August 27th, 1893 — Philip Rowle Residence

Sera couldn't fathom what she'd been doing when she started feeling ill. It was like she'd woken up, but it was the middle of the day, and her housekeeper was talking to her about something she didn't care about. She looked confusedly up at the woman. "I don't care," she managed, and started reaching for objects near her. Why was she wearing orange? She didn't even look good in orange. The housekeeper looked at her as if expecting input, and Sera waved her hand — "Whatever you think is best, really."

She didn't remember the housekeeper's name. That was — unsettling. One of the objects was an address book maintained in her own handwriting, although Sera did not remember half of these people — where were her friends? Why couldn't she find them? The first name she found and recognized was Philip A. F. Rowle, and family. (How long had Philip been married?)

She held the address book in her hand. The house was decorated by a hand that seemed odd to her, as if her own taste had been subdued, and Seraphina walked stumblingly over to the floo and read out Flip's address.

His staff seemed surprised to see her, and Sera demanded entrance to her brother's study — where she was lucky enough to see him. The door clicked shut behind her and Sera leaned against it.

"What's — happening — to me," she panted. She felt as if she may faint, or vomit, or something. And Flip looked different, why did he look so different? She remembered him being younger —

— she remembered herself being younger.

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   Edwin Rowle

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He’d shut himself up in the study for a minute – just a minute, that had turned into ten and then twenty and then two hours – because there was too much in his head, like his head was being torn apart by it all. Everything hurt. His arms felt sore; there was a stabbing feeling in his knee, like he’d just hit it against something and the pain was still ricocheting around in him; there was a terrible ache of sorrow in his chest. It was more than he had felt in years.

There was some kind of work on the desk, paperwork, research, reports – he didn’t know. He’d seen the signature on it – Philip Rowle – but otherwise would scarcely have recognised it as his. And then – still more strangely – when a woman stumbled into the room, it took a moment to sink in that she was Seraphina. Sera – his sister, Sera – Sera, whom he best remembered as a nine-year-old, a girl, ten years younger than him... although that wasn’t right, because somewhere in his head he also remembered her graduating and marrying and having children, too. A life within a life. Memories locked up in memories.

He saw the terrible confusion on her face, and felt it. Viscerally. A muscle clenched in his jaw. “It’s happening to me too,” he said, grimly. “It all feels real.”

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Sera slid downwards against the door until she was sitting down on the floor in a pile of skirts. "It feels like —" she broke off. She did not know what it felt like; it felt like feeling again.

"Something's wrong," she said instead, "Or — something was wrong." With both of them, too, because she recognized the look on Flip's face as mirroring the look on her own. It wasn't just her. And why did her adult life — why did it feel like a dream? Why did she only have foggy memories of Philip's children, and of her own?

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Seraphina sank down to the floor, and if his hands had not both been clamped around the edge of the desk (– they had been frozen there some time, as if he were caught between temptations to upturn the table or bash his head in on it –), Philip might have been able to crouch down and console her.

Console was maybe not the word. He didn’t know what the feeling was: nor did she. Because something had been wrong with him. Both of them.

He opened his mouth, felt a stabbing ache in his head, shut it again, tried to remember. “What’s,” he began, and his mouth felt numb, tongue heavy, like he was coming down off some high and his body was seizing up and leaden from it – he exhaled deeply and snapped out of it again. “What’s the last thing you remember? Really remember? Something you felt?”

The first feeling for him, before the misery and hopeless grief had flooded in, had been a fizz of anger, some flash of old resentment for Robert, of all people. Robin had – ruined something for him. Something big.

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Flip's question was hard, and Sera closed her eyes as she tried to grasp it. "It was the morning after a party," she said. She remembered waking up late, updating her notes on the many men she had danced with, and going to breakfast. "I was excited." She had felt that she was cultivating many options.

"I remember thinking about all the callers we would have," Sera said. She laughed, and was not sure if she was bitter or if it was silly — it was impossible to grasp what she was feeling now. "Mr. — I can't remember. Someone had tried to kiss me, and I wanted him to pay a call." She laughed again, a giggle that tumbled out of her at the absurdity of memory, of the absurdity of remembering a feeling. And everything after was so — blurry.

