Rosura, Part Seven

Lily sat up in bed in the Hospital Wing, taking in her surroundings with bright-eyed interest. Agitated voices were proceeding from the office at the end of the room. She was sure that nice man with the white beard and the crooked nose, who’d said his name was Dumbledore, had left the door open on purpose, so that she would be able to hear his conversation. A strange name, Dumbledore - and yet it seemed right, it sounded familiar, it seemed to fit his face.

“Her parents are here,” the white-bearded Headmaster was saying. “They would like to take her home. And possibly for good.”

“Back to the muggle world?” came Madam Pomfrey‘s shrill, horrified voice. “Absolutely not, Dumbledore!”

“Poppy, they are her parents,” he said gently. “There’s nothing I can do.”

“But she’ll be of age in a few weeks. Then she’ll be able to decide for herself what she wants to do.”

“Unfortunately, she is only of age in the wizard world. In the muggle world, she will not come of age for another year. We must respect their laws, Poppy.”

“Their laws don’t apply to her! She’s a witch!”

“Only if she wants to be. I agree that the Lily we both know wants to be a witch. But whether she is still that Lily remains to be ascertained. Memory charms can alter people profoundly.”

There was a sound from Madam Pomfrey’s direction - almost a sob, and Dumbledore’s voice paused. Lily had the impression that he was putting his arm round her.  

“Her parents have agreed to let me take her home tomorrow,” he resumed, still in that gentle voice. “We have only one night to try and repair some of the damage that Lucius has done to her, and enable her to make her own choice. I must visit the library, but I will return soon, and then we will endeavour, with great care, to restore her memories. It can be done, Poppy.”

Lily pretended to be asleep as Dumbledore crossed the room. She felt his gaze on her - and was sure, though she had no idea how she was sure, that it was full of distracted amusement. Madam Pomfrey came back into the Hospital Wing after him, and fluffed some pillows savagely. Lily listened to the matron’s heels clipping sharply against the stone floor, as she bustled around. She seemed to be slamming cupboard doors rather a lot, and, when she was still, Lily heard her sniffing. She wondered whether they had been close. Her face was familiar, and Lily had a vague notion that it very seldom smiled, but, other than that, she knew nothing about the woman.

She opened her eyes as the door to Madam Pomfrey’s Office slammed closed, and looked about her.  

She imagined she ought to be feeling frightened, because she couldn’t remember anything about her life from the age of six upwards, but the castle, even the bed in the Hospital Wing, seemed familiar and reassuring. She got the feeling that she had been happy in this place. With excited curiosity, she sat up in bed and craned round to see out of the window. An emerald lawn stretched down to a steely-grey lake, its surface completely still, without a single ripple. In the distance were the grizzled oak trees of an immense forest and - farther off still - the grey-purple rock of a snow-capped mountain.

All these things seemed right, comforting, exciting, and Lily knew that this place was exactly where she was meant to be, even if she couldn’t remember ever having been here before.

She would tell her parents that she wanted to stay. She would trust her instincts, trust the nice man with the crooked nose and the long white beard. She would leap into the unknown, because, although she had fond memories of Manchester, there was no challenge there.

The only thing she could feel, apart from excited curiosity, was love. She thought it was love, anyway; she had never, to her knowledge, felt anything like it before: it was half-thirst and half nausea, half butterflies in her stomach, and half arrows in her chest. She knew her heart was aching. She just couldn’t remember who for.

There was a knock on the door of the Hospital Wing, almost too quiet to be heard, and a boy poked his head round the door, glancing all around the room, as though to check that they were alone.  

“Hello,” she said, smiling. “Are you here to see me? You can come in, Madam Pomfrey’s in her office.”

The boy sidled sheepishly up to her bed-side. He had untidy, jet-black hair and glasses, which magnified his hazel eyes. His shyness, or whatever it was, made him seem much younger, but he must have been about sixteen, Lily thought. In her year, probably. He was holding a bunch of flowers, which he shoved onto her bedside table without looking at her.

“Thank you,” she said, with bewildered amusement. “What’s your name?”

The boy finally looked at her. There was an expression of supreme agony on his face. “James Potter,” he mumbled.

“Oh,” she said. “Right. Hence the flowers.”

“What do you mean?”

“I heard them talking about you - Poppy and Professor Dumbledore. You’re the one who left a map of the castle lying around, and Malfoy used it to get in.”

James Potter looked down at the floor again. “I’m sorry,” he said, and his voice was breaking, as though he was trying to hold back tears. “I don’t know how he got it - I didn’t mean for it to happen - ,”

“It’s alright,” Lily said, alarmed at his emotion. “Dumbledore says he’ll be able to fix me, pretty much.”

“Pretty much?” James asked in an agonized voice.

