Time Interned
Chapter 37: Gossamer Thread

Defence Against the Dark Arts was the longest class of Remus's life. He sat in the second row in his usual seat beside Mione. The information went from his ears to his hand and onto his paper without any of it touching his consciousness. His free hand lay on his partner's thigh, but even that barely registered. He was reliving his time with Mione from September until this morning. Most would think his primary focus would be on the gymnastic events of the previous evening, but that was not the case.

She had been cool at first, offering only reserved conversation. Then in October something changed and she started talking to him openly and warmly, and he began to hope. Hope turned to desire and a flirtation that she had equal part in until December. Then she ignored him, cut him out of her life and literally turned her back on him. It had been for his own good. She wanted to remove herself from his company so that when she left, returned to her own time, he would not feel the sting of it. It hadn't worked, and she returned to him, filling his life even more completely than she had before. Instead of flirting with word and gesture, they were snogging and making love for hours. It was the opposite of her original plan.

If she expected her departure to be anything less than gut-wrenching, she was an idiot. Which meant, as Sirius said, that she had a plan to remove herself from his life in another way. She would use magic to make him forget and to help him move on to become the man she knew.

He did not like that plan. He wanted to remember, but he knew she was right. Hermione had said she was thirteen when he came to teach; he had seen a photograph of her at thirteen, and she was womanly enough to tempt him at that age. He could not imagine how he would react the first time she stayed back in class to ask a harmless question. To be alone with her again after seventeen years apart would be torture, and dangerous.

"Remus?" she squeezed his hand. "Are you all right?"

"Yes, fine, great," he said far too quickly.

"You're still taking notes," she pointed.

His hand was moving across the bottom of the page, transcribing the loudest voices in the crowd of students as they left the room. He growled at his stupidity and crossed out the notes he had written after Morven told them to leave.

"What's the matter?"

"I'm fine," he assured her. "Just thinking…"

"About last night?" she pulled close.

"I wa–"

"Oi! Lover boy, get a move on!" Sirius called, interrupting Remus's near-confession. He scowled and cursed his friend, but secretly wanted to thank him. He had planned to tell Mione the truth, but worried how she would react. Would she clear his memory this soon before she left? Before he had given her the Felix Felicis to assist her? There were so many more complications with this relationship than he had initially thought might exist. Dating after this would seem a cake walk, provided he remembered this particular relationship.

They left the classroom together, but Edlyn and Una stood blocking their passage. They looked on the pair with hungry eyes and stole Mione away, literally ripping the girl from his hands. They were desperate to know where their friend had spent the night. Visual inspection alone told them nothing; both she and Remus looked perfectly clean and presentable, though Remus did have a hint of stubble on his teenaged chin. They did not know Mione was brilliant and could clean clothes and bodies with a single spell. Remus could hear their urgent whispers and giggles echoing through the corridor ahead of him.

"How long before they figure it out, do you think?" Remus wondered.

"Those girls have dirty minds, so I'd say an hour at most," James shrugged.

"You seemed mighty distracted in class? Reliving some of your finer moments?" Sirius draped an arm over his shoulder as they walked.

"I was thinking about what you said, actually," Remus replied.

"You spend the night naked with Mione and you're thinking about me the morning after? I don't know if I should be worried or honoured."

"Worried," said James.

"Fuck off," Remus said. "I think you're right. She's going to take my memories away."

"Do you want her to?"

"No…yes…I don't know. I don't want to forget her, but I don't want to put her in danger because I can't control myself when she's thirteen and doesn't know any better."

"Very wise," Sirius said.

"Well, there might be another way," James said in a low voice as they dropped into their seats in the Great Hall. "I was inspired by your girl and went to the library. Found a couple books on memory charms." He pulled a book from his bag and flipped through until he found what he was looking for, then laid the book down before them. "It says that memory charms only work on memories in the person's brain."

"Your point?" Sirius asked.

"It won't work on memories that have already been pulled out," James smirked and turned the page. He jabbed a finger at the illustration.

The old German woodcut print showed a man holding his wand to his head, a thin thread trailed from the tip to his temple. Had the man not been bald, the thread might easily have been mistaken for a strand of hair. The caption read that memories could be removed for outside viewing with a Pensieve.

"A memory can be pulled out and kept in a jar or something. You'll still sort of remember, but it would be like you're remembering a story someone else told you."

"When did you find this out?" Remus asked.

"Last night when Sirius first said something," James replied. "I went to the library and read whatever I could find."

"Why bother keeping it, though? If it's so dangerous to remember her, why keep it?" Sirius asked as he thumbed through the rest of the book.

"I figured it would be the best of both options. We'll hold onto it until after Mione's not your student anymore and can give it back to you," James said. "Pop it back in your brain, and decide what to do then."

Remus looked sceptical. He knew James would die well before Hermione came to school, but he did not know what would happen to Sirius or Peter. A lot of dark and dangerous things were happening outside of Hogwarts and it was a very real possibility that his memories might never make it back to him.

"Alright," Remus said. "I'll do it, but I want to find a safer place to keep my memories."

"What? We're perfectly safe places," Sirius smacked him.

Remus narrowed his eyes at the boy, "I don't trust you not to look, you randy bastard."

"Git."

"Sounds good," James interrupted before they started properly fighting. "There's bound to be some way to lock the memory somewhere until a certain date."

"To the library!" Sirius stood and pointed.

"After lunch, you git," Remus pulled him back to the bench by his Gryffindor tie.

oOo

As they stood, Remus heard the sudden burst of giggles. He looked over to the Hufflepuff table, where Mione sat blushing while her friends covered their faces. Pamela was peeking through her fingers and saw Remus staring at them. She squeaked and hid her face while giggles took hold of her whole body. Edlyn, clearly the most courageous Hufflepuff of their cete, stood and started making her way around the table to intercept him.

