Down Memory Lane

Chapter Two-Guilt Trips

The dark haired boy opened his eyes and gazed blearily around himself. He seemed to be in a void of darkness that was never ending, except for a point quite far off in the distance that was filled with a radiant bright light. Something tickled at the edge of his mind, though what it was, the boy couldn't tell.

A voice reached out to him through the darkness, bidding him to come closer to the bright light. Something in him told him not to trust the voice, but to stay right where he was. He didn't know why, but he listened to it.

Maybe this voice could tell him who he was.

~&~

Lia awoke to a soft beeping that reverberated through wherever she was. Very slowly, she opened her eyes and tried to focus around her surroundings. She was in a small room with white walls and a divider going through about midway through it. The beeping seemed to belong to a machine that was near the bed she was in. Her breath caught in her throat and she bolted upright.

//"Oh my God! Look out!"...Squealing tires...screaming...crashing...pain...blood...\

"Oh no," Lia breathed, and forced herself to look at her left arm. It immediately began to throb painfully as she inspected the damage. An ace bandage ran from just below her fingers to her elbow, and then halfway up her upper arm. Poking it gingerly, she gasped as shockwaves of pain rocketed through her body. She gritted her teeth to stop from screaming in pain.

"Lia? Are you awake?" a familiar voice asked from across the room.

"Jack?" Lia called out, disbelieving. Jack must have been out of her bed already when Lia awoke, because the divider parted and she came through. With a stab of envy, Lia saw that Jack was completely uninjured, except for a small bandage on her forehead.

"Oh, gol. Look at your arm!" Jack exclaimed, pointing.

Lia glanced at it and then, with a perfectly straight face, looked up again. "Now how did that get there?"

Jack laughed, and then quickly sobered. "The...the guy we hit..."

Lia's insides turned to ice. "Yeah?"

"He's in a coma. They're not sure if he's going to come out of it." Jack looked away as Lia felt the corners of her eyes prickle with unshed tears. "He's in pretty bad shape. They wouldn't tell me how bad it was, but I think he hurt his head and had a few broken bones, at the very least."

"Oh God," Lia murmured, burying her face into her good hand and arm. She looked up and wiped her eyes. "How long have I been out?"

"They brought us in five hours ago. Kirsten and Pyro are in another room, but they're not hurt much either. I think that Pyro sprained her right wrist and Kirsten was rambling, but that's normal for her. I had trouble convincing the doctor of that, though."

Lia laughed quietly. "Wait...what about Chris?"

"He's annoyed. They say that his ankle is broken, and they told him he won't be swimming for about a year."

"Uh oh," Lia groaned. "He'll want my head dressed and served on a platter, then."

"Remember when Mike couldn't break a minute on his fly?" Jack asked her.

Lia grinned. "And he kept cussing and scaring everyone?"

"That's the one. Well, Chris was the same way when they separated us."

"Well, I bet that was pretty."

"Oh, yeah. Gorgeous!" The two girls laughed quietly. A knock interrupted their laughter, and an adult--most likely a nurse, Lia thought--stuck his head in.

"Your friend Chris wants to see you."

~&~

"Where's Harry?"

Hermione looked up from her book. "What?"

Ginny rolled her eyes. "I said, 'Where's Harry?' He said that he was going for a walk hours ago, and he hasn't come back yet."

"He probably just got lost," Hermione said, flicking the page of her book over and glancing at the back. "As long as he has his wand, he'll be fine."

Ron entered the room and leaned up against the doorway. "Does either of you two know where Harry is? He left his wand on the bed." He held it up to verify himself. Ginny and Hermione looked at each other; their worry was quite plain on their faces.

~&~

Jack glanced worriedly at Lia as their wheelchairs squeaked down the hallway. Her face looked as if it had been carved from stone, while her eyes were bright. Whether it was from fear or from pain, Jack couldn't tell, since her friend hadn't said a word since the nurse had come to get them.

Chris and the strange boy's room was over two hallways in the critical ward. They had housed Chris with him for no reason except that the boy would have been alone if he awoke. He hadn't had any identification on him, nor had anyone been near him when the accident occurred.

And even after five hours, no one had called for him.

"How much farther till we get there?" Jack heard herself asking. She hadn't even realized that she was talking to the evil-looking nurse that was pushing her down the hallway.

"Not much," she answered. Then, "Doesn't your little friend ever talk?"

Normally we can't get her to shut up, Jack wanted to say. Instead she said, "Sometimes." Lia just looked ahead, as if she wanted nothing more than to sink right into the floor.

"What happened to you anyway? We're not told much, except for what the problem is."

//Bike...boy in the street...collision...screaming...sharp pain...darkness...

An ambulance's wail around her...\

"It was an accident. No one meant for it to happen." Jack looked down at her hands twisted in her lap.

