The Forgotten

The Forgotten

"We rarely forget that which has made a deep impression on our minds." - Tryon Edwards

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Prologue: The Setting of the Stage

"All the world is a stage." - William Shakespeare

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James Aston was use to strange things happening to him.

James was around 35 year old, was a successful and well respected Professor of History at the two colleges where he worked. He had been found lying half dead in the middle of a park 14 years ago on November 1st, with almost no memory of who he was, where he was from, or what he was doing there. In fact, the only memories he had were of a few odd names, and the knowledge that he was called James.

Over the next few years, James was in a state of limbo. He had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, and he spent a lot of time chasing shadows, trying to find out who he had been. But it was impossible, and after a while, he gave up and started searching for a job.

It had surprised him when he found his love for history, but the more he thought about it, the more it made sense. He had no history of his own, and it comforted him to know that his past was still there somewhere, forgotten perhaps, but never lost.

He rose quickly through the ranks of well-known historians, and it was while giving a lecture in Dublin that he found his second love. Teaching came naturally to him, unlike history, which required much more effort, and was probably another reason he loved it so much.

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Lily Reynold enjoyed the odd events that always seemed to come up around her.

Lily had been told that she was around 35 years old, though she liked to think she was quite a few years younger. She'd had a severe case of amnesia ever since she'd been found outside the ruins of an old church on the 1st of November, 1981. Her only memories were of her first name, Lily, and of people's voices, people she could not remember except for their quiet sobs and loud laughter.

It had taken several years for her to get on her feet again. With no history, she had no idea where to start her life, and for a few months she had tried to dig up whatever might have been left of her past life, but when she didn't find anything, she was eventually forced to give up.

She had been hovering in the back of a used book shop a year or two later, when, while reading the back of a particularly badly written novel, she'd thought with a snort; "Even I can do better than that." And so she left the book shop and instead went to buy a cheap notebook from the shop a few streets down.

Years later she was working on her fifth novel. Two of her previous books had been in on top of the best sellers list, and her current project, "Prophet", was awaited eagerly by a surprisingly large amount of fans. True, she wasn't recognized when she walked down the street, but it was enough.

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Harry Potter was used to being ignored over the summer holidays.

Harry decided that it made for a nice contrast after all the attention he got over the school year. But after spending three weeks with the Dursleys he was already wishing he where back at school, were he would be able to bury himself in Quidditch or school work to take his mind off Sirius.

Don't think about it.

Those four words seemed to have become his mantra, something he chanted over and over in his mind, focusing all his thoughts only on the words themselves and not on the meaning behind them.

His scar had begun hurting on almost a daily basis now. Not a harsh, head splitting pain, but a prickling ache that stung continually, sometimes waking him in the night when he could not ignore it anymore.

Letters from Ron, Hermione, and Remus (who insisted Harry stop calling him by his surname) came frequently, so that he almost always got at least one letter a day. The letters were not long, or particularly interesting, but it made Harry feel better to know that they cared enough to write so frequently. His own responses where not that much longer. They generally consisted of what he had eaten for breakfast and anything interesting he'd seen while wandering the streets, as well as a few questions as to how everyone else was doing. He knew he couldn't ask anything in detail, but he still wondered what they were up to while he was stuck here, cut off from everything and everyone he cared about.

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Luna Lovegood knew that something was about to change.

Luna had never been good at Divination, though that could have been because Trelawney was the professor, but something told her that the world was about to turn in a completely different direction.

For a while she thought it might have been He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's return. But that wasn't it, because she'd known about that since last year, and this had started only a few weeks ago. She thought it was something else, perhaps to do with the Battle in the Department of Mysteries. But no, again the timing was off.

The feeling had been increasing over the past few days, and with it she had grown more and more sure of herself. This had to do with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, true, but there was something else, buried beneath the surface. Something she could not make out or even understand, but it was there, none the less. But Luna could wait. She was used to believing, even when she had no proof, and she would not have to wait long before something, for good or for ill, happened.

