a/n: sorry to people who wanted me to continue this, because you probably thought I had given up and wasn't going to. Actually, this story just got left behind for a while. Sorry. I hope you like it.

This was me Gilderoy thought numbly, staring at the picture in his hands, his face screwed up in concentration. No, that's not right. This is me. No. It's not. Help me, please. Who am I?

He must have said the last part out loud because a healer named Aldalone Loell came bustling over to his bed from where she had been tending another patient on the other side of the closed ward. Gilderoy noticed that it was the curtained end. The end where Frank and Alice were living. The healers never allowed him back there.

Loell came to his bedside and asked what was wrong. She was a plump, younger woman with blonde hair that she kept tied up. She looked anxious.

"What's the matter, Gilderoy?"

And all of a sudden, Gilderoy found that he didn't know. He didn't know why he was sitting on that bed, why he was in St. Mungo's hospital, why he existed, or who he was.

"Who am I?" he asked stupidly into the air between himself and the friendly healer. He had a weird thought about What if words were solid? but didn't say it.

Healer Loell went over to his bedside table.

"Did you drink all of your sleeping draught, Gilderoy?" she asked him, her brown eyes staring into his forget-me-not blue ones, trying to detect any guilt or deceit.

"Yes," he answered, without any hesitation. He had only hidden the potion in the beginning, in the drawer in which he kept his robes. But now he was used to the acrid taste so that he could stand it.

Gilderoy's stomach felt oddly empty.

"Could I have something to eat?" he ventured, watching Healer Loell rearrange the quilt on the end of his bed.

"Please?" he asked when he got no response.

"Gilderoy, it's four o clock in the morning," she told him.

No wonder she was still around! Gilderoy remembered her telling him how she had a 10-5 night shift, which was why she wasn't there in the mornings.

"Ad-Ada-

"Ad, Gilderoy. You can just call me Ad. I've told you that before." The witch smiled tightly, and Gilderoy knew what she was thinking. He wasn't even remembering simple things very well, and that was after The Obliviation. Or so, that was what he had heard people saying. Healer Loell had told him that healers were only allowed to tell "those who couldn't remember" so much.

Gilderoy had been here in the closed ward for almost 3 years now, and all he had been told was that something had happened to him that made him lose his memory. He had asked the two healers who were in charge of him, Healer Loell and Healer Elleyne, but they had told him there were things that couldn't be brought into the light at the moment. So Gilderoy had let them alone about it completely. In fact, he had forgotten about it completely…until today.

His stomach churned, and he looked to where Healer Loell was now checking on the sallow-faced man in a bed nearby. She had a slight frown on as she turned to Healer Brodyn.

"Bode's breathing seems slightly irregular when he sleeps," she whispered slowly.

Gilderoy frowned as well. Bode was his most mysterious ward-mate. He had a speech impediment, but Gilderoy didn't know he had a breathing problem too. Was that why he never left his bed?

"Ad?" he asked quietly into a pause in the two Healer's conversation. Aldalone Loell pardoned herself from Brodyn for a while, and came back over to his bedside.

"Yes, what is it?" she asked, sounding a little impatient.

"I had a dream last night."

He didn't even register the words in his mind before saying them. His mind seemed to be constantly trying to play tricks on him, and he never remembered having a dream until now. In fact, it was what had awakened him from the deep fog of sleep that usually shrouded him until a late 11 o clock in the morning.

And unlike most dreams, he found when his previously obliviated mind groped for what had happened in it, it was seized upon immediately.

Gilderoy came back to earth to find Healer Loell studying his face intently.

"Are you sure you've taken your sleeping potion? Dreams are extremely rare when it takes effect."

Gilderoy nodded immediately.

"Ok…what was it like? Your dream, I mean? Can you remember?"

Yes. He could. He remembered perfectly. A little too perfectly.

Leaning over the edge of his bed, he started to speak, then hesitated, searching for the right words.

"It was…very real," he said, and this time though he tried to control it, his voice had a shaky quality to it. "It felt as if…I was there. In it. Like it really happened."

Healer Loell nodded.

"Oftentimes dreams do seem real. I remember having one once where I was climbing a mountain. I could feel details like the harsh wind whipping at my face and I could smell the sea from somewhere. It was all very peaceful…then I fell."

Gilderoy looked at her. She gave him a half smile.

"But it was all just a dream when I woke up of course, but when I lost my grip on the rocks in the dream, that couldn't have felt less like dreaming. It felt real."

Gilderoy thought about this, but somehow it didn't seem to match the same sense of reality he had felt before he awoke.

"Is that what you mean by real?"

"Sort of. I don't really know. I feel tired."

"Well I won't stop you from going back to sleep."

Healer Loell blew out the candle she had lit beside Gilderoy's bed and stood up again. Gilderoy was indeed tired again. Even though he could remember the dream perfectly, thinking of it exhausted him. But whenever he tried to think of something else, his mind would not permit it. It was almost as if it was all he had to think of.

"Was the dream good or bad?"

Healer Loell's voice came to him on a sort of tide. He was quickly losing consciousness.

But nevertheless, Gilderoy knew the answer to that one.

"Bad. It was very bad," he added with a slight shudder. His words sounded muffled and clumsy in his own dull, thumping ears.

Healer Loell's footsteps faded away and came back to his bedside quickly.

"Here. This is 100 Dreamless Sleeping Draught. That'll keep the nightmares away."

He felt her hand lift his chin and tasted something sour and unwanted trickling down his throat.

"You're late," the man snarled, bringing his hand upwards.

Gilderoy tried to move his head away, to close his lips, but he found he could not move easily. The potion was taking him.

The impact was cold and hard.

There were no dreams that night.