Clueless {Scorose}

Chapter 65: Hogsmeade 2.0

The next Hogsmeade trip was this weekend, and boy did some of us really need it. It will give me the perfect chance to buy Lily a birthday present, even if I'm a few weeks ahead of schedule.

Lily's been excited about her birthday ever since February started. She likes to make the whole month a celebration, not always outright saying it, but still being more positive than usual.

Though it has been harder to be so positive this year. She's been in more pain with all the changes going on inside of her. Not to mention the number of people that have been giving her a hard time about it, now that she's quite visibly pregnant.

At her appointment this weekend, Madam Pomfrey let me bring up the sonogram, showing me the right way to do it and everything. I guess she'd noticed that I became somewhat interested in it after coming to all of these appointments.

"You know Miss Weasley, you're picking up quite well on medicine," she told me as I was helping her clean up Lily's bed. She had left, complaining of a headache so I told her to go on without me. "Do you know what you want to do after Hogwarts?"

"No, not really," I say. "I'm still unsure."

"That's perfectly normal at your age," she explains. "But nonetheless, have you ever considered becoming a Healer?"

"Hm, I don't think so," I say. I guess that somewhere in the back of my head I figured I would end up working for the Ministry, just like the rest of my family. But being a healer--that sounded interesting.

"You should," she said. "You seem to have quite an interest."

"Thank you, I will think about it."

Later that night I'm reading through a few books I had taken out from the library. I come across the books I took out with Al the other day and pick off from a page I had bookmarked.

"Unknown Memories" are most commonly associated with dreams or visions that could have a multitude of possibilities. We categorize them into three main topics that we find the most common in witches and wizards, them being Legilimency, Vivid dreaming, and The Memory Charm.

I read through the paragraphs on legilimency and vivid dreaming. I know Al isn't a legilimens so that's out of the question. The vivid dreaming paragraph sounds the most like what happened, but then I read the whole two paragraphs about the memory charm and feel intrigued.

The rarest case of the three is the Memory charm, which also happens to be the most forgotten as well. In this case, we find that witches or wizards will pick up on memories that might have been taken from them through the Memory Charm, also known as the Forgetfulness Charm, or just "Obliviate." This is due to the strength of the charm. If the caster of the spell doesn't place a strong enough charm on the subject, it is possible that they might start to remember pieces of what was once thought to be removed from their memory.

The reason this case is almost never identified is because those who experience it would never remember that they were obliviated in the first place. In most cases, these witches and wizards assume it to be an odd thought or of course, vivid dreaming or legilimency.

It goes on to list the symptoms and more details. I bookmark the page and get up from my desk to go find Al. The last bit of information scares me a bit and I want to make sure that this isn't what he's experiencing.

I don't really know why I am so hung up on this, after all, it was just a dream Al had, but it gave me the creeps. I just had this weird feeling that I didn't like, especially because Claire was involved. That alone made it more of a big deal in my mind.