Spell Damage

After the Rain

Story Summary:
In the first hour after Voldemort's defeat, Remus Lupin is hit with a Memory Charm that goes wrong. His friends wait to see if he will recover.

Chapter 01

Posted:
01/26/2006
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2,896

Spell Damage


I. Tonks


Harry’s always blamed himself.


I’ve told him a million times that he’s far too hard on himself. If it’s anybody’s fault it’s mine, but you have to understand how it happened before you judge any of us. There were only the three of us at headquarters that night, the night of the last battle, and none of us was in any condition to fight. Minerva had been hit by a curse that sapped her powers a month earlier; Alastor’s reflexes had become more and more erratic over the past year; and I had a three-week-old baby in my arms. Remus and I had named her Irene, which means peace. It was the sweetest and bitterest word we knew.


We waited and worried and watched the flashes of light on the horizon, and then Harry came bursting into the room just after midnight and shouted that Lord Voldemort was dead. Then we were all shouting and crying and toasting the end of the war with a fifty-year-old bottle of Scotch from the Black cellars. You don’t begrudge us that moment, do you? None of the others had come straggling back yet; we didn’t know that Ron Weasley was lying dead not fifty yards from the Dark Lord, nor that Severus Snape, who was our man after all, had pledged his loyalty with his life. No, the first we knew of the cost of victory was when my husband Apparated into the room with Peter Pettigrew’s body in his arms. He was shaking and staring over our heads as if he couldn’t see any of us, and what he said made no sense at all. He was ours, I don’t believe it, he’s dead and he was ours. I killed my best friend, I killed my brother, and he was ours.


“Has Lupin got any brothers?” Harry asked.


“No,” I said.


Moody pressed a glass of Scotch into his hand. “Steady, lad. Tell me what you mean.”


Remus took a sip of the Scotch, still wild-eyed and distracted. “I mean he was our man, a true Gryffindor, and I didn’t see it. He told me, but I didn’t understand in time. He said ... he said ‘Pain is a blunt instrument.’” He met my eyes for the first time and fell silent, as if this somehow explained everything, which of course it didn’t.


“What does that mean, pain is a blunt instrument?” I asked after a moment.


“It means he was passing false information to Voldemort. Lying under torture. It was a catch-phrase we used when we were boys. We had so many of them. And I’d forgotten.”


Minerva knelt beside the dead man on the hearthrug and closed his eyes.


“It’s nonsense,” said Moody bluntly. “He was lying to you. He’d not have survived five minutes if he didn’t know Occlumency.”


“Peter did know Occlumency. A little, anyway. Enough to get along – if nobody suspected – and nobody did. Not even me, not even after hearing so many stories about how he’d bungled things at just the wrong moment for the Death Eaters and the right moment for us. I killed him, and I don’t deserve to be the one left alive.” Remus was speaking quite calmly now; he might as well have been talking about the weather. He drained his glass and rested one hand on his wand. “Excuse me. I’m going outside for a bit. There’s something I need to do.”


The rest of us looked at one another, panicked, and I caught him by the wrist as he stepped toward the door.


“You know what to do, lass,” said Moody quietly. “I’d do it myself, but I’m not good for much these days.”


I did know. An emergency Memory Charm, the last-ditch way to build artificial walls in a man’s mind and save his sanity.


“I’ll do it,” said Harry suddenly. “I know how.”


“I’ve got much more experience with it,” I said. “I’m an Auror.”


“You’re also his wife,” said Harry, and I saw at once what he meant. Breaking the integrity of another person’s mind, even for the best of reasons, means breaking trust.


“All right, Harry.” I stepped aside.


Obliviate!


I knew right away that something had gone very wrong. Remus crumpled to the floor, as still and silent as the last of his childhood friends, and little Irene, who had slept through it all, began to wail.


Harry and I turned him over and whispered “Ennervate,” and after what seemed like an age, he blinked his eyes open and gazed vaguely at Harry.


“Hello, Prongs,” he said.


II. Minerva


“You were Neville Longbottom’s Head of House,” said Tonks. “Did you know that he spent three weeks in St. Mungo’s when he was a toddler? It was the same thing, a botched Memory Charm. The Auror who found Frank and Alice was a bit upset, as you can imagine, and his hands were none too steady. I found the record at headquarters.”


“I suspected as much. It explains a lot of things.” I remembered Neville at eleven, round face furrowed in concentration as he bent over his schoolwork. Now and again he would dart a glance toward the corner of the room as if hoping to catch sight of one of the things that were perpetually escaping from him, like his toad, or his left mitten, or the entire contents of last week’s lessons.


