Rating:
PG-13
House:
Schnoogle
Characters:
Harry Potter
Genres:
Mystery Drama
Era:
Multiple Eras
Spoilers:
Philosopher's Stone Chamber of Secrets Prizoner of Azkaban Goblet of Fire Quidditch Through the Ages Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Stats:
Published: 10/12/2002
Updated: 04/06/2003
Words: 29,471
Chapters: 8
Hits: 10,523

Memory Madness

Lucy-Liza

Story Summary:
Harry Potter disappeared after the Third Task. Now, a year later, a boy with dark hair, green eyes and no memory will be taken back to where he belongs, Hogwarts school of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Mystery, suspense, and, hopefully, a fantastic plot.

Chapter 07

Chapter Summary:
Harry Potter is thought to be dead. It is almost 6 months since he disappeared after the Third Task, but he is still out there. What happens when he gets back to Hogwarts? Find out...
Posted:
02/12/2003
Hits:
957
Author's Note:
Sorry this chapter took so long, much quicker updates in the future, promise. Don't forget to review! I love everyone's reviews!!! They are all fantastic! *smile* No time to reply to reviews right now - i shall try to make some individual comments on next chapter if i can *eeks*

Memory Madness

Chapter 7:

Ron had always liked Christmas. Before he went to Hogwarts it was always a great family time. Even when some of the older boys were at school, or even out of school, the Weasleys still managed to gather for the holidays.

After he started at Hogwarts, Ron didn't really need to go home anymore. He had family there anyway, like the twins and Percy. But he also had Hermione - and Harry. Even when Hermione went home, which was only once or twice in their years at Hogwarts, there was always Harry.

This was the first Christmas without him, and Ron knew that everyone had that thought shadowing the back of their minds.

After the incident in the kitchen, Ron had waited until Hermione had fallen asleep again before he sent a hurried letter to Remus Lupin. He asked the only thing he could think to ask. He had wondered if there was any way he could tell if there had been a ghost present in his house. He thought it was the only logical way to prove he wasn't completely crazy.

Hermione woke up soon after he left her though, and he cut the letter shorter than it might have been otherwise. She came in talking about having the most vivid dream. She was unsure whether all the stuff with Harry in the kitchen had actually happened. And after a moment's hesitation, Ron told her it must have been a dream, and advised her to forget about it.

He spent a long time thinking over whether this was the right thing to do. But he came to the conclusion that it was. Hermione didn't need to deal with it now. He did, but she was spared the trouble of spending sleepless nights wondering if their best friend had visited them or not.

He hadn't received a reply from Lupin, which disappointed him, but he could always ask the professor about ghosts when he got back to Hogwarts after the holidays.

Ron was brought out of his thoughts when the smell of late breakfast encouraged him to head for the kitchen.

Hermione was talking animatedly with Ginny about some book they had both had the good fortune to have read. Ginny caught sight of him and gave him a small smile which he returned.

Ron and Ginny had rallied together on more than one occasion to raise Hermione's spirits. From the cheerful look upon her face however, it seemed unlikely Ron and Ginny would need to help Hermione that day.

"Oh, Ron, dear. Sit, sit, I have some toast here waiting for you," Mrs Weasley called to him. With a slight nod, Ron took a seat.

A loud bang from upstairs made everyone in the kitchen jump slightly.

"What have they done now?!" Mrs Weasley raged, heading towards the stairs with a scowl.

Ginny, who sat closest to Ron at the table, leaned across to him. "They'll be in for it this time," she muttered. Ron nodded, paying the minimum amount of attention to his sister. He would have been more attentive, but his mind was occupied. If he could, he would rather find a way to test for ghosts than just wait until he could talk to Lupin about them.

Ginny must have noticed her brother's preoccupied mood. It was quite easy to tell something was bothering him when he spread sugar on his toast and put butter in his tea.

"What's wrong?" Ginny whispered, concerned. Ron glanced over at Hermione, who was reading a text book while eating. He sighed and shook his head at Ginny, determined to keep this worry to himself.

Ginny fortunately let the subject drop, and later that day, Mrs Weasley was enlisting everyone's help with the decorations.

Fred and George were de-gnoming the garden as the first of many punishments for blowing up half of their bedroom earlier that day, but they also joined in with the decorating when they came in.

First was the Christmas tree, then there were some garlands to hang on the banisters up the stairs.

Ron, Hermione and Ginny were concentrating on the tree to start with.