“Well, you see, the Memory Charm wasn’t done properly. Dumbledore says Malfoy never did listen in class. If it had been a skilfully-performed memory charm, Dumbledore would be able to break through it, but because it was messed up, its effects will be less straightforward. It will take him a while to sort out. But he’ll do it,” Lily added, trying to encourage him. “He’s absolutely brilliant - there’s nothing he can’t do.”

James was still looking at the floor morosely. She had a very strong impression that this was not his usual pose.

“I’ll be alright,” she said, trying to keep her voice bright and gentle, “I always am - well, anyway, as far as I know. I feel like the kind of girl who’s generally alright in the end.”

James gave an unhappy snigger. “What can you remember?” he asked bleakly.

“I can remember my mum and dad and sister. I can remember Manchester - that’s where I grew up. And I can remember all the spells I must have learnt here. I can still access my knowledge - I just can’t remember how I got it.” She paused and then, almost apologetically, she said: “Were we friends, you and me?”

James gave her a strange, painful smile. “I wanted us to be,” he said.

Lily smiled. She reached under her pillow and brought out some parchment and a quill. “Well, as of now, we are,” she said in a business-like voice. “Just tell me everything, everything, about the magical world. Don’t scrimp on the details. I want to know it all - why the robes, why the secrecy, why the Slytherins think I’m a waste of space - ,”  

“You’re not a waste of space,” Potter protested, as though her words had stung him.

“I know,” she said calmly. “I just want their mistake to be explained.”

“There’s no explaining it. They’re just idiots.”

“Oh. OK.” She scribbled on the parchment. “Slytherins. Idiots. Got it. Now what?”

She had made him smile. Unfortunately, this just seemed to make him more nervous. “What - where shall I start?” he stammered.

“Hogwarts,” she said. “Tell me about Hogwarts. How old is it? Who built it? Who are my friends here, and what do I do with them? Do I have hobbies? Do I play sports? What’s my favourite food?”

“OK,” James was laughing. He looked quite handsome when he laughed. “I’ll see what I can do.” He sat down in the chair by her bed-side and started to talk - about The Ministry of Magic, Dragons, Floo Powder, Meg Valance and Mary MacDonald, the Magical Ethics Club, Quidditch and Voldemort. He was still nervous - and, once or twice, he looked up at her, and lost the thread of what he was saying. But, for the most part, he seemed to relax. The sensation of being listened to was clearly one he enjoyed.

He touched on the subject of the Death Eaters once or twice, and, when he listed the people he suspected of being involved with them, he mentioned a boy called Snape - Lily felt an inexplicable little wrench in the pit of her stomach, as though she’d missed a step going downstairs - but she didn’t say anything. Potter seemed to get agitated at the mention of the name, too - he clenched his fists and ground his teeth a little.

“So I’m a muggle-born,” she began, when, for the first time in twenty minutes, Potter fell silent, “and You-Know-Who thinks we should all be sent back to the muggles?”

“Or worse,” Potter added grimly.

“Are there any other muggle-borns at the school?”

“Yeah, loads. But not all of them admit to it. I reckon there are some in Slytherin, but they’ve found wizards to pose as their parents. Dangerous, though. Wizard couples who help muggle-borns, or even ones who adopt muggle-borns, get targeted. There was this one couple - fostered about ten kids but, because they’d all been abandoned by their parents, nobody could prove they weren‘t muggle-borns, and, last year, the couple disappeared. Even their children haven’t heard from them - they’re still here at the castle, Dumbledore’s looking after them. Some people reckon they went into hiding - but I reckon they got got,” he finished ominously.  

“That’s sick,” Lily cried. “That’s really sick.”

Potter was watching her dreamily - he seemed to be admiring her indignation. Lily blushed.

“When you get your memories back,” he began tentatively, “will you promise you’ll still talk to me?”

Lily smiled. “I can’t,” she said playfully. “What if I find out something about you? Something that explains why we were never friends?”

“I was different then,” he protested, without thinking.

“Aha!” Lily exclaimed. “So there is something?”

“I was an idiot,” Potter said, his eyes round and passionate. “I was an idiot, and you told me so. But everything’s different now. I know I was an idiot. That’s got to count for something.”

Lily was laughing at his serious face. “It ought to, I suppose,” she said reluctantly. “It depends how much of an idiot you were. And how bad you feel about it.”

But Potter never got a chance to tell her, because Dumbledore re-entered the room, his blue eyes glittering with the same mixture of amusement and distress that Lily had sensed in him earlier.

He nodded at Potter. “James,” he said courteously. “Has Madam Pomfrey by any chance, taken leave of her senses and given you permission to be here?”

“No, sir,” James replied sheepishly.

