Disclaimer: I make no claims. Potter and Fallout are the IP of Rowling and Bethesda, respectively. Just having fun.

NB:

Dear Readers. Both of you. ; - )

Reworked the opener after some helpful criticism from my troubled subconscious, who insists that a post Volde-death Harry with any sort of memory at all would never get shot in the head, much less sit around feeling confused about it afterward . I must say I'm inclined to agree with my subconscious, and not just because of its power to totally destroy my love life if I make it mad. So here's a far more amnesiac Harry, more of a Bourne Identity type. Let's see where it goes, yeah?

**In case anyone stumbled in here without knowing the Fallout universe, here's the brief summary (though I'll try not to take to much as a given, please do let me know anytime if I haven't given enough background on stuff). Up to WWII, same history as us. Or as the Potterverse, might be more apt in this case. At any rate, sometime mid Cold-War, China surpassed Russia as the chief bogeyman, and the USA got real... different. The 48 mainland states were reorganized into 13 Commonwealths (and the original 13-star circle flag brought back). Nuclear technology started powering everything, just like 50's B-movies always predicted. By the 2050s, clean water surpassed oil as the main reason to fight big, nasty wars. And in 2077, WWIII (or just "The War" in Falloutverse) pretty-much roasted the whole globe in nukes. Some creatures survived on the surface, mutating in all kinds of interesting ways. And some survived in giant, uubiquitous bunkers called Vaults. Harry is starting the story some 200 years after the war, so society has made good steps to cobbling itself back together... sort of. But that should become clear as the story progresses.

****If, on the other hand, there's a Fallout fan reading this that doesn't know Harry Potter... well, you know, I'm not sure if my imagination is even capable of dealing with that hypo. At any rate, there's plenty of him on the internet, you should be able to sort anything I treat as understood, pretty easily.

And please please, do review if you have any opinions on things. I'm way more likely to keep working on this, and not let my Attention Deficient Creator Disorder punt it, if I know anyone gives two figs.

Enjoy.

October 19th, 2281

The dark-haired man called Harry blinked a few times as his vision adjusted to the bright sunglare of the Mojave at mid-day. He stood on the front porch of Doc Mitchell's house, at the top of a small hill overlooking the town of Goodsprings. To the north he could see another, higher hill, topped with a graveyard and a water-tower. Beyond it, in the distance through the heat-haze of the desert day, he could just make out the Vegas skyline.

Behind him to the west was a ridge of low, dusty mountains. They ran southeast, partially obscuring his view, though he thought he could just see the frame of a wooden roller-coaster in the distance. To the east was a windswept desert valley, and another ridge. Along this ridge to the northeast he saw some kind of communications array, a cluster of enormous dish antennas, many miles away but still visible to his naked eye.

He frowned. He knew nearly nothing. His name had come to him easily enough, when he woke a few hours ago from what the kindly doctor told him was an eight day nap. His first name, anyway. He could speak, he could reason, he could read and write and even whistle a tune, more or less. The doctor told him his health was fine. But he knew nothing about himself, beyond his name. He had no memories; not of this place, not of his life, not of how had come into Doc Mitchell's care.

Not that he was sure he wanted to remember the last bit. According to the doctor, Harry had been brought to him with ropeburnt wrists, a lungful of dirt... and half his head blown off by a bullet to the forehead.

Earlier that day...

He carefully kept his eyes closed, instinctively tensing up, fighting panic as he realized he was awake. He felt... hazy. He couldn't remember where he was, or should be, or had recently been. He didn't know whether he was safe. If enemies were nearby, it might be to his advantage to appear asleep. So he stayed still, kept silent, and quickly took stock of his surroundings with his other senses, as best he could.

The air was warm, and dry. There was... something else, too. About the air? Something dangerous was absent. Something that could have made waking up confused much, much worse. His confusion only increased as he tried to understand this feeling, so he moved on. He was lying on a thin mattress, wearing only briefs, with a sheet laid over him. His muscles were sore, but after testing with a wiggle of fingers and toes, he concluded that they were functional. He could smell soap, body odor, grain alcohol, and maybe a hint of dried blood. His mouth was dry, and tasted like a week's worth of hangover. He felt a breeze, and he could hear the rapid creaking of an off-balance ceiling fan. And he could hear footsteps approaching.

He opened his eyes with a start and turned his head in time to see a bald, white-mustachioed man take a seat in the chair next to him. The man wore a rough outfit: homespun trousers and a shirt that looked to be made of light canvas, and a red handkerchief around his neck. His face was calm and his expression reassuring. The man in the bed blinked at the man in the chair, feeling just as unsure as he did unthreatened.

"You're awake. How bout that?" The strange man spoke first, adding to the wakened sleeper's confusion. The white-mustached man spoke with a twang, he was almost certain the accent was American. Why did that seem... wrong? His misgivings must have shown on his face, because the man lifted both his hands in a calming gesture, and spoke again.