  

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He didn’t know what it meant, what any of it meant, but he listened to Seraphina with a furrowed brow and all the concentration he could against the tide of other griefs. (Their mother was dead? Their mother was dead. And Freddie. He had lost his son. His son had drowned in the bath and it made him flinch, now, to picture it, the fragile little figure, damp hair and clothes and vacant, staring eyes, in a way it never had before – what was happening to him?)

The last thing Sera could remember was so different from his. That didn’t make sense, did it? He had been annoyed, and she had been excited – there it was right there in her brief girlish peal of laughter, like an ancient echo – and that did sound like Sera, so like the little Sera he remembered. Miranda had always been grave and serious and sensitive, as long as he could remember; Edwin had been a baby, but he’d been quiet, placid, gentle. And Robert, of course, the brother he’d been closest to (– in age, more than by choice –) had always been a prick.

But Sera had been bright and vivid and fun. Sera probably was bright and vivid and fun, because surely she hadn’t changed just because Philip couldn’t remember anything of her. He had forgotten things, and he felt foreign, but the world? The rest of the world had to be the same.

“It’s – my memories, maybe,” Philip said through gritted teeth, with a stab of frustration. “I don’t have – I don’t know.” And whatever had happened to him – modified memories, some hazy charm over half of his life – how had it also happened to his sister? Was it some bloodborne illness, a disease? Were they mad?

A sharp rap at the door sent an involuntary twitch up his spine. He was in no fit state to answer questions – he didn’t want to see his children, the woman who called herself his wife – but, in bloodless dread and without much tenderness, he dragged Sera up and out of the way, far enough along the floor to step around her and fling open the study door anyway.

Philip had no idea why he had expected another sibling, but it wasn’t them – just the butler with a letter. He snatched it off the silver plate (the man looked oddly aggrieved at his lack of thanks) and thrust the study door shut again. His pulse was thumping almost too erratically in his ears to bother reading it, but he tore it open anyway and scanned it swiftly, only catching a few words the first time through. It was not what he’d expected.

It was from Robin. Philip read the letter again, in disbelief, the parchment trembling in his hands. He couldn’t tell what he felt from it – anger, sadness, horror, something else? – but the news had stopped him from digesting anything else. Their father, in a coma.

“It’s about Father,” Philip said, with a hard, uncertain blankness, when he finally acknowledged Seraphina again. He let the letter drop out of his hands to her instead. No doubt there was an owl on its way to her, too. She might as well read it for herself.

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   Seraphina Bythesea

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Sera limply let Philip slide her along the floor. Her house dress felt like a trap — partially because it was a brown she would not have picked for herself — and she wanted to curl her knees up towards her chest, but her skirts felt heavy. Instead she scooted herself along the floor until she pressed her back against the hard wood of Philip's desk. Everything felt too loud, and there wasn't even that much noise. What had happened to them? To them both? She was supposed to be younger. Philip was supposed to be younger. She reached up to touch her hair and begun pulling out the pins holding it up. And then Philip was back, with a note, and she had a handful of pins and all she could do was let them fall to the floor with a clatter.

Sera read the letter, then looked up at Philip, then back down at the letter. She read it again. Their father was in a coma. Their father. "Philip," she said. She looked up at him, and held up the note. She remembered her father's eyes, meeting hers, and —

"Father," Sera said, with a flash of real feeling — a variation on the distress she was feeling, but a note of plaintive anger, too. "Father." She could not articulate it, but — had he done this tot hem?

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   Philip Rowle

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The news about their father had unseated him for a moment, thrown him off his train of thought. Because it had come out of the blue. As out of the blue as the sensation of feeling alive had returned just to drown him. That was... some coincidence. Coincidences like that just couldn’t be.

But Philip wasn’t sure he had actually put it together – consciously – until Seraphina had said his name and he had frowned at her, at the way she had pulled out her hair. There was a strange, unfamiliar look to her like this, as if she had never ever come close to undone before. And there was something else new: the thread of anger in her tone.