“I did not think so. She is not the kind of woman who can be parted from her senses without a fight. I need hardly remind you, given the amount of times you have been in here yourself for your numerous Quidditch injuries, that she is particularly fierce in the care of her patients, and would never allow a victim of magical memory loss to be confused by visitors.”

“I just came to tell her I was sorry, sir.”

“I have no problem with you being sorry, James, only with you being sorry here.”

“Yes, sir.” James gave Lily an embarrassed little parting smile, and left the room, leaving her alone with those soft but sharp blue eyes. She suddenly felt apprehensive.

“Now, Lily,” Dumbledore began, sitting in the chair that Potter had just vacated. “I would like to explain the procedure for breaking through memory charms. Naturally, your memories are not gone, merely inaccessible. Extremely complex memory charms can implant false memories in the mind of the victim, and these are particularly difficult to unravel, since the witch or wizard attempting to break through them must separate real from false memories. Luckily, it would take a more accomplished wizard than Lucius Malfoy to strike you down with one of those.”

Lily smiled appreciatively.

“Legilimency is required in order to break through memory charms. Do you remember what this is?”

“Mind magic,” Lily said immediately, feeling a thrill at knowing the answer to a teacher’s question that she sensed was a familiar one. “The ability to extract thoughts or memories from your victim.”

“Victim is a strong word,” Dumbledore said, smiling, “but, essentially, you are correct. When your memories are exposed to me, they will become open to you. I’m afraid that this means I will be unable to respect your privacy, Lily: it is impossible to predict which memories I will see and which I will not. I therefore beg you to excuse the interference. It is the only way.”

“I understand, sir.”

Lily braced herself for some kind of shock, or pain, but there was only a sensation of vertigo when Dumbledore raised his wand and cried: ‘Legilimens’. Images were suddenly rushing past her mind’s eye, sometimes too quickly for her to recognize, sometimes slower, as though casually clamouring for her attention.  

One memory, Dumbledore seemed to linger on - it was a half-lit dusk, smelling of pine resin, and she was flying on a broomstick, with Meg’s distinctive, barking laughter echoing in the background. Lily saw, as though she were a bystander, her flying form catch the Quaffle, and throw it through a hovering hoop, before dropping several feet, almost plummeting into the emerald grass below. Recovering clumsily, she pointed her broomstick upwards, still grinning with pride at the goal she had scored. A holler from Meg, a curse from Sirius Black, and a telling silence from Potter. Lily turned to see him staring at her with the same dreamy look she had seen him wear earlier that day. When Sirius threw him the Quaffle, it zoomed straight past his left ear. He recovered, though, and magnificently, darting down like a dragon-fly, snatching the Quaffle out of the air moments before it hit the ground, and turning his broomstick sharply, so that he skimmed the grass, before shooting upwards once more. He was the embodiment of the phrase ‘in his element’. Lily saw her past self glowering with reluctant admiration. She had felt - she remembered it now - so vulnerable, so clumsy, up in the air on an unsteady broomstick, while Potter zoomed here and there, as though propelled through the air by the power of his confidence. You hardly noticed the broomstick at all.

Lily fell back against her pillows, sweating and dizzy. She had been affected by that memory, in a way that she couldn’t immediately pin down.

Still, there were other memories to pay attention to now: they were all at her fingertips, clamouring to be re-examined, petted, polished and stroked.

It was a while before she noticed Dumbledore again. He was politely examining his fingernails, waiting for her to tear herself away from the happy reunion with her memories.

“Are there any noticeable gaps?” he asked, when she looked at him again.

Lily thought about it. Severus was the most noticeable new-comer. She could now locate the source of the ache she’d been feeling all afternoon. The memory of him torturing Lucius Malfoy was suddenly much more distressing than it had been before.

She had always feared that hatred was his one consuming passion, and now she knew for sure.  

“I don’t know,” she said hesitantly.

“There probably will be,” Dumbledore said gently, “but they will come back to you eventually. Don’t force yourself to remember. Memories are like Unicorns – they cannot be caught by strength or guile – only by inattention. You have to turn your back on them and pretend to be interested in something else: then they will come to you.”

“Thank you, sir,” Lily murmured.

Dumbledore brushed aside her gratitude with a wave of his hand. There was a hard look in his eyes, and Lily wondered whether he blamed himself for what had happened to her - though how he thought he could contend with Malfoy's potion-addled madness and Potter's genial stupidity, she had no idea. They were both forces to be reckoned with.

“You will, of course, be telling your parents that you wish to stay?” Dumbledore asked tentatively.

“Yes,” Lily replied, surprised at the question, “of course.”

He smiled: it was a complicated smile - a patch-work quilt of emotions, and Lily was feeling too confused to unravel it right at that moment, so she just smiled back. He was a strange man, Dumbledore.