A/N: Those who know, correct me if little things are off. Like the phone number.

As time marched on, Erin was introduced to more forces of nature than she had ever seen before. She was witness to the a flash flood, some truly frightening thunder storms, and their respective birthdays.

She had found that she was hilariously bad at beer pong. She teetered on her feet as she tried to clear the pyramid of even just three cups. The men watching their game were amused by her colorful cusses and applauded her for a few of them. Jonathan had clearly had his share of heavy drinking days as his hand-eye coordination skills somehow improved the more inebriated he became. The most memorable win ended in him drumming his chest with his fists like a gorilla and roaring at everyone in the pub that he ruled this kingdom. He had a similarly outrageous hangover the next day and Erin snidely laughed at him as she hovered over him.

"Go away," he said, with his head buried in a pillow.

She brought over a trashcan and and he promptly took it to retch in.

"Who's the king?" she asked.

"I am," he replied and threw up again.

The townspeople had ever so slowly warmed up to their presence. She attributed it to Jonathan saving a toddler from almost drowning in a nearby river. They bought a large party tent to set up permanently outside, under which they had plastic tables and some folding partitions. It was there and the den where they saw their patients.

Some of the more well-to-do citizens were surreptitiously bringing in the "addled folk". It would happen at odd hours where Jon could finally relax and take a long shower and Erin was having her last cup of coffee for the night. She was piecing together a strange dichotomy for the town. The higher-functioning people lived normal lives and had banished their strange family members to the dodgy end. How and why, she didn't know. But she reserved her judgement as all kinds of people, young and old, came by with their wayward relatives in tow.

"Well?" the woman asked, "Can you fix her?"

She was a young, in her mid twenties. She kept anxiously pushing back an errant lock of dyed blond hair behind her ear. While the two looked to be close in age, they were vastly different otherwise. The one who had brought the other in was smartly dressed with high-end jacket and boots. The woman she had brought with her was in a pinstriped pajamas and a periwinkle-colored bathrobe.

"What's you name?" Erin asked.

"Shelley," she said quickly.

"Just a moment," said, Erin and sat the Shelley down with some tea as she examined her ward.

She had long brown hair that was plaited into a messy braid. The stray hairs framed a pale face with scattered freckles. Her blue eyes were opened wide, the pupils small, and her gaze seemed distant. She was focused on something miles away from here.

"I'm Dr. Coffrey, what's you name?" she asked.

"Susan," her companion supplied.

Erin stopped herself from telling the woman off. She had wanted to see if Susan would give any spark of recognition.

"Susan," she plied again, smiling, "Is that you?"

There was no response.

"Susan, do you know where you are?"

"Do you know what day it is?"

Susan's lips fell open just a touch, but she was clearly not in their plane of existence. Her expression was completely blank.

Erin turned to Shelley.

"How long as she been like this?"

"Maybe last month? I came back for vacation and found her like this. Her mum won't tell me anything and she's been acting all depressed"

"I'm her cousin," she added after Erin's questioning look.

"What was she like before?"

"Normal. Never had a health problem"

"Is she always like this?"

"Yeah. I feed her and she eats. We have to use a diaper for toileting though."

"Any medications? Allergies? Did anything happen while you were away?"

Shelley shook her head. Erin took a deep breath as quietly as she could and sat down so she was eye-level with the woman. She hated doing this type of interrogation.

"And to your knowledge, was there anyone who would want to hurt her? Verbally or physically?" Shelley's eyes were starting to water and she struggled to keep her composure.

"What are you saying? That someone would do this to her? There was no one! No one!" she said, her voice rising.

Erin put a hand on hers, hoping to calm her down.

"I'm sorry, I just need to ask. This state could be induced by some kind of shock"

"Oh God," said Shelley. "Oh God, Oh God"

Erin took her shoulder in a firm grip.

"Look. We don't know anything yet. I'm going to do my best to help you, do you understand?"

Shelley nodded and took heaving breaths and she tried to calm herself down. Erin redirected her attention to Susan.

