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LAST TANGO IN PARIS “Sal,” Hermione asked from the kitchen doorway, “where’s Severus?” Sal, who had just finished stirring orange essence and maple sugar into a block of cream cheese, was now attempting the fiddly task of sandwiching the resulting mixture between candied pecan halves, without actually touching either. It required a steady hand and a killer Levitation Charm, from the looks of it, not to mention more patience than Hermione herself possessed. “Sal?” she prompted again, and he shrugged without looking around. “His study?” “I’ve been in there all afternoon.” “Treehouse?” “Just checked.” “Backyard?” Hermione sighed. “If he was any of those places, do you think I’d be standing here asking you?” Sal’s wand slipped, and a stray pecan ricocheted off the wall, a scant inch from Hermione’s left ear. “Sorry,” he said, looking unrepentant. “He’s probably off somewhere, then. I haven’t seen him.” “Thanks anyway,” Hermione said, and ducked hastily out of the kitchen before he could decide to Levitate any more groceries her way; Sal hadn’t been his usual sunny self for the last few days. The big chair facing the fireplace in the parlor was empty. She decided to claim it. The book on Memory Charms hadn’t been particularly inspiring. Once a self-inflicted Obliviate was cast, according to the scant few paragraphs she’d found on the subject, it was notoriously difficult to undo. Caution - only a fully-trained witch or wizard should attempt this!!! the footnote had read. Unqualified individuals who perform this spell run the risk of doing themselves permanent, irreversible mental damage!! Which sort of left her out in the cold, Hermione thought - she’d clipped through the first- and second-year textbooks Severus had brought her, and was getting fairly consistent results with some of the more advanced charms in the back of the third-year text, but she wouldn’t call herself ‘fully-trained’ or ‘qualified’ either one - not at this point, anyway. And for every skill she felt she’d mastered, something else cropped up that didn’t feel quite right; ‘it’s as if I get only so far, then hit a wall,’ she’d complained to Sal the other afternoon, and indeed that’s how it felt - as if some shadowy, immovable presence was standing in the way of her progress. And then, it couldn’t be the same, relearning it all now … could it? It had to be like what they said about languages - the younger you started, the easier it became to attain fluency. Hermione kneaded her temples irritably and cursed herself for a million kinds of fool. You had to have known, she told herself, what it would mean. You had to have known what you’d be giving up. Even though she’d been told enough to get a fair picture about her recent past - about Bill, about the Consortium, about the tragedy and the Fidelius and those bleak starved days in Paris - it was hard to imagine being desperate enough to do what she’d done. If I had it to do over again, she thought, would it be the same? Impossible to say. What she did know was this: she was tired of being an amnesiac. It had been comforting at first - like a rebirth, like stepping off a seashell onto a beach free of expectations or inconveniently complicated emotional detritus. And this place? Like a womb itself, comfortable and cut off as it was from the outside world. But the more she heard about her - the pre-Kate Hermione, her former self - the more she wanted to reclaim her lost territory. And that look in his eyes last night (You do love me, don’t you? - a cautious nod and a guarded Yes) only strengthened her resolve. She’d wanted to pry further, but she hadn’t dared. Secrets there, she thought - shared history he hadn’t wanted to get into, and probably for very good reason. If you knew everything there is to know, his eyes had said, you wouldn’t be asking. You wouldn’t even be here. Her wand was in her pocket. She toyed absently with it, then tucked it regretfully away again. Too big a risk; too uncertain a result. Behind her in the kitchen, Sal was singing - something jaunty and improbably bright about a rose, a fair maiden, and going off to war. Hermione smiled in spite of herself, and half-turned to get a better look at him. A glint of metal caught her eye; a black three-ring binder lay open on the floor by the chair. She hadn’t noticed it before, but she recognised it now; it was one of the volumes they’d brought back from Cairo, open now to the second or third page. Curious, Hermione lifted it up and turned it round to read the label on the spine: Vanesca, it said, and below that, 2 of 2. Well, that solved one mystery, at least: wherever Severus was right now,
she’d lay odds that Binder 1 of 2 was with him. Pity, too - now that she’d
finished the Obliviate book, she would have liked to dive into these. Could it hurt to start halfway through? She hesitated, then opened the binder again to the first page. A letter, she saw, addressed to her - this did seem to be a trend, didn’t it, forever re-reading her own mail? She scanned the note and frowned. Draco - what an odd name, and unfamiliar to boot - though from the way he’d written they’d obviously been friends. And 'Gabrielle sends her love’ - confirming that she did indeed know a Gabrielle, she just didn’t know how, or why. “St. Mungo’s,” she said aloud, peering at the letterhead and trying to make out the address through the blurry photocopy. “Huh.” A hospital of some sort, evidently, and this Draco Malfoy must be its Head of Operations. Maybe they’d been in school together? She didn’t know. In any case, he’d been kind enough to furnish her with a test subject - Lockhart, whoever he was, some poor unfortunate dependent on the Headmaster’s goodwill. She turned the page and read the caption: here were Lockhart’s CAT-scan results, subtitled Male Subject, 46 - Unsuccessful Memory Charm, and a photo underneath: what had to be Lockhart’s brain, plumply healthy in all respects except for the web of sticky, slickly shining grey candy-floss that covered it. Hermione’s mouth went dry. That’s what it looks like. That’s what I did to myself. And - this with a rising note of hysteria - and I