"What's this?" Hermione asked, pulling out an oddly shaped star from the box of decorations. Ginny giggled, and Ron's ears turned pink.

"That-" Ginny started laughing again. "That was - Ron's. He made it when - he was about five!" Ginny giggled uncontrollably.

Hermione's shoulders were shaking with silent laughter too. The 'star' looked more like a 'splat' than anything. Ron was trying to ignore the two giggling girls. It was times like that when having Harry around would have been very useful. In those sorts of situations, Harry, not feeling very comfortable, would step in and say something. In a case like this, Ron could just imagine Harry looking at his 'star' decoration and commenting, "Well, it's - original." And he might have moved the conversation on - to avoid Ron's further embarrassment. As it was, Ron had to endure the girls' giggles getting louder and louder. They were setting each other off, and in the end, they both lay across the sofa gasping for breath while Ron stood defiantly looking for a space on the tree to fit his 'star'.

It may have been rather embarrassing and humiliating, but Ron didn't really mind. At least Hermione and Ginny were happy for the moment. That was the important thing. The twins found his mutant Christmas decoration hilarious every year though, but just as long as they didn't come in right then...

"Ah, look at this! Ronnikins has put up his ickle star again!"

Too late, Ron thought.

"If that's a star I'll eat my Wizards hat," the other twin chortled. The girls found themselves in another round of giggles and Ron turned pink around the ears once more.

"Shut up you two," he muttered, facing the tree and placing a shimmering gold ornament on a branch.

"Or what?" Fred crowed. "You'll stun me and George with your artistic talent?"

Ron frowned furiously at the snow flake he was trying to hang on the tree. Those two could be awful sometimes. It didn't make it any easier when Ginny and Hermione had tears of laughter running down their faces. As the twins were also starting to laugh, Ron thought it best to retaliate.

"No, I'll do this..." and he turned and jumped on Fred, throwing him off balance and pinning him to the floor. He knew this wouldn't have worked if Fred had been expecting the attack, but he had the element of surprise on his side.

While he would have dearly liked to take a punch at Fred, George made it impossible when he joined in the fun and fiercely tickled Ron until he fell off Fred and was laughing loudly.

"N-no! St-stop! Stop!" he gasped. George eventually did, and pulled away grinning. Hermione and Ginny were laughing again, but had been making themselves more useful and were doing the tree as they giggled and chuckled at the Weasley boy's antics.

"Honestly," Mrs Weasley's voice sighed from the doorway. "What am I going to do with you boys?" But she was smiling ever so slightly, and tried to hide a chuckle when she saw Ron's decoration hanging on the tree.

A few hours after dinner that night, Ron was to be found sneaking in to Ginny's bedroom. He would never go in her room normally - he remembered the vile colour pink she had asked their mother to charm it some years before, and wasn't keen to go back in there.

When he slipped in to the room, however, he saw that it was not pink anymore. In fact, it was a pale peach. It was also remarkably tidy, though Ron wasn't sure if that was just because Hermione was sharing it, or if Ginny always kept it so neat.

He paid no more attention to the room, and set about the task at hand: to find a useful book about ghostly things in Hermione's large book collection.

He found her trunk easily, and pushing away his guilt, he opened it to find it stacked full of books. Not a big surprise.

The books were just piled. And he was sure there was an expanding charm on it or something, because it seemed to be a lot bigger inside than one would expect.

He got on to his knees and started to rummage around in all the books. He found all the text books for the fifth years, but also quite a few from their previous years. He found extra text books for background reading or advanced work. Then he found a pile of books she must have picked up somewhere for a spot of 'light' reading. And one of these was just what he was looking for.

Ghosts And Apparitions: All You Need To Know.

Ron smiled, silently thanking Hermione for reading anything and everything.

For the rest of the evening, he sat in the sitting room with everyone else, listening to their conversations and smiling absently as he thought of what he'd do later that night.

Eventually, Mr and Mrs Weasley were both very tired and went up stairs to bed.

"Don't stay up too late, kids," Mr Weasley yawned as he left.

Ron then waited patiently as Hermione and Ginny talked themselves to exhaustion. They both finally headed for bed, and Ron followed, making them think he was bed-bound as well.

But he wasn't. As soon as the girl's door was closed, Ron crept over to his own bed, pulled out the ghost book from underneath it, and headed to the kitchen.

Wary of the noisy floorboards, it took him a few minutes to navigate his way safely downstairs, but then he sat at the kitchen table, and started to read the book by the light of an old candle.

