Potter47 Part II
Unforgotten
"I'll just wait, then!" called Harry as the loo door shut to his side, and he very nearly laughed at the absurdity of it all:
First, he had lost his memory and driven Ginny to tears after she had, out of nowhere, snogged the life out of him in just a moment; then, he had to go to the loo, but of course it was occupied, so he had plopped down in the middle of the corridor to be tripped over not once, not twice, but three times, by different people. But no, he didn't move. And now, Hermione had threatened Ron out of the loo, and then pushed him back in with her...Harry shook his head. Things sure had changed since the last time he could remember.
And now, he sat in silence, just short of laughter, as he heard soft sobs, which pretty much took the laughter out of him in a flash; he knew those sobs, as much as he wished he didn't. It was Ginny. But...where was she? He didn't feel her footsteps coming, didn't see her in either direction, and of course she wasn't in the boys' loo with Ron and Hermione, so...
She sobbed again, and he knew: she was in the girls' loo, and probably had been the entire time. Of course she has been—I would have felt her if she walked by.
"Oh, God," said the muffled sound that was Ginny, and Harry wondered why he couldn't hear Ron and Hermione, but he could hear Ginny clear as a bell.
He pressed his ear to the wall, and now he could hear even better, though there wasn't really anything else to hear; just the same sniffling and sobbing, with the occasional muffled exclamation thrown in for good measure.
Finally, Harry stood, and it felt rather painful to do so. He rubbed his back as he put his ear to the door, instead of the wall beside the door, and he knocked with his knuckles, causing a sudden hitch in Ginny's breathing.
"Uh—I'll be out in a minute...!" said Ginny, and her voice sounded so miserable that Harry imagined she had it much worse than he...but then, isn't not remembering often much preferable to remembering? Isn't that why people go to such lengths to forget?
"You don't need to hurry," Harry said, shaking his head as though she could see him. "I just...are you OK?"
"Harry?" Ginny said, and Harry wondered just how much a girl could cry before...running out of tears, or something. Apparently a lot, he reckoned.
"Yeah, it's me."
"You don't...you still don't remember, right?" she said, with what seemed to be a slight bit of hope at the edge of her voice, as though hesitant to make itself known. Harry felt terrible to extinguish it, but he did anyway:
"No, I don't," he said, sliding down the door into a sitting position again, in a very sad way, and he couldn't figure how a movement could be sad, but it was. "But I wish I did. Are you...all right?"
"I'm fine," she said, which was obviously not true. "Just a little emotional right now. Sorry."
"You have every reason to be emotional," said Harry, unsure whether that was a good thing to say or not; it seemed rather hollow, considering he didn't even know exactly what she was emotional about.
Silence.
"It's horrible, you know," said Ginny finally, breaking into the soundless, pulsating air that was almost painful. "You can't possibly understand...I wouldn't want anyone to have to understand, but...it's just...oh, never mind."
"Ginny?" said Harry again. "It's all right, Ginny, everything's going to be fine..."
"You'd think that, wouldn't you?" she said, and he didn't know what she meant. "But of course, you don't even know what's wrong, so how would you know?" Silence again. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say that like that, I'm just...yeah, very emotional at the—" hiccough "—moment."
Harry didn't really think that this conversation was going anywhere...they seemed to be saying the same things, over and over again. Perhaps he just didn't understand it all well enough to know what to say.
But then Harry knew what he had wanted to say, what he had meant to say since the beginning of this...odyssey.
"What happened, Ginny? What happened that I don't remember?"
Ginny was silent.
"Ginny?"
"Well...where to begin?" Ginny said, sounding almost as though she were giving in to something, but Harry couldn't figure what. Almost as though... almost as though she had just noticed that he really wanted to know, that he really didn't know.
"The beginning sounds pretty good to me," said Harry, almost-smiling in an almost-wryly sort of way.
"OK then...we came to school. Nothing really out of the ordinary, not for you, anyway, until...until Halloween."
"Halloween?" questioned Harry.
"Yeah, it's this holiday, the thirty-first of October, where people go around and—" A beat. "That was a horrible joke."
"What happened on Halloween?" said Harry now, and Ginny told him.
"That night, Halloween night...I had this dream. When I was lying down, in my bed...staring at the ceiling—I don't remember if I was actually asleep or not, because it was as though the dream played itself out on my ceiling, like I was just watching it. Riddle—You-Know-Who—somewhere in between, actually, I reckon...he was...young, but he didn't really look so much like Tom, and he didn't...he didn't resemble you at all, I know that."
