What is life without memory?

A fresh slate, a chance to live for tomorrow,

Without the ghosts of the past,

Without pain, and without beauty.


Her feet follow a memorised path toward the experimentation chambers. She picks up number 507 along the way, the bell-jar feeling heavier in her arms than she recalls.

She goes through the motions for what she hopes will be the last time, setting up the bell jar on the dish and tipping the potion into the open mouth of the metallic mask. The orange mist is as bright and alive as she remembers, the brain pulsing and shining as the potion works its ways into its deepest vaults.

Even now, she cannot shake Draco from her mind, the lifeless, broken way he had looked at her as he closed the front door of his apartment, all her questions lying unanswered on his living room floor.

She draws the memory out, empties it into the Pensieve and plunges forward on a deep breath.

It's the same house, the same mustard yellow sofa. The same wallpaper and wooden furniture.

There is no cuckoo clock on the wall, no jewellery box on the mantelpiece, no birdhouses along the shelves. The young man is absent in all of the framed photographs along the wall.

An old woman emerges from behind a bead curtain hanging over an archway.

"I made these sugar cookies for you, dear."

"Thank you, Mrs. Livingston. You really shouldn't have taken the trouble."

"Nonsense, dear. The potions you prescribed have been working wonders. I plan to take full advantage of my mobility while I still have it."

"I'm very happy to hear that. No more pains, I take it?"

"I get the occasional pain flare at night, but it's so much better than what it used to be."

"That's good. Please call me the minute anything changes. As I said, it's a new method, so we cant be sure how long the effects will last."

"I'm not long for this world, dear. I'll try anything so long as it doesn't kill me."

The old woman smiles at Hermione as a mother might smile at her child. There are still no traces of the young man, no indication that he had ever lived in this house. The air around them then ripples, like a flat stone skipping across the surface of a pond. Mrs Livingston's memory is starting to repair itself, adapting as best as it can to the hole that's been torn inside of it.

"We never had any children, you know, George and I. Can't for the life of me remember why. We had assumed we would, but somehow it never came to pass. We got caught up in our own lives and our youth, until a day came when we weren't so young anymore. It makes me worry sometimes, more and more now, about what will happen to this house. I hope another family will move in, maybe a nice couple with children, and it'll live on in some way.

"It's a relief though, to believe I might not die in pain. Thanks to your potions, I might actually be able to go peacefully in my sleep. How lucky I am to have met you, dear."

Hermione smiles down at her fingers clasped together on her lap.

"I'm just doing my job, Mrs. Livingston."

"Please dear, call me Maria."

Hermione waits for them to finish their conversation. She waits until they embrace at the doorstep and part ways. The young man never reappears, erased at last from his mother's memory.

The memory starts to fade, and it is like she is looking at it behind frosted glass.

She emerges, wide-eyed and gasping.

It worked. It finally worked.

She had always wondered what this moment would feel like. It often seemed abstract, like a star in the sky one often gazed at, but could never hope to touch. She thought she might feel triumph, a sense of achievement at creating something even the most brilliant of minds had never even dared attempt. Or might she feel shame at letting things get this far?

Instead she feels nothing. She's reached the edge of a precipice, one she's being walking toward for so long. Now she's looking down into a deep, unknowable darkness, trapped inside of a moment, before the fall from which she is just one small step away.

There is only one person she wants to see before she jumps.


A/N: This was a really short chapter so I thought I'd slip in a note to you all here. Thanks to everyone who has been reading Memoriae so far, we have just 3 chapters to go till the end! How have you been liking it so far? I hope the plot has been clear, because I usually like to imply or suggest things rather than say exactly what is happening. Let me know if anything's been unclear or confusing and I can try to clear it up in the next chapters or in another A/N. Again, thanks for reading and if you've enjoyed this story, let me know if there are other Dramione drabbles, ficlets or oneshots you'd like to see and I can try to make it happen. Much love!