knew. I knew what it was, I knew what I was doing to myself. And I felt bad enough to do it anyway - to think this was a better option. Heavy. Shuddering, she flipped to the next page. This one was an original, not a photocopy: heavy lavender stationery, still faintly perfumed with violets and written in a looping, studied hand: ** My dear Miss Granger - or should I say, Mrs. Weasley? - Words fail to express my gratitude for your efforts on my behalf. I am told that you are the developer of the marvellous little potion that restored my memory; I, of course, could have achieved similar results, being a bit of a crack hand at Potions myself, had I only been in my right mind. Very clever of you to have figured it out for yourself; congratulations from your former professor and mentor are very much in order! Now that my convalescence is ended, I shall naturally be writing a memoir of my ordeal in the bowels of the Pit, in order to bring hope to the similarly afflicted and provide a suitable account of my triumph over this terrible tragedy. You needn’t fear, however; I’ll be sure to give you credit where credit’s due! Fondly, ** Torn between a gasp and a chuckle at the sheer audacity of this, Hermione
turned the page again and found her reply, faithfully catalogued for posterity
on Consortium letterhead: ** Dear Mr. Lockhart, Thank you for your note; I’m glad you found my product satisfactory for your purposes. You are, of course, entitled to write anything you wish about your experiences at St. Mungo’s, but do keep in mind that the experimental product Vanesca was given to you in strict confidentiality, and that disclosure of the existence or nature of this product in any public forum will result in immediate lawsuit. To this end, the Consortium requests that any forthcoming manuscript be submitted to its legal team at the above address, prior to publication. Best of luck with your future endeavours. Sincerely yours, ** Ha, Hermione thought, and had already turned to the next page before it hit her: she’d come up with a product that cured memory loss, that reversed Obliviate, that essentially solved her present dilemma … and she had no idea how to recreate it. If irony on that grand a scale wasn’t already illegal, it certainly ought to be. She paged through the next section of the binder - mostly correspondence to and from Eli Lilly, her Muggle distributor, regarding the results of the field trials. The next page to catch her eye was a photocopy of a brief teaser article, clipped from an American medical trade journal: Lilly in Field Trials for New Alzheimer’s Med. Following it were a series of terse e-mails: Brad, it wasn’t supposed to be public yet! - and Conlin’s reply: It has to happen sometime, right? What are you worried about? And then, there it was - Gilderoy Lockhart’s return-to-the-public-eye
interview, in a splashy two-column Daily Prophet article. This
one wasn’t a photocopy, but yellowing newsprint; Hermione stared at the
smug, preening face in the moving photograph that accompanied the article
and felt her stomach do a back-flip. The article was full of the same self-serving pap she would have expected from the man who’d written the purple letter at the front of the binder. She noticed, however, that he’d taken her warning to heart and not mentioned either the Consortium or the product Vanesca by name. He had, however, mentioned her. It was sandwiched in between a couple of self-congratulatory paragraphs, and it was only a fleeting reference: “Mr. Lockhart, please tell us how exactly you overcame your sad condition? Our readers want to know!” “I’m not at liberty to reveal the secret,” he’d said coyly. “But I will say that even in my weakened state, I had been working closely with Hermione Granger, a young protegée of mine from my days as a professor at Hogwarts. I never gave up hope, you see, that my memory would eventually be restored.” “How brave,” the reporter had sighed. “How disgusting,” Areli had penciled in the margin. “Honestly, Hermione, we ought to sue him just for being tasteless.” Hermione turned the page. The Lockhart article wasn’t as funny to her as she knew it should have been; she felt faintly sick, and heavy with dread. There were only a few more pages left in the binder - she was near the end, now. ** Hermione, Draco had written, Well, he’s a waste of space, but at least it’s not my space he’s wasting anymore. Shall we try again, maybe with a couple of more deserving candidates? I’ve got the Longbottoms in mind, actually - if this stuff works on Obliviate, it might work on Crucio-induced damage, too. Frank’s mother was their legal guardian, up until recently, but she’s recently deceased. I’m trying to get in touch with Neville; he’s the next of kin. Does anyone have any idea where he went after he finished at Hogwarts? ** I don’t know, she’d written back. Once you find him, we’ll get that ball rolling. I think that’s a great idea. ** And then there were no more letters. Hermione noted the date on her last bit of correspondence - June 19 - and had to stifle a moan with the back of her hand; one thing she remembered asking, early on in her stay at the Montana cabin, was When It Had Happened - what day, what hour? The twenty-second of June, they’d told her. At nine in the morning. Three days before, she’d dashed off that offhand little note, her whole life in front of her, and stashed it in her binder … not knowing or guessing that she’d never fill another one of those empty plastic sleeves, that in less than a week her house of cards would be ashes in her hands. Hermione bit her lip, and shuddered, and let the cool smooth plastic of the sheet protectors ripple through her fingers like the sigh of a ghost. It wasn’t until her hands touched something lumpy that she realised the binder wasn’t quite empty, after all. The last page wasn’t a sheet-protector, she discovered, looking down; it was bisected into four smaller pockets, the kind of specialty sleeve designed to hold photos, or CDs, or liner notes. She’d been very thorough, it seemed - and not only in terms of organisation. Each one of the four pockets held a tiny white box with a bold purple
stripe. ** |