As he might have been be after a night of unencumbered drinking, Darcy was mildly surprised he remembered what had happened.

From the white walls to the stiffness of the fresh-pressed cot, the sterility of the hospital room was familiar, yet, in the haze of first awakening, felt distinctly wrong. There were no beeps of heart monitors, nor odd cords stuck into his veins. A cloth divider hung around his bed, blocking off the view of anyone or anything but a faint scrolling pattern on dusty peach-tinted fabric.

Darcy tried to shoot up in his bed and instantly got a rush to the head that proved this a terrible idea. He slowly leaned back down, outstretched his right hand and brushed at the divider, pulling away just enough for him to see his surroundings.

Were it not for the wands and the bizarrely uniforms, the rows of cots seemed far more reminiscent of a World War II era hospital than a modern one. The long, lime green choir robes were issue enough for Darcy to do a second take in disbelief. He may have tried for a third, were his concentration weren't torn by the curtain parting on the other side.

"Darcy." Dudley stomped over to Darcy's bedside, stating his son's name sternly, but not quite angrily. His hands clutched the side of the cot with such force, it sent a shake through the mattress. Darcy turned his head, twisting just enough that he could confirm his father was indeed speaking to him. "How're you feeling?"

Darcy closed his eyes, casting the light back out for another second. "Is that a jolly green choir?"

"No," Dudley's strong front was betrayed by the dip in his tone, as if he couldn't quite understand what he was trying to explain. "They said they're healers. Like doctors, but, not."

"Who're greatly inspired by Kermit the Frog?" Darcy tried to joke. No one laughed. He pressed a hand over his face, blocking the light out more.

"You up to talking?"

"If it doesn't involve thought."

For once, Darcy was almost thankful for the shadow of his father hovering near him. It made the world a little less bright. He rolled further onto his side, so he'd be facing towards his dad.

"You know what happened?" Dudley moved his fingers up to Darcy's shoulder, trying to give a supportive gesture. Even through the bedsheet, Darcy could feel the coarseness of his dad's calloused fingers, and, more unusually, the absence of them where his palm should have been.

"Remember, yes. Know…" Darcy forced his fingers apart to squint up at his dad's bandaged hand. Instantly, the medic's words trickled to the forefront of his mind. "What attacked you?"

"Neighbor's dog. Dark wizards. Not that bad."

"That… is a really weird sentence, dad."

"Not the first time. The last one was way worse." Dudley's grip on his shoulder grew slightly tenser, as if telling Darcy without speaking that it would get worse, and likely soon. "Your uncle showed up before anything. Your mom's at a safe house."

"What dark wizards? You mean, that one you hid from?"

Dudley shook his head a bit. "Some other one. He takes them down for a job. Sometimes, some of 'em want to get him first and attack us. Remember visiting Grandma Carol? Disney World?"

"Sort of?"

"Never happened. We hid. He did some spell thing after. He faked the souvenirs, changed the memory."

"Except yours?"

"Yeah."

In a way, Darcy felt almost less disturbed than he should have been by this. He wondered if Atticus knew, but opted not to ask that in favor of a bigger issue. If they had done the magical equivalent of neutralizing him after similar issues before, why did he still remember this one?

If Darcy hadn't been dizzy before, trying to catch up was fixing it. He placed one hand firmly on each side of himself, pushing up on the cot so he could try and lean upright. He needed to see the look on his father's face to know his answers weren't lies.

"In a week, will I remember this conversation?" Darcy asked, his voice dipping lower.

Dudley sounded firm as ever. "You'll need to talk to Harry."

"That's not an answer."

"I don't have one."

"Uncle Harry tell you what happened to me? Drugging? Spells? Who found me?" Darcy tried to imply that he was asking for any information whatsoever that his dad had to give.

It seemed that Dudley didn't catch on, though, as he'd settled on shrugging. "Both."

"Can you tell me?"

"Wait for your uncle," Dudley insisted. The stern tone meant something, but the implications of how Dudley wouldn't answer it was more cryptic to Darcy than a simple explanation—mainly because if the answer was simple, Dudley could've told it.

