Remember Me

Jane made her way back up to the main library floor, willing her hands to stop shaking. By the time she got to the desk, she'd convinced herself that nothing was wrong. That lack of sleep, combined with the doctor's prediction that her memories were resurfacing, had her imagining things.

Besides, any woman sitting alone with a man she barely knew would tense up at him touching her. Okay, she reasoned, tensing up was a little different than the full-blown panic she'd felt, but the rationalization worked for her.

Her brush with past memories had been neither thought about nor retained. Her brain had effectively wiped the experience away.

Her workday passed with nothing out of the ordinary happening. A blessing and a curse, because time seemed to drag. When she found herself idle, her thoughts returned to the British man that had come from nowhere and set her even, ordered life off its axis. Jane had read enough love stories to know a hackneyed when-we-met-I-just-knew scenario when she saw one. But that's how she felt. The connection had been there from the moment he'd said...

"Excuse me?" Jane nearly yelped when she heard him say it just as she was thinking it.

"Did I startle you?" Harry's brow furrowed.

"I was just thinking," she left the thought unfinished, not wanting him to know exactly what she'd been thinking.

"So was I," Harry started uneasily. "Based on your earlier reaction, I guessed lunch was out," he let a small smile tug at his mouth. "How about dinner?"

There was something about that smile, and the green eyes twinkling down at her that made the last of her apprehension fade. The link she'd felt with him was too compelling to not explore further. "I'd love to."

^*^*^*

A comfortable silence ensued as they made their way to a nearby restaurant. It wasn't much, just a little Italian place buried next to a grocery store. But Jane loved their food and she was known there. Dreams or not, she was still dining with a man she barely knew. Home court advantage was definitely the rule of the day.

Orders placed, Jane and Harry watched each other over the rims of their drinks. Harry, wanting a clear head, had stuck with water. "So tell me about your friend, the one that's missing."

Harry was very glad he hadn't had his water glass to his mouth. He'd have sprayed her with it. "She was," he paused, gathering thoughts, "unique."

"You fly across an ocean for unique?"

"It's complicated, I guess," Harry smiled. "We met at boarding school when we were eleven years old. She was an insufferable know-it-all back then, quoting books left and right, always positive she was right about everything." Harry paused again, grinning wildly. "It didn't help that she usually was."

Jane watched him as he spoke. There was a light to him when he spoke of this girl, a near radiance. She found herself envying her once again. "Does she have a name?"

The internal debate took Harry a few moments. But he reasoned that if she hadn't recognized her name in writing, she wouldn't when it was spoken. The doctor's words about forcing memories being dangerous echoed in his ears, but he pushed on anyway. "Her name was....is Hermione."

"So what changed?" Jane asked, elaborating when he looked at her quizzically. "I mean, what would make you charge over here for such a know-it-all bookworm?"

"Well, we were only eleven when we formed that opinion," Harry said, not sure how he felt that she had no reaction at all to her own name. "We came to depend on her bookish nature to help us get out of one scrape or another. And she saved us with her knowledge more times than I can count. Over time, we became best friends. The three of us did everything together."

"Three?"

"My best friend, Ron, was the third side of our little triangle."

"What kind of things?" Jane asked. As she had no memories of her own, she loved hearing stories of other's childhood friendships. She knew she was just living vicariously, but didn't care.

Harry pondered this for a moment. He didn't think battling mountain trolls or rescuing hippogriffs would go over well, so he wracked his brain for anything that could be understood by someone drenched in the Muggle world.

"We studied together, shopped for our school supplies, spent time at Ron's house with his family over the summers. We spent a lot of time at the pub in the local village, plotting ways to make life miserable for the one student we all hated. And of course, he spent equal amount of time doing the same. Usually made for some fireworks when our plans met up with each other's."

Jane and Harry looked down in front of them. At some time during their conversation, their dinners had arrived. They shifted gears to neutral topics as they ate, and finished eating before Jane was ready for their evening to end.

They were sipping cappuccino when Harry asked what she'd been dreading. "So tell me about your childhood friends."

"I don't have any," she said simply, silently begging that he drop it. He didn't.

"You mean none that you keep in touch with?" Harry prodded, fishing for some clue as to how she had ended up in this situation. All he knew for certain was that her memory was gone. If he had a hope of fixing this, he needed to know how it had happened.

