Disclaimer: I do not own these characters, nor aim to profit from them. They are the intellectual property of JK Rowling and other involved publishers and companies.

17: The Slughorn Lectures on the use of magic for the purpose of modulating, attenuating or degrading memories

It took quite a while for Slughorn to recover from his self pity. But like a boss he wallowed out of his pathetic simpering like the cold hearted bastard I begun to remember him as. He told me the tale of his escapade, following Cho's departure to find her husband.

"At first, I thought I would merely keep an eye out for Mrs. Haley," he was holding up his notebook, as though reading a bed time story to me. "I followed her as far as Edinburgh, and then a bit deeper into the highlands. But she didn't show much talent for investigation. As the days began stretching out, she stopped looking for her husband and began wallowing with childhood nostalgia over..." he peered into his notebook for reference, "Cedric Diggory, who was a Hufflepuff student and her beau back in Hogwarts. He died, by the way."

Cedric Diggory's name brings forth memories of a Yule Ball. A dress of pink and an image of me being the center of attention. I don't really recall who my date was, but everyone's eyes seemed to have fell upon me, back then. I smile at the warm memory.

"Yes, I was the Queen of that Ball," I sigh.

"I wouldn't know," he shrugs, uninterested, "Anyway, Cedric Diggory had been murdered by Lord Voldemort when he was a student of Hogwarts, cutting the dalliance quite short."

Voldemort! What an odd name!

"A Lord, you say?" My mind tries desperately to fish up something. I have a bad feeling about that name.

"A Dark Lord," Slughorn intones, menacingly.

"Like Darth Vader?" I frown.

"Who?"

"A Dark Lord... of the Sith?"

"What?"

"Forget it," I sigh. My memory is a mess right now. The name conjures up really frightening visions, mixed with a bunch of other emotions, but they're too complicated.

"Where was I..." he mumbles, then finds the passage in his own notebook, dabbing the part with his finger as though he'd just discovered something new. "Ah! And well, she stops investigating all together, opting instead to drink herself to oblivion."

"Can't blame the girl," I shrug. "Boyfriend dies by the hand of a Sith Lord when they're kids. I'm sure that must have been shocking. Something she must have carried through her life, I suppose. How good is your memory, anyway?"

"It's fine; better than you, obviously," he grits his teeth. "And stop calling him a Shit Lord, whatever that is. He was bad, I recall, but Voldemort was nothing like a Golgothan fecal demon. He was a Dark Wizard."

"Oooh!"

"Stop making stupid faces," he snaps. "Voldemort was later destroyed by Harry Potter. You might have seen the picture of me and the young man. A very prestigious member of the Wizarding community."

Harry Potter. I remember that name! I rush over to the wall, scanning for the picture that would bring memories forth. A bespectacled boy, looking rather uncomfortable, awkwardly shakes hands with Slughorn over a plaque that reads 'The Slug Club'.

"He was my date at the Yule Ball!" I gasp.

"Was he?" Slughorn scribbles something into his notebook. "He was your.. paramour, then?"

"No," my memory surfaces... "he ditched me."

"Ah!" Slughorn's voice is rather annoyingly content, as though he were saying 'I knew you couldn't be that important'. "Well, Harry Potter is a big name in the Wizarding World, Miss Patil."

"So how'd you end up losing your memory?" I ask, impatient to move the subject along.

"Cho eventually ended up in that tavern which you had begun investigating."

"Tavern?" I feel weak in the knees.

"Yes," Slughorn's voice fills with dread. "It was a tavern... that is all I have written down. And it is where all my investigations end. Your name is written in my notebook, as well. Do you remember anything?"

For a brief moment, my mind is filled with flashes of fuzzy faces, incoherent and vague. Almost like a ghost story, I see figures hooded and menacing as they close around me. Memories begin to emit pain. The more I try concentrating on the faces, the more agony I feel. Suddenly I could smell something in the air. Olfactory cues that tickle the back of my mind. I try to concentrate on some of the blurry faces. For a fleeting moment I think I see something tangible, like part of an eye, a mouth or a nose, but my headache only worsens.

"Parvati!" Slughorn shouts.

I am drenched in sweat, and my fists are balled and shaking. Surrounding me is a thin bluish hue, like an iridescent light, as though I were radioactive.

Slughorn stares at me.

"I can't remember any of the faces in that tavern, as well," he speaks cautiously. "Do you recall anything?"

My breath calms down, and my headache relents, as though it had been brought on more by hyperventilation.

"I saw a face," I reply. "A woman, at the center of the faceless. Hers is the only face that I recall, the only one I can make out clearly, but it's a face that brings forth no memories. She is dark haired. Unnatural pustules cover her face, like a disease. I can sense hatred, like burning vengeance."

Slughorn shakes his head. "I cannot recall any faces. My memory just terminates as soon as I envision Cho entering the place. I try to back track again and again, but I can't seem to find the place."

He's wallowing into self pity again. I scratch my head, trying to place things in order. "You mentioned Eloise Midgen."

Slughorn sighed. "That was after I entered the tavern. I walked about, forgotten and forgetful, and everything had been a nightmare. Only a week or so, however, for me, until I ran into a garage sale where I recovered most of my trophies. Someone had put all my little trinkets out in front of Flourish and Blotts, and their presence suddenly brought forth enough memories to help me along. No one was buying any of them, anyway, and the girl at the shop gave them to me, more out of pity, it seems."

