Disclaimer: do not own Harry Potter

Note: title comes from an instrumental song that had been playing in the background. Alternate fic title: The Mind Frack.

You know that cliché where the time-displaced hero/heroine changes the world?Yeah. It's like that. Only not. At all.

She wakes in hospital and knows it's wrong. It's calm, it's quiet. She is alone. Cherry blossoms drift across charmed walls and she's in a bed. Soft sheets and a softer wrap covering. When she stands and edges to the open door, she's failed at locating her wand.

There are no wards to keep her in, but someone must have placed an alarm to her movements because she was swarmed with mediwitches before she can turn the corner.

"Oh my," and "dear girl," and "we didn't expect you up" aren't what she hears. To her, it's all clicking heals and sibilant sounds and no one to answer her questions. Her demands. Because she's alone and that's not right either.

Someone touches her and she won't have that. Ever.

She wakes in hospital and knows it's wrong. It's calm, it's quiet. She is alone. A field of tall grass shift like water on charmed walls and she's in a bed. Soft sheets and a softer wrap covering. When she opens the door, she's failed at opening the window.

There are no wards to keep her in, but someone is sitting just to the left and so she has no place to hide.

"Hello dear girl, you've given us quite the fright." It is a man in healing green, but the man is no healer. Brown hair and brown eyes; she's seen him before. He has come from the bowels of the ministry, to claim her and her knowledge. To help her, he had said when this was new and she had thought a generous maybe.

They talk and it's academic, she thinks, all metaphor and allusion. She knows what he's trying to say but she won't accept it. She subscribes to lex parsimoniae and time-travel is a theory with too many assumptions. No. Not time-travel. Not when she had thought to use it, to change things, not when she has studied its philosophy and raided the Halls of Time for records of capability and found it wanting.

She has not gone backwards.

She is frustrated, as he talks to her- talks slow and calm as if she's a wild thing. And she might be, just a bit, because she is curling her hands and hating that they are empty. That they took away her conduit to magic and left her bare. But more than that, she is angry. Angry that they are lying to her. That they are keeping her separated and sedated and left in a void with the same five people saying the same thing.

She is much too angry to pretend. She grinds her teeth and lets him talk, but even then she has had enough. Enough of all of this.

He takes her to an empty room, round and spacious with tall windows opened to maintained autumn grounds. There are tables and chairs aplenty, discarded books and cards and games on shelves that speak to her of other occupants. Other lives.

She takes a rocking chair by a window that smells of rain, sits and watches the looping leaves that fall and fall and fall but never leave the branches empty. A masterful spell to engage all the senses, but it has its flaws, its glitches. It takes hours for this tell, hours to spot and understand the workings of its weaving. But she does. They have ensured her no respite in this hellish place, have underestimated her drive and loyalty.

The man in green doesn't ask her questions any more, just studies her as she studies the illusion. She lets him. Lets him do this because she has no other choice.

In her rocking chair she sits and thinks. Plans. Plans in the deepest pit of her mind, a tiny cubby in a void she had created before the scavenger hunt, the only place untouched by the 'mind healers' that try to take her soul.

She doesn't plan to change the world, nor the course of history. Instead she plans to trap them, to catch them on their lies and destroy them. Plans destroy them all.

She will break free of this prison – break free and break them – no matter the redundancies and the care they have taken. It is all a lie and she will have none of it.

Hermione Granger knows she has not traveled back in time. Knows it with her entire being. She was taken, snatched, that long and cold night in a wooden sanctuary by enemies that wanted precious information.

She knows she has not travel backwards because she has studied mind magics as she once studied time. She knows she is trapped.

But not for long.

No. Not for long.

[x]