Rehabilitation
Mr. Black's first days under Maple Zheng's watchful attentions were not what she would call pleasant. He argued about the food, demanding larger, richer portions that his body wasn't yet ready for. He tried to berate his nurses into giving him additional nourishing draughts and potions to restore his muscles. Though he was meant to be strictly in bed or in his chair unless attended by two aides, they often came in to find him already walking unsteady circuits of the room by himself.
And that was before his physical therapy began. Almost a year of atrophy had claimed much of his muscle mass, going from photographs of him, and it would be a slog to get it all back. The potions would take care of most of that, but reminding his newly-regenerated muscles of what they were supposed to do was something else entirely. He first had to learn to keep balance on his own and to walk distances farther than the end of the hall. Which meant getting the infamous Sirius Black to use a walker. True to form, he fought them for every step.
“This is rubbish,” he groused, pausing to rest. He pushed his walker aside, braced his hands on his knees, and drew deep breaths into his chest. The two aides on him rushed to support his weight and get a chair under him, and he battled them away with a growl. “I don't need you or your sodding walker. I walk fine on my own.”
As one of the aides held the seat for him, Maple took his left arm, and the other attendant the right. They guided his hands behind him to enforce the transition they wanted—both hands on the arms of the chair and then lower himself into the seat. As soon as they released him, he plopped. Again.
“Would you say you're back to where you were before your imprisonment? Because I have a hard time imagining that the man who chased four Death Eaters across Cornwall would get winded after a lap about a hospital floor. Now. Safe transitions. Walker. I don't care if you only have to use the lavatory, you wait for assistance until I tell you otherwise.”
“I said I'm fine—”
“Let me be perfectly clear about where you stand in this hospital, Mr. Black,” Maple said slowly. She planted both hands on the arms of his chair and leaned down low to him, locking her eyes on his. “You are the patient. I am your attending healer. Every single person you will see in this hospital who is in any way involved in your care goes through me, from the witch who draws your blood to the one wizard who changes your sheets. You were signed into my care, which means you don't leave this place without my say-so. And I don't say so until I'm satisfied with your progress. I don't care if it takes another year, I will get you back to how you were.”
She straightened and pushed his walker closer. “Now. Transition—the right way—and we'll do one last lap for today.”
He grumbled again, something about preferring the company of Dementors to this, and she folded her arms across her chest. “The sooner you're fit, the sooner you're rid of me.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Fortunately for Maple and her team, Mr. Black seemed to take her words to heart. Or, at least, some of them. Inside of his therapy sessions, he quickly became her most diligent patient. Outside of them, all of the good habits they instilled in him evaporated like dew on a sunny morning. Obstinate man that he was, he continued with his exercises and added a few more when left to his own devices. Within a week, Maple had an alarm installed on the seat of his chair and the edge of his bed. If he stood without his aides, a blaring klaxon summoned them at a run to make him sit back down. She also charmed his walker to position itself in front of him no matter which direction he turned if he tried to get up without it, nudging at his thighs until he took hold.
“I'm starting to think you don't want me able to get about on my own,” Mr. Black muttered after yet another siren brought Maple and her team sprinting. His tone was cross, but the slightest tug of a smile twitched the corner of his lips.
Slowly, Mr. Black's health returned. His balance improved, as did his endurance. When his therapy sessions no longer exhausted him and he seemed to be able to better stand on his own, Maple took him from a two-aide assist down to one, though he still wasn't permitted up on his own. Eventually, he even stopped fighting her on that and conceded to signaling for help before he tried transitioning to his walker.
So, when his alarm sounded in the small hours before dawn after two weeks of cooperation, Maple herself went running. A fall now could set him back for weeks. She skirted into his room, taking in the whole thing at a glance.
Not on the floor. Not in his chair. Not in bed. She hadn't passed him or his walker in the hallway, and he couldn't have gotten far enough down it to be out of view. She rounded the bed and found him. Propped in a corner. On the floor. Head cocked to the side, knee tucked to his chest. Fast asleep despite the whoop of the alert.
Figures. She flipped her wand at the alarm, and it cut off sharply. Mr. Black's on-call aide had arrived now, too, and she sent her off with a wave and stooped beside him.
“Wake up,” she urged, prodding him gently.
He swatted in her direction without stirring. “Sod off, Moony.”
“Come on.” Maple shook him more firmly. “Back to bed, Mr. Black.”