"You know, no's an answer. I don't like it. But you could go with no."

In a rare moment, Darcy's difficulty managed to make his dad a little happier. There was nothing close to a smile on his features, but there was a little less stiffness in his inflection. Dudley patted his hand where he'd once been holding on, almost but not quite swatting Darcy. "You're yourself, again. Good."

"I'd rather be Stephen Strange," Darcy quipped again, trying to distract them both. It didn't work for long.

Dudley waved a hand, flagging for the attention of the fluorescent green graduates. "Hey! Green people. Can my kid eat yet? He missed dinner by being unconscious." He shouted to the crowd. Darcy flinched at the noise.

"Sir, quiet, please," one of the healers called back, quieter, but still too loud for comfort.

One green robe stepped away from the patient they were tending to and approached Darcy's bedside. They set their eyes on Dudley, addressing him and not Darcy. "Does he have an appetite?"

"Yes," Dudley answered for him.

Darcy raised his head as high as he could muster while leaning back on his arms. "Not much. Gelatin and applesauce?"

Dudley stood his ground, looking only at the healer. "He means yes."

The healer chuckled lightly, as if listening to a colleague at a comedy club's open mic night and being too polite not to indulge the delusion they were funny. "If you have any, it should be fine."

The healer raised her wand towards the doorway, murmured "accio applesauce, accio spoon" and, within a few seconds, the foodstuff and utensil were shooting through the air. She picked up a tray from beside Darcy's bed and pointed the two items down, forcing them to land on the tray. She passed the gravity-bound items towards Darcy with a smile. "Enjoy." She turned slightly, facing both of them. "If you need anything else, there's a bell by the bed. Works a bit better than shouting." She winked, turned on one foot and sprung back away.

Darcy clasped his hand to his mouth and struggled not to snicker at her. Dudley reached down for a bucket and offered it out, prompting with a "here".

Darcy raised his hand and shook that away, gesturing it off. He swayed to grab his spoon, slid lower in his bed and tried to eat in what little peace he could find. He took about three bites from the applesauce cup before crashing back to sleep.

He awoke to such a soft whisper of his name, he assumed that he'd imagined it.

By the time Darcy's eyes cracked open, he could see faint flickers of candlelight passing overhead. The dusty peach divider had been drawn around his bed once, concealing all details of the room but the silhouettes of the presumably green cloaked healers on the hospital floor. The squeaks of footsteps and rolling cots were too soft to distinguish as coming from any specific place. Wherever those people were, they caused just enough noise to further muffle murmurs from a trio of nearby silhouettes.

Darcy raised his head to glance at the curtain, but not around it. As tempted as he was to go pee, and he really, really had to, he was just a smidge more invested in hearing what these people had to say.

"I didn't receive my supervisor's approval for this," a stranger, presumably another healer, stretched her hands out to gesture two figures away.

The second silhouette was also cloaked, moderately tall with an undistinguishable build. The third had a tall bun, was strangely box-shaped, and was carrying an assortment of what seemed to be blocks.

"It's auror business. We've got to be discreet."

"Be that it may, if there's not a life at stake tonight, you can come with visiting hours in the morning."

"Can you think of anything more discreet than being surrounded by dozens of concerned families?" the second silhouette asked back in a way that immediately jogged Darcy's memory. He knew that voice, now. More importantly, he was relatively confident that voice was here to see him.

"The rules are for our patients' well-being. Unless someone else's life is in direct danger, we ask you give them their rest. Please," the healer insisted respectfully.

Darcy closed his eyes most of the way, so he'd pass as having just woken up. He flung an arm across his curtain, pushing it aside. "Can someone take me to the toilet? I can find my bedpan, but it's terrible," he asked, his words hushed enough that he didn't think he'd wake anyone, but plenty loud to be heard.