"Easy there, easy. You've been out cold a couple of days now. Why don't you relax a second? Get your bearings. Let's see what the damage is. How about your name? Can you tell me your name?"

Yes, definitely an American accent. The man in bed closed his eyes, trying to make some sense of things, to find anything familiar about his situation, and came up with nothing. He raised a hand to his head in frustration, and elected to simply answer the question.

"Harry," he said, his voice coming out in a dry rasp. "My name is... Harry." He blinked in confusion, feeling sure that there should be more to his name than that. Nothing came to mind. He frowned deeply, running his hand through his hair and staring at the mattress, trying to remember... anything. Remembering nothing.

The man in the chair chuckled. "Well, can't say that's what I'd have picked for you," he said, "but if that's your name, that's your name." He reached behind him to grab a bottle of water from a shelf, and handed it to Harry, who unscrewed the cap and sat up a little to drink it all down quickly. "I'm Doc Mitchell," the stranger finally offered. "Welcome to Goodsprings."

"Thanks," said Harry as he set down the empty bottle. "Where am I? What happened?"

"You're in my home" replied Mitchell. "In my office, I should say, which is also my home. Town of Goodsprings, near the city of New Vegas, in the Mojave Wasteland. Used to be, State of Nevada, Southwestern Commonwealth. Back before the War. Ancient history, of course. I'm sorry, I go on sometimes."

Harry stared blankly at him. The doctor carried on.

"You came in here with a couple of holes in your head, about eight days ago. Victor brought you in, he's one of the townfolks. Said he pulled you out of a half-done grave up on Boot Hill, after he saw the rascals who shot you run off. He's an odd one, Victor, but trustworthy as a rule. I'd say he saved your life." The doctor paused, looked Harry over. He shook his head once. "Of course," he continued. "I guess you deserve a fair bit of credit yourself. When he brought you in, I could hardly believe you were still breathing. One lung collapsed, the other half-full of dirt, and still leaking blood from the biggest, dirtiest head wound I've ever seen on a living man. Fair bit of the back of your skull was missing."

Harry sat bolt upright in bed, filled with what some part of him already knew was an irrational panic, as he hurriedly and carefully searched with his hands for anything terribly wrong with his head. He felt nothing. No jagged bits of skull, no slick blood or brainmatter, not so much as a bandage. His hair wasn't even missing. He let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding, and looked hard at the doctor, searching his eyes for an answer. Was this some kind of twisted joke? Perhaps the doctor was a friend of his, playing a prank? Or an enemy, deliberately misguiding him for some bad purpose?

Doc Mitchell sat calmly, watching the emotions play across Harry's face, before speaking again. "I got to work right away, of course, and I'm glad to tell you that I'm pretty well-equipped here. Your skull patched up nicely once I applied the protein and mineral packs to the synthetic bone lattice frame..." The doctor trailed off as Harry blinked in confusion. "Well, I'll spare you the technical parts," he amended. "But to sum it up, the outside of your head is back to normal, near as I could make it. The inside is up to you, not much I could do past rootin' around to remove all the bits of lead. But you're thinking and talking, that's plenty more than I expected. Hell, like I said, breathingis more than anyone could have expected."

The two men sat in silence a moment, the doctor staring at Harry as if hoping for answers but not expecting any, Harry staring at the doctor's eyes, trying to decide what to believe. He felt very strongly that he could... see something in them. Truth. Sincerity? The doctor meant what he was saying. The doctor... feltwhat he was saying. Mitchell was mystified about Harry, but far from displeased. He had seen too much, seen too many terrible deaths in the Wasteland, nothing he could do to help, always too much injury and too late to the operating table, only troubles and more since they'd been turned out of their home, and poor Helen gone these five years now...

Harry's eyes widened. He wasn't making guesses, wasn't imagining things. He... he knewDoc Mitchell, had no doubts about him now, knew for certain. Like he knew his own name. Or part of it, anyway. Like these things were simple fact, an observation of the weather just out the window. Harry shook his head as if to clear it, ran his hand through his hair again.

"Right through the middle of your forehead," said Mitchell in a wondering tone of voice, learning back in his chair, staring up at the creaky ceiling fan. "Right through some of the most important parts of the brain. Damnedest thing I've ever seen, and I've seen a few things in my day."

Harry spoke again. "Do you have a mirror?" he asked. Mitchell grabbed one from a cart behind him, and handed it over without comment. Harry raised it to his face, and sat for a long moment, looking at the man he saw. Green eyes, bright green. Closer to emerald than hazel. Dark black hair, with a faint peppering of gray. Harry tried to recall his age, and came up with nothing. His birthday could be the fifth of never, for all he knew. His age could be fifteen, or fifty. Certainly looked closer to fifty, though. And in the center of his forehead, a strange scar. Jagged, like a stylized letter zed. Or a lightning bolt. Harry traced a finger over it. "What...?" he whispered.