"No. I mean none at all." Jane inhaled sharply and told him everything. "About four years ago a doctor and his family were on their way home from dinner when they spotted a girl wandering on the side of the highway. She was babbling, hunched over and nearly catatonic. They got her to a hospital and found no evidence of drug use, physical abuse or injury. It was five days before the girl even spoke, and when she did, they found that she had no memory. Outside of being able to walk, talk and read, the girl was a blank slate."

"And that girl was you," Harry said, fighting with everything in him not to take her hand in his, fighting not to wipe away the tears laying unnoticed on her cheeks.

"Yes. An extensive search was launched to find out who I was. But after two weeks, there was nothing. No missing person's reports, no friends searching for me. In the end, everyone decided that I was a runaway. The doctor, Dr. Ramsey, did everything he could to help me get on my feet. I'll be grateful to him until the day I die."

And so will I, Harry thought. "That must have been very difficult. I can't imagine waking up one day not knowing who I was."

"You get through," Jane said mechanically.

^*^*^*^*

Later that night, Jane sat at the edge of her bed and sighed. It had been such a peaceful night. She truly enjoyed Harry's company. He seemed a little shy at first, but once he'd warmed up he'd kept her giggling with stories about his friends. She felt a little envious, wishing she had memories of old friends to cheer her when times got rough. She told him about her best friend Mariah, but those stories hadn't had the same camaraderie as Harry's had.

Settling the covers around her chin, Jane desperately wished that she'd see Harry again soon.

And then she was sitting across from him in the white room. "This isn't quite what I had in mind," she said.

"Sorry?" he asked, puzzled.

"Never mind. Do you know what this place is?" Jane asked, waving a hand to indicate the room.

"I think it's your subconscious," Harry grinned. "Would you like to go somewhere else?"

They both stood and Jane followed Harry out of the door and straight into a bar. An odd assortment of people were gathered around in what looked like Halloween costumes. Some wore robes and odd shaped hats, some had on what could only be described as medieval wear. "Must be a theme party," she muttered, but the room was so loud Harry didn't hear her.

He stopped walking a few feet from a table that sat a man with his head slumped onto crossed arms. She glanced up at Harry, surprised to see a tortured look on his face. Jane almost had to jump aside when another man ran past them.

"Harry," the redheaded man poked a finger onto the slumped man's head. Jane assumed this was Ron. And then she realized that Ron was the other man she'd seen with Harry at the library.

"G'way, Ron," came the muffled response, confirming Jane's suspicion.

"This is important," Ron tried again, but Harry remained slouched over. "You're going to hate me for this, but I have no choice." Ron withdrew a stick from behind his back, muttered something and touched Harry on the head with it.

The effect was instantaneous. Harry sat straight up and glared at Ron. "What did you do that for? I'd just gotten numb." He raised his hand to signal for more from the bartender, bur Ron grabbed his hand and forced him to listen.

"Thought you might like to see what came earlier," Ron said, determined, "from Hedwig."

Harry straightened his glasses and read the message. "What kind of twisted joke is this?"

"It's no joke, Harry. Hedwig's been holding onto it since this morning, waiting for you to come home. I finally convinced her to let me read it."

Harry scanned the words again. Both of them. Hermione's alive.

"But she's not. She's gone, Ron. I saw her die."

"Did you?" Ron sat down, lowering his voice. "You said you just saw her disappear."

"But I was right across from Voldemort. I heard him. He said Avada Kedavra mere moments before he died. She's dead. As dead as him." Harry pushed back from the table, fury rising in him like a hurricane. "Don't you think I want her to be alive, Ron? Don't you think I did everything in my power to get her back? I begged McGonagall on my knees for the time-turner. I begged until I was hoarse, but she wouldn't let me go back. Wouldn't let me undo the one thing that could have kept her alive.

"I would give all that I have, Ron, all that I am to have her walk through that door and tell me she was okay, that she'd looked up some obscure book and figured out how to undo it. But she's gone," Harry's voice cracked. "She's gone."

The fury died down, and Harry lost all momentum. He reclaimed his chair and put his head back on his arms.

"Just think about this, Harry, before you return to your drink. Your parents died, but didn't disappear. Neither did Cedric, or anyone else you've seen that curse performed on. If she's really dead, Harry, then where's her body?"

Jane turned to the dream Harry, but he was gone. With a snap, so was the dream.

She sat up in bed and rubbed a hand across her face. And she'd thought the cave dream was disturbing. Dutifully, she took up the notepad by the bed and wrote down what she could remember. One of these days, she'd find the time to read all that she'd written down.

Across town, Harry bolted from his bed like he'd been shot from a cannon. "Bloody hell," he muttered, then dropped his voice so as not to awaken Ron. How had he joined Hermione in sleep? He was miles from her, with no spell cast, yet their dreams had meshed again.