"Of course not, dear," the nurse said idly, turning the chair around the corner. Lia's evil nurse did the same, and they stopped in front of a room with the number 604 labeled in plain white letters on a green board. The door, unlike the walls, was blue. It matched every other door in the hallway.

A low muttering met Jack's ears as the nurses pushed them through the door. Chris was sitting low in his bed, his leg suspended in the air by a large sling. Even in her foul mood, Jack could see the corners of Lia's lips twitch, as though she had heard what Chris had been saying.

"Your friends are here, Christopher," one of the evil nurses said. "You can see them for fifteen minutes; no more."

"Fine with me," Chris muttered, and the nurses left.

There was an awkward silence, in which Lia became overly interested in her hospital smock and Jack felt her eyes wandering around the paintings on the wall.

"That guy's on the other side of the room," Chris said, breaking the silence as if it had been glass. "That beeping thing has been getting on my nerves, and I kind of wish they would turn it off."

"They won't," Lia murmured softly. "They wouldn't be able to tell if he died."

"They could hook him up to some machine that made a real loud noise if he suddenly died."

Lia looked at him, horrified, her mouth gaping like a fish out of water.

Jack rounded on him, and felt her cheeks grow warm. "Chris, don't you ever say a thing like that! If he dies, do you have any idea how upset Lia would get--how upset any of us would get? Talk about a guilt trip!"

"She should have been paying attention to the road!" Chris yelled back. "If she had been, my leg wouldn't be in a cast!"

"Next time I'll make sure you're killed, then!" Lia shrieked, tears rolling out of her green-gold eyes. "Maybe you won't be so grateful that you escaped with your damn life!"

"Well, thank you for being a guardian angel!"

"Your fu--" Lia was interrupted by a low moan from the other side of the room.

~&~

"Turn around. Don't listen to them," a familiar voice said in his mind. "If you do, you'll never wake up."

"But who am I?" he asked, running his hand through his messy black hair.

A girl swam into view, her long, waist length curls rippling in an imaginary breeze. A small, sad smile played on her full lips. "You'll know. Don't worry. Just believe what your heart tells you to." Before he could do anything to stop it, the girl vanished, and the bright light roared towards him, eventually enveloping him.

He squinted, trying to lessen the pain the light brought his eye, and the shrill voice of an angry teenage girl met his ears.

~&~

"Harry!" Ron yelled, his voice hoarse from the half hour they had been searching for their lost friend.

"Harry, where are you?" Hermione said. She coughed and tried to regain some moisture in her throat.

"Look!" Ginny pointed. A red car was being detached from a very large--and now very dead--oak tree. Surrounding the area was bright yellow tape that read "POLICE LINE: DO NOT CROSS" over and over again.

"What happened here?" Hermione asked a nearby boy of about eight.

"The car hit a kid," he said. "I'm not sure, but I think he died."

"Oh, dear," Ginny said. "Was he a friend of yours? A your brother?"

"No," said the boy, shaking his head. "Actually, I've never seen him before. Probably from out of town, if not out of state."

"Hermione!" Ron yelled, and she turned to see him bent over and picking something up from the ground. It was a pair of black-rimmed glasses, quite smashed, and definitely Harry's.

~&~

Kirsten turned over onto her side to glance at Pyro. "Do you think he's dead?" she asked.

"Dunno. They would have told us, I think," she answered. "Poor Lia. She'll feel bad enough just hitting him. I remember when she nearly ran over that Shiatsu when she took her driving test, and spilled the instructor's coffee all over his suit."

"Ah, those were the days," Kirsten sighed. Someone knocked on the door, and two evil-looking nurses came in.

"Your friend wants to see you."

~&~

"Do you think he's waking up?"

"Dunno...oh, God, did he get that scar from the wreck?"

"No, stupid; it wouldn't be a scar if he got it from the wreck!"

The boy squinted into the light and tried to lift up his arm to shield his face from the light. For some reason, he couldn't move it.

"Jack, he's trying to move. God, did I paralyze him?"

"No...it's the brace, stupid."

"Would you quit calling me stupid?"

"What's going on? I can't see while you two are blocking him!"

"Shut up, Chris!" the girls said in unison.

He blinked and everything came into slightly sharper focus. The boy supposed that he must wear glasses, since everything was so blurry, but he could make out the shapes of two teenage girls leaning over his bed. One of them had short brown, curly hair that reached to her chin. Under one of her green-gold eyes ran a scar, though from what the boy couldn't tell. He turned his head to the other girl. She was taller and slimmer than the first, with long, straight light brown hair with bright orange streaks and blue-gray eyes.

Where am I? he tried to say, but something constricted his being able to talk, so it came out as a mumble. The curly-haired girl giggled.

