Elleyne came to work late on December 27th. She had been disturbed by the news that morning. A girl had died, apparently from falling down her stairs, but there was no exact proof. It was all very strange. Perhaps a murder, Elleyne thought as she pocketed her wand, checking the time on the wall. The scary thing about accidents like that were that they could happen to anyone. It could've been one of Elleyne's neighbors. Hell, it could have been her.

Elleyne walked into St. Mungo's with slight apprehension. Thirty-five minutes late. Josh Brodyn would kill her. And her expectations were not disappointed, she found as she ran into him in the corridor outside of the Spell Damage corridor.

"Elleyne!" Brodyn exclaimed, dropping a pitiful stack of papers and bending to pick them up almost simultaneously.

"Scare you, did I?" she grinned.

Josh didn't take the humor in stride. Big surprise.

"You wouldn't have scared me had you been on time," he puffed testily.

Elleyne didn't think this particularly fair. Others had been late far more often than herself; it seemed that being the only healer who was both young and single made Josh think that she had nothing better to do, nothing to detain her from her duties.

And she found herself wishing, more and more often, that she did. But that was beside the point.

"Just…just be on time," Josh finished rather lamely, levitating his papers once he had organized them, seemingly under the impression that they would suffer less harm this way.

Elleyne nodded, and walked down the disconcertingly white hallway and to the door of the closed ward. It had been a long time since she'd seen Gilderoy, and she was eager to check on his progress. She was unusually impatient for the young former celebrity to regain his memory, and had to admit that she might have been acting a bit unfairly to the other patients over the last couple of months.

Stepping through the doorway of the closed ward, Elleyne looked around and immediately spotted Gilderoy. He was sitting at the wooden desk where he had learned to write and read. As she came up behind him, Elleyne saw that he was experimenting with and practicing flourishes on his now very impressive and much-practiced autographs. He looked up as she came to stand beside him.

"Hi, Roy," she said, smiling at the nickname he had insisted she use from henceforth.

Gilderoy grinned hugely. "You remembered!"

"Of course I remembered, silly. How was Christmas in the old cell?"

Gilderoy shrugged, looking down for a second. "Okay. I didn't get to hand out as many of these as I'd have liked to," he said, waving a hand toward the autograph.

Elleyne had the feeling that there might be something Gilderoy wasn't telling her, but she left off for the time being, despite her curiosity.

Then, randomly, Gilderoy spoke again, in a tone of wonderment and mystery.

"I was a teacher," he breathed.

Elleyne was shocked. "A teacher?"

She couldn't remember ever hearing about Gilderoy in any position of the like, and wondered if this was some sort of dream he had had.

"Yes," Gilderoy confirmed, sounding very certain. "I was a teacher, and I taught the boy with the scar. Why, I probably taught him all the tricks in the book!" He flashed another quick grin.

"But…Roy…" Elleyne began. She wasn't sure what to say to this. Then, "Hold a minute. Who's this boy with the scar?"

This time Gilderoy hesitated.

"I…I had visitors. For the first time, except…except they weren't really mine, I don't think. Maybe the boy was, at least. He said I taught him, you know…the boy with the scar did, that is. But then the other boy said they didn't need autographs. He was probably just being modest…but yes, the boy with the scar, he came with his friends, he had lots of them….I wish I had lots of friends."

Elleyne, who had been about to say something, was frozen by these words. She didn't know quite what to say to this. An awkward silence passed, then Gilderoy said, "He was familiar, too, that boy, the one with the scar. I've known him. I'm sure I have."

Elleyne thought. "What kind of scar did this boy have, Roy?" she asked.

"It was on his forehead, and long and jagged. It was pretty easy to see. Why?"

Oh gods, Elleyne thought, Harry Potter? Did Harry Potter really visit Gilderoy?

"Hmm…I don't know, Roy. Not really. Ergh, I'm so absentminded today!" she groaned. "I'm sorry."

"No, it's okay. I know the feeling."

They had a good laugh over that one.

It was later in the afternoon when Gilderoy said, "I must've done a lot of great things in the past, you know."

Elleyne looked up from a brief report she was writing on Henry, the squawking wonder.

"In my mail there were many enlightening letters. I don't know what half the things I fought were, but I've done some pretty impressive things! I hardly know how I had the time!"

"Well, you wrote books about everything you did, actually. I'm sure you got that from the letters. I also think you may have added some fiction to the facts, just to make things more interesting. Some people just don't understand the difference. You know what I mean, right?"

Gilderoy looked mystified.

"Never mind. You were a good, admirable person, though. That's the important part."

And there it was. It was the first time Elleyne had lied to Gilderoy, and she wondered why she'd done it. She had been one of the few young but not-so-impressionable witches that had not been excited at Gilderoy Lockhart's charm, a few years back when he was all the rage. "He's just a pretty face," she could remember thinking with disgust "and his books are all lies, the lot of them." Still, she had been a bit surprised to realize just how right she had been. Her sister Laura, as well as a few of her friends, had had to deal with her teasing for a staggering amount of time. They had been besotted with the fraudulent rogue, but Elleyne had been sure that she would never like anything about Gilderoy Lockhart.

So what had made her lie? For one, she did like Gilderoy. How could she not, when he was, after all, almost as innocent as a child? You had to have a great amount of sympathy for anyone who had suffered a total Obliviation. But it was more than that, and she knew it.

Gilderoy had a chance of being a considerate, fine person, and Elleyne wasn't sure that the truth of what he had been would be a good thing to know at all. For this reason, she half wished he wouldn't regain his memory. With the memory, vestiges of his old personality would surely come back to Gilderoy. She knew that it was part of the recovery process, and that she should be glad of it, but…

But what?

You lied.

Later, as Elleyne gave over the night shift to Healer Loell and apparated to the ground floor of the building, and still later, as she sat awake in front of the fire in her small, sometimes lonely but always comfortable house, she thought about what she had done, trying to find justification.

I made him feel good about himself; that's all that should matter.

But it's not all that matters, and you know it, Elleyne. You lied to a patient! You're supposed to have their trust.

I didn't want him to know the horrible truth!

So you shouldn't have told him anything, now should you? That's not your job. Your job is to help them recover, and telling him things isn't going to make him remember them. You should know from your training; with cases like his, all you can do is hand him cues and hope that he will start to remember. Telling stories, good or bad, will not help if he doesn't recognize them.

Elleyne knew this was true. And then there was the fact that she would be in enormous trouble if Brodyn ever found out that she'd been telling anything to Gilderoy. Or that she'd given him his mail. The mail would surely endanger her job, if anyone found out she had given it to him. But she had been careful to only let him peruse it during the 24 hour shift that belonged purely to her.

But still, they might find out.

I don't care. It was worth it.

And it was.

But you still lied to him.

…