For reasons he couldn't place, he had shown her the beginning of his quest to find her. The vague, anonymous letter that had sown the seeds of hope in his miserable life and had given him a small raft to cling to in the storm of his grief.

*^*^*^*

The next morning, Jane awoke dazed. At first, she couldn't remember why. Then the dream came back to her. Last night, she'd thought that what she'd seen had really happened. But in the light of day, she realized that was nonsense. She'd obviously taken pieces from her conversations with Harry and built a dream around them. "I ought to sell tickets to these things," she muttered.

Jane tossed the covers aside, glanced briefly at the notepad by the bed, but ignored it. She didn't have time to rehash her dreams this morning.

She purposely detoured through the park on the way to the library, hoping to catch a glimpse of Harry. But he wasn't on their bench. Neither was he at the entrance. "Silly girl," she said under her breath.

Of course, he showed up at the precise moment she'd decided she wouldn't be seeing him that day. "Excuse me," he said softly, gaining her attention. Mariah's head whipped up, but Jane was so focused on Harry, she didn't notice.

"Can I help you?" she answered in the same low voice. It was foolish of her heart to start beating faster just because he stood there, but it did anyway.

"I'd ask you to have lunch with me," he smiled across the desk, "but I'm horribly afraid you'll take off running."

"If I guarantee I won't, will you ask?" The increase in her pulse rate had Jane nearly giddy. She'd never flirted before. It felt wonderful.

"Let's give it a try, shall we? Jane, are you free for lunch?" Harry knew she'd been teasing him, but his heart was in his throat anyway as he waited for her answer.

"I certainly am," she laughed. "I'll meet you over at the park at noon." Jane glanced around to introduce Harry to Mariah, but her best friend had gone off someplace. Noticing her boss headed for the circulation desk, Jane ushered Harry away with a slight blush to her cheeks.

He was sitting on their bench when she found him, but he wasn't alone.

"Jane," Harry stood as she approached, "this is my friend Ron."

Jane smiled and extended her hand. "Ah, so this is the other partner in crime. Harry told me a little of your school day adventures last night at dinner." Ron seemed to shoot Harry a worried glance, but recovered quickly and nodded.

"Yeah," he said in a rough voice. "We were usually up to no good, the three of us." A strange something came over his face just then and he took a step backwards. "I'll be off. Enjoy your lunch."

"Did I say something wrong?" Jane asked as Ron did everything but run from the two of them.

"Not at all," Harry appeased breaking out the sandwiches he'd bought at a nearby deli.

Ron watched from a nearby hedge. He knew he shouldn't but couldn't seem to stop himself. It was almost like going back it time, when seeing Harry and Hermione with their heads together was commonplace. It had taken all of his reserve not to enfold her in his arms when he'd taken her hand.

When he'd awakened on that cave floor to find You-Know-Who dead on the floor, Ron had felt a momentary exhilaration. Then he saw Harry huddled in a corner, muttering "she's dead" over and over again and his world had plummeted. It had been hard to watch his best friend drink his life away, but Ron had remained by his side, waiting to help Harry pick up the pieces of his life and move on. And then they'd received the note. And they'd begun to hope.

Watching them laugh together, Ron's heart warmed and his face brightened. Harry had told him of his true feelings for Hermione once he'd surfaced from his drunken existence. Of the scene that had caused her fall down the stairs. Ron was infuriated. Hermione had been as close to him as his own sister, and he'd wanted to throttle Harry for botching it so badly and spooking her.

Now, that all seemed academic. Harry and Hermione had found each other. It was only a matter of time before she recovered her memories and life was back on course again.

Ron tensed as a sniff sounded nearby. Not sure what else to do, he investigated the surrounding bushes. About twenty feet from him, Ron found a woman watching them the way he had been moments before.

She was about his age, a head shorter that him, with straight black hair that ended in a razor sharp line at her shoulders.

"Interesting view," Ron called attention to himself. The woman jumped. He nearly sprung the wand from his sleeve but she ran off before he could.

When he turned back, he saw Harry stand and take Hermione's hand. As he pulled her to standing, he must have tugged too hard because she stumbled into him. An alarmed look creased her face and she ran from him towards the library. The deaf could have heard her screams of "No" as she fled.

"What happened?" Ron asked as he reached Harry.

"I don't know. Everything was going well until I helped her to her feet. Something isn't right, Ron. That's the second time she's run screaming after I touched her."