a/n: DISCLAIMER: wow, I don't even own some of the text in this chapter. Some of the things people say are actually from the "closed ward" chapter in OotP. So don't sue me. I have no money.

The holiday season at the tail end of the year found Gilderoy signing autographs left and right. The Christmas season was a busy one, and as a result, the closed ward was fuller than he had ever seen it. Already there had been three visitors, but despite this, Gilderoy had an ensuing, annoyingly pervasive feeling of loneliness.

Gilderoy had not had any visitors to speak of before, but he supposed it hadn't bothered him much because he hadn't been in a condition to give much thought to it. Now that he was, he began to wonder if he had known anyone, had them talk, smile, laugh with him when he was normal, before the Accident. Maybe no one remembered him.

But that couldn't be true, his mind reasoned. He had received letters. More letters than he could read in one night, and some that he gave up on in frustration because he just couldn't understand what they all were talking about. They. Yes, there were a lot of them. His fans.

As Gilderoy sat moodily, staring across at the beds opposite him, and their occupants as well as the visitors that some had. A man that Elleyne called Danny had two visitors who looked like friends. Gilderoy couldn't understand; how could he have so many fans yet no friends at all?

Gilderoy's brain was in overload with all his questions about a life which had once seemed so simple, but was now turning out to be filled with hidden complications and mysteries of a past he didn't even remember. And what was worse, Elleyne was not here today. She was the only one of the Healers who would take a dozen of his autographs with a smile before she told him thanks, but she had enough now.

Gilderoy watched as Danny's visitors gave him some sort of joint Christmas present. He tried to thank them but all he could do was squawk, sounding like a turkey being strangled. The visitors to the Longbottoms had still not emerged from behind the curtain at the end of the ward. He had seen them come in, a stern, tall old woman with a hat topped with a stuffed bird, and a chubby kid who looked extremely glum. The woman had been walking too fast for the kid to catch up easily.

Gilderoy watched the curtain for a while longer, until he became distracted by the sound of Healer Strout, who was wearing a tinsel wreath in her hair and coming in from the hallway outside, a load of presents in her arms. For some reason, this peaked Gilderoy's interests. He was terribly bored, and as he wondered what was outside, he felt excitement boiling in the pit of his stomach. Healer Strout was looking the other way, holding the door open with her foot, while taking a present off of the top of the precariously stacked pile and handing it to the person in the nearest bed. It was the perfect opportunity. It would probably never happen again.

Holding his breath, Gilderoy shot up from his bed, getting a strong headrush as he did so, and snuck out the door and down the hall a ways. A few seconds later he heard the door snick shut again. He had a random thought about what he would do if he couldn't get back in, but it was quickly devoured by excitement.

It was colder out here in the hallway than in the room he had just left, and Gilderoy shivered in his sparse lilac dressing gown. The hall was long and white, and Gilderoy walked for a while without this changing much. When he had come quite a ways, one old man in a portrait stopped him with a suspicious and stern note to his voice.

"And where do you think you're off to, young man?"

"I'm exploring!"

"Are you quite sure you should be doing that? You don't appear very stable."

Gilderoy shrugged, then thought of something. "Would you like an autograph?" he asked the portrait eagerly.

"That's the silliest thing I've ever heard. What need would I have of an autograph? I don't even know who you are. You're certainly unstable."

Gilderoy felt a bit disappointed, but persisted on his quest down the hall, leaving the old man in the portrait mumbling about "delusions of grandeur".

Soon Gilderoy came to a set of double doors with a small window set into them. He looked through it and saw what looked like a set of stairs going downwards, nearby. As he watched, a boy came out onto the landing. The boy had messy black hair and glasses. Behind him came three others, a boy and a girl with red hair who looked like brother and sister, and another girl with brown bushy hair. Gilderoy wondered if they were more visitors, or if they lived here as well.

That's when he noticed that the boy with glasses had stopped talking to his companions, and was looking directly at him. The redheaded boy and the girl with the brown hair also looked at him, and started to move their mouths in what looked like shock, but Gilderoy couldn't hear what they were saying from this side of the door. He pushed it open and came out to stand in front of them.

"Well, hello there!" he told them in what he believed was a good voice for welcoming visitors. "I expect you'd like my autograph, would you?"

After the portrait's rejection, he felt he deserved a good turn this time.

The boy with glasses didn't say anything right away, but muttered something to the redheaded girl next to him. Gilderoy thought that was a bit rude, but he ignored it, waiting for an answer.

The redheaded boy asked him how he was. Gilderoy grinned. It felt so great to be talking to new people!

"I'm very well indeed, thank you! Now, how many autographs would you like? I can do joined-up writing now, you know!" He dug around in his pocket for a minute before retrieving his favorite quill, and looked up at them again. They were an oddly silent bunch.