“Does it?” said Tonks, who had known Neville only as a young recruit to the Order. “But I mean, he grew up all right. Well, mostly all right, anyway.”


I looked at her. She was still so very young, her eyes bright under a mop of mousy-brown hair and her baby nestled in her arms. I remembered her as a first-year, a bundle of scraped elbows and untied shoelaces who had blackened Mutius Flint’s eye for taunting her about how half her relatives were in Azkaban, and I didn’t know how to tell her not to hope.


“He was a child, and young children are more likely to recover from spell damage than adults,” I said slowly.


“Right. Good point.” She looked worn and defeated.


“I wouldn’t give up hope yet. We simply don’t know.” I tried not to think about Gilderoy, who would never leave St. Mungo’s. Well, to be absolutely honest, I tried not to think about how Filius and I had joked about Gilderoy. “He’s a strong man. Very strong. Go home and get some sleep, and I will contact you if he wakes.”


I turned back to Remus’ bedside and thought about him as a first-year too. What I remember most about him was that he was such a cheerful, good-natured child; Poppy and I couldn’t figure out why, when he’d been through things that would make grown men bitter. If we had known what was to come, we’d not have believed it.


That was the night I felt I had been a teacher for too long. One remembers too much, and finds oneself haunted by the shades of the children who were. I don’t know how Albus stood it for so many years.


III. Remus


... a strange place, a dry and sandy riverbed. Arid like sheets, white sheets? A thin white curtain veils the window. I do not understand, am I in France? The land so flat that I cannot gauge the distance to the other side. A place like a garden, very near and very far, white poppies blooming under dark cypresses, and a strange tree heavy with fruit.


A girl holds her hands out to me from the far shore. The name in my mouth is Emmeline? I think that we were lovers once. Her mouth is red and wet with pomegranate juice, and no wind stirs beneath the trees.


“Wotcher, Remus. I brought you some strawberries.”


The taste of summer-fruit, not pomegranates, and the girl is not Emmeline because Emmeline is dead, I remember now. There is a war and I must fight in it.


I start for the door and not-Emmeline shakes her head. “It’s all right, go back to bed. You can’t go out just yet, not until the Healers say you’re able to leave.”


Tears in her eyes, I do not understand what is the matter because she is not Emmeline and so she cannot be dead. Who is she? Narcissa, Narcissa Black? The curtains are pale and paperthin, paperwhite like narcissus and the sky is black. Her face is Narcissa’s but her eyes and hair are not.


“Do you remember what happened?”


A boy beside her, James is his name? I think he is my friend. But he has the wrong eyes, just like Narcissa, who is not a friend at all and I’m not sure why she’s here...


“You ... you both went shopping. For new eyes.” I don’t really remember, but this seems like a reasonable conclusion. One must above everything be reasonable. However, they look unhappy with this answer.


“Not quite,” says Narcissa after a moment. “You’re in St. Mungo’s because you’ve taken a bit of Spell Damage. The Healers think you’ll get better in time.”


Time is a mystery. They study it in the Department of Mysteries, did you know? Some say it is an arrow and some say it is a loop. Something is wrong. If I could go back in time I could put it right; but that can never happen now. Birds fly like arrows, ravens and vultures, circling over the dead. The people with new eyes are unhappy because someone is dead.


“Someone is dead.”


They look at each other and James bites his lip. “Yes. My friend Ron.”


Ron is not the name I am trying to remember, but that is something. There are proper things to say after a death. “I’m sorry. Let me know if I can do anything.”


“Er. Thanks.”


James turns away and I think that I ought to lend him a handkerchief, but there are only strawberries, so I offer him one. I still feel as though I have forgotten something terribly important, but my mind is foggy and I cannot concentrate. James is here, but Sirius is not, he must have sent his cousin instead, and wasn’t there supposed to be a third? I have an impression of a boy walking at my elbow and laughing, but when I turn no one is there at all.


The darkness behind the curtain grows thinner. It must be nearly morning.


