It seemed as though there wasn't enough air in the room. Harry's knees felt like noodles and he could swear that needles were piercing every fold in his body. There was an acrid odor, too. He realized it was him. His pits stung.

"Harry, remember the breathing exercises. In through your nose, out through your mouth. That's right. Careful, the pensieve is on your left. Here, the camp bed is two feet to your right. That's right. Steady now. I'm going to take off your shoes and put some blankets under your legs to raise them up. Next, I'm going to levitate a blanket over you and cover you up," Besel informed Harry. "Accio pepper-up potion."

"I thought pepper-up was for colds," Harry managed to utter.

"Yes, it is brilliant for colds—but it is also useful for shock, which I think you're experiencing right now," she said.

"What?" Harry panted. "I thought people got shock from getting hurt—like a wound."

"That's right, but not all wounds bleed. Emotional trauma can cause shock. Please take the potion and if and when you're feeling up to it, we can talk about what just happened," Besel said, pressing the cool, glass vial into his hand.

Harry propped himself up on his elbow and sniffed at the vial, feeling the mint vapors opening up his nasal passages, tendrils tickling his brain. He pressed the thin glass to his lips and felt the cool liquid coat his tongue. He imagined it was a vibrant green as it coursed down his throat, snaking through his sinuses, and blowing out his ears and nose. He tried, but couldn't hold back a cough.

Besel encouraged him to do the meditative breathing exercises that he'd been practicing with her as well as Ms. Midgeon after his coughing fit was over and the steam didn't seem to be exiting his ears as forcibly.

"I'll guide you through the body scan, okay?" Besel said.

"All right," Harry said.

She started by asking him to squeeze and release his toes one by one first on his left foot, then his right foot, and gradually worked up his body. By the time she'd verbally reached his knees, his heart didn't feel like a gerbil trying to escape his ribs. He had never felt as safe before with an adult as he did with Besel. Just that thought alone made his breathing steady.

Her soothing voice was asking him to tense and release the backs of his knees when he lost track of it. He slipped in and out of awareness as he was trying to figure out how to activate the muscles behind his knees that had somehow become peppermint flavored marshmallows melting in hot cocoa.

oO0OooO0OooO0OooO0Oo

Someone snoring woke him up. Then he realized that he was the one snoring and that his chin was resting in a puddle of drool. He wiped his face with a corner of the pillowcase and shifted carefully to his back, trying to remember why he was in a camp bed in the hospital room in the Center again.

The memory of the scenery rushing by as he, the Dursleys, and Piers drove to the zoo came back into focus suddenly—but it wasn't that. It wasn't all the houses, people, and cars with so much color, shadow, and texture and being able to see for such long distances in between all the buildings, even for milliseconds or the expanse of the sky up above, cut as it was by bisecting wires of telephone lines. It was the blow of having sight for the brief forty or so minutes that he had spent in his memory and then returning to instant sightlessness that was jarring. It was the journey back through the Pensieve that garroted his windpipe.

He remembered Besel's breathing exercises and tried to use them, aware that he was getting light headed again. As he acclimated to being in the Center, he realized that he was starting to associate the pain of the loss of his sight with the presence of pepper-up potions, the texture of overwashed linens, and the sound of sterile metal instruments striking glass vials. He doubted he'd ever associate it with anything else.

"You're waking up," Besel said from the side of the camp bed accompanied by the sound of paper sliding against paper and a book closing.

"Erp! I didn't know you were there!" Harry said, touching his hand to his face and realizing that he wasn't wearing his glasses.

"I never left," she explained. "You slept for about a half-hour. You haven't missed dinner yet."

His stomach rumbled as if it was just reminded that he was hungry.

"How are you feeling?"

"I'm okay, I guess," he said, wiping his face again, worried that he still had spital on his chin, then struggling to sit up.

"You don't have to get up if you don't want to," Besel said.

"No, it's okay. I want to sit up," he said, finally managing to throw off the blankets and extract his legs. He leaned his elbows on his knees.

"I'm not sure I can do the memory thing again… it was really hard to come back…" Harry said slowly.

