Chapter Two

They were arguing. She wasn't certain if they were far away, or if her senses were still mired in the strange fog that had threatened to drown her. The voices were drifting towards her, and she found she could understand them easily. Indeed, they made no effort to disguise what they were saying.

"You're the one that insisted we bring her inside, woman!"

"We couldn't just leave her lying there in the street, outside our door!" came the shrill reply. "I just want to know how she knew your name!"

The response was angry. "Be very careful what you say next." It dared defiance, as if spoiling for a fight. "Be very careful what you accuse me of. I've never hidden anything from you. I'm not the one that lies, witch!"

When the other voice responded, it was more measured. The woman seemed to be speaking with forced calm. "I wonder who she could be. I don't recognise her."

"She's not from 'round here. Fancy London clothes, expensive shoes. Best not be one of your lot."

She lay somewhere between sleeping and waking, not quite ready to face the world. Currently, she was warm and comfortable, but she had a suspicion the sensation would not last long.

"Filthy Muggle."

That insult was delivered in a softer, more cultured voice than those raging further away, and seemed to be addressed to her. She gave up any attempt to remain asleep, and stirred where she lay.

She was lying on a bed, or something equally soft, and was covered with a blanket. She was still dressed in her jeans and jumper, but her shoes were gone. She opened her eyes slowly, aware as she did so of the dull pain across her cheek and forehead. Shifting slightly, she felt a similar pain in her right shoulder and hip.

She was in a narrow bed, pushed against a wall. There was a window behind and a doorway to her right. Lounging arrogantly against the frame was a young man with unkempt dark hair and suspicious eyes. On seeing her awake, his glare deepened.

"Who are you?" he demanded. "How do you know Tobias Snape?"

She blinked, suddenly aware that her mouth felt dry and gritty. She desperately wanted something to drink. The boy didn't seem to need an answer.

"Don't you dare think you can embarrass my mother, in my house!" he hissed. "Don't think we don't know exactly what you are and just why you're here. Fainting in the street!" He spat the words out, as if their darker meaning should be somehow clear to her. Determined to defend herself against this unprovoked attack, she took a deep breath, only to be overcome by a coughing fit.

The boy sullenly pushed himself from the doorframe to pass her a glass of water from the bedside table. She took it gratefully, but somehow misjudged the distance to her mouth, and ended up slopping most of it down her front. The boy reached out to steady the glass and help her sip, careful not to touch her fingers with his.

"What's your name?" He asked a little less aggressively, as if finally convinced of her weakened state.

She swallowed the cold water gratefully and nodded her thanks. Suddenly panic returned.

She met his stern gaze, her eyes embarrassingly full.

"I don't know," she whispered.

The suspicion returned to his eyes, and he watched her in silence as she leant back against the pillow. She stared back, not knowing what else to do, taking careful stock of his features. He had a bony sort of face, all nose, cheekbones and forehead, although it was obscured for the most part by the mess of black hair that fell in heavy curtains on either side. His lips were thin, but expressive, while his dark eyes were fathomless.

The voices downstairs reached a crescendo before halting abruptly with the slamming of a door. The boy glared at her as if daring her to comment. Tears pricked at her eyes once more as she realised she was the cause for the argument, for the boy's anger, and the slamming doors.

What had she done?

-x-

He hated returning home. Perhaps if he returned for Christmas and Easter like other students, the summer holiday wouldn't be quite so difficult to endure. Perhaps he would be less of a stranger to his own parents. Instead each time he returned he was shocked by the shabby, ordinariness of his childhood home. His mother would have grown smaller and older in his ten month absence, her hands and face red from work, her shoulders thin and stooped in defeat. Her face had lost any softness long ago, and now her thin mouth was always pinched with suspicion and envy.

He had endured his childhood, counting down the days that he might escape to school, having been fed stories full of magic and wonder about the place in lieu of fairy tales at bedtime.

Hogwarts.

The school was simultaneously even more wonderful than his mother had described and bitterly disappointing. It was filled with magic, obviously, and knowledge was freely available, especially to those who actively sought it. He was at last free from his father's influence, from the misery of this dying town filled with insipid Muggles, from a place where could never fit it.

However, Hogwarts came with its own trials to be borne. His aptitude for magic and willingness to learn took second place to his unkempt appearance and second hand robes. Even Slytherin, the house he had known he would belong to, put less stock in his mother's blood purity than the terrible solecism she had committed when she married not even a Muggle-born, but a Muggle.

The summer holidays had always been somewhat of a mixed blessing. They took him away from his tormentors, both within his school house and elsewhere, but they also stranded him in the decaying hovel that was his family home, firmly under his father's shadow. His father might have little hold on him anymore, but it was still unpleasant to be forced to share a roof with the man and to witness daily the sham of his parents' marriage.