The candlelight was far too dim for any look Darcy got to be clear, but he could confirm far more detail than the sheet allowed. The cloak did indeed belong to a healer. There was a short, blocky woman carrying a bunch of thin, long boxes. Most importantly, Uncle Harry was here.

"Look. He's awake already. We'll take him for you. Everyone could be happy," Harry suggested. The word 'could' stood out to Darcy in this statement as making it technically true for every person everywhere.

The healer seemed to notice this, too. "Alright, Mr. Potter." She wagged her wand towards the lot of them, sending out one quick flicker of a spark in warning. "Stay in the building. I'm calling security for protocol. They'll be watching you, so, don't you dare try anything funny," she threatened in such a stuffy way, Darcy suspected her idea of a punishment was to force someone into writing a letter of apology.

Harry nodded. "Of course. We're completely humorless," he agreed in word but not inflection.

That, the healer didn't notice. She folded her arms and stepped aside, allowing Harry and the blocky stranger to cross the otherwise quiet hospital floor.

Darcy unclutched his hand from the curtain. He attempted to slide off the bed, only to nearly stumble on the floor. Harry grabbed onto his arm, pulling Darcy back upright. "Lean here. I've got you."

"I'm fine."

"Sure," Harry dismissed, most likely placating Darcy rather than believing him. Considering Darcy also knew he could barely stand, he couldn't take that much offense.

Darcy shifted his weight towards Harry and held on while he staggered his way across the floor. He spotted a glistening metallic sign beneath one of the candles, lighting up the number '3' and the label of 'Potions and Plant Poisoning'.

Darcy waited until they were most of the way towards the elevator for him to hush a question. "Who attacked me and how? Dad said you'd say," he started yawning halfway through and struggled to swallow the signs of it.

"It was a pureblood supremacist and some followers. They tried evaporating a potion called the drought of living death. It puts people to an endless sleep until given the counter-curse. It didn't work," Harry started to explain.

The more Harry explained, the more Darcy paid attention to the words, and stopped watching his increasingly unstable footing. It seemed strange to Darcy that Harry would take the time to explain any of this if he was going to replace the memory a few days later.

Harry gave an extra strong pull on Darcy's arm, yanking him up. Darcy shook his head, snapping as close to attention as he could. "Do you know what a pureblood supremacist is?"

"A quasi-racist against muggles and offspring? Of other muggles, not the band." Rather than wait for another question from Harry, Darcy jumped on throwing his own. "You know who saved me? I'd send flowers."

Harry tugged Darcy to a wobbling stop in front of the elevator doors. He pressed the button. They both paused. "We're not sure, yet. Either someone passed by and left, or, it might be possible that you saved yourself," Harry meant to explain, but the words in that order were even more confusing.

"Did I hallucinate the hyper-realistic tin men? Or did that actually happen?"

"You mean, did the people who attacked you turn to metal?"

It was harder to admit "yes" to that question than Darcy expected. It sounded as normal as it felt insane.

There was a part of him that wished he hadn't seen his uncle nod understandingly. "We found them trapped that way. It was a type of transfiguration. A type of magic. Changing living things into something else."

The elevator dinged open in front of them. Somehow, the act of holding this conversation made Darcy's feet feel even less steady against the seemingly shifting ground. He wobbled his way across, matching Harry's intentionally slow pace to enter the elevator. The silent, blocky woman and her boxes followed along behind.

It wasn't until they were standing still that Darcy dared to try staggering another question. "You think I got them to go metal Medusa on each other, or, something?"

Harry stayed quiet for a moment, seriously considering how best to phrase this without being ambiguous. "You might be a wizard. We're going upstairs to test if you can use a wand. If any of them react, we'll know."

Another day, at a less disorienting time, that might've been the best news Darcy ever heard. Between the rocking sensation of the elevator and the general sense of malaise that kept him clinging to Harry as might as cowardly child, he was left with less enthusiasm and more crushing confusion. The best he could manage to process it all was to stare blankly at the buttons and admit his other, lingering thought. "I really need to pee."

