The light in the long-stay ward was soft, and the ward itself was quiet in a striking contrast to the bustle of the waiting rooms downstairs.
When Gilderoy Lockhart greeted them, Sherlock and Harry exchanged a silent understanding and said nothing at first. They simply watched the man in the hospital bed with appraising eyes.
Hermione, cautious and probing, stepped forward half a pace and said gently, "Er—Professor Lockhart, are you feeling all right?"
Lockhart's face broke into an excessively radiant smile. His teeth were so white they nearly caught the light. "Wonderful—absolutely wonderful! Dear Hermione, and Sherlock, Harry—goodness me, I'm so touched that you came all this way just to see me!"
Then, with barely a breath, he turned eagerly to Dumbledore. "Albus, do you see? Just look! My students care about me enough to visit—surely that says something! Won't you please let me return to Hogwarts? I feel magnificent—better than I've ever felt in my life, I assure you!"
He straightened his back, deliberately displaying his apparent vitality.
Harry was rendered almost speechless by the near-sulky tone in Lockhart's voice.
"I'm sorry, Gilderoy," Dumbledore said, his tone was calm as though Lockhart's eagerness were beneath his notice. "The Healers here have made it quite clear that until your recovery can be fully confirmed, this is where you belong. It is for your own wellbeing. We must respect the judgment of the professionals."
"I am not ill! I am not the least bit ill!" Lockhart snapped, his brow was knitting sharply. The brilliant smile vanished as if it had never existed. "I feel absolutely splendid—better than ever before! I could get out of this bed right now—leave this instant—immediately!"
"Gilderoy," Dumbledore said, his voice still slow, "if you are truly not ill, then why have you spent the past nearly three years lying in this very bed, receiving treatment?"
The contrast with Lockhart's growing agitation could not have been sharper.
"That has nothing to do with me!" Lockhart's voice shot up. "That's something the hospital ought to explain! They made some sort of error—or perhaps—perhaps they had their reasons—"
His voice trailed low. He suddenly sounded far less certain of himself.
"And yet," Dumbledore said, a note of gravity entered his tone, "the hospital has so far been unable to identify the precise cause of your condition, or to define any clear criteria for recovery." He paused. "Besides which—you still cannot recall that one particular thing."
The moment Dumbledore mentioned that particular thing, every trace of indignation and agitation drained from Lockhart's face, as though something vital had been struck. His mouth worked soundlessly; his eyes flickered. He said nothing—and began, with visible anxiety, to rake his fingers through his neatly styled golden hair.
Harry and Hermione quickly exchanged a baffled look. Sherlock, however, had noticed something. His gaze swept rapidly between Dumbledore and Lockhart, and then he turned directly to Dumbledore.
"Have you already asked him, sir?"
"I have," Dumbledore said, with a weary expression. "Without result."
Sherlock was not especially surprised by the answer.
He said nothing further to Dumbledore. Instead, his eyes moved across the cluttered bedside table and settled on a handsome hardback book with Lockhart's beaming face emblazoned on the cover—Wanderings with Werewolves. He picked it up.
"Professor," Sherlock said, turning to Lockhart and holding the cover up for him to see, "do you remember the story in this book?"
"Of course I remember it!" The sight of the book transformed Lockhart instantly—his eyes lit up, his bearing revived. "Dear Sherlock, you don't actually think I'm ill, do you? I tell you, I am perfectly lucid!"
Harry and Hermione looked at each other again.
In that moment, they understood, dimly but with gathering certainty, what Lupin had meant when he'd spoken to them earlier. Their former Defense Against the Dark Arts professor was clearly not quite right.
"I can tell you all about it this very second," Lockhart declared, thumping his chest with enthusiasm, launching into what could only be described as a performance.
"That book records one chapter of my many glorious exploits! It tells the story of how I heroically rid an isolated little village of a werewolf menace—once and for all! I shall have you know, what I faced in Vârcolac was a breathtaking, grueling battle. In the end, I subdued the savage creature, and with a magnificently powerful spell of my own invention—the Homorphus Charm—I restored it to its pathetic, but at least entirely human, form—"
Sherlock cut him off without ceremony, making no grant for the performance. "Could you tell us the exact incantation for that charm? We have considerable need of it."