Slowly, he peeled his eyes open and grogged up at her. “Lemme be. I'm tired.”
“Which,” she said as she leveraged him up to his feet, “is why you should be in bed. You'll sleep better there.”
“It's too soft for my liking anymore,” he said as she ushered him back to bed. “Can't get any kind of decent rest.”
“You never seemed to have any problem with it before.”
“Well, I was exhausted before, wasn't I? Didn't matter where I was, if my body said sleep.” When he realized Maple wasn't going anywhere until he made himself comfortable, he settled against his pillows and sighed. “After a year sleeping on a stone floor, I'm used to it now.”
“Well, you ought to get un-used to it, Mr. Black,” she said. She fetched his blankets and helped get him situated. “You'll ruin your spine that way.”
“Just means I get to spend more time here with you, doesn't it, beautiful?” he said with a wink.
She couldn't help the small smile it brought to her face. It wasn't so much the compliment, even, as it was that it had been the first time since his arrival that Mr. Black had shown any sign of commitment to his own recovery. Perhaps, if she were careful, his surly disposition could be chipped away at.
That night, the nightmares started. They started minor enough, a twitch in his sleep or a low whimper. As the week drew on, though, they worsened. Without his exercises to wear him out, Mr. Black wasn't sleeping as deeply.
“Sleeping draughts?” Maple's cohort Alexandra asked.
Maple waved the suggestion off. “I don't want to start him on any more potions unless we have to. I wasn't intending to start him on psychiatric care until he was reliable on his feet, but I don't think we can put it off.”
She turned to the healer across the table from her, an egg-shaped man from Mental Magics. “What are our options?”
Liam Abbott laid out the choices for Mr. Black's situation, each worse than the last. Pulling the very memories from Mr. Black's mind as if to put them in a Pensieve would soften the edges, making the trauma of that Halloween foggier. It would be as though the events had been put behind frosted glass. The concern, though, was that should he ever need to recall it in clearer detail, he'd be unable to. It would also prevent his processing and moving through his grief in a healthy fashion.
The other choice was to build a barrier to wall off that night from the rest of his memories and then to slowly lower it as he grew better able to deal with what he'd been through. The problem there was that, if Maple had learned anything of Mr. Black, it was that he would worry at the wall like a loose tooth. He would chip away at it too quickly until the whole thing tumbled down in a rush. And where would he be when that inevitably happened? The whiplash could indeed be more damaging than doing nothing.
Sedatives, calming draughts, and other tonics were strictly out of the question; Maple refused to provide him with anything that could prove addictive merely for a short-term fix.
“There is one other option,” Abbott said. He rifled through the papers before him without actually looking at any of them.
“No,” Maple told him flatly. “I don't care if you pioneered the technique; I don't care how many other near-successes you've had. You are not removing the memory altogether.”
“Selective Obliviation has come a long way in the last five years—”
“—And it is still highly experimental and unreliable, Liam. You nearly ruined that poor Auror. I heard he had to switch departments entirely when you were through.”
“Now, Healer Zheng, just hear me out—a case of this magnitude. If it's successful, it would put Obliviation therapy on the map. Countless people were traumatized by the war. Dozens may never fully recover. But if we can help Black regain some semblance of normalcy, it would prove beyond a doubt that it works.”
Maple felt the heat rising in her cheeks. “Do you have any idea what that would do to him? Have you even spoken to him to know how deep it runs?”
“He's a prime candidate–if I can remove his time in Azkaban from him–” Liam persisted, and Maple slapped a palm on the table between them to shut him up.
“You wouldn't be Obliviating just a year,” she snapped. “We're not talking about a single bad event or even a rough patch. We're talking about the death of one of his oldest friends. If you remove that, he gets no closure from it. You have to remove every scrap of his time with the Potters. He'd have to forget all of it. You would be rewriting his life from scratch, reworking his entire personality. You're not doing that to him. The answer is no. Bring me something else, and find yourself another test rat.”
Liam had stammered a few more points, but she wouldn't be swayed from her initial refusal. She had seen a few of what Liam called “successes”, and the deeper the memory ran, the more holes it tended to leave in the patient's psyche. In some cases, yes, select patients may benefit from a total wipe of a memory that prevented their being able to function normally, but that didn’t apply here. She would simply have to find a way to get those results for Mr. Black while avoiding the method. But, unfortunately, it seemed that there were some things they just couldn't fix with magic.