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The world didn't collapse in an instant.
Life wasn't kind enough for Harry to do that.
It cracked slowly, like glass left out in the cold for too long: first a thin crack, then a silent network spreading beneath the surface.
Harry noticed it for the first time in the library.
Hermione was talking to him about something complicated, books stacked like little defense towers, and he was nodding in all the right places. Or at least he thought he was.
Then she smiled.
And Harry realized, with a gentle and irreparable delay, that he didn't remember why that smile seemed important to him.
It wasn't empty.
It was worse.
It was slippery, like trying to grasp water with bare hands.
“Hermione,” he said, and her name caught in his throat as if it were too big for him.
She looked up. “Yes?”
Harry opened his mouth.
And there was nothing on the other side.
Just a sense of absence, like a room whose air had been removed without warning.
"Forget it," he finally muttered.
Hermione looked at him for a long time. She wasn't stupid. She never had been.
But she didn't say anything.
And that was the first mistake they all made.
The next few days got worse without warning.
Ron would tell him a story at the dinner table, and mid-sentence, Harry would lose the thread as if someone had cut the ribbon of memory.
Ginny laughed in the corridor, and for a moment the sound seemed familiar... then it was just sound.
Even Hagrid's face began to feel distant, as if seen through a fogged-up window.
It wasn't pain.
It was erosion.
Something inside him was returning pieces of the world to the void.
One night, Harry woke up with someone's name on his lips.
He couldn't say.
It was there, crystal clear... and then it wasn't.
He sat on the bed, his heart beating as if it had been racing without knowing where.
"Ron," he said into the darkness, because it was the only name that still seemed stable to him.
He got no answer.
And for the first time, he thought: what if this too disappeared?
It happened two weeks later.
Ron was standing beside him, speaking softer than usual, as if afraid of frightening something he didn't understand.
"...and anyway, Fred would have said you were an idiot," he was saying, and smiled as he said it.
Harry looked at him.
He really looked at him.
And he found nothing to hold on to.
Not the color of his hair. Not the way he moved. Not that ancient feeling of "home" that should have been there, somewhere.
Just a figure learning to become a stranger.
"Sorry," said Harry.
Ron paused. “For what?”
Harry swallowed. His chest was too empty to contain the answer.
“I… I can’t…” he trailed off, frustrated with himself, as if he were failing a simple spell. “I can’t remember properly anymore.”
The silence that followed wasn’t gentle.
It was true.
Ron didn’t move immediately.
Then he sat down on the edge of Harry’s bed, slowly, as if afraid that too abrupt a move might shatter what was left.
“Okay,” he said.
Just that.
Harry looked at him, suddenly frightened. “I don’t remember you very well,” he confessed, as if it were a physical sin. “And I’m sorry.”
Ron breathed in.
Exhaled.
And then, with a simplicity that seemed impossible in this crumbling world:
“You don’t have to remember me perfectly.”
Harry clenched his fingers in the sheet.
Ron continued, his voice firmer now, as if he'd decided that at least one thing wouldn't be lost without a fight.
"I'll remember you."
Harry looked up sharply.
Ron wasn't smiling.
It wasn't easy comfort.
It was a promise held together with bare hands.
"Even if you forget everything," said Ron, "even if you're left with only pieces... I'll never forget you. Understand?"
Harry opened his mouth.
But the name he was supposed to say broke before it was born.
And then he did the only thing he could: he nodded.
That night, when Ron left, Harry lay awake for a long time.
The world inside him felt like a house losing its lights, one room at a time.
And for the first time, he wasn't afraid of the dark.
Because somewhere, in the other half of the darkness, someone was still keeping a lamp burning with his name on it.