Mione locked eyes on him and mouthed the word 'Run.'

The brave Gryffindor gathered his bag and ran to the exit to evade her. "Help," he said as he raced past his friends, strolling through the entrance hall.

"Remus!" Edlyn called after him.

"Edlyn," James smiled and blocked her way. "How have you been?"

"Fine," she said, not looking at him.

He was shocked. She always turned to gillyweed when he was nearby, lost ability to function if he spoke to her, yet here she was completely unaffected by his smile. She was ignoring him in favour of Remus. He didn't want to return to his conceited ways, but this was just crazy.

"What do you want with Remus?"

"I need confirmation," she said dismissively and tried to walk around him. James was quick and kept himself immediately before her. "Will you please stop that?"

"No, sorry," he smiled again as her eyes turned on him. She blushed but did not giggle or sigh. "Confirmation of what?"

She turned her eyes away and blushed deeper with embarrassment. "Of what happened last night…"

"Oh, that," James said. "I only know what Remus said."

"What did he say?" She turned on him eagerly.

"Well, I don't think it would be right for me to share that information," he looked away, a small smile on his face.

"So it's true!" She squealed and ran back into the Great Hall.

"Hufflepuffs are so excitable," Sirius shook his head and smiled. "You didn't say anything and look at them. Maybe I should go rescue Mione."

"Moony might get a little hex happy if you go saving his girl," James warned.

Sirius's face darkened with the thought of an angry Remus at his throat. He didn't know if sleeping with the girl would make him more or less possessive of her, but he did not wish to find out. "Fair point."

They turned and left Mione to the Badgers. Remus would be mortified to learn that the whole of Hufflepuff knew his prowess by now. James wanted to warn him about the stares and winks to come; Sirius, git that he was, wanted to be the first to rub it in. They found him fresh from the bath, buckling his belt and digging for a clean shirt, his bare back exposed.

"Oh, I see how it was last night," Sirius poked at the cuts down the Prefect's back. They were nowhere near as severe as the marks left by the werewolf or by the Animagus's claws, but they were deep enough not to have completely scabbed over yet. "No wonder you want to hold onto your memories."

"Bad news," James said, ignoring Sirius's comments, though he was impressed by the scratches. "They know."

"Yeah, I figured," Remus said. He hissed as the shirt hit the fresh marks on his back. A wave of the wand would have them healed and gone inside a moment, but with the prospect of losing his memory, Remus wanted all the evidence he could that this was real. A few scars, even if they faded with time, were as good as Galleons to him right now. "So, this removal of memories, how does it work?"

"You hold the thought in your head, say the charm and pull it out," Sirius said, looking in the book. "Easy as breathing."

"How do I put them back in?"

"Uh," James stole the book from Sirius's hands and tore through it to find the answer. "Oh, you just hold it to your head. I thought it would be more complicated."

"When should I do it, then?" Remus said, more to himself than anything. He didn't know what it would feel like to have a memory plucked from his head or how he would behave once it was gone. Would he remember Mione?

There was a time limit to his decision. Her potion would be mature in just a fortnight. She might decide any time during the next two weeks to wipe his memory clear to make her departure easier on the both of them. He refused to miss his window to save what they had.

"Now," Remus said with a determination that was totally alien to his normal speech. "Give me the book, I'm going to do it now."

"Aren't you meeting Mione in a bit?" James questioned.

"Yes," he said. "If ever I deserved to act weird, it would be now. She can explain away anything odd by what we did last night or that all her friends knowing we did it."

"Cunning," Sirius muttered.

Remus sat on his bed, studying the book, muttering the charm again and again until he got the inflection exactly as it was described in the book. His friends watched, worried that something might go wrong, but not wanting to say anything to disturb him. After thirty minutes of muttering, Remus conjured a silver flask as described in the text and readied himself to lose a memory. He closed his eyes and remembered her hair tickling his side, her breath grazing his skin as she slept, her cool hand on his warm stomach. It was a small and seemingly insignificant memory, one he could live without but one he would very much like to keep. Holding it in his mind, he put his wand to his temple and muttered the charm. A silvery thread stuck to the tip as he pulled the wand from his head. It looked like one of his greying hairs. He slid it into the flask and closed the lid tight.

"What's it like?" James whispered.

Remus frowned and thought about the memory he had just pulled away. Somewhere between their last roll in bed and waking, he had a fuzzy idea that there was something else. Like Mione had woken the next morning and told him she had been lying on his chest and he was imaging what that must have felt like.

"Strange," he replied. "Let me try again."

He decided to lose a less pleasant memory, the first day back to classes in January when he realised she would not be speaking to him or sitting by him again. He focused on that painful thought and pulled the memory loose. Again it was like one of his friends told him what had happened. He couldn't really believe there was a hole in his memory, it was so fuzzy around the edges; the memories still in his brain blurring to fill the gap.

"Very strange," he said.

He kept at it until he had only the very vague notion that he had a girlfriend. He knew her name and what she looked like, but everything else seemed like hearsay. He couldn't be sure that she was from the future, liked to study or even if they had sex just last night. If anyone said anything to the contrary he would not be able to disprove it; everything was a bit indistinct.

"I think you might have taken too many out," Sirius worried aloud. He did not like the dazed look on Remus's face when James asked about going to see Mione. If he acted this way when he went to see her, she would know something was wrong. The girl was smart, smart enough to know the difference between embarrassed and befuddled.

"No, I'll be fine. I know what to do," Remus insisted. He screwed the cap tight on the flask and buried it in the bottom of his trunk. He would work out later how to seal it and remind himself in about twenty years that it was there and very important.