4th October 1994, St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, London, 11:23 AM
The Janus Thickey Ward was on the fourth floor of St Mungo's, at the end of a long corridor whose walls had been painted, at some point in the previous century, a particular shade of pale green that someone had once decided was restful and had not, since, troubled themselves to revisit the decision. The corridor smelled of disinfectant charms layered over older charms layered over the lingering ghost of something pungent and herbal that the Healers used in the worst cases. The lighting came from suspended glass globes that emitted a soft, even, unflickering glow, designed to be neither stimulating nor depressing—a precise medical neutrality that managed, through sheer commitment to neutrality, to be both.
Ethan walked at his usual unhurried pace, his charcoal travelling coat folded neatly over his arm despite the morning's cold, his silver pocket watch tucked into the small chest pocket where he could feel the soft tick of it against his ribs. The silver-framed glasses caught the corridor's even light. His face was its usual scholarly composure—the practised, professional gentleness of a man who had walked many corridors of this kind and had learnt, long ago, that the corridor itself required a particular interior settlement before one entered the ward at its end.
Beside him, Samantheus Faramundo walked with the heavier, more deliberate stride of a man who had been here before and had not enjoyed any of his previous visits.
"Frank used to host the Auror Office tactical reviews," Sam said quietly, keeping his voice low against the corridor's hush. "Once a quarter. He'd have us all round to their cottage in Suffolk. Alice would cook—she was a terrible cook, Frank used to say so to her face, and she'd laugh and feed him anyway. They had a small dog. Some sort of terrier. Bit my ankle once. I never quite forgave it." A short, dry smile. "Frank wrote me a letter when I made Senior Auror. Three pages. Said he was proud of me, and that I should remember to delegate, because nothing ruins a leader faster than the conviction that he is the only one who can do the job."
"Sound advice."
"It was. I have failed to follow it consistently for fifteen years."
They walked another few paces. Sam's deep-blue eyes were fixed somewhere middle-distance, on a point that was not the corridor.
"When I heard," he said, "what had happened to them—I was in Bonn, on a counter-intelligence assignment. Three days delayed by international Floo. By the time the news reached me they had already been moved here. The Lestranges had been arrested, tried, and sent to Azkaban. Crouch Senior had wept publicly at the trial. I came home and visited. Once. I did not come back for a long time after that."
"Why not?"
Sam was quiet for a moment. "Because I am a man who is accustomed to being able to do something about a problem. And there was nothing here I could do. Nothing." He glanced at Ethan. "What is your honest assessment of what we are about to attempt?"
"Honest assessment: difficult. Possibly impossible. Likely valuable to attempt regardless."
"Mm."
"And Sam—"
"Yes?"
"Thank you for coming."
Sam nodded, briefly, and they continued.
Augusta Longbottom was waiting on the bench outside the ward.
She was not, Ethan noted with the small professional registration he could not entirely turn off, the figure he had pictured from Harry's accounts. Harry's stories had constructed, over the years, an Augusta who was formidable and somewhat fearsome—the grandmother of the Howler, the woman who had put a vulture on her hat. The woman on the bench was certainly that woman. She was tall and bony and her grey hair was scraped into a severe bun, and she was wearing a long dark green travelling robe with a black trim and a high collar, and the famous vulture-hat sat in her lap like a small censorious owl.
But she was also, Ethan saw with the quieter perception that always preceded him into rooms, a woman of seventy-odd years who had been visiting her son and her daughter-in-law in this corridor every Wednesday and Saturday for fourteen years, and who had, in those fourteen years, gradually shed every reserve of energy a person was permitted to spend on their own well-being and had not yet begun to refill them.
She rose when she saw them, with the brisk dignity of a woman who had decided that posture was the last thing one did not surrender.
"You are early," she said.
"By eight minutes," Ethan agreed pleasantly. "Mr Faramundo prefers to allow margin. I have learnt to indulge him."
"I prefer," Sam said dryly, "to be where I have said I will be, on time. It is occasionally controversial."
Augusta's sharp blue eyes moved between them. "And you are, again—"
"Acquaintances of the family." Ethan inclined his head. "Forgive the imprecision. I am Ethan Esther. This is Samantheus Faramundo. My son Harry is at Hogwarts in your grandson's year. Neville is Harry's good friend. They have been in each other's company a great deal these last three years."