IV. Harry


One of the things they don’t tell you about being the Chosen One is that after it’s over, after the Dark Lord has been defeated and the reporters finally leave you alone, you still have to figure out what the hell you’re going to do with the rest of your life. The Ministry said they’d overlook the fact that my last year of education had been spotty, but I wasn’t about to work for Rufus Scrimgeour as long as I had any other options. And Luna’s dad offered me a job at the Quibbler after he interviewed me – writing the horoscope column. I gave it a go, because it was the sort of job where you could make up anything you liked and get your name in print – but I kept thinking about how Ron and I used to make stuff up in Divination and how he always came up with funnier ways to die than I did. And now he was dead, and it wasn’t funny at all.


It was the same way with finding a place to live. The Weasleys said I could stay at the Burrow for as long as I liked, but Ginny was still at school and it was only her parents and me in that big house that used to be so full of people – and there were pictures of Ron everywhere, and I kept thinking of how Mrs. Weasley had said once that it was a lucky day for their family when he sat next to me on the train, and the way things had turned out, it wasn’t. Hermione visited every day, but it wasn’t the same without him. We both talked too loudly and too much to fill in the awkward silences, and then a month or two after the battle she said she’d got a job offer from a magical research firm based in Africa, and she thought they might take me on as well if I applied. I said I’d visit her there. I didn’t particularly want to move to Africa, but then, I didn’t know what I did want.


So when Tonks said I could crash in their spare bedroom for a while if I needed a change, that sounded all right. Knowing me hadn’t been very lucky for her family either, but at least there was something I could do for them. She needed all the help she could get, with a new baby and a husband who couldn’t remember anybody’s name and tended to get lost in his own house. We’d find him wandering aimlessly between the bedrooms and the living room, sometimes walking into walls, looking for something or someone who wasn’t there.


I took him by the arm and steered him to a chair by the fire, and Tonks took Irene out of her cot and brought her in. “Do you remember who this is?”


Lupin took Irene in his arms, very gently, although he was looking at her as if he wasn’t sure what she was doing there. “Simon?” he said.


“No, it’s a girl,” said Tonks. “Your daughter. Don’t you remember?” She tossed her head back, trying to look brisk and cheerful, and almost immediately dropped her eyes and bit her lip.


“Oh yes, of course I do now,” he said, but he still looked like he didn’t. “Crystal, wasn’t it?”


Crystal? “Not quite,” said Tonks. “Try again.”


I looked at her and mouthed Where’s he getting these names from? and she mouthed back I don’t know.


Lupin was still studying the baby. “Sapphire ... no ... Amethyst ... Roxanne?”


I couldn’t help it. I started humming Roxanne, you don’t have to put on the red light. Tonks caught my eye and burst into helpless giggles, and then we were all laughing, all three of us, and Irene wriggled and cooed, surrounded by happy adults for the first time in her life.


V. Luna


Daddy said he had been worried about Harry ever since he quit his job at the Quibbler, so Ginevra and I went to visit him during one of our Hogsmeade weekends. Of course we weren’t really supposed to leave the village, and I’m not supposed to Apparate at all because when I took the test for the first time I landed with my head on backward, as I wanted to see what I looked like from behind, and the examiner didn’t realize I’d done it on purpose and became rather cross when I tried to explain. But that sort of thing had never stopped us before.


We said hello to Professor Lupin and his wife and had some tea, and then Harry and Ginevra said they were going out for a walk in the park. They invited me along, but I thought it best to let them have some privacy. They’re in love with each other, but they haven’t been going out since the end of our fifth year. First Harry was too busy saving the world, and then I suppose it left him a bit confused when he actually saved it, and although Ginevra says that she doesn’t mind him being confused, I think he believes that she ought to. It is all rather complicated, and it makes me glad that most likely nobody will ever be in love with me.


Neville says that isn’t true. But Neville has never shown any signs of being in love with me, although I checked his aura thrice, just to make sure.


I do like Professor Lupin’s wife; I had never met her before, but she is very nice. I said that I thought things must be rather difficult for her.


“It’s all right,” she said. “We get by, and Harry’s been a huge help. He has his good days – more of them now than he used to.”


“Oh,” I said. Actually, I had forgotten there was something wrong with Professor Lupin, because he had offered us tea and biscuits quite kindly and asked me how the Crumple-Horned Snorkacks were doing. He did appear to be under the impression that my name was Artemis, or occasionally Cynthia, but I rather liked this for a change. “Actually, I meant it must be difficult being a reincarnation of the Pink-Haired Prophetess of Astarte.”


She stared at me for a moment (people do that sometimes), and then laughed out loud. “Do you know, I don’t think it’s ever bothered me before.”