If Darcy hadn't been so locked in his befuddlement, he might've noticed the double-take this reaction got from Harry. "…We'll stop on the way."

As promised, they did stop at the bathroom. While Harry made sure that Darcy didn't pass out in any stalls, the box-holding woman arranged things on the fifth floor.

By the time Darcy stumbled his way out from the bathroom, the souvenir shop had been illuminated as best as candles could allow. The staggered flickering of dozens of flames unified into an unwavering beam along each wall. Rows upon rows of various goodies lined the faintly sweet scented shelves of what should've been a store abandoned to the night. The cashier's chair had been dragged to the center of the room. A stack of at least twenty thin, slate blue boxes wrapped in brown ribbons rest by its arm.

At first, Darcy stalled in the doorway, taken aback by the glow. He pressed his palms over his eyes and squinted, struggling to adjust. Harry, who was still standing over Darcy, guided him forward, crossing the room towards that chair. They came to a stop just a few steps from the former box-holder.

"Darcy, this is Brooke. She's a wand keeper. She'll tell you how to handle them. If anything goes wrong, I'm here to stop it," Harry tried to explain.

Darcy extended his free hand towards the newly-identified Brooke. "Hi, Brooke, I'm Darcy. I was drugged involuntarily," he stated proudly, slightly as a joke, but mostly to justify how terrible he must've looked.

Regardless of the reason, Brooke shook her head. "I heard. Congratulations. Now sit." She slapped both her hands on the back of the lone chair. The smacking sound alone forced Darcy's attention to it.

Harry loosened his grip on Darcy, lowering him down towards the chair. Darcy flopped limply across it. It took two quick blinks and accompanying shakes of the head for Darcy to remotely resemble being aware of where he was.

Now that he was seated, Darcy was at roughly the right height to look the wandkeeper straight at eye level. He had just managed to notice this when Brooke pulled the ends of one ribbon with her teeth.

"Potter give little time to be selective. I rush to describe incident to vands. These say late bloomer might be interesting, perhaps," Brooke spoke through a heavy accent of no particular eastern European country, and yet a little bit like most of them at once. The closest he could come to placing it was the Maximoff twins in Age of Ultron, which was automatically wrong. "You may not know this, boy, but, vizards do not pick vands. A vand picks them."

"Like pet cats?" Darcy meant to joke. She ignored it.

Regardless of her accent's place of origin, Brooke raised the lid from the box, revealing a thin, tan wand with visible wood grain and a thick handle nestled in velvet. "Is fir, thirteen and three quarters, unicorn hair. Clings to survivors of impossible things." Brooke pinched the wand between two fingers with the ribbon around them both, preventing her from physically brushing the wood.

Brooke cupped her remaining hand around Darcy's, pulling it closer to her, and rolled the handle into his grasp. Even in his drowsiness, the proximity sent a quick shudder through his shoulders. He grit his teeth and tried to concentrate on his hands.

"Grasp against palm. All fingers graze. Hold steady, and no choking. As vith person, few enjoy choking," she almost admonished.

As instructed, Darcy let his fingers wrap around the handle. He loosely jostled the wand from Brooke's grip, pulling it towards himself with the handle pointing inwards.

Brooke paused at the sight of him, furrowing her lips and eyebrows. She shook her head, turned at least thirty degrees away from him, and pointed towards the wall. "Now vave. Say first vord to mind. Content does not matter. If likes you, it tells you."

Darcy raised his hand, still loosely grasping the wand. He pointed along the wall and waved his hand carefully through the shape of a 'u' while speaking. "By the eye of Agamoto." His arm stayed extended and his eyes attentive while he stared at the nothingness ahead.

"No, no. Faster. Vith meaning! Vands sense passion. There no passion in vet noodle arms!"

The analogy brought a wrinkle through Darcy's nose. "Agamoto!" Darcy thrust his hand across himself, slashing the wand as he might a dagger through the air.

The only thing to move was Brooke marching back towards him. She wrapped the ribbon around her hand, snatched the wand back and tucked it safely in its box.