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Ron and Ginny Weasley had come to expect the worried frowns of their parents and older siblings at the breakfast table.

Bill was staying with them while he worked here in Britain, and even though the twins had their own business, Molly had refused to let them move out completely. Every morning when they came downstairs they would pause and listen from the second floor landing, because the second they entered the kitchen everyone would stop talking and the newspaper would mysteriously vanish.

Ron and Ginny did not share a room the way they had when they where younger, but sometimes one would sneak into the others room late and night, when whispered conferences where best held.

They had tried getting the paper delivered to them but the owl didn't know not to drop it off at the breakfast table, and when the owl had delivered two Daily Prophets rather than one Molly had passed it off as a mistake, while Ginny hurried off to cancel their subscription.

But they never gave up that easily, and so far they had managed to sneak 16 newspapers out of the bin, which were then read by wand light under Ron's bright orange sheets.

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Hermione Granger didn't show her parents the Daily Prophet anymore.

Half of her reasoning was that she didn't want them to think Hogwarts unsafe and pull her out of school, but the reasons went deeper than that. The headlines did not proclaim the death of a family every day, but people were already starting to disappear, and the Dark Mark had been spotted four times in the past three weeks.

She didn't want her parents to deal with a war that they could never, would never be involved in. She didn't want to have to see their worried faces or overhear the quiet conversations they had when they thought she wasn't listening. Maybe it was selfish of her to want to keep her parents out of this. She wasn't sure she cared, as long as they came out of it all alive.

For the first few weeks, Hermione had thrown herself into her school work, letting the comfort of undeniable fact wash over her. She had already done most of it now, and being forced to deal with the reality of everything, she did the only thing she could. She faced it head on, willing herself to remember sacrifices, and fear, and hope.

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Neville Longbottom had come face to face with his worst enemy, and been unable to do anything.

It wasn't, he would reflect later, as though it were for lack of trying. He had never been that good at magic, really, but in that moment he had put everything he was into that spell... That spell that hadn't worked when he so desperately needed it to work. He still remembered the terrifying rage, his fury at the woman who had taken everything from him, the woman who had killed right before his eyes, the woman who had laughed and was then gone in an instant, taking with her the scraps which were all that was left of Neville's innocence.

Gran had been furious at the loss of her son's wand, but when she'd seen Neville the anger had drained from her face and she'd enveloped him in a hug, something she hadn't done in years. The look on her face suddenly gave away how very old she was, and was something Neville never wanted to see again. They hadn't said anything as they'd left the train station together.

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Remus Lupin was tired.

He was tired of losing everyone close to him, he was tired of being a menace to society, he was tired of always playing the peacemaker, he was tired of living.

Remus had always been good at hiding his emotions. For his first year and a half at Hogwarts he'd depended on it constantly, using it to deceive people into believing he really had gone to visit his mother. Eventually, of course, Sirius, James and Peter had found out, and it was slowly with their friendship that he had begun to let his emotions show. Everything had always seemed to be so much easier when it had been the four of them.

After that night in 1981 when his world had come to a screeching halt Remus had gone back to depending on his ability to fade into the background, to be a face that was easily forgotten. He'd gotten so used to hiding his emotions that it was almost hard to open up when he'd discovered the truth about Peter's "death" and Sirius's "betrayal".

And now, just when he had begun to feel again, another twist in fate was wreaking havoc on his world. If he had been more superstitious and less familiar with the reality of life, he would say that someone up there was laughing at him. The patterns were to clear to be ignored, and slowly, though he was resisting with every fiber of his being, Remus was beginning to wonder if he was cursed.

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Nymphadora Tonks had grown use to change.

'Change should have been your middle name.' Her mother had often said when Tonks was younger. She had grinned at the time and given herself long green hair, which made her mother grin and her father chuckle.