A small, considerable change went across Augusta Longbottom's face. The severity did not lift, exactly—Augusta was not a woman who lifted severity but a window opened somewhere in it.
"Esther." She took a closer look at him. "Harry's father, then. Harry Potter-Esther. The boy who duelled four Ravenclaw fifth-years for a Lovegood girl."
"That is the boy."
"Neville," she said, "writes to me about him. He says—and forgive me if I am paraphrasing closely... Harry is the kindest person at school who isn't trying to be kind on purpose. That was the precise wording. I have remembered it because it is, I think, the highest compliment my grandson is presently capable of paying anyone."
Ethan's expression did not change very much, but his eyes warmed. "Harry will be glad to hear that, when I tell him."
"And you, Mr Faramundo." Augusta turned to Sam with the precise scrutiny of a woman who had known many Aurors in her time and could spot a former one at fifty paces. "I have heard your name, I believe."
"Possibly, ma'am."
"Mm." She let the Mm sit. Then, with the brisk practicality of a woman who had no time for further preliminaries: "Shall we go in? They are not at their best in the late morning, but they are not at their worst either, which I find is the appropriate compromise for visitors."
She turned and went through the ward door.
The Janus Thickey Ward was a long, high-ceilinged room with a row of beds along each side, separated by white curtains drawn for privacy. The light here was natural—high windows on the south wall, charmed against direct glare, gave the room the soft diffused quality of a chapel. There were perhaps fifteen patients in the ward. Some were asleep. Some sat in small armchairs beside their beds with their hands folded, looking at nothing. One man with bandaged eyes was being read to, very gently, by a Healer in a lime-green apron. The quiet was the particular quiet of a place where people had been waiting a long time and had stopped hoping that anything would soon change.
Augusta led them to two beds at the far end, separated by their own small partition.
Frank Longbottom sat in the armchair beside his bed. He was a thin man of around forty-five, with the same broad-set features Neville had inherited in younger form, and the same kind brown eyes. He was holding, in both hands, a small wooden toy Snitch—the kind of practice Snitch enchanted to flutter its wings within the closed fist and he was looking at it with the sustained, unwavering attention of a man who was watching the most interesting thing in the world. He did not look up when they entered.
Alice Longbottom was on the bed. She was wearing a hospital gown over a soft pink dressing-gown, and her hair—prematurely grey, cut short was neat in the way of a woman whose hair was looked after by other people. She was sitting upright with her hands folded in her lap, and as Augusta approached, she smiled. The smile was real. It was also empty in the way that empty smiles are precisely most heartbreaking when they are real—the muscles remembered the shape; the meaning had gone somewhere else.
"Hello, dear," Augusta said quietly.
She bent and kissed the top of Alice's head. Alice turned her face up toward her mother-in-law. Her hand fumbled at the bedside table, found a Drooble's Best Blowing Gum wrapper—silver, slightly creased from previous use and pressed it carefully into Augusta's palm.
"Thank you, my love," Augusta said. She did not wipe at her eyes. Her voice was perfectly composed. "I shall keep it safe. As ever."
Sam crossed to Frank's chair. He did not bend. He squatted, as though to put their faces level, and after a long moment of consideration—as one might allow a wary animal to study a hand—he placed two fingers very gently on the back of Frank's wrist.
"Hello, Frank."
Frank did not look up. He continued to study the Snitch.
"It's Sam. Sam Faramundo. I've been a great fool, my friend. I should have come back. I should have come back many times over the years."
Frank's lips moved. He produced no sound, but the lips moved—shaping, perhaps, a single word or perhaps not. Then he returned to the Snitch.
Sam stayed where he was for another full minute. Then he stood, slowly, and walked back to where Ethan stood at the partition.
"Right," Sam said. His voice was perfectly level. "Right. Let's get on."
Augusta straightened from her low conversation with Alice. She turned to Ethan with a question forming in her face that she had been forming, Ethan suspected, all morning.
"Mr Esther. I am, I hope, not impolite when I say—you are not here only to pay a social call. I am too old to mistake the shape of a visit, and this visit has another shape inside it."
Ethan exchanged a brief look with Sam.
Sam stepped slightly forward. He was very precise when he spoke, in the way of a man who did not wish to mislead. "Mrs Longbottom. May we sit. There is something we ought to tell you properly."
