Title: Of Memory Against Forgetting
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: General
Length: 815 words
Content notes: memory charms
Summary: In which one of Gildeory Lockhart's victims notices and fights back -- maybe too little, maybe too late, but sometimes it's important to stand up and set the record straight.



Agnes MacPhearson knows her memory is full of holes and shifts out from under her mental feet like sand washed free by a receding tide. It's always been that way -- the important things stick, but her mind's definition of important doesn't always match up to what the rest of the world expects her to remember. Fortunately, magic gives her ways around that.

She scrimped and saved, swore at her hoard of lost notebooks and useless Remembralls, and finally had enough to buy a Pensieve when she was twenty-six. She fills it every evening, sorts through to discard everything irrelevant, and stores the important bits in carefully labelled bottles in a series of filing cabinets that are bigger on the inside. The index is in another, larger bottle attached to the Pensieve by a silver chain -- she knows perfectly well she'd lose it otherwise.

By her fortieth birthday, she has the most extensive collection of information on magical nuisances and parasites within a hundred mile radius. Maybe being an exterminator isn't a glamorous job, but it pays the bills in full and on time, and frankly Agnes prefers dealing with pixies and the like to making conversation with other humans.

Her system is awkward, but it works.

So of course Agnes notices when over an hour of her Tuesday afternoon goes missing.

Everything from when she spotted that ridiculous Mr. Lockhart on High Street as she stepped out for her daily constitutional, to when she abruptly found herself on the banks of the Clyde with the sun noticeably lower in the sky, is sliced out neat as you please. There's a vague suggestion of an uneventful walk in her brain, but in the Pensieve that notion is a watercolor wash thinned down nearly to nothing rather than a solid silver weight.

Agnes concentrates as hard as she can on the memory extraction spell, and manages to dredge up a fragment of trying to send Lockhart on a nonsense quest, looking for a wee tim'rous beastie. (Did he think it was real? He can't possibly have thought it was real! Robbie Burns is bloody famous, he is, and there's enough Scots around Hogsmeade that even wizards with a pureblood pedigree back to the Norman Conquest know his poems.) He insisted on tagging at her heels, said some pretty nonsense about her way with imps, and then--

And then nothing.

But Agnes knows her memory is unreliable, and it's not unheard of for imps to drag bits of broken spells around with them to chuck at anyone who crosses their path. So she writes it off as a minor inconvenience and gets on with her life, documenting and disposing of magical pests as well as minor hexes.

Then Lockhart publishes Marauding with Monsters.

Agnes doesn't think highly of Lockhart's writing, but it's good to keep abreast of the field so she regularly buys his books, takes notes on the useful bits, and then chucks them into her fireplace.

This time, though. This time, he's written a bit about imps along the Clyde, which includes a search for something he calls a "Weetimorousbeastie" and Agnes's own signature Flipendo Knockback jinx.

Agnes looks up the symptoms of memory charms the next day, snarls as she stores them in another large bottle chained to her Pensieve, and sues.

Lockhart comes to visit her during the initial back-and-forth of the case, all gleaming, insincere smiles and offers of settlement money to make her drop the accusations. Agnes casts a Flipendo through her window and laughs as Lockhart picks himself and his dirt-stained robes up from her front garden.

The case vanishes from court records. Nobody remembers she sued.

She sues again. And again. And again.

The fourth suit sticks, but by that point Lockhart's in St. Mungo's for keeps. His estate is solvent, though -- more than rich enough to pay out a dozen times over. Agnes gets her damages.

She also gets the satisfaction of knowing she's created a precedent. The powers that be are keeping his lies out of public view, but Agnes has some time on her hands, a newly purchased full run of Lockhart's books, and a cumbrous but extremely thorough organizational system.

She pulls out Break with a Banshee, thumbs through to the first, and doubtless fraudulent, tale of adventure and heroism. She notes the location, the few tangible details that made it through Lockhart's rot-sweet froth of lies and misdirection, and the method used to defeat the banshee in question. Then she pulls out her research tools and gets to work.

Sometimes the magical nuisances that need to be removed are people -- whether actively evil or simply indifferent to the suffering they cause -- and the systems that let them gnaw away at trust like termites in a foundation or gnomes in a vegetable patch. Somebody has to sweep things clean.

Agnes is very good at her job.