It never ends. Erasmus doesn't want to interact with the world, he doesn't want to join the other kids in their classes, he doesn't want to talk to the smiling, lying adults. He just wants to stay in this room and pretend that there's no world outside of its walls. If there's no world then there's no one left to hurt him.

But Dumbledore doesn't let him pretend, he visits and visits, weaving his genial, smiling lies and never faltering even when Erasmus yells at him. Even when Erasmus threw the bag of sweets back in his face and it broke, spewing sweets in their bright-coloured wrappers across the floor, all Dumbledore did was smile gently and draw his wand to tidy up the mess.

At which point Erasmus dived for the safety of under his bed, because a wand is a terrible thing. He doesn't remember much of anything, but he remembers a white hand and a dark-wooded wand and the bright, pretty, terrible magic that sprang from it. He remembers the sound of screaming. Some of it might not be his, but he's pretty sure a lot of it is. Dumbledore spent nearly half an hour trying to coax him out from under the bed but Erasmus just curled up tighter the more he talked and eventually the man must have got the message because Erasmus awoke in the dust, his cheek cold where it was pressed against the stone, and he was alone.

He just wants them to leave him alone, that's all.

Why can't they understand that?

"Misery wants company," Dumbledore quoted at him once, eyes actually twinkling. Twinkling! Erasmus's misery doesn't want company. Erasmus's misery wants to crawl into a dark corner and fade away into nothing. Nothing is a pleasing thought, he likes the idea of oblivion. Not this aching limbo of half memory and whole hurt.

Oblivion would be better than this place.

- 

Harry and Hermione try not to laugh as they sneak down the hall towards the hobby room. Mr Granger had a choice between an office and a hobby room and he took the latter. They creep along the carpet on tip-toe in mimicry of old adventures through school halls, sans invisibility cloak, and as long as Harry only remembers those happy adventures he can stay in this moment, in this tenuous happiness. If he thinks too hard he'll lose it, so he doesn't think, he just follows Hermione down the hall and fills his world with the smile on her face and pretends there are no shadows in her eyes. Hermione gently pushes the door open, with a faint whisper as the wood brushes over the carpet. They peer inside, Harry leaning on Hermione's shoulder – and Mr Granger looks up.

He smiles on seeing them and waves them in. Harry loves this room. It's filled with a miniature railway landscape that is forever growing and changing, like stepping into a new world where he's a giant and old familiar things are suddenly tiny and strange. Carefully the children tip-toe to the stools by the workbench, hardly daring to breathe as if they could make the tiny, perfect models vanish in a puff of air. Mr Granger smiles at them and bends his head over his work again, creating tiny trees two or three inches high.

There is more magic here than in all of Hogwarts, watching Mr Granger's steady, dentist-trained hands undertaking work of incredible detail, turning sticks and glue and flock into miniature realities. Hermione and Harry can spend hours sitting side by side, watching in breathless awe as Mr Granger cunningly puts together the intricate landscapes that his model trains run through. And they try their own hands at the magic, at the art of creation, and they laugh at their sticky attempts and feel proud when Mr Granger admires them. They help with small things, and even if they make mistakes it's okay because Mr Granger doesn't mind, he just laughs and does a little bit of his magic so that even a mistake looks perfect.

It's magic. Harry knows it's magic. When a new landscape is completed and the trains run through the new world for the first time, darting in and out of the tunnels and stations, snaking around hills and across bridges, there is no word for it but magic. Good, wonderful, awe-inspiring magic.

Harry doesn't know it, but there is healing here. In the small comforts of watching a man working his hobby, of being part of a family, of watching the magic of an artist at work. Little scabs heal over in the peace of the work, little wounds stop festering and start healing. Perhaps it is because there are no demands here but what he puts on himself. No one is urging him to get better or to tell them what happened to Voldemort, he is simply here, part of the companionship, belonging here. There is time and ease to play, no expectations. Perhaps it is because here, unlike in real life, he has control over the landscape.

Harry only knows he is having fun.

- 

Professor McGonagall visits Erasmus every day. And he is quick enough, observant enough, to know that it is nothing that Dumbledore has said but instead a decision she has made for herself. Angry, he wants to sneer and say it's because she pities him or because she wants to feel like a good Samaritan. But underneath his anger he is observant and he thinks that mostly it's because of a friendship for someone he doesn't remember. Whatever that may mean. He's seen the flash of dismay when she looks at him after a moment of absent-mindedness, as if whomever she thought she was with is not him. He's seen the tension in her when she visits, visibly reminding herself he is not someone else.

But he also knows the acerbic kindness of a woman who will not shield her tongue just because he is 'ill' but who will like him simply because he is himself. That is why he asks her what he would ask of no one else.

