Ocean
Harry slams the shot of whiskey down, wishing it were a strong double of Ogden’s finest rather than the muggle stuff. He needs it. Something stronger. Something more. Something dulling.
His visit to the Cullens went fine. Better than he expected, even. Less hostile than he thought they might be. Vampires are volatile creatures, after all. Harry had thought it best to kill two birds with one stone and get both treaties set up in one day and enjoy the rest of his time in Forks without interference from the two half-muggle creatures. That was, at least, until he learnt of Alice’s visions.
Merlin.
He just can’t catch a break. What is it with these seers constantly surrounding him and ruining his bloody life? No wonder Alice had given him the creeps that first day of school. Vampirism aside, she really is too much like Luna. At least Luna is discreet about her skills—in the sense she never voices them properly, never actually prophetises. She just leans into her intuition. Seems abnormally perceptive, even.
Alice on the other hand.
Harry remembers what she said that first day to him, the way she’d declared his future happiness and rattled off that she’d seen such a thing happening. Such a casual vision. A casual prophecy. A casual way to trap Harry into a new future of someone else’s design, someone else’s accord.
“Another round?” The bartender asks, collecting Harry’s tumbler with the ice still rattling in it.
“Give me the whole bottle,” Harry replies, digging in his pocket for several crumpled notes. He slaps them on the table. Likely too much but he doesn’t care.
The bartender slides the bottle over and plops a fresh ice cube in his glass, pocketing the cash hastily. Harry rather likes him. He reminds Harry of Mundungus, all rough around the edges with a strong scent of tobacco and alcohol. Questionable morals. That works in Harry’s favour though, if the bottle of whiskey in front of him is anything to go by. He didn’t have to confund him or anything. He was much too happy to earn some coin, even from someone who looks like a teenager.
“You get sick and I’ll kick you out.” The bartender mutters, shuffling off to the next customer.
Harry is a little surprised he’s not the only one here at three AM. It’s a dingy bar in Seattle, off the port and nestled between two buildings, the stairway to the basement bar almost undetectable. Harry has a nose for these things now though. Maybe he always has. Had a nose for scenting trouble, noticing when something is just slightly amiss. When danger lurks in the air. He found this dive easily, even without a sign out front and it being two levels underground. There are two old men across the bar, curled around a small table with large pints of beer in front of them.
Still, they’re not the only ones here.
“How long will you stand out there watching?” Harry mutters under his breath, slamming another shot of whiskey down and pouring another two fingers.
The vampire opens the door and walks in, ignoring the greeting from the bartender and sitting next to Harry, turning to face him completely.
“Let me guess?” Harry drawls, picking his glass up and using it to point lazily at Edward, the vampire who constantly tries to enter his mind. “Alice?”
“She told me where you’d be.”
Harry laughs and shakes his head. “Of course she did.”
“She doesn’t mean any harm by it. She knew I wanted to talk to you.”
“Right. And what about what I want?” Harry asks, slamming his glass down too roughly, the alcohol slopping over the sides and across his fingers. “Did she ever think about that? Did you?”
Edward frowns. “Perhaps you should stop drinking, James.”
“Why? This conversation sucks when drunk. Can’t imagine I’d want it to continue sober.”
“Well, you’re underage, for one.”
Harry’s laugh is short. He downs his drink pointedly and pours another. He’s lost count of how many he’s had now. Ron would rip him a new one if he found out just how much he’s been drinking, but luckily for Harry, Ron isn’t here.
Edward sits in silence, his thick eyebrows furrowed so deep Harry’s surprised they don’t slide off. Merlin, he hates him. He hates the way his chiselled face looks worried for him—worried for Harry. Hates the way those molten eyes look distraught. Hates the way he wants to collapse in the man’s arms and curl into a ball like he does only for Death. It’s a horrible feeling. One he doesn’t trust.
“Why are you here?” Harry growls out.
“I—” Edward pauses. “I’m not entirely sure myself.”
And isn’t that just great? Harry’s stuck with a vampire who has attachment issues.
“I’d appreciate it if you fuck off. It’s rather obvious I want to be alone.”
“Do you really, though?”
Harry pushes his chair back and stumbles to his feet. Edward’s marble hand shoots out and grabs his bicep, stopping him.