"Perhaps fir too firm," she spoke towards the box, so intensely concentrated on it that one might be forgiven for expecting the wand to reply.

Brooke set the box behind the chair before returning her eyes to the stack of boxes. She searched through the labels, leaving Darcy to curl his neck at an awkward angle to watch her rummaging, and Harry to keep holding his own wand at the ready in case something happened. Brooke emerged with a new, slightly shorter box in hand, the ribbon already removed.

"Valnut, ten and a quarter, unicorn hair, agreeable, likes vit and cleverness," she offered a thicker, cocoa-brown wand from its box.

Again, Darcy took the wand into his grasp. He fumbled to grab it for a second, partly from drowsiness and primarily due to staring less at the wand than at his uncle's cautious focus. Harry stared straight back.

Darcy shook his head to pretend that hadn't happened. He closed his eyes and tried to think of what little he knew about principles of magic. Perhaps he needed a specific intention.

Darcy concentrated across the way, focusing up to a candle overhead. He raised the wand with a swooping swoosh. Every ounce of concentration in his body honed on one mental image—to take the tiny flame flickering on one single candle and blow it out. "Extinguish!"

To say that nothing happened was dishonest. Someone did move. Brooke stepped right back to Darcy's chair and plucked the wand from his hand.

"Not so," Brooke stated, far more focused on the wand than on him. She lightly tapped the wand back into its case, opened a new box and started again. A slightly crooked, smooth wand with an almost butter-yellow tip and flecks of bark on its handle rest inside. She pushed it towards him, not even bothering to remove it for him this time. "Villow, twelve even, phoenix feather, springy. A healer's wand, fond of untapped potential." Even she didn't sound like she thought this would work, anymore.

Sensing the lack of enthusiasm, Darcy checked back to Harry. His uncle was still watching just as intently, giving the distinct impression he anticipated something more than flailing gibberish.

Darcy took the box from Brooke's grasp. He reached for a shelf beside him and leaned against it, pushing himself to stand. His fingers squeezed through the cushioned wrappings to force the wand free, then pointed it back at the candle with determination. He kept his eyes closed, picturing the flame going out and the wind washing over it. "Alakazam!"

The room was quiet. Darcy opened his eyes. The light still shone ahead, completely unchanged.

Darcy reached back for the last box, put the wand away, and allowed himself to slump over the shelf of gift-shop approved treats and knick-knacks. The row of snow globes and fake dancing flowers wobbled under him. For hardly spending thirty seconds upright, he felt ridiculously sore.

Again, Brooke approached, taking the box from him. Again, she set the rejected wand aside, reached into the stack beside the chair and half-waved a new wooden stick at him. Her entire body was sinking with a bitter dissatisfaction he might've related to more if he weren't suddenly so desperate to sleep.

"Twelve and a half, ebony, dragon heartstring, unyielding and combative. Dark vood for dark name," Brooke offered.

At first, Darcy was so distracted he missed sight of the slightly curled pitch-black wand being waved in front of him. Only the handle shown any signs of a wood grain, where it formed a twisted circle that faintly reminded Darcy of a raindrop.

Darcy's finger grazed above Brooke's, reaching through her grip to hold the wand. His right hand had barely made contact with the handle before his left shoulder fell into the shelf beside him.

It was a testament to how much he shouldn't have been awake that Darcy's first reaction to falling wasn't to catch himself. It wasn't even to notice how what a single second ago had been a hard, wooden shelf had suddenly turned into an especially tall pillow. He'd simply let himself fall, oblivious to anything but the people nearby.

It wasn't until the third second that Darcy registered the wand was glowing green.

"Augck—" Darcy released the handle and snapped his hand back. He wobbled along the halfway-shifted shelf, which, upon closer inspection, now bore a much closer resemblance to a plush toy replica of a store shelf than the wooden case it had been.

"Pick the vand!" Brooke demanded. Her inflection lost a little of its impact when Darcy's head was squished against a wood-printed pillow.