"Look at his eyes!" she exclaimed. "Have you ever seen a shade of green so bright?"

"Yours, when you're angry," the second girl pointed out.

"Chris," the curly-haired girl said, standing up straight and turning around to look at a point behind her. "Is there some way to notify a doctor or someone that he's awake?"

"Yeah," a voice answered. "Tell the evil-looking lady who's coming in right now."

Something creaked--a door opening, perhaps--and the sound of sniggers erupted from across the room.

"He's awake?"

"Yup!" Curly seemed to be doing some sort of celebrating, though her movements looked hampered. The boy couldn't guess from what it might be from. "I didn't kill him!"

//"Kill the spare."

"Avada Kedavra!"\

"He wasn't dead in the first place, stupid."

"I said quit calling me stupid!"

The boy shifted slightly in the bed he was in and tried not to yell as pain flared in his legs. Instead, a groan escaped his mouth.

"Everyone out!" said a woman, coming into view. She angrily wheeled the two arguing girls out of the room and pulled the divider closed. Calling to the second nurse--this one an evil looking male--they pulled whatever was preventing him from talking out of his mouth and gave him some water.

"Okay, first order of business," the woman said, pulling a clipboard off of the end of his bed. "I need your name, your birth date, and anything that you might be allergic to."

The boy looked down at his sheets and played with a loose string. "I don't remember anything."

~&~

Hermione was trying hard to ignore the pains of terror that were pulsing through her stomach. Her mother was on the phone, trying to contact the police in the area. Something kept disconnecting her, however, and it didn't help to raise Hermione's mood.

"He'll be okay, 'Mione," Ron told her soothingly, rubbing her back with his hand.

Hermione didn't say anything. Instead, she continued to stare at the broken glasses that sat in her hands.

"I know what you're thinking, Hermione," Ginny said softly. "And I would tell you not to, but I know that you're the strongest--and smartest--witch in your year."

"What has that got to do with anything?" Hermione murmured. "I wouldn't curse you, if that's what you're implying."

Ron glanced at Ginny from behind Hermione's back. "And that's why Malfoy ended up in the Hospital Wing how many times last school year?"

Hermione sniffed. "Harry contributed to over half of those." She began to shake with suppressed tears. "He's dead. I know it. I can feel it. Harry's not living anymore." A fat tear rolled down her cheek, and she turned to sob into Ron's shoulder.

~&~

"I can't believe they kicked us out!" Lia exclaimed angrily, pulling the fingers of her good hand through her hair. Surprisingly, it wasn't as knotted as she thought it would be. "It's not like we were a menace to him or anything!"

"Lia, who's the one who wouldn't stop shouting?" Jack asked her. Kirsten tried to hide a smile.

Lia mumbled something and her cheeks pinkened. "Still..." The teen grinned hugely. "I didn't kill him!"

The door opened and the evil looking nurse came out. "You should consider yourself lucky, Ms. Florence. The boy won't be pressing charges."

"But she nearly killed him!" Jack exclaimed. She then blushed as Lia shot her a furious look.

"Why isn't he suing me?" she asked, turning to the nurse.

"He doesn't remember what happened. The poor boy doesn't even remember his name."

~Four hours later...~

Daniel Shrouder didn't like working graveyard shift any more than your average custodian. The halls of St. Christopher Memorial Hospital were slightly creepy at night, what with the humming of all the electrical equipment that was hooked up in the various rooms.

He peeked into one that supposedly housed an amnesiac and a boy with a broken ankle. The boy was supposedly bad tempered and foul mouthed, but the amnesiac hadn't said more than five words since he woke up.

The kid was small for his age--malnourished, the doctor had said--with a shock of messy black hair and emerald green eyes that made one think that the boy had seen things that no human should ever see. The most curious feature on the boy was a small lightning shaped scar on his forehead above his right eye.

The thing that happened next nearly made Daniel wet his pants.

The divider was violently pulled back so that the boy's bed could be seen from the door, and instead of the normal peaceful scene of the patient sleeping, chaos reined around his bed. Swirls of green light surrounded him, along with flashes of red and bright white energy. A blue-white glow joined the previous energies and tried to form a protective barrier around the sleeping boy, but the red energy burst through the blue-white one as if it had been no more than air--which, Daniel supposed, it was.

The green light flashed brightly, expanding to take up the whole part of the amnesiac's space. When the light formed the shape of a skull with a snake protruding from the mouth, Daniel decided that he had eaten too much of the hospital cafeteria's version of apple pie and ran down the hallway, screaming bloody murder.

~&~

Pyro couldn't understand why she was still awake at eleven-thirty, considering the amount of painkillers the nurse had given her earlier for her sprained wrist. Feeling slightly silly, the girl sat up in bed and looked around her room.