"Ok dear, I'm just going to touch your face and give you a physical exam. Don't be alarmed"

There was no need for the preamble as Susan continued to stare off into space. Erin put her hands on Susan's head, feeling her scalp with her fingertips and didn't find any depressions or bumps. She peered into Susan's face. The same blank expression. Small pupils. Her eyes were aligned and not showing any type of strange rotatory movement she had seen in some of the other people. She fished out a penlight from her shirt pocket and flashed it in her eyes. They were reactive, normal. She could feel Shelley's concerned gaze as she continued with the exam and moved onto testing some of the more specific nerves.

Her case was distinct from the others she had seen. She couldn't discern any neurological damage that had been more obvious with the other people. The woman had seemingly just shut down.

"Ok Shelley," she said. "If you have any medical records for her, I'd really like to see them. And I'll visit you once I've gone through them all. All I can tell you know is that from our limited exam, there isn't anything jumping out at me except that she's in a nonresponsive state. I can't tell if there's any brain damage, but her essential functions like breathing and eating obviously aren't affected"

Shelley gave Erin a weak watery smile, and grabbed her cousin's hand to lead her away. Erin felt like an idiot. Years of schooling, calling herself a physician, daring coming to another country, and she was useless. She put hands on someone to tell their loved ones what they already knew. She watched them get into their car and drive away, then aggressively flopped onto the couch. She stared ahead, like Susan, thinking of what it all meant. Wisps of ideas came to her, but nothing really fit. She heard soft steps as Jonathan came out of the bathroom, and felt the cushions sink as he sat beside her. The smell of alpine aftershave hung in the air.

"Hey," he said. "Are you all right?"

He could see the line of her jaw stiffen as she clenched her muscles.

"We're getting a whiteboard," she said tersely, then got up to go to bed.

Practically overnight, they rewrote their grant proposal. While still providing basic medical services, they began to create a database of the afflicted people-hoping to synthesize what the syndrome was and create a treatment plan.

Erin suspected this was where Jonathan had wanted to drive their research all along. Sometimes, when she hit a wall and spent a few days being frustrated, he would quietly leave a tab open on her internet browser with a surprisingly helpful resource. If she wasn't mistaken, he almost seemed a little reticent to show them to her. The man she had come to grow fond of was usually more enthusiastic about showing off his expertise.

As the nocturnal visits became more regular, Erin found herself struggling to find a balance between being the more sympathetic type and the analytical one. It was hard to objectively look at everything when she had to turn on her softer side and provide reassuring words. She caught herself irrationally hoping for simple reasons for everything, and believing at one moment, that really- everything would be ok.

It reminded her of a coming-of-age moment as a younger student turning physician. She had always taken pleasure in the wild and traumatic cases. Someone had their fingers sliced off? Excellent. The worst form of lupus? Very cool. Metastatic cancer to the bone causing excruciating pain? So intriguing! Like a dog chasing a loud car down the street, she would come to attention when word of an interesting case came by, then shoot off to it. It wasn't a rare phenomenon. As they were all emerging from the boring world of textbooks into the more exciting hospital wards, into the more exciting and now slightly frightening world of running a ward, they were bound to be enraptured by the pathology in words turned into real life.

Illness was the interesting part, not the person. The people were unimpressive, ugly, smelly, old, uninformed, uninterested. She remembered speaking to a man who had been so neglected at home, he was brought into the hospital. It wasn't his tragic story that was the memorable thing about him, It was his damn nails. All half an inch long, with dirt and who knows what crusted underneath. What she hadn't realized then was that she had unconsiously created a barrier to feeling more empathetic by getting more involved with the disease process.

When her own father passed, she had a difficult time going to see him. The boundary between work and her personal life didn't exist in that circumstance. She had struggled with the same thing she was struggling with now. Weeping didn't help with thinking. And thinking didn't help with telling your dad how much you loved him. She opted for the clear-headed route, and still wasn't sure if that was the right decision.

After that, things had changed and she had resolved to be less of a "gunner bitch" in the immortal words of a ticked off classmate.

