A Matter of Black and White

DISCLAIMER: This story is based upon the works of JK Rowling. Anything you recognize is hers. I’m making no money off this. I’m just having some fun adding my own little corner to the amazing world she has created.

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CHAPTER 7—THIS THING CALLED PROGRESS

The following morning, a milky sunshine seeped into the Leaky Cauldron through the filmy windows of Aurora’s upstairs room. She sat with her elbow on the sill, the thin line of her lips hidden behind the fist upon which she was resting her chin. She used her other hand to absently stroke Lilitu, who was dozing on the opposite end of the window ledge. Occasionally she would direct her wand at one of the room’s many clusters of spider webs. Most of them were already rewoven into elaborate patterns of zigzags, spirals, and geometrically impossible shapes—an old Holdahexe spell. Ha, who said she couldn’t do practical magic? Just because Defense Against the Dark Arts had never been her forte did not mean that she was useless with a wand.

Of course, that irksome little Voice of Reason reminded her, she wouldn’t feel the need to redecorate her room with crocheted cobwebs if Severus’s observation about her magical talents and limitations hadn’t had some truth to it. She preferred Languages and History—safe subjects in which no one ever got hurt. Being able to do a neat little butterfly stitch with spiders’ threads wasn’t going to change all that, and it certainly wasn’t going to help her against the Dark Lord or his Death Eaters.

Aurora reached out to pet her familiar’s sleek feathers—there was nothing like rhythmically stroking an animal to soothe the senses. Lilitu, however, was in no mood to calm anyone. She had awakened with a ruffle of golden feathers and was aiming pointed, perturbed pecks at the window pane, on the other side of which a sparrow had had the gall to alight. The little bird hopped around three times until it saw the source of the tapping. Aurora expected a startled chirp when it came face-to-face with the owl’s large predatory eyes, followed by a fluttering retreat faster than you could say Fizzing Whizbe. The tiny creature, however, held its ground, either because it thought itself more eagle than sparrow or because it understood the practical benefits of being separated from a yellow-eyed monster by a sheet of solid glass. It cocked its black-hooded head to one side, intently studying the much larger bird just a few inches away. Aurora thought she must know what the animals at the zoo felt like. Lilitu gave her a guttural hoot, protesting the indignity of becoming a mildly interesting specimen to this little speck of a bird. She rapped more loudly on the pane, insisting on being let outside to remind the sparrow of its place in the food chain.

“Let him be, Lilitu,” she chided, swiftly whisking her hand out of reach of the owl’s snaps at it to draw her attention.

Lilitu twisted her head toward her and gave another plaintive “Hoo!” which clearly said, “I’m your noble familiar, your beloved pet! Surely you won’t let me be dishonored by this riffraff off the street?”

“Oh, for Holda’s sake!” Aurora sighed. She aimed her wand at the ledge outside the window and Vanished it. The sparrow dropped a few centimeters (Aurora could have sworn she saw Lilitu strain with satisfaction to watch the startled bird plummet toward the ground). Then it found its wings and it fluttered across the way to a dilapidated Muggle Victorian building whose accumulation of decorative juts and knobs and ledges left many fine perches for the winged population.

The Victorians—now there was a people that knew about progress. Of course, their idea of progress had also resulted in smokestacks that had blackened all its fine white marble buildings like the one that was the Leaky Cauldron’s Muggle neighbor. Nevertheless, the Victorians with their steam locomotives, their electric light bulbs, and their mechanical everythings had had the idea of progress right—always moving, always changing. What kind of progress had she seen lately? Her Occlumency certainly was not progressing, nor was Severus’s pedagogy. Right now, their rate of learning seemed more on par with the Dark Ages.

Who said the wizarding world was so advanced? Hadn’t it learned to power its trains from a Muggle invention? Weren’t electric light bulbs cleaner and brighter than the sooty candles that cluttered her room? Weren’t the Muggles just a bit ingenious for inventing the sewing machine when they couldn’t use magic to tailor their clothes?

The wide Muggle world that spread out before what Tom, the proprietor, called the “back side” of the Leaky Cauldron suddenly seemed to offer a wealth of forward-moving possibilities. If nothing else, it presented her with a day’s diversion from her frustrations with Occlumency. Deciding that inspiration and distraction were both worthwhile motives, Aurora foraged through her trunks for a plain white dress, then headed down the stairs and out the inn’s “back door” that led her into Muggle London.