“You’re awfully lucky,” I explained. “You see, it’s often quite hard on Seers if they happen to be born after their prophecies have been fulfilled, because for some reason people won’t take prophecies seriously if they’re about the past instead of the future. Daddy wrote a lovely long article about it once.”


“Silly of them,” said Professor Lupin. “The past is where the great mysteries are. If only we knew the truth about the past...” He stared at the opposite wall with a fixed look in his eyes, as though he were hoping he would be able to see through it, although of course this was quite impossible as he wasn’t wearing the Crystal Spectacles of Chercedonia. “If only we knew...”


“More tea, Remus?” said his wife, a little too brightly if you know what I mean, and before he could answer she knocked the sugar bowl over with her elbow and had to clean it up. As I said, I liked her very much, but I don’t think she should have interrupted him just then. It reminded me of the time Neville took me to visit his Mum, and she was just about to give him a gum wrapper when one of the mediwitches swooped in and told her to put it in the dustbin with the rest of the trash.


I worked out later that if you rearrange the letters in “Droobles Best Blowing Gum,” they spell out “Gold Bribe Below St. Mungo’s.” But Neville said he didn’t think the letters were as important as the fact that it was a gift.


I made up my mind to ask Neville if he would visit them when I was at school, because the look in Professor Lupin’s eyes was a bit like Neville’s when he’s trying to remember something, and I thought perhaps they might be able to help each other. You see, they’re both the sort of people who like helping more than they like being helped, and that makes it rather awkward for their friends sometimes.


VI. Neville


I didn’t want to visit them when Luna asked me. I’ve spent too much time visiting people with Spell Damage already, you know? Most of all, I didn’t want to face Tonks and Harry because I knew they’d be hoping for a miracle – I’d been there too, and so had all my family, and after you’ve given up hoping it’s very hard to watch other people hope.


One of my first memories is of Gran cuffing me around the head for talking about how we would go on a picnic when Mummy and Daddy came home. I won’t say she was right, but I understand now why she did it, you know?


But, well, it was Luna, and she and I had been through a lot together. (I know people keep expecting us to pair off like a couple of exotic animals on Noah’s Ark, but it isn’t like that; we’re friends, is all.) And it was Lupin, the first teacher who’d treated me like I was clever and competent. I still use that Riddikulus spell all the time. It’s not only good for boggarts.


All the same, I was dragging my feet as I went up their front walk one raw wet day in March. From all I’d heard, there was a good chance that Lupin would call me “Frank,” which would have been bloody awkward.


It never, in my wildest dreams, occurred to me that he would call me “Augusta.”


You see what I mean about Riddikulus? Harry and I fell all over the kitchen laughing, and after a moment Lupin seemed to snap to himself and started laughing as well, and his little girl pulled herself to a standing position in the playpen and giggled. And then things were all right – well, not perfectly all right, but normal and friendly, even though I wasn’t sure Lupin really saw the joke any more than the baby did.


We talked for a bit about Irene and how big she was getting, and about my research at the Herbology Institute. After an hour or so Tonks came home from work, tumbling headlong out of the Floo Network and scattering ashes all over the hearthrug.


As entrances go, it was a fairly dramatic one, but Lupin barely glanced up. “Hello, Dora,” he said mildly. “Do try not to get any ash on Augusta, will you? I understand she’s become rather persnickety in her old age.” There was a wicked twinkle in his eyes, and I realized he did see the joke, after all.


I had never really noticed until that Tonks had never told me her first name before, and for a moment I thought he was just getting things wrong again, but it was clear from the look on her face that he wasn’t. She froze in her tracks as she was crossing the room, and so did Harry, and for a moment there was absolute silence.


“Did he ever call you ‘Dora’ ... before?” Harry asked at last.


“Not outside of the bedroom, ‘cos he knew what was good for him. But I think I might have to allow it – j-just this once...” She grabbed the nearest dishrag and started sobbing into it, and for a moment none of us knew what to say. “S-sorry,” she muttered. “Been rounding up stray d-dementors all day. It gets to you, after a while.” But we all knew this wasn’t about dementors.


By the time she finally took the rag away from her face, Lupin’s arms were around her waist and she was smiling and so was Harry, and I knew they’d had their miracle after all. That was when I reckoned it would be better to let them have some time alone, you know? So I went out for a walk in the garden.


I wandered up and down the path, noticing that the snowdrops were poking their small green spears of leaves out of the mud and the sky was beginning to clear. And that’s when it hit me that this was the first spring after the war, and there would be many more of them to come.