The best part of the holiday had always been the glorious hours he had to spend with Lily, his best friend since childhood. The obligatory two weeks that her family spent in North Wales were always a torment to him. These days she may as well have moved there permanently for all the time they spent together. She had not forgiven him yet and was not likely to. It didn't matter that he said he was sorry, how often he pleaded with her. She had made up her mind. She had dropped him so quickly, it was almost as if she had been looking for an excuse to let their unlikely friendship go.

No, that was unfair. Lily Evans was not that shallow. He had done an unforgivable thing in her eyes, attacked her using the one word he knew would cause her the most harm. It didn't matter that he had been half out of his mind with rage and shame. He had hurt her.

The weeks of the summer holiday stretched before him, as dry and arid as the dusty street he lived on, leaving him as forlorn as the dying flowers in the window boxes next door. He fled the house at every available opportunity, walking for miles until he left his wretched town behind, or else shut himself away in his room, reading and rereading the few books he had been allowed to remove from the library for the summer, working on possible spells, spells that he wouldn't be able to try until next term, pure magical theory at its most taxing. Creating spell-work and charms was a bit like sentence structure, you not only needed to know the laws governing every part of a sentence before creating one, but also had to have the natural flair, the ability to construct. Potions were even more complex; although modifying existing potions came easily to him, he'd not yet managed to create anything impressive from scratch. He was toying with a certain formula in his head, but as yet, his efforts had yet to yield anything other than brown sludge.

He stood in the doorway and gazed down at the girl as she closed her eyes and tilted her head slightly to face the wall. So his last bolthole had been taken from him too, given up without permission to this unknown girl with expensive clothes and knowledge of his father. How wonderful.

"Why my room?" he had asked his mother as she had cleaned the girl's face while she slept.

"We couldn't put her on the sofa It just isn't long enough. Besides, your father is going to call into the surgery and ask someone to pop in a visit her, see if she needs to go to hospital."

"Why did we bring her in, in the first place?" he had demanded, already knowing the answer. His mother couldn't bear any hint of a scandal to be attached to their names, living as they did in such close proximity to their neighbours.

"Tidy up in here," came his mother's tired response. "At least hide your schoolbooks before the doctor gets here. She'll be gone soon enough. They'll most likely want to keep her in hospital overnight."

The girl had woken shortly afterwards while his parents were arguing downstairs. She had been confused and shaken, barely able to lift the glass of water he gave her, her large eyes filled with frightened tears. He was still considering her disturbing reaction to his questions as his mother returned, slightly red-eyed, carrying her best nightgown.

"Has she woken up yet?" she asked, her voice barely more than a whisper. Slightly redundant, considering that her shouts had filled the house only moments before.

He nodded. "She doesn't remember who she is. Did she hit her head on the way down?" he asked, keeping his voice dangerously level. "Or did finally meeting you chase away whatever courage prompted her to initiate this meeting?"

His mother kept her eyes on the resting girl. "I won't be spoken to like that, Severus," she chastised, although her tone sounded resigned. "Have a look in her jacket, see if there's anything in there to say who she is." The girl on the bed stirred again and opened her eyes once more. "Don't worry; the doctor is on his way. We'll have you home in no time at all."

The girl relaxed against the pillows and smiled weakly. "Thank you," she breathed. "I'm sorry to put you to so much trouble." A London accent too.

"Not at all," came his mother's clipped reply. An awkward silence descended, thankfully interrupted by a knock at the door. "That'll be Dr Harrison now. Severus, can you bring him up, please? Severus?"

Severus acknowledged her with the barest jerk of his head, his attention caught by the contents of the girl's jacket pockets now grasped in his hand. He held out his hand to his mother, oddly grateful when he heard her ragged intake of breath. There, amid the sweet wrappers, odd coins, and bus tickets, was a wand.

Three pairs of eyes rested on the narrow strip of vinewood.

"Why are you here?" his mother asked quietly.

"I don't know," came the whispered reply. "I just remember falling." Severus silently handed her the wand. A tiny burst of sparks flew from the tip and the girl sighed. "I didn't realise how lost I felt without it."

They sat in silence, three pairs of eyes fixed upon the wand as it trembled slightly in the girl's hand, until a second knock sounded through the house. They all started as if slightly guilty.

"Severus, go and bring the doctor up. Stall for a little time if you can." She turned to the girl on the bed. "We can't send you off to a Muggle hospital. If need be, we'll get you to St Mungo's once the man has left, but first we need to convince him that you're fine. Here's what I want you to do."

-x-

He watched while the girl chatted happily to the doctor. She was far more at ease with the Muggle healer than he or his mother had ever been, and he guessed that she must have had dealings with the Muggle world before. Muggle-born, perhaps? Or half-blood, living in closer contact with the community that he did? She played her part perfectly, the silly southern chit who got lost looking for the home of a school friend.

"We've already managed to contact her parents. They're on their way to collect her now."