The smile faded from Lockhart's face by degrees. He stared at Sherlock for a long moment.
"Why do you want to know that?"
"As I said—we have considerable need of it." Sherlock's gaze seemed to pass straight through him. "If I recall correctly, Professor, your secret ambition is to rid the world of evil—is it not?"
Harry and Hermione both shot Sherlock a startled glance.
The quiz from their very first lesson with Lockhart was still vivid in their minds. That particular question—Hermione had been the only one to answer it correctly at the time. And yet Sherlock had remembered it?
"That's right!" Lockhart seized on the words as though they were a lifeline, sitting bolt upright. "To rid the world of evil! And also—hm—to launch my own line of hair-care products!"
Harry stared at him, thoroughly at a loss. Hermione quietly sighed. What on earth had I been thinking, idolizing this man?It was embarrassing.
"Then tell us the incantation," Sherlock said, his voice was flat. "We want to help someone who was bitten by a werewolf return to normal."
"Well—even if I told you, you wouldn't be able to manage it. Forgive my frankness, but it is an extraordinarily complex spell—it requires a very high level of magical mastery to wield, involving the most delicate manipulation of magical energy—"
Sherlock interrupted him again, turning to where Dumbledore sat watching quietly. "With respect—do you truly believe that even Professor Dumbledore's abilities fall short?"
"That is not what I meant—Albus's mastery is naturally—it's only that—this particular spell, it is very—very special—"
"Leave it, Sherlock."
It was Lupin who spoke—Lupin, who had been silent throughout, watching. He stepped forward. His expression was difficult to read. He glanced briefly at Lockhart, who was shifting uneasily on his bed, and then turned to Sherlock, placing a hand lightly on his arm.
"I am genuinely grateful for everything you've tried to do for me. Truly." He met Sherlock's eyes with sincerity. "But before you arrived, Professor Dumbledore already tried. You can see how that went. This is getting us nowhere."
His voice was low, weighed down with exhaustion.
In the academic year of 1994–1995, the Triwizard Tournament—dormant for over a century had been revived, with Hogwarts as its host.
The eyes of the entire European wizarding world had turned toward it, and the students of Hogwarts had, almost instinctively, overlooked the curious pattern of their Defense Against the Dark Arts professor mysteriously disappearing on every full moon, with Snape stepping in to cover his lessons.
Add to this the scheme Sherlock had proposed—the "woman in disguise" stratagem which had succeeded in muddying the waters just as intended.
But as Sherlock himself had made clear when he first offered the plan: it was a stopgap measure, nothing more. It treated the symptoms, not the disease. The longer Lupin remained at Hogwarts, the more certain it became that his secret would eventually surface. It was only a matter of time.
For that reason, at the end of the previous school year, Lupin had submitted his resignation to Dumbledore. The Ministry had proposed sending an experienced Auror to teach, and he had taken the opportunity to recommend the genuine Mad-Eye Moody—Alastor Moody—for the Defense Against the Dark Arts post, and proposed that Igor Karkaroff, who had already decided to remain at Hogwarts, serve as his assistant.
With the experienced and ever-vigilant Moody on hand to watch him, Karkaroff would be kept well in check—unable to pass dangerous ideas or Dark Magic to the students unchecked.
Moody himself had no objection to this arrangement. With Voldemort already restored to power, he thought it no bad thing for students to witness real Dark Magic in the classroom including the three Unforgivable Curses—so as to understand their true horror and learn to defend against them.
As for Lupin himself, he planned to devote more of his energy to the Order of the Phoenix's covert work.
Snape, of course, would continue to supply him with the Wolfsbane Potion, ensuring that even when the full moon forced the transformation, he would not lose his mind.
But a long, searching conversation between Sherlock and Dumbledore at the end of the previous term had quietly shifted Dumbledore's thinking.
