Prologue

The first time it happened, Albus thought he'd lost his mind.

It was October 4th. Albus remembered because it was Lucy's birthday. He could recall sitting in an unused classroom with his sister and cousins, sharing cake and pumpkin juice. Rose must have asked him thirty times if he was alright. He remembered finally snapping and yelling at her to just back off and the next second in seemed, Albus found himself outside under the quidditch stands with a smoking cigarette in his hand and no memory of getting there or how he had managed to get a cigarette.

He wracked his brain trying to remember how he'd gotten there but the memory did not exist. He buried the cigarette in the ground and sprinted all the way back to Gryffindor tower. He ran right into Rose who seemed to have been waiting for him outside the portrait hole. She scolded him for a good ten minutes for running off how he did and how she was still waiting for an apology. Albus stood there, shocked and confused, lost for what to say. Rose mistook his expression for regret and her face softened. She said that maybe she was being a little too overbearing. She gave Albus a hug and lead the way into the common room. Albus didn't tell her.

He was fine for a few weeks, trying to forget and convince himself that nothing had happened. A few days before Halloween and Albus had a run in with Mr Fucking Perfect. Albus hated Scorpius Malfoy and his pretentious attitude about how he was better then everyone and knew it and how he was the King of the whole damn world and didn't want to share the limelight. Scorpius hated Albus and his whole family and how they were everything his family wasn't.

Nothing was different that day except it was. Usually they just yelled at each other, throwing insults back and forth until a teacher would separate them. This time Albus only heard Malfoy's first jab at his family and the next second Albus was on top of Scorpius punching him over and over again. He didn't remember getting there.

Once he realized what he had done Albus scrambled backwards and looked at his hands and at Scorpius Malfoy who was bleeding on the ground and staring up at him in stunned horror. Albus ran, not knowing what else to do.

Two days later and he didn't remember what set him off. All he knew was suddenly he was in the prefect's bathroom with a bottle of hair dye in one hand and his bangs dyed a brilliant shade of red. He stared at himself. He had wanted to dye his hair since the beginning of the summer but he thought he wouldn't actually go through with it. He tossed the bottle and when Rose asked later about the hair he lied and said he'd been thinking hard on it for a few days and had decided to do it today.

In the time leading up to the Christmas break, everything got worse. He would have more strange memory gaps and more people coming up to him and telling him about things he had done without remembering. Girls would come up and thank him and ask if they can hook up again sometime. Albus would lie to them because he had no memory of ever getting with them. People would congratulate him on quidditch games that he wouldn't even remember playing.

And then came Christmas. It got better when he found out. Leading up to him finding out what was happening he began to wonder if he could keep going on like he was. Was he really living anymore. Or was every second going to be spent worrying about what he was going to do next or who he was going to hurt without being able to remember. After December he spent the rest of 6th year figuring out how to handle it. He tried to keep to himself and he even apologized to Scorpius Malfoy. He wanted things to get better. And it did for awhile.

Then August happened.

After it happened, he needed to go back to school. He didn't think he could spend another minute in that house where the memories he remembered and the ones he didn't haunted him so vividly.