"No worries, Harry. We'll only do what you're comfortable doing. If you don't want to do it, you don't have to do it," Besel explained.

His shoulders sagged in relief.

"Do you want to talk about the memory?" Besel asked.

"Not really," Harry confessed. "Is that okay?"

"Absolutely," Besel said without hesitation. "You mentioned that you wanted to share it with Healer Jordan and Professor McGonagall. Is that still the case?"

"Yes, I just don't want to go in it again. I'll also give them other memories if they want them. I just don't want to watch them hurting him again," Harry said, then realized he was talking about himself in the third person and corrected, "… hurting … me."

"That is a big revelation, Harry. That is big work," Besel acknowledged.

He shrugged in response.

"I'll give this memory to Healer Jordan," Besel said. "We can get the others later—when you're feeling more rested."

He nodded.

oO0OooO0OooO0OooO0Oo

Thursday after dinner, Harry and Gemma took their brooms to the O&M room to practice flying. Gemma had confided to Harry during dinner when they were conversing via notebook and anagnóstis that she was nervous being able to fly since her balance was connected to the damage to her inner ear. Harry was thinking about that as they walked through the gym to the park. He tugged on her arm just as they stepped out onto the pavement outside of the gym to get her attention.

"If your hearing loss affects your balance, how come you feel really steady when you're guiding me? You never trip or seem off balance," he said.

She made the writing sign on his palm, so he summoned the notebook, pencil, and anagnóstis from his staff to give to her and waited patiently while she wrote.

"I've been practicing and strengthening my core for a while—it was really bad at first, but I am better. But that's with both feet on the ground. I'm nervous about being able to balance on a little stick up in the air," she explained.

"We'll just stick close to the ground, okay? It is bound to be soft from all the rain yesterday. We'll take it really easy," Harry assured.

Gemma tapped "okay" on his hand and the "thank you" sign as well, which meant she touched his chin with three of her fingers. He stored the writing implements in his staff and took her arm again.

The grass at the park was marshy from the heavy rain the day before, so they mounted their brooms right away to avoid soaking their trainers. Harry put the bell charm that he learned from Godric on Gemma's broom so he'd be able to tell where she was. Gemma's broom was making gentle bell tinglings that were pretty loud when she was right next to him, but not too persistent because she wasn't moving much.

He set his staff to vibrate and put it inside his broom.

He turned to Gemma, "Are you ready?"

"Yes," she tapped on his arm and he realized that once they started flying, he wouldn't be able to communicate with her. He was suddenly alarmed and reached out for her, finding her shoulder.

"Wait," he said. "How are we going to talk once we're flying?"

She took his hand and wrote, "B-E-L-L-S-?"

"But you can't hear them," he said.

She tapped his chest and he took it to mean, "but you can."

So, he took her left hand and muttered Campanis Minima and did the same to her right hand—they made different bell sounds from the one he'd cast on her broom.

"Okay, shake your right hand… twice means 'yes' okay? And shake your left hand once for no, okay? They sound different to me. Shake your hand a lot to get my attention. Yes, that's right. Okay, at least we have something. I'll just try to stay in front of you so that you can see when I'm trying to get your attention, okay? Or I'll cast a lumos charm with my wand."

She shook her right hand twice and the chiming bells sounded. Her left hand had more of a clanging bell sound and her broom sounded more like jingle bells. It was a bit cacophonous when it was all going at once, but it was better to have some sense of communication.

"Okay, are you ready now?" he asked, smiling in her direction.

Her "YES" was emphatic with the bells and he grinned (reminded of Tinkerbell talking to Peter Pan) then leaned forward gently to start flying low to the ground—his feet just ghosting over the lawn. He was relieved that his staff's vibrations were easy to detect over the bell noises from Gemma's broom.

They made a gentle lap around the park. He could hear her struggling a bit to keep the broom steady and at a constant speed—the bells were really good at communicating those differences. Harry kept a little ahead of Gemma and would turn to ask her if she was okay with a hand signal, knowing that she probably couldn't read the papers while they were flying. She responded with her "yes" bells. Her flying got more steady the longer they did it and he stopped when they had gone around once and asked if she was ready to go a little higher.