Not only should the fragment of Voldemort's soul residing within Harry not be surrendered to fate without a fight—neither should the werewolf curse that had haunted Lupin for half his life. No thread of hope, however slender, should go unpursued.
So, when word came that Gilderoy Lockhart had regained consciousness, Dumbledore informed Sherlock at once. Sherlock had said, with certainty, that the key to solving Lupin's condition might well lie with this particular man.
Sherlock's reasoning was this: the extraordinary events described in Lockhart's books were not fabrications from whole cloth. They had genuinely occurred—only the true hero was not Lockhart himself, but the adventurers whose memories Lockhart had erased with an Obliviate.
And what mattered to Lupin was what lay inside Wanderings with Werewolves.
In that book, Lockhart had described in meticulous detail how he had battled a werewolf in Vârcolac, saved an entire village, and subdued the beast. He had even re-enacted passages of this "heroic" episode in his second-year Defense class, casting Neville Longbottom as the werewolf.
According to Lockhart's account, he had used his self-invented Homorphus Charm to restore the werewolf to fully human form.
Sherlock's conclusion was therefore clear: the one who had actually subdued the werewolf and cast the spell was someone else—someone whose accomplishment and memory Lockhart had stolen. Which meant the spell was real. Which meant it was worth finding.
Sherlock's objective had been precise from the outset: to extract, from within the wreckage of Lockhart's disordered memory, the genuine incantation that might finally help Lupin.
Remus had allowed himself to hope. If Sherlock's deduction was correct, it meant that a fully transformed werewolf could be restored—changed back to human. Which, in turn, meant he might remain at Hogwarts as a proper professor after all. He was fonder of teaching than he generally let on; the Order's open horizons, for all their importance, appealed to him rather less.
The reality, however, had proven thoroughly unkind to the hope.
The Lockhart who had woken from his long stupor appeared to have sustained some form of psychological damage from Voldemort's possession.
At first, he had struggled to confirm even his own identity. After a period of recuperation he seemed, on the surface, to have returned to himself—but when Dumbledore attempted to guide him toward recalling the specific details of that spell, his memory fractured again into serious confusion and blockage.
After examination by St. Mungo's Healers, and confirmed by Dumbledore himself, the diagnosis was grimly absurd.
Lockhart, who appeared by all external signs to have recovered, had constructed inside his own mind an entirely false set of memories—a complete and seamless revision.
Every lie he had ever written in his books, every fabrication he had performed before a classroom, he now held to be irrefutable fact. He did not merely claim these things. He believed them, wholly and without a shadow of doubt.
In other words: he was entirely sincere in his conviction that the hero who had defeated the werewolf in Vârcolac and saved the villagers was himself. That the Homorphus Charm had been his own invention.
The problem, of course, was that the spell he described so confidently was far beyond the genuine limits of his magical ability. He could not reproduce it. He could not provide a single useful detail. Whenever Dumbledore or Sherlock raised the subject, the scene that had just played out was the inevitable result.
The problem appeared to be a dead end—completely, irrevocably sealed.
Sherlock had not even needed Remus to explain it aloud. The moment Remus asked him to let it go, combined with what he had just witnessed, was enough for him to reconstruct the full picture.
He turned to Dumbledore. "You have no way through it either, sir?"
He asked because Dumbledore had precedent. Both Morfin Gaunt and the house-elf called Hokey had each had false memories planted inside their minds by Voldemort. Yet Dumbledore had, with remarkable skill, extracted the true memories buried beneath the fabrications.
The situation with Lockhart was, in its nature, not entirely different—except that the architect of the false memories was Lockhart himself. Could it be that in this particular arena, his self-deception ran deeper than Voldemort's artifice?
"I'm afraid not," Dumbledore said.
Sherlock had not quite expected that admission.
"His conviction in this matter is far more tenacious than one might imagine," Dumbledore said, with an air of helpless resignation. "I suspect that's precisely how he managed to hold on for as long as he did."
'Well. There you have it.'
Everyone present understood what Dumbledore meant. And the looks they turned toward Lockhart, lounging cheerfully against his pillows, were against all expectation—tinged with something very close to awe.
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