Make Me Forget

Memories

Flashes of light painting the sky. Red, black, purple, and of course: that sickening green colour of death. Screams of terror when curses find their targets. Worse still: the unblinking stare from hundreds of dead eyes, the now silent victims of Avada Kedavra. The smell of fear, ozone and burned grass.

When the dark mark shot up into the sky some instantly froze and stared at it, petrified like rabbits caught in the headlights of a car, awaiting death. Others managed to ignore the green skull with its serpent tongue and kept on fighting illuminated by the green light. They survived. If they where lucky.

The irony of it all. The sunset pours blood and gold over the battlefields. It's going to be a perfect day. A perfect day for a picnic, the perfect day for a war? Blue skies and white fluffy clouds above. Sunshine and curses. Lush green grass with the black soil exposed in deep gashes. A confused earthworm wriggling in the gorge made by an evil curse. Black dirt. Pink worm.

They were fighting a losing battle, because in this kind of war there is no such thing as a victory or victors. They are all victims. There are survivors and casualties, but no one really wins. That's what they forget to tell you when you join the army. War is not like chess. The pieces don't rise again afterwards, and a broken human can not be mended.

A piercing scream, nothing like the murmur of tortured voices always present at a battlefield like this, but something new and horrid. A surreal scream. A scream containing the pain of thousands of Crucio curses. A scream that ended it all, for better or for worse.

Someone always had to clean up the mess. It didn't matter if it was a game of chess or the worst war in modern times. Someone had to collect the broken pieces, mend those that could be mended and take away the ones beyond all help. If they thought the fighting was bad, they quickly changed their minds. The sun shone mercilessly like a blowtorch in the sky, and flies started to gather as soon as the crossfire of curses stopped. There was no time to mourn. Something had to be done, and quick. No one had enough strength to put a freezing-charm on the battlefield to preserve the corpses. It was a vain battle against decomposition. Dead bodies were lifted and carefully piled - Death-Eaters in one heap and the rest in rows for identification. After a couple of hundred corpses no one really cared which one was friend or foe. The neat rows soon enough became piles of bodies.

A pale hand was sticking out from underneath a great heap of dead witches and wizards. Lean fingers, pink nails, and a blue ink-stain on the thumb. The sounds. Flies buzzing everywhere. "Wingardium Leviosa" uttered with voices rough from shouting curses and crying. The dull thumps when dead bodies land on each other, forming large piles. Black robes, hot in the sun. A feverish struggle to get rid of the corpses, already decomposing, before plagues follow the scent of war.

No one knew how they had managed. Ask anyone who was present that and the following days; they couldn't have given you an answer. They didn't want to remember, didn't want to talk or think about it. Their minds shut down the painful parts and busied themselves with work, building what war had destroyed. That, however, didn't stop the nightmares.

Make me forget

The tent looked like a big beer-tent from some kind of festival, to everyone who didn't know what it was. Actually it was just that, an old party tent, but with a new purpose. It didn't seem very festive now. The blue stripes where faded from many years of sun, and the white ones had a sickening yellowish tint. No one cared since the tent didn't stand there to be pretty, it was waterproof and the better tents had other more important uses. The important thing was that it did what it was intended to do, it kept the things in it dry and out of view.

It didn't look very festive on the inside either. No one had bothered with the floor, so it was plain grass. The tent was slightly over-sized given the fact that most of the time only one or two people worked in it. A camouflage-green curtain partitioned the tent in one small and one bigger room, and a blue couch was the only furniture on this side of the makeshift wall. The empty doorframe was covered with a grey and white wool-blanket with a pattern of polar bears. If someone wished to enter he or she had only to push aside the makeshift door.

A young woman did just that and walked inside. She was very pale and held a stone basin pressed tightly to her chest as if her life depended on it. Her eyes had a haunted look. A beardless, tired-looking healer in filthy white robes greeted her faintly. He tried a professional smile, probably to encourage her, but he had already seen too much for the smile to reach his eyes.

"Welcome. I'll explain the procedure to you." he started, but she cut him off before he had a chance to give her the standard speech.

"You don't have to do that," she said in a low but uncompromising voice "About ten people explained it to me in detail already. I'm going to put my memories of the war in a big pensieve." She shuddered unintentionally. "And then... It's history."

"Basically yes." he confirmed, "I see you have your own pensieve. Have you put any of your war-memories in it?"

"No."

"Then why..."

"I've put some precious memories in it." her grip on the stone-basin tightened "If... If something goes wrong."

"Don't worry!" this time the caring smile might have reached his eyes "Nothing bad is going to happen. I have memory charmed 50 people only this past week. This spell rarely fails."

"I know, but if. There are some things I really want to remember."

"I understand." he said calmly, and then thoughtfully added, "I guess that is all right."

He pushed the green curtain aside and led her to an enormous oval stone-pool in the far end of the tent. The pool was three meters long, two meters wide and deep enough for a grown man to stand on the bottom of it and still not be able to peer over the edge. The bottom of it was covered with a whitish silvery liquid.

