I knew all about waking up in the hospital.
About being broken, about being patched up, about getting back up again.
Hermione, Ron, and I had always joked that I should have had a plaque above the bed in the Hogwarts hospital wing for how frequently I ended up there.
Now that I was staring down at the plaque, my plaque, it didn't feel so funny anymore.
Harry Potter it read.
Curse Rehabilitation Ward.
Long-Term Patient.
A year, the healers said at first. A year or more, the Unspeakables corrected, after prodding at me with strange brass instruments, whispering to each other while I laid there, shaking.
I knew it was bad when they started bringing in Curse Breakers, treating me like some kind of artifact, not a person.
The first few days were the worst.
I was in and out of consciousness, my head swimming whenever I moved too fast.
Healers came and went, always whispering, always watching.
My body shook like a newborn foal. My legs refused to hold my weight. I couldn't stand. Couldn't hold my head up for too long. Couldn't go to the bathroom alone.
The Boy Who Lived. The Man Who Conquered.
The man who pissed the bed out of misplaced pride.
–⊰❁⊱–
I forced myself upright, the sheets sticking to my sweat-slicked skin. My body protested every movement, pain shooting up my spine, my nerves raw and exposed to the the world, and angry about it. But I had to try.
A wand rested on the nightstand beside my bed, a loaner wand, not my own. Mine had been snapped in the raid.
I wrapped my fingers around the handle. It sat in my palm like dead weight, cold and indifferent. I waited to feel the binding. Waited for the binding, the allegiance shift that came with picking up a new wand. The way it was supposed to hum, even slightly, in recognition of a wielder.
Silence.
"Lumos."
Nothing.
I tried again. And again. Nothing.
No flicker, no warmth, just absence. Just dead air.
A quiet cough behind me. I turned, jaw clenched.
A Healer, young and fresh-faced, trying too hard to look sympathetic.
"It will take time," she said gently.
I wanted to throw the wand at the wall. I wanted to rip out the IV in my arm and run out the door, magic be damned.
Instead, I slammed the wand onto the nightstand.
"Piss off," I muttered.
–⊰❁⊱–
That night, I dreamed that everything was shaped in fire, and a sickly purple light.
A voice screaming my name- Ron? Someone else?
The smell of fabric burning into skin.
A wand raised against me. Mine pointing away at another threat. Too slow. Always a split second too slow.
A woman's voice, clear and sharp and hateful, echoing through the hall- "Crucio!"
Pain. White-hot. Blinding. Rippling through me.
I woke up gasping, fingers feebly clawing at the sheets like I was still there, still burning, still screaming. Heart hammering.
For a moment, I could still feel it, the phantom echoes of it crawling under my skin.
I forced myself to relax, to still, to breathe. I ran through my Occlumency exercises like clockwork, because I had to, because if I didn't, I'd lose myself to the past.
Pictured the green canvas, gradiented from light on the outside to dark on the inside.
It was just a dream, I told myself.
Just a dream of a memory.
A memory waiting to come back in full and rip me open.
–⊰❁⊱–
I spent days in silence, watching the world move on through the small window across the room. The streets beyond were alive with movement—people coming and going, living their lives, untouched by whatever had brought me here. Time hadn't stopped for them. It hadn't frozen in place, waiting for me to recover. It had simply continued, indifferent to whether I could keep up.
The healers were polite but distant, treating me like something fragile, breakable. Their voices were always gentle, their footsteps soft, their hands careful, like they expected me to shatter if they pressed too hard. They spoke to me with the same delicate courtesy they used on the truly ruined patients—the ones who would never walk again, never hold a wand, never reclaim the pieces of their lives that had been lost. I hated it.
I wasn't the only long-term patient in the ward, but I might as well have been. Others whispered about me when they thought I couldn't hear, voices hushed but unmistakable. Harry Potter. The Savior. The Boy Who Lived. And now? Just another broken thing. Some of them pitied me. Others resented me. I ignored them all the same.
Sometimes, I caught glimpses of visitors in the hallway. Flashes of red hair, the faint murmur of voices I knew. Ron. Ginny. Maybe even Hermione. But I never let them step inside. I turned away before they could see me like this, before I had to face whatever expression would cross their faces when they saw what I had become.
The world had moved on after the war. People had picked up the pieces, built new lives, pressed forward.
And now, I was here. Stuck. Trapped in this room. Waiting. Rotting.
I wasn't used to waiting. I wasn't used to feeling helpless.
In war, there had always been something to fight. Someone to chase. A next move to make.
As an auror, there was always another case, another wizard to find. A lead to run down.
But there was no next move here. No battle, no strategy. No case. No lead. Just patience. Just time.
I had fought so hard to live.
Now I wasn't sure what I was living for.
–⊰❁⊱–
It was four days later when they brought someone new into the ward.
At first, I barely noticed. The usual shuffle of Healers, the quiet murmur of voices, the rustling of fresh linens being arranged—it was just another routine. I had stopped paying attention to the comings and goings of this place, unwilling to care about the patients who arrived, recovered, and left while I remained.
Then, a laugh.
It was light, unburdened, effortless in a way that nothing in this ward ever was. It rang out across the sterile walls, weaving through the stagnant air like sunlight through dust. The space had been filled with the quiet shuffling of feet and hushed voices for days, but that laugh cracked through it, as if something long absent had returned without warning.
Something inside me tightened, instinctive and sharp, a phantom ache beneath my ribs. My stomach turned cold before my mind could catch up.
I knew that laugh.
The realization hit like a curse to the chest, but my body moved before I could think. I turned too fast, ignoring the spike of pain that lanced down my spine, but I didn't care.
A girl sat on the bed beside mine, her dark hair falling in soft waves over her shoulders. She was speaking to one of the Healers, her voice light, curious, untroubled. Her eyes were bright, open, brimming with something I hadn't seen in too long. Not wariness. Not grief. Just… ease.
She turned toward me.
And smiled.
For a horrible, disorienting moment, I thought my brain had misfired, that the curse had done something worse to me than I'd realized. My mind scrambled for explanations. A trick of the light. A hallucination. Some cruel mistake.
Because she looked at me like we were strangers.
Like she had no idea who I was at all.
My stomach twisted, a nauseating churn of disbelief and fury. My fingers clenched into the sheets, gripping them like an anchor.
"Is it today, then?" The words slipped out, unbidden, sharp as a blade between my teeth, the words leaving me before I fully knew what I meant by them. I wasn't sure if I was asking her, or myself.
Because if Pansy Parkinson didn't remember what she'd done—
Then I didn't know who the fuck I was supposed to hate anymore.