21: Forget me Not

"Tracey?" Blaise grins. He rarely smiles, I recall, but when he does, it's rather disarming.

"Hey, Blaise," I feel myself blushing, but I am immediately derailed from the odd voice escaping my lips.

"Busy?" Blaise pulls me along, hoisting an arm around my shoulder, or her shoulder... Polyjuice is definitely not recommended for people suffering amnesia. I'm having a hard time as it is for Blaise to pour out his affection to someone else for me.

I can't help but take a couple of peeps at my ex-boyfriend. It's still fuzzy in my mind why he broke up, but I can't help grinning like an idiot, despite the fact that my inner self is screaming 'he's not into you! It's Tracey he's smiling at!'

Wait, a minute. Tracey?

Who's Tracey and how the hell did I end up looking like her when I drank a vial of polyjuice potion concocted from hairs from... Roger's bed.

It feels like a stone drops in my stomach.

"Wait, Blaise," I push him away, not sure what to think.

Immediately, Blaise's face washes from an eager loving look into one of steady apologetic withdrawal.

"Sorry, about that," he backs off. "Look, Tracey. I'm over it!"

"What are you over?" I squint.

"You know,..." he glares at me/Tracey, "Padma."

I can't help myself. I'm not sure if it's pure unadulterated joy, or something more mischievous in seeing Blaise Zabini squirm.

"Padma?" I laugh incredulously.

"Stop it!"

I can't. I can't stop laughing, whether it's because the obvious fact that the Memory Witches haven't been able to completely wipe the trace of me from Blaise's mind, or that despite his mind wipe he still remembers some feeling about me that he had to pester Padma, or that Tracey had actually spurned him because of it.

I can't stop laughing. I haven't had anything good happen to me in a long time.

"Look, I said I'm over her, Tracey," he scowls.

"No," I shake my head, jabbing a finger at his chest, accusingly. "No you're not. Not when you keep denying that you are, you're not."

Blaise rolls his eyes. "Whatever. Anyway, I just ran into an odd little pair, coughing up blood."

Oh, right. About that. My mind settles down, despite itself.

"Odd?"

"Well, they're unregistered Wizards, for one thing," he begins, "not a single record on them. No Wizarding Registry, no Immigration ID, no Hogwarts diploma, no apparition licence, no Squib number, nothing."

"Vagrants," I shrug, though I quietly take note to the extent the Witches had been combing through the ministry. Did they, perhaps, like Slughorn, have an agent inside who could expunge these records? Did they cast some all encompassing erasing magic? Was such a thing even possible?

"The older one's contracted muggle disease. At least I think so. That's why I need your help on this."

"Me?"

"Well," Blaise shrugs. "You are the official muggle transmitted disease specialist."

"Huh," I snort. Help me out here, Blaise! "Any opinion of your own?"

"Well," Blaise scratches his head. Yep, the hook-line-and-sinker. Blaise would never back away from an opportunity to be an arrogant prick. Somehow, I feel like I know Blaise far better than anyone I've encountered. "I first thought it was..." I try to keep up, but Healer lingo is pretty weird. Some of the words they use share word roots with arcane charms, and I can catch a gist of it. But mostly what I'm hearing is..."Blah blah blah, (something in the lungs), blah blah blah, (blood), blah (zombie) blah blah, (poison), but then, I thought, blah blah (Runes) blah (cake?) blah blach blah (crab?) blah blah blah (Ice cream?). So I'm waiting for the results. (okay, not ice cream)"

I nod, trying to dissect the jumbled up words in my head. Believe it or not, Parvati Patil, gentle folks, learned how to study properly only after she graduated Hogwarts! If there's anything I'm good at, it's ignoring things that don't matter. I am terribly good and pooling a whole lump of frivolity into the waste basket of my mind. I guess it's probably why I'm able to carry around this huge heap of encyclopedic charms knowledge. I dump a whole lot of the knowledge that I really don't care about, and crumble it down into little bits that I can swallow.

Yay for me.

The answer is plainly obvious.

"You don't know what you're talking about, do you?" I sigh.

Blaise, I kid you not, "harumph"s.

"Right," I shake my head. "It's not a prophetic curse, it's not an undead parasite, it's not nether, it's not Lethe River Water. Somehow a Wizard contracted a muggle disease, end of story?"