Now she wondered how much would have to change before it would be safe to live a normal life again. How many more battles were they going to have to win, and how many more sacrifices would have to be made before this was all over, another story forgotten on a dusty bookshelf.

Working as both an Auror and a member of the Order of the Phoenix, she was juggling her job, her missions, and staying alive all while trying to get enough sleep to wake up the next morning. She knew her partners-in-crime Kingsley Shaklebolt and Bill Weasley were having just as much trouble as she was trying to manage everything at once.

And now the Order was supposed to build a city underneath Hogwarts and its grounds, without any of the students noticing or getting suspicious, without quitting their jobs, and without losing their minds.

Occasionally, just every once in a while, Tonks really wondered about Dumbledore's sanity.

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Severus Snape was once again playing the dangerous game of double agent.

He had been playing that game for a year now, true, but now that things were finally out in the open, everything was about to get very nasty, very personal, and very dangerous.

He sometimes felt that he had fallen through time, back to 17 years ago when things were in such a similar situation. Darkness was on the horizon again, the Ministry was in disarray (then again, when wasn't it a mess?), and all the while people were choosing sides, some digging their own graves, others turning away in fear. The rest made ready to fight.

And yet this time there was a possible end in sight. Although he hated to admit it, even to himself, with Potter Jr. alive there was an end in their sight, and with that came the knowledge that this time they where better prepared, that this time they knew what to expect, that this time there was hope.

Severus told himself to stop being a sap and turned his attention back to the task at hand.

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Sirius Conway hated not knowing.

Sirius had been found a month or so ago outside an old graveyard, with almost no memory of who he was and what he was doing in America. The only thing he knew for sure was his name, Sirius, and that the man who had found him that night was his younger brother. Regulus Conway had been found 15 years ago outside the same graveyard, his only memory of his name. Since then Regulus had started a life of his own as a paleontologist, marrying a young woman, Rebecca Toscana, he met six years later while giving a presentation in the museum where she worked. But he still occasionally went to the graveyard where he had been found, in the hope of regaining his lost memory.

It had been on one such occasion four weeks ago that Regulus had found a man lying half dead by a tombstone. The moment Regulus had seen his face he knew they where brothers. But when he'd found Sirius's breathing to be slow, Regulus called the hospital and it was almost a week before the man woke up. Regulus had quickly offered to let Sirius live with his family, until he was able to get a job and find his own place to live. Rebecca had agreed instantly, delighted that her husband had finally found a piece of his former life, and their daughter, a 7-year-old terror known as Rachael, quickly fell in love with "Uncle Sirius".

And so their lives were not so bad. But both Sirius and Regulus felt the pull of the unknown, the knowledge that there were parts of themselves that they no longer knew nagging at them each day as three weeks passed in a hazy blur.

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Peter Pettigrew waited.

He watched the nameless spirit posses his body.

He had known that something was wrong the day he could not move his toes, or his arms, or his fingers. He had woken up and had sat up, right out of his body. For a short moment he had thought he was dead. But then he saw himself sit up. And he knew that someone had just stolen his life.

He watched it betray his only friends.

He hated to watch as it whispered lies in the ears of those closest to him. He had hated it, but he had watched all the same as they made the nameless spirit their Secret Keeper, and he watched the nameless spirit give up their secret willingly, no one knowing it was not him.

He watched it kill under his name.

He could not cry, but in that moment he had wanted to. He had wanted to scream and shout and do anything to stop what was happening in front of him, but no one heard. And people died. And the humorless laugh that sent shivers down his spine was the hardest thing to hear.

He watched it bring the darkness back to life.

He had thought it might be over, though the nameless spirit was still alive and well in his body, he had still thought it might be over. But it wasn't. It couldn't be that simple. And so again, he had watched, watched suffering and sacrifice, all the while knowing that he was powerless so long as the nameless spirit possessed his body. And even if it did leave, his life would be so ruined, his friends so utterly destroyed, that he did not know if he would return to his body if given the chance. But all the same, he watched, and he waited.