"You can start whenever you like..."

He was supposed to explain how to do this, and guide her through the procedure, but she apparently knew how these things worked. She took a deep breath and slowly began to pull a memory from her temple. She screamed. Every memory extracted from her mind seemed to cause enormous pain, as if the silvery thread was made of burning hot metal. Tears poured uncontrollably from her dark eyes as she extracted memory after memory. Every cry that escaped her lips cut like a dagger inside him, and his reaction disturbed him. He should have got used to it by now. He had seen all kinds of reactions before, from pain to sorrow to apathy. Uncontrolled ragged sobs, emotionless staring, silent weeping, or cries of agony and fear. They had to mourn - that was what he had been told. It was unprofessional of him to get affected by it like that. In time he might have to go through this himself. He relaxed for a moment when the screaming stopped, but she had only made a short pause to breathe for a while before she started again. He didn't know what to do so he put a hand on her shoulder in an awkward attempt to comfort her. She flinched at the touch.

"Are you all right?" he asked worriedly. She seemed to stare at something very far away.

"Someone has to remember you know," she said in a strained voice, "this can't be allowed to happen again."

She forced another memory out of her head and let it join the others before continuing.

"And I have to remember before I can forget." she said, managing to keep her voice surprisingly steady.

There wasn't really a good answer to that.

She must be one of the war veterans. He could only imagine what they could have seen and experienced here these last months. He himself had flown in from abroad in the weeks after the final battle to try to help. His land was relatively untouched by war and he felt guilty for that. He had arrived here full of good intentions, but that feeling had shifted soon enough. He felt so powerless facing the enormous amount of dead and injured. The physical injures was not the worst, his education had let him face bad curses before; it was the psychological damage that caught him off guard. They had decided to use memory charms to erase the traumatic memories of the worst months and let the great pensive alone remember the horrors of war.

"Can you take away three years?"

"Huh?" her solemn voice brought him back to reality "Oh you are finished. I'm sorry, what did you say?"

"I asked if it's possible to erase the memory of three years."

"Yes, it's only a matter of calibrating the memory-charm." he explained, pleased to be able to talk about his profession "One could erase everything from a couple of minutes to a lifetime. It takes some practice to learn the necessary accuracy of course. The trick is to be gentle; most of the cases with memory-charms that took lifetimes away were actually accidents by over-enthusiastic beginners. And it gets harder to be precise the longer time-period one is supposed to take away."

She seemed to listen with great interest, but a strange glint in her eyes made him wary and he ended his speech abruptly and frowned.

"Why do you ask?"

"Could you take my last three years away?" she pleaded.

"I can't do that!" he protested "I'm only supposed to take away the memory of the last months. Half a year maybe, a year at most."

"Trust me", she said gloomily, "I don't want to remember."

"You are so young."

"Eighteen."

"Three years, it's one sixth of your whole life. You'd be like fifteen again!"

"Those where the days... Believe me. I don't need the agony of those years! Everything I want to remember is in this." She was gripping the pensieve so hard her knuckles had turned white.

"But your education? You'll have to learn three years of magic all over again."

"I'm a quick learner. Please?"

"I can't. We're not supposed to."

"You won't or you're not supposed to?"

"I'd get in trouble." he said feebly. This sign of weakness lit a spark of hope in her eyes.

"So you can do it." she paused for a heartbeat, "They don't have to know."

"Of course they'd know!" he said sharply "You don't think we just let the patients wander off after a complicated mind-charm, do you? There's a team waiting outside to take care of you and determine exactly how much of your memory is lost. And don't give me those puppy-eyes!"

"There's no need to be rude." she said in a low voice and started to get up from her kneeling position. He offered her a hand but she didn't take it.

"I'm sorry. But you have to understand that it's impossible."

"Anything is possible. You said that memory-charms are hard to control when dealing with longer time-periods."

"Yes but that's not..."

"You can tell them you miscalculated!"

"But I..."

"You are tired, you have worked all day," she paused and continued very slowly, staring into his eyes and pronouncing every word carefully, "and everyone makes mistakes."

He looked back and answered her in the same manner. Speaking slowly and trying to stare her down.

"Have you really, really considered the consequences?"

She gave him a slow nod, not breaking eye contact even for a moment. Her eyes was dark and uncompromising, he had no chance.

"I'm really going to get in trouble." he murmured, and looked away. She didn't thank him, or say anything else after that, if she had done he probably would have changed his mind. He motioned her to sit down on a chair near the back entrance to the tent. She looked down at the ragged grass, crushed by so many feet. He cleared his throat to get her attention. She looked up with a strange expression on her face. She looked exhausted from months of agony and fear, but deep inside her shone a tiny spark of tired hope.

"Are you ready?"

Her tear-strained face was set.

"Yes." she whispered, her voice almost giving up on her "Make me forget."

---The end