"Yes!" was her enthusiastic reply, so they went up a couple of feet higher and did the same circuit. He could tell that she was getting the hang of the balancing and smiled back at her. She jingled her "yes" bells at him.

They were just about to reach their starting point again—Harry could tell by the vibrations that they were getting close to the gym, when he was jolted by a force that hit him and went through him at the same time—it made a booming noise that expanded through his body, pushing out both his ears painfully. He struggled to stay on his madly vibrating broom and heard Gemma's bells explode in discordance. He wrangled his broom back under control and slowed and dropped closer to the ground, trying to near Gemma's, which seemed to be bucking. He could hear her gasping for breath and reached out for her, while his feet sought the ground. His feet sank into the grass at the same time that he made contact with her flailing arm and grasped it. He pulled her to him and she jumped into his arms as her broom shot off. He managed to hold onto his.

"Accio Gemma's broom!" he shouted and then quickly put his broom in the crook of his arm, his left arm still holding her trembling form against his body, and stuck his right hand out enough to receive her broom, which smacked against his palm as they tumbled to the soggy lawn.

The cold, wet grass soaked him from the back of his head to his ankles. Gemma scrambled up and helped him stand up.

"What was that?" Harry shouted to no one in particular, while Gemma was drawing big question marks on his hand.

"Did you feel that?" he asked her.

"YES!" she tapped furiously, the bells sounding mad as they chimed.

"Let's go back to the Center," Harry said as he attempted to remove his staff from his broom with trembling fingers. Finally, he was able to get it out and put his broom back into his staff. He shook out the staff and took Gemma's offered arm and they ran to the Gym door—but it wouldn't open for them. It was locked. Gemma tugged on it first, then pounded on the door—the weird combination of noises with the bells and the pounding made Harry's head ring. He muttered a "Finite campanis minima" to make all the bell noises stop, though Gemma was none the wiser.

"This door has never been locked before," Harry stated. "What's going on?"

He started pacing back and forth in front of the door as Gemma continued to pound on it. He figured it was frustration as much as fear that was making her so insistent.

No one came.

Finally, she relented and joined him in pacing, offering her arm as sighted guide. They walked back and forth a few times together.

It occurred to Harry that he could ask his staff for help as Healer Jordan had counseled him, but he was loath to do that—this wasn't really an emergency. They were just temporarily locked out—that blast of magic, though—and that's all it could be—was worrisome.

He stopped and faced Gemma, "let's go to the telephone. We can call the Center from there and find out what is going on."

She tapped "okay" on his arm and started walking toward the telephone box. She stopped and tapped his knuckles with her broom.

"Do you want me to put it in my staff?" he asked.

"Yes, please" she signed protactily and he stuffed the broom into his staff and they set off again.

As they were walking along the hedgerow that bordered the park, someone came splashing through the puddles on the pavement toward them. Harry gripped Gemma's arm a little tighter, cocking his head trying to get cues for why someone was running toward them. She slowed a little and guided Harry over to the side of the pavement a bit and he held his staff parallel to his body so that he wouldn't trip them up and the person ran by them, making a noise in greeting that sounded something like, "evening!"

Gemma stopped and wrote in his hand, "M-U-G-G-L-E" space "F-I-N-I-T-E" space "S-C-R-I-B-I-U-N-T" space "C-H-A-R-M."

Harry muttered "Finite scribunt loqui" as Gemma snatched the paper from the air by his mouth. He cursed. Now they could only sign protactily. Something was going on—the muggle repelling charms weren't working. They were closed off from the Egress and in some muggle village in the middle of who-knows-where.

We could be anywhere in the United Kingdom!

He took in deep breaths as Gemma led him around the corner and toward the phone box. A car splashed through the wet street on their left and then another one. It seemed this was a pretty busy street which made Harry wonder what happened when the muggle repelling charms were working—where did all these people go?

Did they all think that they were terribly forgetful?

He could hear kids playing at the park now on the other side of the hedgerow. The previously deserted village had seemingly come alive.