Ginny sniffled, and Harry felt, somehow, her wiping a tear away in frustration. She continued:
"I was there, with him, with...Tomdemort, I'll call him. I was standing with him in this place, this empty place, like an abandoned street, and he...he was saying something about...about what would happen when he—"
A phrase arose in Harry's mind suddenly, a phrase and he didn't precisely know where it had come from.
"When he killed someone important to your world?" he finished for her, and he could feel her blinking in confusion, and he wondered, once again, how he could do that.
"Yeah," she said, nodding-though-he-couldn't-see.
Silence, for a long time, as though each of them thought the other had something to say...Harry didn't, of course, but Ginny did:
"And then, I came down to the common room, after that. I just...I couldn't sleep, I couldn't keep Tomdemort out of my head...and I was sitting by the fire...and then so were you. You came down the stairs, and I could...I could feel you, I could feel you coming without having to look round, and..."
"...and I'd had the same dream."
She nodded-though-he-couldn't-see once again.
"You remember?" she said, with that hope in her voice once more, but it seemed rather deflated. He shook his head, and he felt she could tell, somehow, just as he could.
"I just could...feel what you were going to say...it was in my head before you said it, almost. I don't...understand it," he said, and she nodded.
"The same thing happened for a week or so, every night, and after each dream we'd sit by the fire together, thinking, never talking. And over the year, we had more dreams, more thoughts we shared that no one else had. We...all year long, we had this...connection." Ginny sniffled once more. "And now you've forgotten it. How could you forget it? It was...it was the best thing that ever happened to you—" She stopped, now, and stood, and opened the door, and Harry fell in, but he didn't even really notice. She kneeled down to him, and he straightened up, and they looked each other in the eye as she spoke the words...and the connection was there, that amazing thing that had been nearly broken.
"You told me that," she said. "You told me that, and now you've forgotten."
"We were...together?" Harry asked, feeling a bit dizzy as a rush of feeling flowed through his veins, a liquid-feeling that was so much more precious than blood. "Like Seamus and Lavender, that sort of thing?"
A crooked smile faded onto Ginny's face, however tightly and obscured by tears it was. "Not quite as much as Seamus and Lavender. But...so much more than Seamus and Lavender."
Harry felt all his soul reaching out to Ginny, and hers towards him...his soul remembered everything about her, every secret she had ever told him, every caress he had ever felt...
...if only his mind could remember as well. As it were, he was two people at the same time, one who remembered and one who didn't, and the not-remembering one was just a little too strong, so that he could...almost remember everything...almost...but not quite.
Ginny reached a hand to his cheek, and he felt her touch...so soft and strangely fluid, so smooth that his own eyes filled with tears. That touch seemed to slow time itself, slowing the train until it wasn't moving at all.
"Ginny..."
Her hand pulled back, slightly, so that only her fingertips were against his skin, and she spoke in the saddest little voice, barely even a whisper:
"You really don't remember, do you?"
"I'm trying, Ginny. I'm...really trying."
"Try harder," said a voice behind Harry, a hissing, cold, voice that had haunted his dreams for ever.
He didn't need to turn around to know who it was, of course. Ginny did not seem very surprised, for some reason.
"Subsisto Temporis!" hissed Lord Voldemort, and though Harry had felt time had been slowing before...that had only been the train slowing, he knew. This was time slowing, slowing, slowing to a stop, and it couldn't be mistaken for anything else. Time had stopped, and only the three of them, Voldemort, Harry, and Ginny, were awake to the world.
"We need to talk, Harry," said Voldemort, and Harry felt his head spun round as though pulled by the opposite ear, so that he was facing the Dark Lord. Ginny was as well, but she had been facing that direction to begin with.
Harry felt his hands bind together with magical rope, and he felt Ginny feel the same. They were attached to a leash, as it were, and Voldemort was holding the end.
"Come, Harry. Ginny. Let's go for a walk."
Voldemort pulled them by the leash, tightening it painfully round their wrists. "I'm going to take you along the train...and we're going to walk quickly. You have until we reach the end of the train to tell me what I want to hear."
"And what is that?" said Ginny, though for some reason, she seemed already to know.
"We'll get to that in a moment. But first, you need to tell me what I want to know."
Ginny blinked. That was what she had said.
"What I need to know, what I need to understand better..." He seemed to be trying to phrase his question in such a way that they wouldn't see through it, wouldn't hold back because they didn't know what he was really asking. "Tell me, Potter, Ginevra, what would you do, if you could do anything? Tell me now, and don't ask questions."