It took only a few steps into the main of Charing Cross Road for Aurora to appreciate the Leaky Cauldron’s location in relation to the Muggle world as well as to the wizarding one. Now that she was not hauling luggage like she had been when she had first arrived from King’s Cross Station, she was able to fully appreciate the magnificence of the bustling city center.

Generally, Aurora moved easily through the Muggle world. There hadn’t been a witch or wizard for kilometers from her uncle’s home in Switzerland. Even Bern had a relatively small magical population, which necessitated a greater than average familiarity with the Muggles. On the other hand, her anti-Muggle childhood and her Britain-shy adulthood had meant that she had never explored non-wizarding London, and her preoccupation with her new surroundings made her stick out from the locals who moved with tunnel vision toward their destinations. Despite the rush of London-black along the streets, Aurora, clad in a Muggle version of her Holdahexe white, moved slowly down Charing Cross Road, knowing but not caring how she must look every bit the tourist she was.

There were so many bookstores! On the other side of each display window, she caught sight of books stacked and pressed like bricks to form broken walls, like the ruins of the Roman Forum. It would have made her day just to excavate their pages. Unfortunately, most of the stores were not yet open, so she made a mental note of the most fascinating antiquarian shops and promised herself to return later that day.

Since shopping was out of the question for the moment, Aurora set her mind back on the generation of Britons who had inspired this morning’s outing. One of the Victorians’ great contributions to moving forward had been London’s Tube, and a ride on the world’s largest below-ground railway seemed a fitting tribute to the progressive spirit of its architects. Making her way down to Leicester Square Station and occasionally pressing her nose against windows of books with tattered leather covers, she moved more lightly than she had since she had arrived in England.

She had nearly walked her cares away when she finally found a small store that was open. Thanking her good fortune, she stepped inside, some brass bells with East Indian engravings jangling merrily against the door. In truth, the place was more of a tobacconist than a proper bookstore, its printed matter primarily consisting of paperback bestsellers, magazines, broadsheets, and tabloids.

It was the latter that sent her reeling back to the glum mood with which she had started her morning, for the headline of the Sun did nothing to brighten her day. Plastered on its front in bold-faced letters ran the headline “GOVERNMENT GONE WILD: The Truth behind Junior Minister’s Breakdown and Resignation Revealed.” Aurora highly doubted that the Muggle rag was actually revealing the “truth” behind Herbert Chorley’s sudden identification with ducks. From what she gathered from the Daily Prophet, and (more reliably) from Albus Dumbledore, the Muggle official was the victim of an Imperio gone bad. All the same, the fact that the wizarding war was bleeding into Muggle events indicated just how badly things were getting out of hand. Even the more reputable Times was reporting the aftermath of another Death Eater attack—a bridge collapse up north, though of course the blame was going to faulty construction and maintenance instead of ill-intentioned magic.

Verdammt, verdammt, verdammt! Couldn’t she escape this war for a few bloody hours? She wasn’t even officially a spy yet! Her Voice of Reason, the one that was still lobbying for the comfort, safety, and far superior possibilities for career advancement to be had back at Das Institut, reminded her that she could escape just fine if she were to go back to Switzerland. But the Times photographs of two young children whose family car had been crossing the bridge when it had collapsed reminded her why escape was impossible and why, just a few weeks ago, she had found the Swiss government’s policy of neutrality absolutely repugnant.

For the time being, the best escape from current affairs seemed a retreat into the past, so Aurora hurried out of the little store and dove into the tunnels of the world’s first true underground metro system. She shot out only two stations later at the stop for the nation’s most illustrious set of antiquities—the British Museum.

For even a mildly curious person, there were enough treasures and oddities in the British Museum to fill a day. For a student of history such as Aurora, there were enough to fill a lifetime with happy studies. Nevertheless, there was one item that appealed to both her historical and linguistic sensibilities and topped her list of things to see—the Rosetta Stone. She was thankful to arrive at the museum just as the security guards were unlocking the doors, giving her plenty of time to peer through the freshly cleaned glass case and to compare the Stone’s ancient Greek and Demotic texts, which had finally helped Egyptologists crack the code of Egyptian hieroglyphs. She had learned to read hieroglyphs in school and could follow them as easily as she could the much more common Greek. It was hard to believe that, only a few generations before, the language would have been incomprehensible to her and the rest of the world. Now there was progress.

