Somewhere, in the dark, 7 November 1993

He remembers all the things he can't remember. In subtle, useless, maddening ways his body can feel all the people and places and emotions he can no longer feel with his mind. Each of them is a part of him; each claims a little piece of his body.

He remembers James like a hole; a pit of wanting dug out behind his ribs, dark and cold and ohsoveryunfair. James is the laughter that dies in his lungs because there is no one that can ever laugh like they did. Brash, insane, wicked shouts of hysterical, painful laughter, while the others looked on in bemused horror. Images of scandalized professors and turquoise sheep and a rather angry cinnamon biscuit – but nothing cohesive. A story without a plot. He is all nouns, but no verbs. James is an emptiness. James is a longing for innocence and all the things they god damn deserved. But, mostly, he is a blank.

He remembers Lily like a headache. She is a wheedling, gnawing ache behind the eyes: part frustration, part affection, part admiration. Lily is the irritating itch beneath his skull that reminds him to grow up and be careful and never, ever surrender. The shining sixteen-year-old (that he hated once upon a life) and the soft, warm mother-above-all-else blend together in a dull heat, just there, where it can't be gotten to, can't be touched. Lily is adjectives describing nothing. And then she is also nothing.

He remembers Remus on his skin; warmth like sunshine, fingertip touches and a tingling crackle that makes his flesh feel new and sweet. Skin doing everything skin can do: tickling, prickling, stretching, tearing, mending, scarring, touching. Little touches (fingers on the insides of his wrists, knee caps pressed together beneath tables, eyelashes fluttering on a sharp, aristocratic cheek bone) that seared his brain with electric-blue nerve fire. Hard touches (dull pain, searing and aching until oh gods and please, more, oh-- oh gods) that turned the world of a teenage boy on its side like a child's plaything. Remus is the shiver that inches up his spine, the gooseflesh that spreads across his arms and legs. Remus is punctuation on a blank page. He is pauses between breaths and full-stops of thought and dot-dot-dots leading to... Without James and Lily, his mind feels full of holes; hollows, like the shadows between his ribs and beneath his eyes. Without Remus, he feels like he doesn't exist.

But slowly, day by day now, they crawl back to him. His mind reassembles itself, oh miraculous wonder, and the feelings of all these feelings he's lost, they squirm beneath the skin, infect his brain. Sensation becomes emotion, newly awakened, until one night, everything is as it once was. One night, in a cave darker than any cell, the pieces click into place, and a madman's laugh cracks the cold-glass air. And then a sob. And then a silence.