It called to Philip, became a steady thrumming in his own chest, as he turned the thought over and over, outwardly calm and internally manic. Somehow they had both been plunged down into dark, dense reality at abruptly the same moment – somehow their father had suffered something terrible at the same time, and somehow – somehow, Philip agreed or decided (without knowing why or needing more reason than a deep, primal instinct in his gut), their father was to blame for it.

His present flare of anger was building, and put him right back to the last time he had felt so furious, so trapped in his own fate and own skin and raging at the world. He straightened up, and looked down at his sister, jaw set. She had remembered kisses and callers; he remembered something too. “I was going to play quidditch,” he began, the realisation dawning on him just as he said it. “Did you know that? I was going to play, professionally.” Somehow he had suppressed that knowledge from himself in the years since. (No one could quash dreams and ambitions so thoroughly, that wasn’t possible –)

“Except I told Robin,” he spat, almost swaying where he stood from the resurgence of it, “and he warned Father. So I –” his eyes closed briefly: he had almost made the motion of the hex in front of him now, though he wasn’t holding his wand and hardly knew the incantation; “I made him pay for it. And Father,” he echoed – with stormclouds gathering at his brow, and his mouth twisting with sudden rancour – “...I suppose Father made me pay.”

Did that sound delusional to Sera? Philip looked at her warily. Or did that make perfect sense to her?

She was holding out a hand, or the note in it, to him, but Philip felt too wired to touch anything right now, as if every muscle in him had gone taut and rigid from lack of use, or as if a fuse in him was about to blow.

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   Melody Crouch, Seraphina Bythesea

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Sera pressed her free hand over her mouth as Philip told his story. "I remember," she said through her fingers. She had been a child, had not even gone to Hogwarts yet. But she remembered hearing the story — Philip had hexed Robin and left him half deaf, wasn't that funny? Didn't that remind them of how he'd gotten the nickname Flip in the first place? But it had always struck her as odd, that story. Because Philip had never showed a temper. If anything he'd been docile, and thoughtful, and gentle. Not the sort to throw hexes, or to flip a table. Seraphina had thought he was boring.

She moved her hand to wrap it around her throat. She knew she had to look crazy; with her hair half undone and her hand on her throat. But it was as if she had been shoved back into her body after years, and was regaining control for the first time. "Philip, you — you haven't talked about Quidditch in years." He'd never talked about it when she was in Hogwarts, at least — Sera still found the time since she was a debutante to be blurry. There were children. There was a husband. She could not remember either of her names.

But she could remember other pieces. Seraphina drummed her fingers against her throat. "Mama's friend told me I was too flirtatious with her son," she admitted. Her voice was shrill. This was an impossible level of betrayal. It was impossible. "And Mama told me to be more — chaste." It was an embarrassing conversation at the time. Sera remembered promising to be more careful. She remembered insisting to her mother that she would never make a mistake that would damage the family; (although privately Seraphina had thought flirting to be an important part of finding a husband, and that her mother's friend was a prude. Still, it was embarrassing — so she'd wanted to be more careful.)

She crumpled Robin's note in her hand. "And the next day father called me into his office," she said, more firm this time. "And I suppose that he made me pay, too."

A thought struck her, selfish: she had not even done anything.

  

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Hadn’t he talked about quidditch? That felt wrong, but he was wracking his brain now and he couldn’t even remember watching a match recently. His memories were all scattered, anyway, but if he went rummaging around inside himself there were still vague outlines of things to trace: habits and customs and routines. (But no wants, no needs, no real opinions on anything: a blank slate of a man, the walking dead. A coat without an occupant.)

But his own habits were telling, even in what they left out: no quidditch tickets, not even for his sons – son. Subconscious, unconscious, muscle memories. He worked at the Ministry, had had small talk conversations in the lifts – Philip seemed to think he usually found them boring. He would rather talk about the weather than last week’s rankings. When he read the paper, he stopped after the politics and business pages – he handed off the gossip pages to his wife and the sports section to the footman to be shredded for the cat’s litter box.