Gemma stopped and indicated that she was going to turn to her left, then waited for another car to pass. She guided him a bit circuitously across the street—he imagined that the rutted road had deep puddles of muddy water.

She stopped and he heard her prying open the door—the moisture must have made it stick a bit. He reached out and helped her pull it open and they both went inside.

Harry hoped that they were enough out of range of view that none of the muggles would notice that he was summoning muggle money from his staff. He silently hoped that the restriction of underage magic that had been lifted from him so that he could use his staff's magic was still in place. The coins and paper money zinged into his palm and he handed them to Gemma who counted out the ones they needed. She pressed the extra back into his hand and he stuffed them in his pocket. He also summoned the scroll from the Center, hoping that they had printed a muggle phone number on it. He also handed it to Gemma, figuring that she could find it a lot more quickly than he could with his anagnóstis.

After a bit, she shook the scroll and he turned his face toward her and asked slowly, knowing that reading lips was really hard, "do they have a muggle phone number?"

She wrote a question mark on his hand and he tried again, and then she signed, "yes," moving toward the phone. He tried to move out of her way in the cramped space while she handed him the receiver, slotted in the coins, and dialed the number. The phone rang and rang and finally, someone picked up, "You have reached the Perenelle Flamel Adaptation Center. We are currently closed. Your call is important to us. Please leave us a message and we'll return your call as soon as we are able."

It was a recording, a beep sounded and Harry said, "Hi, Healer Jordan? This is Harry Potter and Gemma Boot. Something happened. Um. And we're stuck in the village in the O&M room—you know the one with the park and the gym. We can't get into the gy… " but the beep sounded again cutting him off.

"Merlin's pants!" Harry exclaimed. "It cut me off." He tried to hang up the phone, but kept sliding the earpiece over the buttons, instead of finding the cradle. Finally, Gemma guided his hand up a little higher and he found it.

She took his hand and wrote a question mark. He summoned the writing instruments out of his staff and wrote out as clearly as he could on the floppy notebook while standing up about what had happened.

She tapped his hand for sighted guide, and he put the pencil and anagnóstis in his pocket, but hung onto the notebook, and then took her hand while she left the phone box. She seemed to be in a hurry and he understood when he smelled someone smoking a cigarette outside the phone box and the tapping of an impatient foot. He stumbled a bit as the tip of his staff caught on the lip of the phone box as they were leaving. He was awkwardly trying to hold both his staff and the notebook in one arm. Gemma slid the notebook out from the crook in his arm and nudged his hand toward her elbow, then led him away from the telephone box.

Harry cast the Tempus charm under his breath, knowing that it would only sound in his aftí. It was 8:16 pm. Then it occurred to him to do a location reading with his staff and he squeezed it. They were standing outside of the White Hart pub on Crabtree Road in Old Ellerby. It was a pretty quiet pub as far as Harry could tell, but maybe they could go in and have a pop while they figured out what they were doing.

He ran his hand down Gemma's arm to her hand and turned it palm up, then signed "write" on it. She handed him the notebook and he tried to write legibly on it, "let's go sit in the pub and figure out what we're doing. I have muggle money. Get pop."

She tapped, "okay" on his arm and guided him to the pub.

His staff found the step that Gemma paused in front of and they made their way inside. Gemma paused and Harry guessed it was because it was dark inside and her eyes needed to adjust. He squeezed his staff to get a description of the pub. There were only a few people in it—a man behind the bar cleaning glasses Harry guessed by the squeaking noise that he could hear over a scratchy jukebox record that was playing an old Beatles tune and a couple of solitary men seated at the bar. The pub was thick with smoke, grease, and stale sweat.

She led them to the bar and then jiggled his hand on her arm. He guessed that she wanted him to talk.

"Hi? Excuse me?" Harry said in the direction of the man squeaking the glasses.

"Where're your folks? Kinda late for you two to be out and you really shouldn't be in here. Underage and all," the man probed. "Children need to be with an adult."

"Uh, yeah. We were playing at the park and our mum said to come here to wait when we were ready to go. We just rang her from the phone box. She said we could get a pop while we waited," Harry lied.