He was quiet for a moment, and I could sense his pain in recalling the brief little week where he had lost himself. I almost rolled my eyes out of annoyance that he was upset that he had been through only a week which I had been through for more than a year. But pain and torment is not something to be compared. And he was older, weaker, and had more to lose by losing the past than I, I supposed. Pity. It's pity that I still can't openly hate him.

"Well," I smile, patting his arm, "At least you're better off now, than I am."

He sighs, nodding. "Most of my research has been after my amnesia, I fear. The names, Katie Bell, Eloise Midgen, and Orla Quirk were uncovered from little bits and pieces of my old trinkets. They only occupy something like a footnote in some of my old notebooks, grading papers and such, but it was enough that none of those names appeared in the Wizarding registries."

"Why only those three? You and I both saw a lot more."

"I don't remember seeing anything... but anyway, I believe," Slughorn looks at me sharply, "or at least I theorize, that it is in the nature of our amnesia that we do not recall them."

"Go on," I stare at him intently, trying to fish my memory of ... well, something I should have thought of long before: Memory charms.

"What ways can we magically alter memory?" he proposes. "There is the Obliviate charm-"

"Mnemone Radford, sixteenth century Obliviator," my mouth flies open like the veritable encyclopedia it's become. "Obliviate charm is highly regulated by the ministry of muggle relations, used by authorized Obliviators only to adjust the memory of muggles. Use against a Witch or Wizard is highly prohibited under the Obliviator's First Law, section two. The Ministry Obliviators, however, aren't very reliable in seeking out malicious users, in case of one Gilderoy Lockheart, a perjuror, who was only discovered later by Harry Potter- hmm, a rather nosy fellow, it seems. Anyway, the obliviate charm however doesn't actually erase the memory, as much as buries it under a new layer of thought, much like plastering over with a fresh sheet of paper. Hence, under severe stress or other conditions, these memories may surface."

Slughorn nods. "I thought, at first, it might be Obliviate."

I frown, knowing his objections. "But Obliviate only affects the target. It doesn't erase someone from the world."

"If someone actually performed each and every act of memory wiping, solely relying on the Obliviate charm, the Ministry was bound to have noticed, even if it were staffed only with the most inept Obliviators."

"Besides," I add, a flash of insight crosses my mind, "if it were Obliviate, severe stress would be the key to unlock the tampered memories. What I have experienced indicates that it's not stress that's the trigger, but more of a related item."

Slughorn nodded, "Exactly!"

"A modified Legilimens could alter the mind," I suggest, "especially if you create a subconscious self as a proxy within the mind to act against the host mind-"

"Too complex for anyone to perform without the Magical Academia taking note," Slughorn shakes his head. "Besides, you have to recall, that to us, it happened involuntarily. It would be nearly impossible to implant a histrionic mental core without the cooperation of the subject, and thus also rendering it impossible to also use as a wide spread mechanism."

"Let's get back to Obliviate," I have an odd feeling that I'm onto something.

"I thought you said Ministry obliviators would detect a widespread misuse," he squints, concentrating. "And it wasn't the nature of what affected us as well. So if the charm wasn't used for everyone, and it wasn't used on us, what's the point of returning to it?"

"I have a nagging sensation that somehow the charm has been used, in one way or another," I persist. "It's a gut feeling."

"Well," he snorts, "unless you can defecate your precious gut feeling out into the world, keep yourself constipated for a while, my dear. Moving on!"

We discuss the theoretical possibilities well into the night. I have an odd feeling that this is how it had always been between us. Perhaps in the past, when we were indeed a Master and an Apprentice, I imagine we must have has such animated discussions all the time. It must have been an exhilarating experience. Oddly my memory seems to only regurgitate some deep misgivings against him. But Slughorn seems nice; arrogant, pompous, and easily wounded, but still he's just a gentle old soul. I can't imagine that I actually must have hated the man.

"So, you've been living alone... here?" I ask as I settle down some supper I was able to salvage from his cupboard that consisted almost entirely of canned foods.

He tries to pass as nonchalant, but somehow his eyes are fixed solidly on the meal that I've prepared for him. The poor man probably had been eating directly out of the can until now. He looks famished, tentatively taking a cautious bite, his expression is like that of an exaggerated food commercial.

"Yes, yes," he waves my comments away from his meal. "I've fortified the place to be nigh undetectable. At least the Memory Witches-" (as we've begin to call them) "- won't find me here."

"Well, I've been living in the muggle world, and they don't seem to have followed me-"

"Eloise Midgen?" Slughorn reminds me.

"How can you be sure it's this Eloise Midgen?" I forgot to pursue that line of thought.

"Well," Slughorn settles down his mashed potatoes. "I followed her when she left you at teh tea house. It didn't take long for her to revert back into her old self. From what I've gathered, she interned under your late friend Lavender Brown since she graduated from Hogwarts."

Slughorn flips open a notebook page, showing me the data he's been able to compile on Eloise Midgen. A veritably pimple ridden girl, dapper and down. There wasn't a lot of photos, mostly obscured behind the shoulders of her classmates, and even those she seemed to shy away from the camera. Only one brief accidental photo of her in the background clearly showed her face. And that face really didn't call to mind anyone, least of all the primary perpetrator whom we had tagged as 'the Leader'.

"Huh," I hand his treasured notebook back to him. "I don't remember."

"That's another curious thing, you see." he muses. "There wasn't a lot to forget about these girls in the first place. If there was a charm, or some magic involved in making the world forget about them, it didn't really need a lot of effort. They were practically nobodies to begin with."