He's come back wrong. He's comes back wrong. He-"

Summoning strength from I don't know where, I take a breath and shove him out of my mind, forcefully throwing him out. As he was torn from my mind, I forgot to put the shields back up and I was helplessly pulled into his mind instead.

There wasn't any pictures.

My first thought, was the complete lack of clarity surrounding every memory he has. Some smothered in a grey haze, like he cannot remember what they were, some coated in the blood red mist that encompasses every fantasy he has ever had, presenting them as memories, instead of the longing want normally attached to a daydream.

Snapshots of images are flicking through the front of his awareness, sounds and smells and touch being magnified like in an animal's mind. And through all the chaos and mind numbing, exhausting violence that seem to occupy every waking thought, his emotions cover everything in a roaring fury.

Anger, want and salacious longing flow through each picture as they appear. Each one inconsequential to me, a frame of the orchard at the Burrow, a glimpse of me and Luna at the kitchen table in Grimmauld place, trivial moments in time that seem to harbour a distinctive significance to the ex-convict currently dragging me through his mind.

And it is him leading. I'm not doing any of the searching that's prompting the small insights I'm gleaning from his life. Something's holding me in an icy death grip pulling me into the delicious confusion that is his life now. That something is his metaphorical grasp on the edge of my being. He's searching through his own head, looking for something for me to see, something he's hidden so far down and so far back, buried from himself that he struggles to find what it is he wants to show me.

And then we stop in front of a door right at the very edge of his sanity, I'm given time to reflect that now would be the time to forcibly leave before I'm unceremoniously shoved through, and land in the middle of his worst nightmare.

Or maybe his favourite dream.

It's certainly not a memory, the setting gives it away. We're in a room in some dingy looking hotel, obviously not a real place; it's too rough around the edges. Normally when someone can't remember a certain detail of a memory, inside their own head or in a pensieve, the detail they can't recall is a hazy grey. Hanging on by the tips of their fingers, but not quite solid enough to be part of the original memory, similar to altered memories. The edges here though, like the view from the window and what's in the room other than the bed, are black, like they have never existed and never will. Like they haven't been invented by whoever created this scenario rather then they just cannot be remembered by whoever partook in the event.

Wait, bed.

Why was I seeing this? What was I about to see that was so sinister or chilling that even the great Sirius Black was afraid of his own desires?

Ignorance is bliss.

Thank you for reading Dahlings…

Nixon. x