"Well Miss Jones, other than a couple of bruises you seem to be fine. If you get dizzy or feel sick at any point, you must let your parents know. And no more skipping breakfast. It's the most important meal of the day."

She hung her head, suitably chastised. "Yes, Dr Harrison."

He patted her affectionately on the knee as he stood to leave. "Make sure her parents know what happened to her. Give them my number if they don't have access to a doctor near here."

-x-

Severus lay awake, his long form crammed uncomfortably onto the narrow brown sofa. It amused him no end that the colour scheme of his parent's mostly inherited furniture was actually coming into fashion again. He wondered how long it would take before rattling sash windows and outside lavatories became kitsch.

The girl, Emma, as they had so quickly named her, was still occupying his room upstairs. He had left her clutching her wand as if it would prove to be a lifeline to the world she had mostly forgotten. At his mother's prompting, he had grudgingly leant her his copy of Hogwarts: A History, in the hope that it would jog some of her memories. She had accepted it gratefully, and was already lost amid its dog-eared pages before he had left the room, glad to be free of the sight of her small form swathed in his mother's blue cotton nightgown, her tangle of dark curls spilling across the pillow.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a key in the door and a rush of cool night air that preceded his father into the little front room.

"Still here, then?" he asked by way of greeting.

The temptation to convey his profound love of attempting to sleep on uncomfortable, outdated Muggle furniture was tempered only by his desire to end the conversation as swiftly as possible. "Still here," he conceded. A smirk spread itself slowly over his father's face. Oh, here we go, he sighed at the certain sign his father was about to share some witticism.

"Didn't think I'd see the day you got a girl into your bed, son." He grinned. "Mind you, she did have to be rendered unconscious first."

Glad that the darkness of the room hid the angry red that stained his cheeks, Severus ground his teeth together and refused to reply. No matter how smart his answer, his father would stay and torment him until he had won and Severus was only inches from hexing him. Better to suffer the indignity of defeat and lose himself in plans of what revenge he might wreak once he came of age.

His father continued to chuckle to himself as he made his way up stairs to bed. Severus felt a moments fear for Emma should his father take it upon himself to peer inside her room. She had not relinquished her hold on her wand since the doctor had left.

-x-

Hogwarts: A History was both reassuringly familiar and irritatingly obscure all at the same time. The facts contained within were known to her, Emma decided; whole sentences appeared in her mind before she had finished reading them, as if she had memorised whole paragraphs, but not realised it until she saw the page afresh. It wasn't just the book; other things were doing it to her, too. It was like experiencing constant déjà vu, the simplest of things sending jolts of recognition through her. But despite continually being assaulted by the vaguely familiar, her brain seemed incapable of completing each memory. It was like a constant itch behind her eyes or just under her skin.

Eventually, she closed the book and settled back against the pillows.

She was too tired, and while she might not admit it out loud, too frightened and disorientated to make much sense of her current situation.

Whatever that might be.

For all she knew she might have been in the area looking for some school friend or other when she fainted and hit her head. The fact that she was a witch didn't detract from the fact she was lost and – save for a rather reluctant set of rescuers – alone.

She tried collecting her thoughts in her head before eventually giving up and slowly getting up from the bed. She felt a little unsteady, but crossed the room without incident to the little desk by the window. Feeling slightly guilty, she rummaged through the papers on top until she unearthed an unused bit of parchment and a chewed pencil. Getting this all down on paper would sooth her and hopefully reveal some sort of pattern or order to what had happened.

She scribbled "Things I Know" at the top of the page before gnawing the end of the pencil.

"I am a witch."

Well, that about summed it up. She sighed, then grimaced, rubbing her mouth when she remembered the already chewed state of the pencil.

"I have a wand." And that was it, really. She didn't know her own name or why she was in the current neighbourhood (which, not to be a complete snob, felt like no where she would normally visit. It was so . . . Northern. Basic. There wasn't even a radiator in the room she was in and the street outside was half-cobbled. Not in a picturesque way either; it was more like that had run out of tarmac half way through the job and not bothered to return). She didn't even know what the date was.

The only people she currently knew were Eileen Snape and her son, Severus, who had taken her in instant dislike, even if he had been the one to realise she was a witch. Eileen, Severus, Tobias Snape, and, briefly, Doctor Harrison.

She had understood completely why Doctor Harrison shouldn't find out about her magic, why you never told Muggles. She hadn't seen Tobias Snape yet, but apparently she had recognised him when she had been found, collapsed at the roadside. He hadn't recognised her though. Or so he said. Still, the man was a Muggle – he couldn't have done anything to her memory, could he? There was a tiny chance – and this suspicion felt so unworthy of her that she didn't wish to think it, let alone commit it to paper – that both she and Mr Snape had had their memories modified.

Been made to forget each other.

That thought made her feel sick.

Regardless of what had happened, it was obvious that she couldn't stay where she was much longer. In the morning she would leave.

She just didn't know where she would go.