“Wait, please. I’m sorry. Don’t leave.”
Harry rips his arm from Edward’s grip. There’s a fire along his arm down to his finger tips. He shakily curls his fingers into a fist, stretching them out again slowly.
“Don’t touch me,” he hisses, but he stumbles back into his chair. “Don’t touch me,” he mutters again, shuffling his cup between two hands in front of him, mesmerised by the ice sloshing around.
“Hey man, you ordering something?” The bartender asks Edward, very much implying he’s unwelcome if he doesn’t.
Harry hears Edward order and soon another whiskey glass, empty apart from some ice, is plopped in front of them. Harry fills the glass from his bottle of shitty muggle whiskey even though he knows Edward won’t drink it. Can’t drink it.
“Why are you here?” Harry asks again, this time his voice comes out soft, tired. Resigned.
“I was worried. Alice had some unusual visions.”
Harry doesn’t want to know that. He drinks his whiskey and refuses to ask. Edward stares. He doesn’t touch the glass in front of him, doesn’t fidget in his chair, barely even moves his shoulders in an imitation of breathing. Harry scowls.
“Don’t talk about Alice,” he replies, instead of calling Edward out on….on something. On his lack of humanity, perhaps. The idea is almost ludicrous—calling another being out on their inability to die.
“Why do you hate her so much?”
“Hate her?” Harry asks, gobsmacked. “I don’t hate her. I hate her visions—I hate prophecies.” He spits the word too roughly, too harshly.
“They’re not prophecies. They’re options. Possibilities,” Edward explains, as though Harry doesn’t know that. As though he isn’t aware that possibilities themselves are prophecies, that just their existence can lead to them self-fulfilling.
“Right. Did this conversation work out in the future you saw?” Harry asks him, glaring. “Let me guess. Alice views the possibilities and you pick the best one?” He snorts at Edward’s slightly sheepish face. “Yeah, you can fuck right off with that.”
Edward rotates the glass in front of him slowly. He takes a long time to reply. Maybe this conversation did go well in Alice’s vision—why else would Edward have come to talk?
“It’s not like that with you,” he says softly. “The visions are different.”
Harry wants to bash his head on the counter. Just the thought of being special again makes him want to kill himself. Literally. He’s sick and tired of being the chosen one in some way.
“The visions about you, they’re incomplete. If she can even see them. They’re just snippets of moments, stolen between gaps she can’t see.”
“Huh,” Harry says.
That’s a good thing, at least. Maybe it’s because of his magic. Maybe it’s because of Death. Both options are fine, as long as Alice can’t see his future and rattle off a prophecy like it’s nothing. Like they don’t actually hold weight and meaning and people’s lives.
Harry drinks his whiskey slowly now, avoiding the curious gaze of Edward. He’s unreserved with his stare, unabashed in his attention. Harry can feel him grating across his barriers. How much of his ability is subconscious, and how much does he actively push to enter others minds? How much can Edward see when he reads their minds? Is it like legilimency, where someone’s memories are like movies, playing around the viewer? Or is it more personal than that, more first-person, like when Harry was Nagini, attacking Mr Weasley?
“I told you to stop it,” Harry says, cutting his eyes over to Edward.
“I just want to know.”
Edward doesn’t even have the gall to look slightly mollified, slightly shamed. It’s as though his ability gives him the right to delve into everyone’s mind, to invade their privacy and manipulate inner thoughts, steal them and mould them into fact.
“So because you want to know, you deserve to?” Harry scoffs. “Because you have the ability to do so, it is your right to do so?” He can’t help the anger seeping into his tone.
“It’s not—”
“It is like that though, isn’t it?” Harry laughs, mockingly, cutting his eyes to Edward in a harsh glare. “You think everyone’s mind is yours for the taking? That you deserve to know what we’re all thinking? The actions we might take and the words we might withhold?”
“It’s not something I can control,” Edward exclaims, his eyes wide, flicking between Harry’s.
“Bullshit. I bet you’ve never even tried.” Edward looks away, hand curling around his glass of whiskey. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
“I shouldn’t have come here. I’m sorry, James.” Edward stands so quickly it couldn’t have been human. He stalks to the door and Harry watches him go for just a second before the anger takes over.
