For the Greater Good || Tom Riddle ||

Chapter Twenty-Two: Exhausted into Silence

"The mind is wider than the sky, Gwendolyn," Dumbledore sighed with a shake of his head. He still wasn't convinced. "It can do funny things to forget past trauma. It can disassociate, block a memory, detach from reality... I worry that, if this is truly the case, if your memory has truly been tampered with, it might have been good reason. For protection."

"Are you implying that I shouldn't have agency over my own mind?" Gwen seethed sharply as she stared at him with shrewd eyes.

He squirmed slightly. Although Albus Dumbledore appeared sagely, he truly hadn't had much experience with teenage girls. He had never felt pressure to learn how to be suave and gentile—it served no purpose to him.

Gwen thought about how much of his persona was a façade. The bumbling attitude, eccentric articles, sickly-sweet candies—it was a whimsical wind-up toy that he prepared to keep his act together.

How much of it was authentic? How much of it was a defense mechanism to ward off his guilt? Albus himself thought those questions often.

"I am not. I am merely trying to remind you that you might not like what we unlock."

"I've fully accepted that, although I doubt that whatever has been covered up can be nearly as miserable as the sleep debt I have accumulated."

There was a beat again, a little silence.

"You truly want to do this tonight?" he attempted to backtrack.

"Yes," Gwen assured.

Dumbledore sucked in a breath. His gaze hadn't left the floor for at least half a minute as he deliberated. Finally, as he summoned his Gryffindor courage and examined Gwen's face, the lavender skin circumnavigating her eyes and the straight set of her jaw, he relented.

"Sit still."

Gwen buried her breath deep in her belly. Remember. That was her mantra.

But as he neared her, pulling his wand out of his robe's pocket, she fidgeted.

"Will it hurt?" she asked nervously.

"All knowledge hurts," he replied somberly.

She felt a shivery flicker of reaction as he pressed his wand to her temple, making her want to close her eyes, but she held them open until they stung and blurred. She was about to blink when she felt it: a shift, like someone dragging a blanket along the sand only to lift it suddenly and shake it out.

A cold wash of memory prickled Gwen's skin. It was a child's first recognition of light falling through crib bars, the flashback of watching raindrops patter against a window, the stub of a toe on a piece of corner furniture, the sting of lemon juice on a paper cut, the coziness of sitting in a corner with a picture book, the most foreign and familiar sense of confusion.

The sensation that overcame her was the rush of wind between the trees, the tear of a piece of clothing, the slight hiccup of gravity as one jumps into a pool of water and sinks, weightless and hanging.

There was a pinch, a scrapping, and a sudden tug similar to the feeling of Legilimency. Dumbledore's face contorted in concentration; his brow was furrowed and his brilliant blue eyes were narrowed. The extraction was proving difficult.

But just as Gwen was growing worried, a silvery substance came away, stretching from temple to wand like a thick gossamer strand, which broke as he pulled the wand away from it and it fell gracefully into the Pensieve, where it swirled silvery-white, neither gas nor liquid.

Gwen licked her lips anxiously and stood up. Dumbledore moved to the side silently. The Pensieve was a shallow stone basin, into which runes and strange symbols were carved and precious stones were fitted. It was filled with a smoky white vapor—the collected memories of people who had siphoned their recollections into it. Gwen's memories. She held her breath.