Darcy set a hand against his plush shelf. He'd had every intent of pushing himself away, yet his hand sank so far into feathers, he only slumped further in.

The ebony wand hovered up from the floor, then up more, until it brushed at Darcy's fingertips. Darcy presumed it was Harry's spell, since he could almost see Brooke, and from the little he was cognizant of, she had no wand and hadn't spoken.

Darcy rocked his weight further onto his right foot, balancing just enough that he could loosely grab the wand. A shaking spread through his arm, spreading a buzzing hum through him that, while not conductive to taking a nap, was strangely comforting in its own right. The glow grew paler, the emerald green dimming to that he'd most often seen on glow in the dark stickers. No wisecrack could do this justice, not that he had the awareness left to try. In this one instant, Darcy was filled with an inviolable sense of drowsy, drug-induced harmony.

He raised his wand towards the ceiling, taking aim at the annoyingly persistent candle one more time. The words of evocation braced to strike.

As he meant to speak, Darcy caught sight of the familial blur. Uncle Harry was still watching with his own wand firmly in hand. That formerly expectant look had disappeared. Instead, he was pretty obviously staring at the mangled atrocity of the lopsided hybrid of a half-wooden, half couch cushion shelf, and all the befuddlement it so rightfully inspired.

Harry didn't use a word to answer Brooke. Instead, he addressed Darcy. "Darcy. You can put the wand down."

Hopeful that permission implied sleeping soon, Darcy was quick to let his arm fall, waving the wand down along with his flickering eyelids.

"Perhaps not quick," Brooke added, a bit too slowly, if the immediate sizzling of boiling water against glass was an indication.

With one uncoordinated wave, a row of snow globes started boiling inside their glass spheres. The sound hardly reached Darcy's ears before the spheres started shattering, shooting flecks of glass across the room.

Harry shot his wand out along with a shielding spell, blocking most of the spray from the group. Thousands of shards clattered against the field and trickled to the floor. The few which didn't crash, most of them close to Darcy, had instead begun to float upwards in the form of tiny, opalescent bubbles.

Brooke cackled with a giddy laugh that, if slightly less chipper, would've made an outlet mall Halloween store proud.

As Darcy watched the bubbles float up, the truth finally drifted down into his admittedly disoriented consciousness. No matter what logic should have implied, no matter what he thought he'd known of himself, no one else had cast that spell.

Longer than he had the right to, Darcy kept staring. He meant to wait for the bubbles to vanish, so he could pretend not to notice the hallucination they very well might have been. No matter how long he looked, they remained, hovering firmly overhead.

He assumed he'd been staring for long enough that someone was close enough to hear him ask a question he'd long since given up on. "Am I leaving for the hog pen?"

"Hogvarts," Brooke corrected automatically.

"I don't know. Maybe." Harry tucked his own wand away, allowing him a firmer grip on Darcy. He pulled Darcy's wand-wielding arm over his shoulder very slowly, being careful not to poke himself or accidentally swish Darcy's wand while taking it from his grasp. "I'll talk to your dad tonight, and the headmistress tomorrow. Do you want to talk to him with me, or go back to sleep?"

Given the lethargic, lifeless flop of Darcy's head and limbs when he tried to stagger forward, he thought it pointless to reply. His eyes set shut, blocking out the hovering bubbles, broken glass and Picasso's favorite shelving unit in favor of quiet.

Harry's second statement proved the assumption right. "Sleep it is."

As difficult as it was to make himself budge when all he wanted was his own bed, the moment Darcy hit his temporary mattress, a new idea snaked into his mind. No matter how long he kept his eyes closed, or what dreams he imagined himself having, Darcy was haunted by something he feared no one would say, yet had started to feel true. Uncle Harry hadn't only stuck around just because Darcy was family. Maybe Harry had come because magical police needed to discern self-defense from assault and, possibly, murder. Those three assailants turned to statues might have died. After all, metal couldn't breathe.

That the thought stuck in his mind so long exemplified Darcy's biggest problem of the day. As was often so, his logic fell in the way of magic.