"You know who I am, don't you?"

The question hangs in the air between them. She hasn't moved, not to stiffen in shock nor steady herself for a lie, and that is why he asked her. Not Dumbledore, not Madam Pomfrey, not Flitwick (although to be fair he's not sure Flitwick has any clue who he really is). The question neither surprises her nor scares her. Her eyebrows pull together and her mouth thins into a straight line and Erasmus knows that whatever she tells him know will be the truth. Even if it's not a truth he wants to hear.

"I have guessed and I am certain I have guessed correctly."

"Then who?" The question bursts out of him with more force, more anguish, then he would like, but he can't take the words back now and they arouse no pity in her, only an anger directed at someone who is not him.

"I cannot tell you." She taps her wand to her lips, raising blue sparks, and Erasmus's angry protest is cut off before it begins, because even when he remembers little he knows what that means. Binding spell. She literally cannot speak of it. "The spell was on the note brought in with you, I was given no option in its application."

There are two strands to his anger then, one, the main one, the one he is used to, is anger that people are keeping information from him. The other, unaccustomed and strange, is anger that she should be forced into silence. "He should have asked." There is no question who 'he' is.

She doesn't protest his bitterness. "He should," she agrees. "He wished only to protect you – and I will admit it is understandable—"

—fear and horror and pain, magic and flashing lights that rip and tear, red eyes and harsh laughter, screaming, screaming, screaming—

"—but he had no right to go about it this way." Her eyes soften, ever so slightly. "I continue telling him you have a right to know, but I have little faith he will listen to me."

At least you tried. Isn't that what he's supposed to say? She tried and that makes everything better. But it doesn't. Because only trying doesn't get him the truth, only trying doesn't tell him who he is, only trying doesn't HELP!

She knows. Pressing her lips together she says nothing. And they say nothing for the rest of the visit. What is there to say?

- 

Harry prowls the house in the dark hours when he can't sleep, silent and watchful. Awareness sinks into him, knowledge of the house that is filling up with his love, with his need, with his trust. He knows where Hedwig has chosen to perch, wise-eyed and awake, in the sitting room, knows Crookshanks is sitting still and watchful in front of a likely mousehole in Hermione's room, knows that Hermione is curled up in bed between her parents, one last tear on her cheek. This is the one place he feels safe, the one place where he can be sure of who he is and who is around him. The one place he feels loved.

Padding silently through the halls, he sinks his awareness into the world around him, stretching magic out into the walls, the floors, the ceilings... Feeling the house smile back at him.

He likes staying with the Grangers. He cooks breakfast and dinner every day and after each meal he and Hermione do the dishes together. Mrs Granger lets him help her in the garden and hugs him as much as she does Hermione. Mr Granger is teaching him car maintenance and is explaining all the rules of rugby. It's like, for the first time, he's normal.

He can never repay Mr and Mrs Granger for all they've done. For how they've taken him in and given him family. Not because he is the Boy Who Lived, not because they pity him, not because they are obliged to, but just because he is Hermione's friend. They not only don't think of him as the Boy Who Lived, they don't even know what it means. Oh, they know he's famous and they know what he's done, but Voldemort is mostly an abstract quality to them, not the terror that the wizarding world still remembers, the terror that drove them to give all Death Eaters the Kiss with no hesitation, and they are in fact appalled at a world that hero-worships a boy.

Besides, Hermione loves them. That makes them okay. There aren't many people Harry trusts and Hermione is almost all of them.

Sometimes, though, he thinks that the best thing about the Grangers is that they never ask how he defeated Voldemort.

- 

Night wrapped its cold shadows around the walls of Hogwarts, stars glittering outside in the dark sky in competition with the glittering lit windows of the castle. This close to curfew the night before the first task of the TriwWizard Tournament, the corridors were almost empty. Everyone was in their commonrooms speculating excitedly on what the next day might bring, leaving the youngest champion and his best friend to walk unchallenged back from their training session, magically worn out and mentally exhausted but triumphantly certain of Harry's ability to use the Summoning Spell.

Almost unchallenged.

"Potter! A word!"

Moody's voice, but with a strange edge to it that paranoid, jumpy old Moody had never had before, almost excitement, not quite feverish. Harry and Hermione turned as the man clunked down the hall towards them.

"Hello, Professor Moody," Hermione said politely, but there was that hesitation in her voice that told Harry he wasn't alone in his sudden uneasy feeling.

Moody's artificial eye rolled back and forth between them. "Dammit, Potter," he growled, "don't you go anywhere alone?"

Two things Harry would always remember: The look of unleashed loathing and triumph on Moody's face as he threw the ball at Harry and Hermione's shriek as she tried to push him away. "Harr—"

And then the portkey took them.