Philip didn’t know himself anymore, but he already knew he hated whoever this was he had turned into.

And Sera had obviously been a tease and a flirt, then – which did not seem a real crime to him (now), but to the Philip of yesterday – to their mother and father – it may have been. At any rate, an embarrassment and a liability and... Well, selfishly, it was an odd comfort to find someone else in the same wrecked boat as him, even if it meant Seraphina’s personality had been pulverised.

(He was selfish, then. News to him, but good to note.)

His thoughts were grappling with a multitude of questions at once, and he started pacing back and forth opposite Sera, wall to wall like a wild lion in a cramped cage, voicing spiralling thoughts without any real connection or order or follow-through, just as they sprang to mind.

“Then he did it to you – and whatever he did, if it’s broken now because of his –” stroke, and in this instance he hated the man too much to bear hearing his own voice crack to say it, “... then it had to be a spell. A curse.” No potion, no unbreakable vow, nothing like that could have been so all-encompassing and so life-altering and then lifted just like that. “But not a memory charm,” he said, frustrated, because he still remembered things, they both still remembered who they were before, their father had not just erased it all and made simpletons of them. They would not have jobs and families and society lives now – they would have ended up in the asylum or a hospital ward eventually. No, instead this was more insidious and more deliberate. A course-correction, deftly made. Dark, illegal, something he had never so much as dreamed their father might have the steel to do. “An unforgivable?”

He didn’t wait for an answer, too lost in his own head, too bogged down by reality. He was fighting to keep his head above water. His strides got longer, his hands shakier. He wanted to hit something, kick something, tear down the walls. “You and me – not the others, though, do you think? What would they have done?” Nothing, was the answer. Robin had been perfect, hadn’t he? And Miranda had always been the same, really, since childhood – even if Father had wanted to make something more of her, her frailness could hardly have been cured by an Imperius charm. And Edwin... he couldn’t see any change in Edwin, not from anything he could excavate in his memories. And then –

“Years, you said?” he asked abruptly, and stopped pacing to look down at himself. He looked across at Sera, trying to guess her age. He remembered how old he had been, after the fight with Robin. Nineteen. He could not be a teenager now. He had a wife, and there were children – there was a picture of them here, on the desk – and they were young but no longer babies. “What year is it?” Philip demanded, as if Sera’s notion of the world could be any less confused than his own. He lurched to his desk, started riffling through papers without regard for their contents, frenzied, just searching somewhere, anywhere, for a marked date. August, fine, but what was the year? “How long have we been gone?”

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Philip was right; it could not be a memory charm, because they remembered things. And Sera felt wobbly about the most recent years of her life, but she could remember there — her children were pillars in her memory. Harriet, and Algernon, (Algernon, her heart hurt), and Bernard. Harriet, Algernon, Bernard. She did not remember much about them, but she remembered their births — and that they existed. And if she was Mrs. Bythesea, which she evidently was, then there had to have been something else involved. Because even if she had been obliviated, Sera would not have chosen to marry Henry Bythesea, who she remembered as boring, and mid-looking, and utterly meh.

So Philip was right. It had to be an unforgivable curse. But they were alive, and Sera could not remember being tormented — so imperio it was. But before she could affirm anything, Philip kept going, kept giving her things she had to think about. She was ripping up the note in her hand, the evidence of their father's stroke. Philip thought it was just the pair of them, but something nagged at Seraphina — something about the way her father had behaved when he cursed her. And — she had to believe that Edwin would have noticed something, in the years since she had been cursed. They had been friends. He had to have noticed something, right?

But now Philip was asking her what year it was. Sera's eyebrows drew together in concern and consternation. "I — I have three children," she said, "And — well, I finished school in 1878." So she had been cursed in 1878. When was it now? Long enough for her to have three children; that had to be at least a few years, based simply on the timing of pregnancies. She clawed through her blurry memories, hoping for something solid. She let little pieces of paper flutter onto her skirts. "One of them is — he's about to start school." So it had been at least eleven years. That was an impossibly long amount of time, and still Flip's was longer.