Maybe it’s the muggle whiskey—perhaps it’s stronger than Harry ever really gave it credit for—or maybe it’s simply that Edward’s behaviour is so selfish. So power-hungry, controlling, all without even acknowledging it. So much like Voldemort and Dumbledore, in the way they casually invade other’s minds. How they dip in and out of thoughts and memories, collect nuggets of a being and collate that information into a dossier of pros and cons, weaknesses and strengths, things that can be manipulated. Edward is the same—someone who is so used to living their life by pre-empting those around him, by gleaning information from inner selves and using it to inform his own actions, or to manipulate their own into an outcome he prefers. Worse yet, he combines his own personal knowledge of those inner workings with Alice’s visions. Her predictions for the future combined with Edward’s knowledge on the person, on their likely courses of actions, their thoughts and feelings and reactions to the world and people around them. The idea riles Harry up.
He throws Edward’s whiskey back and picks his whiskey bottle up by the neck, lugging it with him as he stalks Edward out the door and up the stairs as quickly as his inebriated steps will let him.
“Stop!” He yells, stumbling just a bit on the uneven ledge of the doorway.
Edward pauses, already long down the street, stopped under the lone light. Harry begins the trek towards him but Edward turns and suddenly appears before him, his hand out as if to grab Harry and stabilise him.
“You should go home, James.”
“Do you want to know?” Harry asks, slurring slightly.
“To know what?” Edward furrows his eyebrows.
His eyes are a shockingly bright gold in the night. Lit up against the darkness, the dank light from the stairwell shining across them. Harry remembers them being dark before, sometime previously, when he first saw Edward. He doesn’t know when, can’t really place any day before today correctly in his mind, but he knows they were once pitch black against his pale skin, not iridescent like this. Not molten and sorrowful.
“What it’s like for everyone else?”
“What do you mean?”
Harry grabs onto Edward’s arm to stop himself from keeling over, the whiskey bottle barely remaining in the weak grip of his left hand. Edward is cold. Even through the jacket he wears, Harry can feel how cold he is. How hard his forearm feels. It’s like a rock. A block of ice, even. It’s not comforting in the least. But the coldness makes his hand light up in a flurry of tingles. He stabilises himself using Edward and pulls himself to full height. He still has to look up at Edward, up into those confused golden eyes and past those soft pouted lips, curled into a frown.
He slips in naturally, softly. Unnoticed. This isn’t legilimency as he’d always known it. It’s not even the same as it was with Sam. It feels more, in every sense of the word. With Sam, it had been an accident and brief, a quick glimpse into his inner workings and slipping straight on out. Harry rarely uses legilimency on purpose. It makes him feel icky—reminds him too much of those months with Volcemort's magic laying tendrils in his brain, flicking through memories. It reminds him of Dumbledore refusing to meet his gaze. Of Snape, forcing his way in.
But with this, it’s purposeful. He’s purposeful.
Edward’s mind is chaotic. More so than he’d expected from someone so high strung. Usually people who are stressful have rather tidy minds, everything collated into categories and organised based on dates, emotion, impacts. Like Hermione—her mind follows the Dewey decimal system with further breakdowns into muggle and magical within each category. She’s one of the most high strung people Harry knows, yet her mind is the most organised. To be high strung is almost synonymous with controlled.
Harry had assumed Edward would be the same. He seemed like the most on edge out of all of the half-muggle vampires. At their impromptu meeting, Edward had barely glanced away from him. Harry was sure he could hear the man’s thoughts from across the coffee table as he’d considered every possible outcome and tried to predict every action of each person in the room. Due to that, Harry had assumed Edward’s brain would look like Hermione’s. Maybe it wouldn’t be a library, but something similar. He would have a system in place for collating memories and storing them.
But Edward’s mind is like the ocean. Churning around him with choppy waves going in every direction. Harry rather feels as if he’s drowning and it takes him a minute to find his metaphorical footing, to latch onto a thought floating past and allow it to drag him beneath the whitewash foaming on the waves, down with the undercurrent, and into Edward’s mind fully, past the rudimentary defences. James is too drunk, the thought projects. He shouldn’t be out here alone at night. He shouldn’t even be drinking. Harry’s rather impressed that there are defences at all. Edward’s mind-reading ability certainly lends him skill in occulmency. Whether he purposely crafts the defences or not is another thing. Still, they’re weak as defences go, and past the waves and through the murky depths of the underwater currents is his true mind.