Only once the school groups started elbowing her out of the way for brief, half-seeing glances at the display did she explore the rest of the Egypt wing. Afterwards she breezed through the Elgin Marbles and then examined some of the Sutton Hoo artifacts and other displays on Anglo-Saxon Britain. Her feet wore out before her fascination with the World’s Greatest Collection of Imperial Plunder did, so it was with great reluctance that she finally closed her visit by dragging herself to the museum gift shop. She wanted to buy a poster of the Rosetta Stone but found them all out of stock, so she ended up settling for a pack of Muggle playing cards with a picture of the Stone on the back. If nothing else, she could Enlarge one of the cards into something the size of a poster. Of course, she would still have fifty-three Rosetta cards that she did not need, but she wasn’t about to try and explain to the shopkeeper why she just wanted to buy just the ace of spades.

Trudging on sore feet back to the Russell Square Station, Aurora wished she had a cipher like the Rosetta Stone to help her learn Mentior Occlumency. Severus certainly wasn’t offering her any clues. She’d be better off trying to teach herself…even despite the fact that they’d both taken to pointing out that one couldn’t practice any form of Occlumency without a Legilimens.

All in all, the act of harnessing individual memories simply seemed too complex. Each experience was so multi-faceted. It seemed impossible to capture and contain all of its intricacies, to know which way a Legilimens might work his way in, let alone to know which of these entries she should use to get him into a new thought of her choice.

Maybe her self-preserving Voice of Reason was right—she was simply meant to go back to Das Institut. She was a linguist, not a spy. She was meant to work like the Roestta’s Jean-François Champollion, breaking the secrets of languages forgotten to history, not uncovering the secrets of history’s most notorious Dark Wizard. Severus had already seen how hopeless she was with the practical elements of Defense Against the Dark Arts. Who was she kidding to think that she was equipped to be a spy?

Aurora was so consumed by the hopelessness of her project that she ran straight into a little folding table set up at the mouth of the Underground station. Its aluminum legs scraped across the floor, sending a toe-curling screech down the tiled cavern leading to the trains. A sandy-haired dog posted next to the table barked in protest as playing cards wafted down upon him from the table.

“I’m so sorry!” Aurora cried, suddenly called back to reality. “I didn’t see where I was going.” Flustered, she bent to collect the scattered cards. When she went to set them back on the disrupted table, she came face to face with a black man in a knit cap and with a creamy film washed over his pupils.

“Here and I thought I was the blind one,” he chuckled.

A couple of loose cards floated by and down into the tunnel. With a twinge of guilt at the thought that this man made his living with these small bits of paper, she deftly drew her wand and Accioed them back through the stream of commuters. Only the dog seemed to notice with a perk of his ears that the cards were moving against the breeze.

“There we go. I think that’s all of them. I’m terribly sorry.”

“No problem. Do you like magic?”

“Magic?” she gulped. Maybe that Accio wasn’t the best idea.

“Well, I don’t go pulling old Argos here out of a hat, but I do read minds.”

What, was everyone in London except for her mastering mind magic these days?

“Just take a card from the deck,” he encouraged her.

Skeptically, she drew a card and prepared for the Muggle trick. She had drawn the knave of spades.

The man waved his hands over the remaining cards and hummed dramatically.

“Now shuffle your card back into the deck.”

She did as she was told and watched as he fanned the cards out across the table. Then he allowed his hand to hover dramatically above the deck, finally settling on a card near the middle. “I believe you drew the knave of spades?” Then he flipped over just that card.

It was brilliant, really. Well, not the trick exactly. She knew that Muggles could be master technicians of slights of hand. The idea behind the trick, though—the notion of reading a mind for just a face on a card—that was a stroke of genius.

“You’ve just made my day!” she exclaimed and thrust all the Muggle money she had left from her purchase at the British Museum into the street performer’s palm. “Thanks so much!” she called, and she hustled down to the trains.

She now knew how she was going to learn Mentior Occlumency. It was simple; it was elegant; and it was bound to make the vein in Severus’s temple throb in time to the beat of the latest Weird Sisters song.