Sera swallowed. She could not let this lie. "When father cursed you, did he — did he seem like someone who had not done this before?" she said, "Because — well, he didn't. When he cursed me." And obviously Philip had been cursed before she had, because the Quidditch and deafness drama had occurred when Seraphina was a child, but — well, what if they weren't the only two?

  

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They had both latched onto different things, even as they spoke to each other – ricocheting questions off the walls. 1878, Sera said, and she had had children since, too. So – Philip had been born in 1850, and it had happened in ‘69; and ‘78 was already nine years of being under the influence, and if Sera’s son was starting school that was another eleven – fuck, his head hurt. Flip grasped his head in his hands for a moment, temples throbbing. If even existing felt painful now – if he stopped and did nothing and tried to clear his head, he would still feel the burden of it, being weighted down with the years – then forcing himself to think was a whole new kind of torture.

And never mind where Seraphina’s head was at – Philip lurched forwards to the desk again and snatched up a piece of parchment triumphantly. (The triumph was – unsurprisingly – short-lived.) “1893!” He snarled, breathing heavily as the weight of that settled on him. The parchment itself was another Ministry of Magic document. Philip could scarcely tell what the paperwork was for; he couldn’t quite believe that evidently he had held down a Ministry career for the last... What was it, then?

Twenty-four years. Twenty four years. Which made him in his forties, which made Philip feel a little sick. What if their father hadn’t had a stroke at all, and kept on living? It could have been his whole life gone in the twitch of a dreamer’s eye. That was – it was too much to grapple with, in his head, but – that was more of his life spent under a spell than not. That was insane. Their father was a fucking –

He blinked, mid-crunching up the poor unsuspecting piece of parchment dated 1893 in his fist, to catch the last threads of what was troubling his sister more than anything. (He was not sure this fell amongst his priorities: now that he had sketched an answer of what happened and how long has it been? his priority felt very much like what am I going to do about it now?)

So – “What?” he echoed, knitting his brows at the question. He couldn’t remember. Or: he tried harder, rubbing a hand over his face. He had hexed Robin; had been called into his father’s study; he had had nothing to say for himself (nothing appropriately abashed to say for himself); and Father had...

“No,” Philip answered finally, mulling it over and sounding surprised even as he said it. Because there had been little enough expression in Algernon Rowle’s face, then... He hadn’t seemed nervous or excited or bewildered, hadn’t even seemed apprehensive. “No.” Philip repeated, swallowing in utter confusion. “He seemed tired –” his face hardened, “– resolved. He pointed his wand at me like he knew exactly what he was going to do.”

Sera had come after. Which meant... How many times had their Father done it before? The question stumped him, because suddenly it seemed like this conspiracy went so much deeper than he ever could have thought. Two of them was outrageous enough, but... “Then who?”

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1893. Sera's hands, having utterly decimated their elder brother's notes, went back to the other half of her hair. She started systemically removing the rest of the pins, letting them clatter onto the floor of her brother's office. She was going to look an utter mess when she left here. Good. Good, perhaps she should look an utter mess — she had evidently lost fifteen years of her life. Sera's chest hurt with a sudden desperation. She had not gotten to make any of the few decisions allotted to her as a debutante, had not gotten to parent her children differently as she had so desperately wanted to do, had not gotten to fall in love or explore her interests or know her children. She could feel herself on the verge of a high-pitched keening sound, but it did not leave her — because Philip was describing how their father had cursed him.

She turned a pin over and over in her hand. Sera was trying hard not to become any more hysterical than she was, not because she did not think the situation deserved it, but because she wanted her elder brother to take her seriously — her elder brother, who had lost even more time than she had. She could not imagine what Philip was thinking. But — at least Philip was a man. If Philip needed to get out of his life now, he could do so, with some difficulty but not the problems Seraphina was sure she would face. Who was her husband?

She swallowed. "None of us have ever done anything wrong, in society's eyes," Sera said, sounding resigned. "So — it could be any of us." It could, a tiny paranoid voice in her head said, be all of them. But surely their father, even with his extremely evident moral failings, had not cursed all of his children?