She looked up from her laptop monitor and let herself smile at the box of cookies (or "biscuits", as Jon called them) with the enormous pink bow ontop. She had given him a bottle opener keychain for Christmas. Her stomach rumbled and she pursed her lips, trying to convince herself not to want the sweets.

"I'll just finish this paragraph," she murmured to herself, and returned to the screen.

There was a loud rattling at the door, and Jonathan came in with an armful of groceries.

"Are you still working on the case write-up?" he asked.

"...yessss," she said reluctantly.

She quickly saved the document as she saw the screen flicker.

He grimaced at her.

"Take a break, the deadline for submission is months away"

"I'm almos-"

"Take...a...break, Coffrey. I don't want to hear another word"

He walked past her to put items away in the kitchen. She knew she was being inches away from having him blow up at her. She probably deserved it, they hadn't had a non-work related conversation in over a week. She was also pushing him harder than she meant to. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard for a moment, then she closed the laptop.

"I'm going to town," she announced.

"Good," he said from kitchen.

She took the keys to the car from the nail in the wall and headed out.

She had just gotten used to how dark it was in a rural area. She could hardly see the handle and had to feel for the contours before yanking it open to be able to get into the car. As the engine came to life with a reassuring loud hum, the sounds of the forest were drowned out. He was right. She had to get out of her head. She drove towards town, and parked at the pub to take a walk.

She headed down the main street slowly. No one else was out on the streets, and she held onto her phone in her pocket. It was chilly, despite being wrapped up in layers and having a nice wool scarf over her nose and mouth. Once she had reached the edge of the nicer part of town, she lingered for a moment before turning back. She took her phone out and typed a quick text message to Jon. She had to press the screen very deliberately as it was slow to respond.

'Going to check on Howard. Should be quick'

It gave a small "woop" as it sent the message. She walked quickly to the sixth house on the left side of the road. Howard had been making some progress. Or she was just as nutty as he- sometimes it was hard to tell. But she could swear he had micro-moments of lucidity when they spoke. He had started telling her a story about a plague when they last spoke. Maybe that was the environmental link they were looking for. She climbed up the steps and was about the knock when she noticed there were other people in the house.

In the two years she had spent here, she had learned a lot of things about the townsfolk, and one of them was that Howard was incapable with living with anyone else. She crept up to the door and made herself as flat as possible so they wouldn't be able to see her if they looked out the window.

"Hurry up, I want to get back to Marge," she heard one man say.

The other shushed him.

"I'm trying to not mess him up more than he already is. Stop distracting me"

Erin's brow creased, what the hell were they doing? She fumbled for her phone.

"I don't see why you're putting so much effort into it. He's been Obliviated so many times, there's no point"

She struggled to bring up the phone calling screen as it froze on her. Of all the times for it to act up-!

"Because I have standards- and because the report said he was saying such crazy things it was bringing muggle mediwizards in"

She could suddenly hear her heart beating in her ears and pounding uncontrollably in her chest. She jabbed at the screen with her finger.

'9'

"Obliviate!"

'9'

"Daniels, let's go"

"Shit, now you want to apparate all quick huh"

Apparate. She knew this word. Her blood ran cold and she almost dropped the mobile. She had to get to him. Without thinking, she slammed her body against the rickety door. Old and eaten-through as it was, it gave way, cracking at the hinges. She bolted in, trampling over disposable styrofoam plates and broken glass. Howard sat in a chair, staring straight ahead. She turned the flashlight function on her phone and shined it at him. He looked eerie in the harsh light.

"Howard?" she asked, she didn't realize how scared her voice could sound.

He blinked, and look at her with an expression of complete confusion.

"Who're you?"

"It's me- Erin. Dr. Coffrey? Remember? We played Backgammon the other day?"

"Who ARE YOU?" he thundered, and got up.

She took a step back, stumbling.

"Howard?"

"Why are you in my house? Who are you?!"

She turned and ran out of there, narrowly avoiding breaking her face on the mad dash down the steps. Bolting for the pub, she jumped into the car and gunned it back to the house. Jon was in the den, working on something. He got up immediately as she entered, for she must have looked terrified.

"Erin-" he said, holding her quaking arms.

"He- he didn't remember anymore!"