She nodded, once. They drew up three chairs near the foot of Frank's bed, where the curtain offered some privacy and Frank and Alice could be quietly visible to her without being directly observed by them. She arranged her hands in her lap.
"Mr Esther's name," Sam said, "is more accurately given in some contexts as Ethan Esther, true Seer and consultant to the Department of Mysteries. My own position is Head of that Department. We have, between us, a particular professional interest in—and access to... certain branches of magic that are not widely studied, are not publicly discussed, and which are categorised by the Ministry under a security designation I am not permitted, in most contexts, to even name. I tell you these things because we require, today, your trust, and trust requires that you know what you are trusting."
Augusta's expression had not changed very much. The blue eyes had sharpened.
"A Seer. And the Head of the Department of Mysteries. Visiting my son and my daughter-in-law on a Saturday morning with no advance notice and an interest." She said the word interest with a precise dryness. "I am too old for circumlocution, gentlemen. What is it that you actually wish to do here?"
"We wish to attempt," Ethan said, "what others have not."
Her face went very still.
"I will not lie to you, Mrs Longbottom. The Healers have classified Frank and Alice's condition as permanent for fourteen years, and they have done so on the basis of the best evidence available within the standard frameworks of magical medicine. Within those frameworks they are correct. I am not proposing to operate within those frameworks. I am proposing to look at the problem with a different set of tools. The tools are real. They are also—and I will not understate this... experimental, in the proper sense. Mind Magic is a young discipline. Most of what is known about it is classified, much of what is not classified is wrong, and a great deal is genuinely unknown."
He paused. He let the words sit.
"What I can offer you today, with your permission, is an examination. Not a treatment. An examination. I will, very gently and using no spell that has any potential to cause distress or further harm, look at the structure of Alice's mind, and then Frank's. I will tell you afterwards what I see. From that, we will know whether what we then propose is worth proposing. If it is not, I will tell you so plainly and we will not waste your hope."
Augusta was silent for a long moment. Her gaze had moved to Alice, who was watching the curtain ripple in the window's draught with the quiet attention of a person watching nothing in particular. Her eyes returned to Ethan.
"And if it is."
"Then we have a great deal of further conversation to have."
She drew a long, slow breath. Ethan saw it move through her—the tremor in the shoulder, the tiny tightening of the mouth, all the small surface movements of a woman who had carried the weight of fourteen years of no chance and had not, in those years, permitted herself the luxury of perhaps.
"My son," she said, "took his oaths as an Auror in this country at the age of twenty-one. He stood up against the Lestranges in his own home with my daughter-in-law beside him and his infant son in the cot upstairs. If there is a chance that my Frank, my Frank, might—" her voice did not break; it stayed perfectly level, but it became thinner, like a string drawn tight, "—might return, in any measure—then I will not be the woman who refused to permit the attempt because she was afraid of disappointment. I have been afraid of disappointment, Mr Esther, every day for fourteen years. It is no longer an opponent I respect."
She looked at Alice. She looked at Frank.
"Do what you have come to do."
Ethan moved to Alice's bedside. Augusta sat opposite, her hand wrapped around Alice's smaller one. Sam stood at the partition, watching the ward, ensuring no Healer rounded on them mid-procedure.
"Alice," Ethan said softly, settling himself at the bedside chair. "My name is Ethan. I am a friend. I am going to look at something for a moment. It will not hurt. You will not feel anything different from now."
Alice's pale blue eyes moved—not to him exactly, but in his general direction. Her empty, real smile returned. She reached, with the thoughtless habit of fourteen years, to her bedside table and produced another sweet wrapper. She offered it.
"Thank you, my dear," Ethan said. He took the wrapper. He folded it with great care and placed it in the breast pocket of his shirt. "I shall keep this."
His silver-framed glasses came off. He set them very precisely on the bedside table. The dark amber of his eyes shifted, softly, into the deeper amber of the True Sight at low frequency. He raised his wand.
"Legilimens."
It was the gentlest casting of the spell Sam had ever witnessed—a touch, almost, rather than a probe, a careful settling-of-attention upon a surface that the caster had no intention of disturbing.