"What..." began Ginny, shaking her head (it struck Harry as odd, how she spoke, because she seemed to almost be reciting words she had thought of earlier), "You want to know...what? Our ideal summer holiday? Why on earth—"
"I said not to ask questions, Ginny," said the Dark Lord, and at that moment he appeared younger, appeared more Riddle than Voldemort, and that was strange. He tugged them along the corridor, now, and he said, "Start talking."
When neither said a word, he stopped, and turned round, a sneer upon his face. "And I had so hoped you would cooperate. Oh, well...Desiderium!"
Harry felt this strange feeling all of a sudden...as though he were standing in front of a large audience, and was supposed to be saying something...as though he was sitting in the front of the Great Hall, and he was supposed to tell them now.
But he knew what he was being asked this time, and it certainly couldn't be the same thing that he was supposed to tell them. He was being asked what he wanted to do for summer vacation, and that was, understandingly, an odd thing to be asked when interrogated by the Dark Lord.
"I...for summer, I'd...want to be at the Burrow. I would want to...we'd play Quidditch, up in the field, and Ginny, she'd be on my team, even if that isn't really fair...Ron'll only have Hermione this summer, anyway, with the twins as busy as they've been—"
The Dark Lord's face contorted in a fit of rage, though Harry couldn't see why. "No, no, NO!" he said, and, faster than Harry could have imagined, Voldemort reached out and slapped him across the face with such force that it knocked Harry to the ground, causing the leash to tighten painfully round his wrists. "Why aren't you saying it?" Voldemort demanded impatiently. "What are you talking about, Potter?"
Harry was immensely confused and felt that he could ask the Dark Lord the same question.
"Tell me. Now, Harry. Tell me what you wouldn't tell them."
"I don't remember! You made me forget, how do you expect me to tell you?"
The Dark Lord furrowed what could only be called his brow. "I made you forget? What do you...why would I have you forget the thing I need to know?" He appeared genuinely confused, but then a moment later he appeared to be fine again: "You lie, Potter. You didn't forget anything at all. Good try, though. Now tell me."
"You're the liar, Voldemort," said Harry, but he wasn't really so sure...why would the Dark Lord make him forget it, if he so wished to know it? And how would he make him forget in the first place?
He can't know, said a voice in Harry's mind. He can't find out.
It was...as though something deep inside of him had sent his brain a secret message...an odd sensation to be sure.
Don't remember.
Harry said nothing, and Voldemort's face contorted once again.
Voldemort turned to Ginny, quick as a flash. "Desiderium!" he said, and Ginny's eyes began to tear. She swallowed a moment, and then spoke in a voice that was not cutting but cut, a voice that seemed to have been sliced at the vocal chord. The words had a musical quality to them, as though they were part of a poem, or...a spell.
A paper-boat on parchment stream,
Adventures live on liquid wind,
A blanket in a basket pinned...
The world has changed now.
The darkness once a part of me,
Has gone, has faded like that dream,
And though I now can still remember
Burning flesh in dying embers...
The dark has gone now.
The truth, they say, will set you free
You want the truth? Then here it be:—
Ginny stopped suddenly, and a grin slowly formed on her mouth. Voldemort, whose eyes had been slowly glowing in anticipation, in triumph...his mouth fell slack a moment, before his eyes widened and his nostrils flared.
"Why do you stop, Weasley? I am far too busy for games, girl—"
Ginny's grin grew wider, and she glanced at Harry with her own gleam of triumph.
"That's all there is," she said, and yes, it was...it was as though that strange poem she had recited—that strange, almost spell-like thing that really didn't seem much like a spell at all, Harry realised, and wondered why he immediately thought of it as one—had been written on a parchment that had been torn in two; all Ginny could read was what she had, and that was what she had done. But it was not enough. Not for Voldemort.
Not for Voldemort, who lunged then in rage, forgetting, apparently, that he was holding the leash that controlled the two of them—he lunged at Harry, though Harry had expected him to lunge at Ginny, and had been just about ready to help her—but being lunged at himself threw him off completely.
Voldemort held Harry down with his hands round the boy's neck, pushing him into the corridor floor. Harry couldn't breathe, not at all, and he felt for sure that this was it, this was the end; after all, he was quite plainly 'at the hand of' Voldemort...
But then the hands were gone, because Voldemort was gone, and the train was gone, and everything was gone. Harry was lying on the ground, though he didn't really know what ground he was on, or where he was.