She tossed the pin back and forth between her hands. "But whoever else — we're all coming out of it now," Sera said. Had Algernon Rowle simply planned on keeping things up until he died?

  

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None of us have ever done anything wrong. If he tore himself away from thinking about their father for just a second, it all slid into place terrifyingly simply.

Hadn’t he just thought it to himself, not ten minutes ago? Robert had always been a prick. He’d been a pain in the arse since they were boys. Philip had never liked him. And no wonder, then – no wonder Robert had always been the perfectly restrained, repressed, respectable first son. It hadn’t just been in nature; it had been by design. A perfectly crafted heir.

“You’re right,” he said in surrender, chewing on the thought. “I wasn’t the first. It must have been Robin.” He wasn’t sure about the others, but Robin must have been before him, that was the only way to make sense of this. It wouldn’t stop Philip being pissed at his elder brother for what he had done, because the ability to feel rage at anything or anyone again was too painfully powerful to give up right now, some unquenchable burning fervour in his chest... but he almost did forgive him for what had happened, then. Of course Father’s little puppet would have tripped right on back to the puppetmaster to tell him.

(Seraphina looked like an abandoned marionette here, slumped against Philip’s desk and spiralling out on the study floor – ready to take herself apart.)

Somehow the revelation about them not being the only ones reminded Philip that he wasn’t even the only one in this room, and if he sank to his knees across from her now it was entirely for Sera’s sake, to put himself at her level. He looked at her, intent; he wanted to touch her shoulder, in shared rage or sympathy, but he was sure it would be too much for either of them to take. Even his knees on the polished floorboards were almost too much sensation, like there were pins and needles running all through him, making him constantly aware like he wasn’t used to being in his own body at all. So he looked at her instead and nodded.

“Good,” he said, firmly. “Then we’ll find out soon enough.” Though they had lost so much of their pasts, they had to look forward too. And if they were all coming out of it now – at least they were all coming out of it together.

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Sera was not sure he was right; it seemed so risky to send a child to Hogwarts under the imperius curse, and she suspected that maybe Robin and Philip just didn't get along. But it wasn't worth arguing when they would discover it eventually, and once Philip was at her level, Sera felt soothed — it was a reminder that she was not the only person struggling with this, or alone in this room.

She could have sat there looking like an asylum patient for the rest of the afternoon, letting the waves of distress wash over her until they figured more of this out, but there was something like a question lodged in her throat. She was sure she would figure it out eventually, but it was hard to know how to operate without finding the root of this feeling — even in all the rush of every other feeling she had not had for years. And eventually, she was going to have to go back home. (Was that place her home? It was, it had to be, the staff had been talking to her — but she did not feel connected to any place right now. Everything that had ever been home had too many markers of her father.)

It was also hard to imagine herself as having a husband. Finding a husband was the culmination of achievement as a debutante — and his face was blurry to her memory, and she did not know anything about him except that she had not been particularly impressed by any of the decoration in their shared sitting room. But she did not know who he was, really — she had vague memories of a dance with him before she was Under the curse, and knew that she'd considered him horrendously boring at the time. But what would Philip know of his wife?

"Maybe he'll die," Seraphina said, quiet, and sounding younger than she was. 1893 was still an impossible year. "Wouldn't it be easy, if the stroke just killed him?"

If it did, they would never again figure it out how to speak to their father.

  

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Philip shrugged, lips tightly pressed together. Strange, how empty he felt at the thought of that possibility. If what they had concluded here was at all true, it would all but serve their father right to die. Philip was not actually sure it was punishment enough.

Easy.

“Maybe,” Philip agreed, and he couldn’t help but laugh now, darkly but full-throated: an emotion entirely at odds with the situation, but something real. He ought to write back to Robin. They ought to go see the others, and work out if they were all in this state. They probably ought to look upon their father’s face – now the veil had been lifted from their eyes. Maybe the stroke would kill him, and be a second miracle in as many days. “We can hope.”

And if not... well. They would find a way out, a way to wrest back control. He was already determined about that.

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