What Ethan saw, in those minutes of careful examination, he would not describe in full to anyone for many years. He saw, in the front-most layers of Alice's mind, fragments. Pieces of memory the size of a few seconds each, brightly-coloured at their edges and grey at their centres, broken and re-broken into forms that bore no temporal logic to one another. A flash of a young man's face, whom Ethan could identify after a moment's effort as Frank in his early twenties. A summer garden. A voice singing a child's lullaby. A spell-light. A warm kitchen. A baby's small hand. An empty space where a memory had been, the empty space itself shaped like the missing thing the way a chalk outline traces a body.
He went deeper, with the slow, ginger care of a man walking on ice. The fragments thinned. The colour drained. He came to the place beneath the fragments, the structural place that was the Alice-ness of Alice, the architecture upon which a mind hung—
—and found a column of obsidian-coloured magic, cracked through and through in long, jagged, precise fractures, with whole chunks of it simply missing. Not crumbled. Not eroded. Removed. As though something with great force had taken specific pieces of it away on purpose.
Around the column, the basal functions still ran—the warm hum of breathing, of heart, of digestion, of the small, kind reflex that smiled at her mother-in-law and offered a sweet wrapper to anyone who came near. They ran on automatic. They ran without an architect.
Ethan withdrew with the same gentleness with which he had entered. He bowed his head briefly to Alice, who had not registered any of it, and rose.
He performed the same examination on Frank.
Frank's mindscape was slightly different in its specific damages but identical in its structural fact: the same fractured column, the same missing pieces, the same surface scattering of fragmentary memory. Fourteen years of Cruciatus exposure had left precise wounds in precisely matching places, because the curse had been delivered by the same casters in the same room over the same timeframe.
When Ethan rose at last, he replaced his glasses with deliberate care, took a moment to settle his face, and turned to Augusta.
She was watching him with the expression of a woman who had decided, before he told her, that she would receive whatever came.
"Tell me," she said.
He told her.
He used, where he could, ordinary language. The scaffolding, he said. The frame on which a personality hangs. Cracked, in many places. Pieces missing. Around the cracks and the gaps, fragments of memory drifting unmoored. The body operating on its old habits because the body, mercifully, can. But the architect has been taken apart.
Augusta listened without interrupting. When he had finished, she looked at her son. Her eyes filled. The tears moved silently. She did not raise her hand to wipe them. She let them fall the small distance to her lap, and then she nodded once.
"I see," she said quietly. "I see."
Sam spoke then, with the gentleness of a man who had been waiting for the right moment. "Ethan. You and I both know what cannot be done with damage like this. Fragments cannot be glued. Removed pieces of the core cannot be restored from the patient's own resources. A mind that has been broken at the structural level does not heal itself. We have agreed on this for years."
"We have."
"Tell me you have not come here to tell this woman that we agree on this for years."
A small smile crossed Ethan's mouth. "I have not."
Augusta looked up.
"There is," Ethan said, "a possible approach. I should tell you, Mrs Longbottom, that it is theoretical. I should also tell you that I am the person most likely in the British Isles to make it work, and that it is not, even so, a thing I can promise. I can tell you only that it has grounds."
"Tell me."
"Memories," Ethan said, "even fragmented ones, can be stimulated. Memories can also, with proper craft, be exchanged—a memory held by another person, whose recollection of an event involving Alice is clear, can be carefully introduced to her own architecture as a kind of seed-stone, around which her remaining fragments may begin to organise themselves. As for the structural column—the core—it can, in principle, be patched. Rebuilt, piece by piece, with materials drawn from many sources. The closest analogy is to ship-repair: one does not replace a ship that has lost half its hull by giving it a new hull. One patches plank by plank, board by board, until the ship floats again."
He paused.
"But you should know what comes with that approach. There is a paradox in the philosophy of identity called the Theseus paradox. If a ship has every plank of it replaced, one by one, over the course of a long voyage, is the ship that arrives in port the same ship that left? The philosophers have not agreed. I cannot promise you, Mrs Longbottom, that the woman who returns to you—if she returns will be Alice as you knew her. She may be Alice, recovered. She may be something like Alice, but not entirely Alice. She may carry pieces of other memories that she will need to learn to call her own. The same applies to Frank. I will not lie to you about the cost of this."
Augusta was very still for a long time.
She looked at Frank, who was still studying the Snitch in his hands. She looked at Alice, who had reached, again, for a sweet wrapper she would offer to whoever next looked at her. She looked, briefly, at the empty middle distance where the future would be, with or without her permission.