He was about half way through when he seriously thought of giving up. There didn't seem to be anything about testing for ghosts. It had theories as to how ghosts came about, but they were so boring Ron skipped part of it, and it had all sorts of information about ways to exorcise unwelcome ghosts or apparitions. It just didn't have what he was looking for.

He took hold of the candle, meaning to put it away and give up for the night, but some of the wax spilt on to his head, causing him to knock the book to the floor and drop the candle on the table, extinguishing itself in the process.

He ran some cold water over his hand, and when he turned back to pick up the book, the page it had opened on to caught his eye.

He'd found it! It explained how to cast a simple wand-less charm to determine whether a ghost had been present in one's house recently.

Some of the finer points were a little tricky. He would have to do the charm at night - and since he didn't want to wait it would be that night. If the suspected ghost was someone the caster had known, then it helped if an item that belonged to the deceased person could be found. It also mentioned needing candles placed in a circle around the place the ghost could have been; in Ron's case, the kitchen.

"Twelve candles," he muttered to himself, reading the list of supplies. "I hope we have twelve..." But after a quick look in the store cupboard under the sink, Ron found just enough candles to use. He just hoped it wouldn't take long - the less was burnt down on the candle, the less suspicious his mother would be.

So Ron set up the candles around the worktops and window sills so they were equally spaced all around the room. Then, according to a tip he read at the bottom of the page, he was advised to split up whatever the belonging of the suspected ghost was, and put a small part of it in each candle to burn.

This part was making Ron pause to think. He didn't know of anything he could use - unless...

Putting the book down, he hurriedly made his way upstairs and to his bedroom. He tripped over some of his comics, but righted himself just as he reached his old closet. He pulled out the object he wanted from it, and made his way carefully back to the kitchen.

When he was back in the middle of the room, he took out a pair of ordinary Muggle scissors and cut up Harry's old jumper - the same one that had fallen out of his closet on Hermione at the start of the holidays.

Ron placed a bit of the jumper in every candle and as he put the last piece in to the last candle, all the flames flared up and fizzed, sending up a number of sparks.

Ron fumbled with the book, trying to find the incantation he was meant to read out. He had, in fact, been very doubtful that any of this would work without a wand, but he was pretty convinced by this stage - and he just *had* to know, so...

"Illya mantra dustus apparatius comadna!" Ron said, hoping with all his might he had said it correctly.

A strange misty light appeared in the middle of the room, all around Ron and the kitchen table.

The candle flames turned blue, and cast a spooky light in the still kitchen. The mist turned a pale green colour and started to spin.

Ron closed his mouth, which had fallen open, and hastily looked at the book to try to interpret the phenomena.

"Blue means a neutral ghost was present, Red means a ghost was present that had bad intentions..." Ron turned over the page. "Green. Green means...apparition." Ron looked up from the book with confusion plastered across his features. An apparition. That was very - general. What exactly was an apparition? It sounded just like a ghost, but it couldn't be if they were labelled differently.

The flames burnt away the pieces of Harry's jumper, and when they had, all the flames went out as one - almost as though a gust of strong wind had passed through the room. Along with the light of the candles, the mist also disappeared, leaving Ron standing in the darkness, holding a book that had given him more questions than answers.

*~*~*

After Madame Pomfrey had given Harry the sleeping potion, Dumbledore went to his office saying he had a few things to do. Sirius was left alone in the hospital wing, next to Harry's bed.

He had so much going on in his head. He felt like it ought to have exploded. He was glad that it hadn't, of course, but still - how much could one wizard's mind take? Sirius shook his head slightly, and rubbed his eyes tiredly.

Harry was sleeping soundly, barely moving at all. In fact, Sirius jolted a few times when he didn't think his godson was actually breathing, but that was only because Harry's chest hardly rose and fell as he slept.

Seeing little point in staying there for now, Sirius stood to leave. He carefully took Harry's glasses off and left them on the bedside table before leaving the room silently.

His first thought was to go to Dumbledore's office and maybe discuss what was to happen next, and also what had happened previously in the hospital wing. That was a very strange incident.

But no, he turned his steps to the teacher's rooms instead. He came to the dead end down one corridor, and touched one of the stones. "Marauders," he whispered, and a door appeared.

With that, he went in to Professor Remus Lupin's quarters.

It was about the same time Ron Weasley was sitting down to late breakfast at the Burrow that Sirius stood looking around the rooms Remus used when he stayed at the school as opposed to going by floo, or broom, to their flat in Hogsmeade.