"Well, I guess if it is just for a bit. What can I get for you two?" he asked.

"Just a couple of ginger beers, please." He dug out the muggle money from his pocket and handed it to Gemma.

The man set two glasses on the bar near them and said, "that'll be two quid."

Harry could hear Gemma rustling through the money. He put the notebook on the bar and wrote "2 £."

The man snorted… "what? you're blind and she's deaf … and daft as well?"

"She's not daft, just not used to the mu- money," Harry hastily covered up his gaff.

"Well, I'll be. Never mind. It's on me. You two find a seat and I'll bring the drinks over to you," the man said, his tone changing dramatically.

"It's okay, we can pay for it," Harry said, feeling the heat rising in his neck. He didn't want charity or pity.

"Nah, it's all right. It takes some guts to go out and about like you two are. My little nephew, he's nearly three now, he's having a hard time; can't walk yet; weak muscles. They are trying to figure out why he's struggling so much, but maybe he'll be getting along just like you two in a bit. Independent. Gives me hope," the man said, his voice a bit thick with emotion.

"Thank you, that's very kind," Harry said, swallowing down his pride. "I'm sure your nephew will… get along."

Gemma was drawing a question mark on his hand. Harry heard the man grab the glasses off the bar and Gemma was pressing the money back into his hand. He stuffed it in his pocket, then wrote, "free. Find table."

Gemma led Harry through a short maze of pub tables and chairs and put Harry's hand on the back of a thick pub chair—it's surface sticky with a patina of grease and smoke. The barman brought the drinks over to the table and then slapped Harry on the back amiably as he was tapping his staff to make it shrink.

"You kids enjoy," he said as he walked away.

"We will, thanks!" Harry said, settling into his chair. The table felt even thicker with layered grot—he held his fingers so that they just whispered over the surface until he located his glass. He felt around the lip of it to see if there was a straw sticking out of it, remembering how he stuck himself in the nose with the one at the Thai restaurant he'd taken Dr. Granger and Hermione to last Sunday.

Gemma had settled next to Harry rather than across from him so that they could write easily on the notebook. Their backs were to the bar and Harry felt that he could use his anagnóstis here—that it could be mistaken for a pencil as long as no one was looking too closely, it would just look like they were writing in a notebook. He hoped nobody would think too much about how a blind kid was reading what a deaf kid was writing.

He heard Gemma slide her drink closer to her and take a tentative sip. She made an aspirated hiccup. It was an unexpected noise from her—without voice, just the sound of the air moving through her diaphragm.

She slid the notebook back to him and he read her notes: "This is tingly! Wow! Why did he give us the drinks? What if no one comes to get us?"

Harry started to write back, but Gemma stopped him and moved his hands farther down the page.

"He said we reminded him of his nephew who can't walk yet and that he hopes that he'll be getting along as well as we are some day. He was nice… " he paused here thinking about the daft remark and tried to let it go. "I don't know. I guess we can ask if there is a place where we can stay for the night? Or we could try to catch the Knight Bus—does it operate outside of London? I wonder how far from London Old Ellerby is?" Harry had reached the end of the page and had to turn to the next page to finish writing all of this.

Gemma took the notebook and was studying it while slurping noisily on her straw. She had reached the bottom of the glass and was trying to suck up the last drops.

She likes it.

Gemma guided his hand holding the anagnóstis to a word he'd written—his own voice sounded in his aftí, but it was unrecognizable as a word. He had to read the whole sentence again to figure out what he'd been trying to write. He laughed as he wrote it out again, trying to be more careful this time. Gemma made the laughing sign across his back.

The pub door opened and a few more people came in—mostly men with gravelly voices who greeted the barman absentmindedly and then paused for a moment, then continued on to sit at the bar with their mates. Harry guessed that the pause was when they noticed the two strange kids sipping ginger beers.

He was savoring his pop. It wasn't something he got very often. The Dursleys never let him have it at home and guarded it fiercely, so he was never able to sneak one. And of course, the wixen world didn't do fizzy drinks.

The door opened again and this time the voice that spoke was familiar.

"Oh, Harry and Gemma! I'm so glad I found you!"