"My grandson," Augusta said, "writes to me twice a week. Last week he wrote to me about a Defence lesson involving the Cruciatus Curse. He did not tell me the details. He told me he was all right, which I have been his grandmother for fourteen years and I know that all right in his hand means the opposite. Mr Esther. If there is a Frank, or even most of a Frank, who could one day sit at a dinner table with that boy and be his father, even partly—then the woman who refused that on the grounds of philosophical purity is not a woman I am prepared to be."
She drew a breath. Her hands, which had been trembling, settled.
"What do you need from me."
Ethan smiled then—the small, particular smile he gave when he had calculated something difficult and the calculation had completed in a direction he had hoped for.
"First," he said, "we will need formal cooperation from St Mungo's. Sam and I will manage that with the Hospital Board; you will only need to provide your written consent as next of kin. We will keep the technical descriptions appropriately restrained. The Department of Mysteries has standing arrangements for projects of this kind."
"Yes."
"Second. We will need memories. As many as you can find. From you, from anyone who knew Frank and Alice well: their friends in the Order, their school-mates, their colleagues at the Auror Office, anyone who served with them, lived near them, loved them. The richer and more various the memories, the more fully we will have to work with. I will need your help to find these people and ask them, with the discretion the matter requires, for recollections."
Augusta nodded. Her eyes had begun to sharpen with the focused intent of a woman given a task.
"I have a list," she said, "of every person who attended their wedding. I have kept it for fourteen years. I will start there."
"That is excellent."
"And Neville." Her voice had gone, briefly, quieter. "Should he—"
"Not yet, though I shall say his memories of them might be the closest thing we need still... "
Ethan said gently. "He has, I think, been waiting fourteen years for hope, and we should not give him a small one to carry until we are nearer to a larger one. When the time is right, you and I and his friends will tell him together. Until then, if I may—Harry, Hermione, Ron, Draco, and the Lovegood girl already know what happened to Frank and Alice. They know it because Neville told them. They have begun, in their own way, to want to help. Especially Draco, who has been reading Italian Healing journals with the particular stubbornness of a fourth-teen-year-old who has identified a problem worth solving."
A small dry laugh escaped Augusta. "Italian journals."
"Continental Mind-Healing research is some years ahead of British practice in compounded curse trauma. He has been correct to look there. I have arranged—quietly—for him to have access to two of the relevant authors. We will permit him to feel useful, because he is useful, and because—" Ethan's voice gentled "—a Malfoy who has chosen to spend his summers studying Healing texts is not a child whose hope I am inclined to discourage. Especially not when the family from whom he is consciously distinguishing himself is the family that did this."
Augusta, who had been a member of the Wizengamot during the Lestranges' trial, met Ethan's eye. Something passed between them.
"Tell the boy," she said quietly, "that a Longbottom thanks him."
"I will."
Sam had crossed back to them. He clasped his hands behind his back with the easy posture of a man who had reached the operational phase of a meeting.
"Then we have our work, Mrs Longbottom. We will leave you with your son and your daughter-in-law. You will hear from Sam by Friday with the formal arrangements at St Mungo's. You will write to me with the names of those you intend to approach for memories, and I will help you draft the necessary requests."
She rose with them. Her hand, when she offered it to Ethan, was steady.
"Mr Esther."
"Mrs Longbottom."
"Thank you."
He shook her hand and bowed slightly. "Thank you, Mrs Longbottom. For the trust of permitting this. We will not abuse it."
Augusta returned to the bedside. She bent and kissed the top of Alice's head. "I shall be here for an hour yet, my dear," she said softly. "Frank, my love, hold on to your Snitch—well done, that's the way—"
The two men stepped back through the partition curtain, and walked the length of the ward together, and out through the heavy door, into the long pale corridor of the fourth floor, where the unflickering glass globes lit them in their soft, restful, charitable, neutral light.
For a long moment neither of them spoke.
"Theseus's ship," Sam said at last.
"Theseus's ship," Ethan agreed.
"And you think you can do it."
"I think," Ethan said, "we can do something. I will not know whether it is enough until we have begun. But Sam—Neville Longbottom has been raised by a grandmother who has carried fourteen years of grief like a load of stones in a sack. If we can lift even one stone—"
"Then we lift one stone."
"Yes."
They walked on, and the corridor's pale green walls fell away behind them, and outside, somewhere beyond the stone and the spells, an October afternoon waited with its ordinary autumn light.