"What pretty colors," she said dimly, watching the walls swim this way and that. "I could sit here and watch them all day..."

Shaking her head to clear her vision, Pyro tried to focus on the interesting sounds that were emanating from down the hallway through the open door to the room. The sounds became louder and louder, until they seemed to be passing the room.

"Wait..." Pyro murmured. "I want to play tag too..." She sank down onto her pillows and drifted off into multi-colored sheep dreams.

~&~

Why me? Jack thought to herself as she gazed unseeingly out the window to her left. Why did I have to be the one to be roomed with Lia? At least she's finally asleep...

A loud yell came from the opposite side of the room where Lia lay.

"Damn," Jack muttered aloud.

"Sheep..." Lia murmured. "Don't...step...Li-Li!"

"Li-Li?!" Jack repeated incredulously. "It's got to be the painkillers..."

"Don't chase me!" Lia yelled. Jack heard a loud thump and winced as she realized that Lia had probably hit her bandaged arm against the side-table. "Damn things! Let go of my arm..."

Jack sniggered and wondered idly why no one was taking care of the lunatic that was running up and down the corridors screaming.

~&~

Ron watched Hermione's prone form on the bed as she slept, her breathing even and calm. Hermione had been crying since her mother had given up trying to call the police, saying that she would try to contact them again in the morning. It was as if because her mother had given up trying to get through, Harry's chance of survival had lessened even more.

Actually, he thought bitterly, it has. Angrily, he pounded his clenched fist on the bedside table and swore. Why couldn't I have gone with you? It might have saved your God-forsaken life...

~&~

Voldemort looked up from the book he was reading and sniffed the air through his snake-like nostrils. "Wormtail? Bring me the latest map on the location of the Potter boy."

The stammered, "Yes, Master," met his ears, and out of the corner of the Dark Lord's eye he saw a cloaked shape walk to a large silver bowl with runes etched on the side. He pulled out his wand and stirred the contents of the bowl with it, chanting something under his breath. When the normal silver-green light did not appear, Voldemort frowned.

"What is the matter, Wormtail? Did you not say that the spell would last until it was dispelled by the creator?"

"M-my Lord," the man sputtered. He frowned worriedly and stirred the contents faster. "It appears, my Lord, t-that he's gone. That i-is the only explanation."

"Ah," Voldemort sighed, a smile crawling across his thin lips. "At last...the Boy Who Lived now lives no more. Rally the Death Eaters," he said to another cloaked figure nearly hidden in the shadows behind his chair. The smile grew until his teeth were bared almost menacingly. "We have work to do..."

~&~

Thank you to Nova, Jessica, and Kittyluver87 for reading the story and then not killing me--well, Nova and Kittyluver anyway. Wait...just Nova. Would you say that being hit by the same person seven times while in bumper-cars counts as a death wish?

Now...as for my reviewers...

Hallie Marie: I have actually never been in the Music Museum, but I drove past it with my friend and her mother. I'm glad that you like the idea. If you really liked the theme, then you should check out neutral's fic on fanfiction.net. If the hyperlink didn't load for some reason, her stories can also be reached on the schnoogle archive under the name...neutral...As for the h/hr...~*evil grin*~ if you really want h/hr, go read my other fic Together Again. The later chapters ~*coughchaptersfiveandsevencough*~ have a little bit of fluff.

Cricket: I've already explained why to you. Yes I'll use your idea for chapter three. I'm glad that you like my story. C'ya @ school tomorrow...

bluekat: Actually...my birthday isn't for another two months. ~*grins*~ Nova-The-Beta-Reader forced me to watch MP&THG with her a few weeks ago, and I kind couldn't help myself to the funny monks scene...The background on the characters will be in either chapter three or four (haven't decided yet), so keep your eyes peeled for that...~*grins*~

Lucy-Liza: Love the name. And you're right: no one ever gives the poor kid a break...it's Voldemort this and car wrecks that...what is this world coming to?! Chris is actually based on one of the friends of my lovely beta-reader, and I told her what you said...let's just say that I had to whap her on the back of the head to get her to shut-up laughing...And no, there will be absolutely NO slash in this story...it's PG13, not R...And Lia hiding something secrety? I dunno...I haven't dug that deep into her character yet...I'll ask Nova...~*grin*~

magicgerbil: I'm sorry that I scared your cat, but I love the reaction. I'm very glad to hear that the interaction seems real; I tried to think of the way my friends and I talk and act around each other (explaining the violence between Lia and Jack--don't ask where it comes from. Long story...), and it flowed easier that way. ~*grins broader*~

Also thank you to kiki, klopez, Pottergirl34, black panther, hermione512, Gin_Gin, Lady knight, and DracoMalfoy2714.