Mitchell heard him. "That's where the bullet went in," he said, confirming Harry's suspicions. "Nine millimeter. Center of the forehead." He shook his head again. "Passing strange, but I suppose, no more than the rest. Less, maybe. Still, the chems I used to close up your forehead shouldn't have left any scarring at all, and certainly not in that strange pattern, if they did."

Harry set the mirror down with a sigh. Turning to place his feet fully on the floor, and asked Mitchell the only question that mattered, of the thousands he wanted to ask. The one that would answer all the others.

"Will my memory come back?"

He knew as he asked that it was pointless. He didn't know how he knew, but he knew. Memory loss was complicated and had few firm rules. The same went for serious head trauma. Harry had both. Very likely they were related, too. No doctor could say. For all he knew he was a doctor himself. No way of knowing. No way of knowing anything.

"Give it time," said Mitchell, breaking the silence that had followed Harry's essentially rhetorical question. "You can talk, and that's more than most folks can do after being shot in the head." He stood, bringing his hands together with a light clap, making a visible effort to replace the persona of the curious scientist with that of the solicitous physician. "Anyway, no sense keeping you in bed anymore. Let's see if we can get you on your feet." With that, he grabbed Harry's hands and helped him stand, releasing him after his initial dizziness and rush of blood to the head had passed.

Harry stood, holding the bedsheet around him, observing his surroundings again, testing his balance and saying nothing. At length, Doc Mitchell spoke again.

"You must be hungry," he said. "Let's see if you can walk down that hall there to the kitchen. We'll find you something to eat, get you some clothes, and I'll check your vitals again. Take it slow now. It ain't a race."

"Here, these are yours," said Doc Mitchell, placing a few items on the kitchen table in front of Harry and interrupting his attempts to decide which of the items in front of him looked most edible: some unknown meat on a skewer, a can labeled 'Cram' that looked about two centuries old, and somehow most suspiciously of all in this context, a normal-looking green apple.

"Was all you had on you when Victor brought you in," the doctor elaborated as Harry sunk his teeth into the dubious kebab. "Fraid I had to cut most your clothes off you, looking for wounds, but we're about the same size, so these spares of mine ought to do, until you can find something better."

He set a carefully folded rough outfit of trousers, shirt, and kerchief on the table. Harry finished eating and hurriedly dressed, suppressing a few half-formed jokes about how he and the Doc now looked like twins, and turned to inspect his personal effects, munching on the apple while Mitchell rummaged in some cabinets across the room.

There was a nine-millimeter pistol, Browning make, well-maintained but ancient looking, with a spare clip and box of rounds. It felt natural in his hand, but not... familiar. Not right somehow. Maybe it was just the fact that somebody had put him half under with a similar weapon. He frowned, but he holstered it on his right side nonetheless.

Next was a metal hip-flask, bound in aged blue leather, bearing a yellow number '101'. It was full of water, cold and clean. Doc Mitchell must have just filled it for him. Also, in a much darker blue, there was a worn leather pouch. Inside Harry found a small box of hair pins, and a flat-blade screw-driver. Lock-picking tools, interesting. There were also a large number and variety of single-use syringes, lashed together with a rubber-band. Chems. Enough to patch up a wound, not enough for an addict, and anyway, Mitchell surely would have mentioned, had he seen any of the symptoms of addiction. Harry hung the flask and the leather pouch from his other hip.

Still on the table was what appeared to be some kind of oversized wristwatch. It was a heavy metal disk, attached to a leather strap. The words 'RobCo Stealth Boy' were embossed on the edge.

Finally, there was a heavily handled document on light brown paper, with a letterhead reading 'Mojave Express Courier Service, Primm' and typed text identifying it as 'Delivery Order 6 of 6', calling for delivery of a Platinum Chip to the north gate of Freeside. Harry looked it over carefully, memorizing it before folding it away in a pocket. If there were answers to his questions, Primm and Freeside were probably good places to start looking.

The Doc approached Harry carrying something. "Here," he said, holding it out. "Take this. It's a Pip Boy, a personal wrist computer. I grew up in one of them Vaults they built before the war, we all had one. I don't need it anymore, but you might have use for such a thing."

Harry declined politely. "I hadn't better," he said with a smile. "Even the simple tech tends to malfunction around me, if I use it too long. Computers are just a disaster waiting to..." He trailed off on the last word, shocked, eyes wide and mind racing as he tried to figure out where that had come from, wanting desperately to find the memories he must have been speaking from.

Doc Mitchell put a hand on his shoulder, breaking his fugue. He smiled. "Well," he said, "That's a pretty good sign for your memory, I suppose. Let me see if I can put my finger on some paper maps for you then, know I've got some around here somewhere."

Doc Mitchell saw Harry off with advice to ask around town for information on his attack, and admonitions not to be a stranger, and especially to "Try not to get killed anymore." Harry thanked him gratefully, and stepped out onto the front porch and the waiting Mojave Wastes.

Author's Note: You like? You don't like? You review. Okgood.