Blaise flushes red. "That's why I'm asking you. You're the one who's supposed to be the expert on muggle born diseases. That's why you left St. Mungo's wasn't it?"

Well, now I know.

If that was the case, we won't be seeing Tracey Davis here. And probably her hair found in Roger's bed was because she made a ... house call? No. Tracey Davis was making out with Roger Davies, that was for sure. Just that she was the person I needed to see about Slughorn, as well, and she wasn't going to appear any time soon.

"Well, I guess I'll have to find the real Tracey, then," I sighed.

Oops.

Perhaps Blaise didn't hear that.

"What did you say?" Blaise asks sharply, his eyes squinting dangerously.

"Nothing." I squeak, slowly turning away from him, making cautious steps to flee.

"You said, 'I'll have to find the REAL Tracey'." Blaise is following me behind.

My pace quickens.

"Hey!" he calls from behind.

"One little mistake!" I am dashing out of the Emergency Department. Perhaps he'll relent. He has patients! Go back and look after slughorn, you jerk!

But Blaise is catching up. He's following me out into the open.

"Aaaghh!"

Blaise tackles me to the ground; my knees scrape over the jagged sandy pavement. Blaise flips me over, his angry eyes and a menacing wand pointed straight at me.

"Who are you!"

His hands are at my throat, and his wand starts to hum with energy. I can see the anger in his eyes. The anger that he had been duped- he hates that most of all.

"Blaise!" I whimper. "Please, Blaise."

He's seeing the image of Tracey. It'll stall him. Perhaps, I imagine, Slughorn will come to the rescue. Perhaps someone all knowing of the situation will turn up like a heavenly Deus Ex Machina? If there's anything that life has taught me in my long and winding spiral to despair, it's there is no Prince Charming (Ironically, my own Prince Charming is the one who's about to throttle me), and there is no big heroic save from a man, no Harry Potter for me.

Blaise pauses a moment, wavering. I feel his tight grip about my neck slacken. And it's all I need to I throttle my knee upward, connecting with his groin.

"You're an idiot, Zabini," I hiss as he crumples away. I get up, brushing myself. "Accio." his wand flies into my hand.

Blaise reels over, staring at me as I point one wand at him. "Incarcerous!"

Strands of silken rope shimmer about him like gossamer strands, tightening with the tensile force only describable as magical.

With the other wand I trace a complex Rune pattern in the air to dissolve the polyjuice disillusionment from myself.

"My name is Parvati Patil," I glare at him, as the rune charms take effect, my masquerade dissolving away like the mist. "you've forgotten me, but I remember you. I'm the reason you've been chasing my sister Padma around like an idiot."

He stupidly stares at me, mouthing my name without making a sound.

"I'm leaving Professor Slughorn in your care. Make sure he get's better. He's not a muggle, he's not a squib. He was once a great Professor of Hogwarts, and once your Teacher, and always mine. Show him respect. Keep him from harm."

He nods stupidly.

I kneel down at him. He's not struggling, but stares at me like a dummy.

"There is danger." I tell him, patting his cheek. "Someone has erased Professor Slughorn and me from the Wizarding World, from everyone's memory. They've erased me from yours. They might come after you, too."

"What..." he mutters. I toss his wand at his feet. He'll be able to free himself. He'll be safe, and perhaps Slughorn will, too. I can't do everything alone. And Blaise deserves to be burdened with my problems for being an idiot.

I wanted to tell Blaise that Tracey was probably not much into him any more. I wanted to tell him that we were lovers once. I wanted to tell him a lot more, but my severed memories just couldn't enable me to feel anything deeper. To me, he was a memory. It was awesome that I remembered him, and he lived with a Me shaped hole in his heart. But that didn't mean we were destined for each other. I stopped believing in those things.

And with that, I apparate away.

It's time to quit stalling, I know. I had been stalling all my life, in this limpid flaccid anemic state, letting things happen to me. The path of least resistance, the feeling that my golden age has come and gone without my knowing. It has to end somewhere. It wasn't the matter of being a hero or not. That wasn't the point. Not about Hermione Granger, or who was the 'Golden Trio'. I had begrudged them all my life for taking center stage in the story of my life. And now I found what was important to me.

It wasn't about being the hero. It wasn't about taking back what was mine.

I still don't know what The Story of Parvati will be about, but at least I won't make it as foot note in the Eulogy of my friends.