He got to his feet, and looked round him—it was dark, very dark, and he could tell that he was outside. He could feel the wind at his face, and he could smell the outdoors, feel it, taste it...almost as though he were flying with his feet on the ground.
In the distance, he suddenly saw a fire flicker into existence...at a point in the woods, the woods that Harry had just noticed were a few hundred feet away, as opposed to the field that he had just noticed he was standing in.
Harry walked towards the fire, steadily, steadily, until he suddenly heard...galloping?
Yes, it was galloping; a horse was charging away from the fire, straight at Harry, with two people on it.
"Ronald!" called the person in back, and it was Luna, and the horse charged right by Harry, the wind of its passing causing him to spin slightly where he was standing. A moment later came another horse, this one carrying only one rider.
"I'm coming, Luna!" called Ron, from atop the horse, and he was wearing the silliest looking clothes...Harry couldn't describe them, because Ron had gone as soon as he had appeared.
The world settled down a moment, and Harry suddenly knew where he was, though he surely had been somewhere entirely different a moment before. He was near the Burrow, now, up in the field where they played Quidditch. More specifically... he was up in the air where they played Quidditch.
He couldn't control his broom, it seemed, and Ron and Hermione and Ginny looked on in confusion as he sped away from their game back towards the Burrow, and Ginny looked at him in confusion once again as he crashed through her bedroom window, from where she sat on the bed. For some reason that seemed perfectly obvious, she was piecing together a model of the Eiffel Tower.
"Harry? What are you doing here?" she said.
"I can't tell them," Harry said, leaping down off of his broom and letting the words flow out of his mouth. "I can't let them know about the spell, they can't find out—"
"It's all right, Harry," said Ginny, nodding reassuringly and placing her model to the side. "Everything's all right...except... you can't breathe."
And then Harry couldn't, again, and Voldemort was above him, pressing down and nothing had happened at all, and he had been there the whole time.
Suddenly, the train started moving again, launching the Dark Lord off of Harry with its sudden jolt. Harry didn't understand what had happened...or why the train was moving, when no one seemed to have 'woken up.'
"Hey, Harry," said Ginny, grabbing him by the arm, "how 'bout we run now?"
Harry didn't know where they were supposed to be running to, but he ran anyway, ran as fast as he could while trying to regain his breath. Ginny seemed determined, as though she were looking for something. Voldemort was not far behind, and...Harry wondered why the Dark Lord didn't use magic to stop them, or to catch up.
Suddenly, though Harry had (following Ginny's lead) run right past Luna Lovegood, who just happened to be sitting in the middle of the corridor, Voldemort did not—his feet collided with her in what probably would have been a very painful fashion, if she were able to feel it. Voldemort went sprawling. Ginny took the opportunity to hesitate.
"Damn," she said, looking round. "Wrong way."
She turned round then, and ran back the way she came, barely giving Harry enough time to keep up with her. Voldemort, standing rather shakily, at first, took a moment to regain his bearings before charging after them, being careful to avoid Luna this time.
"You don't think you can run away from me, do you, Harry? Ginny? There's nowhere to run, you know that—we're on a train. A moving one, now that the spell is wearing off..."
They ran and they ran and they ran and Harry felt that the train had never seemed quite so long before...finally, they were approaching the opposite end.
"Where are you going?" Voldemort called, a bit of humour in his voice. "What, are you going to jump?"
"Where are we going, Ginny?" Harry asked, quieter. Ginny halted suddenly, pressing herself against a door and muttering, "Over the moon."
That's a strange answer, Harry thought, but then he realised it was a password, and that it opened the door. He had never heard of a secret compartment on the train—no pun intended—and he wondered if it had always been there.
Ginny pulled him inside, grabbing him by the same arm that had started the marathon, and slammed the door behind him. She slid down the side of the door, sitting at its foot and trying to catch her breath.
"What is this place?" Harry whispered, looking into the strange mirror that rested on the wall.
"You don't need to whisper. He can't hear us," said Ginny, sounding as though she were trying to think."
"I think I'll whisper anyway, thanks," Harry said, and he slid down next to Ginny against the door. From outside, they could hear Voldemort cursing—both magically and otherwise—trying to unlock the door, to break through its wards; he couldn't manage it.
A few moments passed, and then Ginny seemed to remember that Harry had asked a question. "This room is sort of like a safe room," she said. "No one can get in if you don't want them to get in, and nothing can get out that's not supposed to get out—like thoughts, and words, and such. That mirror—" and she gestured to the shining glass hanging opposite them, "—is connected to one in Dumbledore's office. He can—"
She was going to continue, but at the mention of Dumbledore's name, the mirror changed, and the headmaster was sitting there, looking at them.