Here, it is calm. A bright, airy room. Views of moss-covered trees outside, much like those in Forks. There’s no bed, simply a white leather lounge chair with a stack of precarious books on the floor next to it, each more worn than the last. A desk in the corner is covered in stray sheet music with a pile of pencil shavings brushed into the corner. And on Harry’s right is a wall of shelving, packed to the brim with records. In the middle sits a record player, embedded within the shelf. He inspects the records up close. Those on the top left are much older. Those on the bottom right are newer.
It’s still not what he expected. It’s tidy, organised, but there’s also mess, in the pencil shavings on the floor and the clothing dumped on a chair in the corner. There’s a chronological order to the records, but afterwards there’s seemingly no order, or perhaps an order that only makes sense to Edward. There’s an empty shelf and Harry avoids looking at it too much. Harry might have entered Edward’s mind on a whim and under the influence, and he might be testing his own comfort limits just in that action alone, but he’s not sadistic nor cruel enough to dig for memories Edward has hidden even from himself.
What? What is this? Edward thinks, his body materialising beside Harry.
“It’s your mind,” Harry replies, dragging his fingers along the records lightly, hearing the memories muttering beneath their cases. Here, inside, he’s not drunk. He can walk straight and talk normally, even though his physical body is inebriated to the point of needing Edward’s strength to keep him up.
My mind? Edward looks around. It looks like my room.
“It does?” Harry looks over his shoulder at the vampire. “It’s a nice room.” He taps his finger on a memory, on a record. He curls his finger and drags the record from the shelf lightly, looking down at the cover. “How does it feel, Edward?” He asks as he drags the record from its protective case and slips the record onto the player, lowering the arm and allowing it to spin. “To have someone in your mind? Rifling through everything you are?”
The memory jolts the room into the distance, the music bringing forth a memory.
It feels horrible, Edward whispers as the memory begins to play.
It’s Edward, playing the piano. Harry knew it would be. He could sense the memory before he chose it. One of serenity. Contentedness. With his sobriety came resignation. Harry lost his vindictiveness once he entered Edward’s mind. His anger melted away into more annoying emotions of empathy and understanding.
Edward doesn’t know any different. He’s lived his entire life—his entire existence, more so—being able to read other’s minds. Not knowing how to stop it, or maybe not even trying. His way of life, his very core, has been tied to this ability from the moment he awoke as a vampire. Harry knows that now, can feel it in his mind and echoing out from the memories. His ability is as much a part of Edward as Harry’s magic is a part to him. It defines him, and has done since he woke with red eyes. Edward doesn’t know how to exist without the protection, the safety he feels when using his ability. To lose it is like losing an arm to him, something he replies heavily on in his daily life. It’s how he copes. It’s why he’s been—in his own thoughts—a complete mess since Harry has arrived. Because he cannot read Harry, and being unable to do so wrangles at his control issues.
And whilst Harry wants to make Edward understand, wants to teach him a lesson in the pure invasion of privacy it is to constantly skim everyone’s minds, he doesn’t want to hurt Edward. Doesn’t feel the vindictive need to make Edward realise how invading it is to have another troll through your mind, dig into aspects of yourself that maybe you don’t even understand or know. So he’d chosen the piano.
It’s a soft song. Melancholic. It reminds Harry of his time in front of the Mirror of Erised. Filled with a deep longing for the things he wants in life. Edward sits alone at the piano in the dark. Moonlight streams in from outside and lights the keys.
“Where is everyone?” Harry asks, turning to Edward at his side, the one watching the memory with him.
They all left. To spend time together, Edward says, or thinks, watching himself with furrowed brows.
“Without you?”
Together, he emphasises, as if that should be enough.
Harry realises it is.
“Don’t read my mind, Edward,” Harry says softly. “You don’t want to see what is in there.”
But I do, he thinks back as Harry closes the door to Edward’s room behind him and finds himself swept back into the currents, spun out into the waves and back into his own mind.
Harry apparates instantly, not giving the vampire time to accost him again.