He was warming up nicely by the fire, when Remus came in to the main sitting room-like area. He jumped about a foot when he noticed Sirius.

"Ah, Sirius, you scared me half to death!" Was the greeting Sirius received. After a pause, Remus collected himself and gestured to a comfy sofa. "Sit, sit."

Sirius did so - and for a moment neither spoke as they just sat at either end of the squashy red sofa facing each other.

It was Remus who eventually broke the silence. "I still can't quite believe it," he said with a shuddering sigh. Sirius watched his friend steadily, mind going a bit numb again.

"It is certainly - unexpected." Sirius admitted stony-faced. Remus looked at Sirius sympathetically.

"It can't have been easy - running in to him like that..."

"No," Sirius sighed. "It was - mind-blowing! I stood slack-jawed for about three minutes together. There was Mundungus prattling on like a twit, and I was just - gob-smacked!"

Remus frowned a little. "Mundungus? What does he have to do with it?"

"He was with me, not far from Diagon Alley, like I said before. He didn't recognise Harry though. His glasses were broken, and you know how rough his sight is without them."

Remus nodded, and the two old friends fell silent again for a while, both lost in their thoughts. Remus was so very curious. He was also itching to see Harry, but knew better than to try to visit just yet.

"Well..." Remus trailed off, and only went on when Sirius looked up and nodded for him to continue. "H-how is he?" He asked hesitantly. Sirius looked thoughtful, as though he was thinking the question over carefully before answering.

"He's so - so..." Sirius struggled for a word to describe the boy's temperament. "He's so - like he always was! I don't know quite how to describe it. He has no memories from what we can gather. Though he knew Draco Malfoy vaguely. But still - he has the same manner, the same sort of awareness - the same Harry-ness!" Sirius ran a hand through his hair. "I really can't explain it properly..." Remus shook his head at the statement.

"No," he said, "I think you explained it perfectly. But what you say about Malfoy was interesting. When did he see him?"

"After Dumbledore had arrived down at Hagrid's hut, Malfoy came looking in through the window. We had to get him in to explain and make sure he didn't tell anyone. But Harry said his name when he noticed him at the window...it was very odd." Sirius wore a pensive frown.

"Yes, strange," Remus acknowledged in agreement. But he noticed the far away look his friend wore. He knew that look. "Something else is bothering you, Sirius. What is it?"

"It's just - this thing that happened in the hospital wing..." Sirius began. He told Remus about Harry's collapse, about his and Dumbledore's theories of Harry having acquired more magic, and then went on to tell him about the way Harry had detected Poppy Pomfrey lying. Then he finished off his account with the way Harry had lain frozen-like for a few minutes, seemingly staring at the ceiling.

Remus was frowning in a way that informed anyone he was thinking very hard.

"I think I have heard of something like this before," he murmured, and hurried over to a bookcase bursting with old volumes and tomes. Sirius watched curiously as his best friend flipped through the books at a tremendous speed, tossing them away when they yielded no useful information.

"Aha!" Remus cried triumphantly. "I knew those things sounded familiar...lets see...Oh..." Remus trailed off, gaping at the page.

"What? What is it?" Sirius jumped up and hurried over to his best friend, looking expectantly at the other wizard.

"Incredible..." Remus whispered, shaking his head. He wandered over to the nearest armchair and sat heavily in it, while Sirius paced and fidgeted as though he had ants in his pants.

"Tell me, tell me," he said impatiently.

"The way he knew when Poppy was lying - it would seem that he is a Lythium (just pronounced Li-thi-um). That means he can detect deceit or lies. He would know when someone is being untruthful, and could probably see though glamour charms and all sorts of things. If he is really powerful in this gift he could probably see through polyjuice too." Remus explained wide-eyed.

Sirius was gaping. But he soon frowned a little. "He can't be very gifted with it, or he would have seen though Barty Crouch Junior's disguise, wouldn't he?"

"No," Remus shook his head. "If you and Dumbledore are correct, this gift is probably a recent addition to his talents along with more magical ability."

Sirius nodded, and ran a hand through his hair. "And what about the thing when he froze?" He ventured to ask. Remus frowned again.

"I am not quite sure about that - though I *know* I have seen or read about it somewhere...I'll look in to it, anyway."

Sirius nodded and stood, heading for the exit. "Thank you, Moony. I'll come back later, I need to go back to Harry; he might have woken up by now."

Remus nodded understandingly. "See you later, Padfoot."