"I thought time was stopped," was the first thing that came into Harry's mind and out of his mouth.
"Time never stops, Harry," said Dumbledore. "If one could stop time, I would not have nearly as many grey hairs." He paused. "It is good to see that you were able to reach the room, Miss Weasley. I had hoped that Miss Granger or yourself would be able to do it if the need arose..."
Ginny furrowed her brow. "Hermione knows about this place? You said I was the only student who knew of its existence."
Dumbledore hesitated. "Oh, yes; so I did. I believe I said the same thing to her, actually...what a silly mistake." But of course he had known what he was doing.
"Professor, I dunno if you know, but Voldemort's right outside this compartment," said Harry, slightly edgy for some reason. "Is there possibly anything you can do to help us?"
"No need," said Dumbledore. "You've helped yourselves as much as you've needed help. When the train stopped, I was alerted immediately, and Aurors have been dispatched. I see that Voldemort appeared to stop time? A spell like that only works in a contained area, as you probably don't know, time-stopping being a Dark Art. Out here, nothing has changed.
"Voldemort does not like being alone when faced with many of his enemies, and he is at the moment—no. He's already gone." Dumbledore had looked at some point that seemed to be below his mirror, perhaps some sort of monitoring device. "He's fled just as they were arriving. You'll be all right."
Everything was happening at a sort of odd pace, in Harry's head, with quite sudden starts and stops and now a very anticlimactic ending to the run-in with Voldemort...he almost felt dizzy.
And then he remembered that he had forgotten.
Neither Harry nor Ginny moved for a very long time; long after Dumbledore had disappeared into reflection. They stared at the empty mirror for a while, still trying to catch their breath. And then, Ginny spoke:
"He's going to come back," she said. "We still have to be careful with it."
Harry furrowed his brow. "With what?" he said.
"What do you mean, with what?" she echoed. "With the spell, of course—"
And then recollection dawned on her face. "Oh! I'd completely forgotten."
And it was then that Harry realised how not crying Ginny had been since Voldemort had come, how...easily she seemed to recover from the sorrow she had been in only moments ago. And things started to fall into place in his mind, slowly but surely, but surely not enough to deem his memory back in place. Ginny didn't seem to notice, however.
She placed her hand on his forehead, as though cooling a fevered brow, and closed her own eyes as he closed his. She spoke:
"Reiterate."
And then, he remembered.
"Ron! We're going to be late...the prefect's meeting, remember? Luna...well, you too," Hermione said, rushing out of the compartment and practically running towards the front of the train. Ron and Luna didn't really struggle to keep up, not particularly.
"So," said Ginny, grinning at Harry mischievously. "They've all gone and left us alone. Shame on them. Whatever shall we do to pass the time...?"
Harry grinned back. Ginny leaned over, her eyes sliding closed, and just as their lips touched...
"GAH!" Harry shouted, collapsing to the floor in pain. His hands were clasped over his forehead, over his scar, and his breathing was ragged, and his face was contorted.
"Harry!" Ginny said, down by his side in a flash taking hold of his arm and looking into his face worriedly. "Harry, are you...are you going to be all right?"
It may have been a coincidence...but when she grasped his arm, the pain faded, and he could relax, he could breathe, in and out, in and out. He opened his eyes now, which he couldn't remember closing, and looked Ginny in the face.
"He's coming."
Ginny didn't need to ask who, of course.
"To the train? He's coming to the train? But...how can he—"
"He's going to stop the train first," Harry said. "And then he can make a Portkey...he was explaining it to the Death Eaters, he was...I saw him, I saw them, he was...he was exuberant. That word stuck in my mind, I don't know why..."
"But...he can't find out, about it, about the spell—"
Harry's eyes widened. "I'd forgotten," he said. "You're right...if he can find that, then it's..."
"We can't let him," said Ginny. "It's just what we've talked about, we've always said...why we separated it, so that if he found one of us, he couldn't..."
"But we're together," Harry said, and the words had a sort of finality about them, a sort of resounding voice that discouraged all further thought for a while that was almost too long.
"So..." Ginny said, and her next words seemed oddly like an echo: "So what will we do?"
Harry watched out the window for a moment, and then, he perhaps thought that Voldemort would be able to see him there, so he jumped away. And then an idea formed in his mind, one that should have been more obvious than it had...
"Ginny...this is going to sound crazy, but...I need you to Obliviate me."
Finis.