The redheaded boy told Gilderoy that they didn't want autographs. Gilderoy didn't plan to listen to him. He needed to get some autographing business done today!

The boy with the glasses finally spoke to him, nervously.

"Professor, should you be wandering around the corridors? Shouldn't you be in a ward?"

Really, what was with everyone asking that? Gilderoy turned back to the boy, and noticed for the first time the jagged, lightning shaped scar on his forehead. He stared at it, something straining in the back of his head. He had the odd feeling that he had seen it before, somewhere.

"Haven't we met?" he asked slowly, almost afraid of the answer.

The boy looked deliberating.

"Er…yeah, we have. You used to teach us at Hogwarts, remember?"

Gilderoy was struck by the information he had just received. He paused to gather breath, and then gasped, "Teach?" He let out his breath slowly, letting his puzzlement have full reign. "Me? Did I?"

When no one said anything, Gilderoy began to feel strangely out of place standing in front of these people. The boy with the scar, he had taught the boy with the scar. It was incomprehensible. Take that with the letters, and he couldn't fit two and two together to make sense. Gilderoy decided it was high time to steer away from the subject.

"Taught you everything you know, I expect, did I?" he said laughingly. "Well, how about those autographs, then? Shall we say a round dozen, you can give them to all your little friends then and nobody will be left out!"

They still looked rather unenthusiastic. Was it possible that they just didn't understand HOW good at joined-up writing Gilderoy had become? Or how wonderful his autograph looked at the bottom of his picture, written at a bit of a slant?

Just then, the door came open behind him, and he heard the voice of Healer Strout issue out of it.

"Oh, Gilderoy, you've got visitors! How lovely, and on Christmas Day too! Do you know, he never gets visitors, poor lamb, and I can't think why, he's such a sweetie, aren't you?"

That was the problem with Strout, Gilderoy thought. She really did give out too much information. He was, however, extremely happy that he hadn't been chided badly at all for his daring escape.

Healer Strout made her way over to the group of people on the landing, and beamed around at them all.

"We're doing autographs!" Gilderoy told her, flourishing his quill to make the point quite clear. "They want loads of them, won't take no for an answer! I just hope we've got enough photographs!"

And he did. He really did. He was getting awfully excited about going back to sign them all. Anything to stop looking at the scarred boy, actually. He was making Gilderoy sweat.

Strout took Gilderoy's arm and smiled at him like he was her own son.

"Listen to him," she said.

It half creeped him out, but it half made him extremely comfortable as well, the way she was so motherly.

Gilderoy remained standing, while Healer Strout babbled to the visitors about how she was so glad he had visitors and all of that. Then finally, he let himself be steered up the corridor again, into the ward from whence he had came, and all the way to the chair beside his bed. Gilderoy leaned forward to where a pile of photographs lay await on his bed, raked them in towards him, took out a quill and began to sign.

Gilderoy hardly looked up as he signed, and then only briefly as he tossed the letters at the red haired girl, who was closest to him, so that she could put them in envelopes. Envelopes dried out Gilderoy's tongue, and he could never get them to stick all the way.

"I am not forgotten, you know, no, I still receive a very great deal of fan mail….Gladys Gudgeon writes weekly…I just wish I knew why…"

The red haired girl didn't give him any hints, and neither did anyone else. Gilderoy looked at the photograph he was holding and grinned.

"I suspect it is simply my good looks…" And without another thought, he went back to signing.

It was only in the heat of doing something like this, repeatedly signing his name on pictures of himself, that Gilderoy, who did not really know who he was at all, was able to feel as if maybe in a smaller sense, a more unconscious, general sense, he did, or would. For when you don't know who you are, he thought, you often must need something to hold on to, and a name was something.

So Gilderoy was surprised when he looked up what seemed like ten minutes, but was really close to an hour later, and noticed that all the pictures he had thrown into the red haired girl's lap were still sitting there, forlornly. Some were even at her feet, as she stared with rapt attention and interest at the boy with the scar and his friends, intent on what they were saying.

"Look, I didn't learn joined-up writing for nothing, you know!"

It was silent for a moment.

Then the red haired boy said something about having to go, each of the kids took an autograph, and they left. Strout met them near the door and escorted them for a ways. When she got back to Gilderoy, he was feeling moody again.

"Now don't look at me that way, Gilderoy," she clucked at him cheerily, plumping his pillow absentmindedly as she scurried around. "You've just had visitors!"

But, he thought as she bustled away, he was fairly certain that the people he had met, even the strange boy with the scar, had not been his visitors.

Gilderoy hung the remaining autographs he had written (37 in all) around his bed. At night they waved, smiled with their dazzling teeth, and winked at him in a most charming way.

It was like a fifty visitors, all for him, all standing by. Sort of like friends.