"Mudblood filth, you will tell me where the sword is."
Bellatrix Lestrange twists the dagger, pressing the point into the flesh of Hermione's neck, its tip breaking the skin slightly. Hermione feels a brief chill from the cold metal, then an intense burning as poison seeps into her.
"Never!" she says, feigning more courage than she feels.
"So be it. Crucio,"
The pain is unlike anything Hermione has ever felt, a sensation of being flayed alive, skin torn by a thousand jagged tears, acid dribbled into her wounds. She arches her back and screams, thrashing violently. Rivers of pain wash over her and blood runs down the side of her face from a tongue bitten through cleanly.
The Death Eater twists her wand and the pain redoubles. She screams again, louder this time, and begins to choke on blood. Waves of agony break across her consciousness, crashing against her crumbling sanity. Her hold on clarity slackens and long moments pass, reducing the proud Gryffindor to a base thing, mere flesh.
She's unable to draw breath. Only a plaintive whimper escapes her lips.
"Crucio."
The curse lashes against her once again and something breaks inside. Her mind fractures, turning in upon itself as it becomes too much to bear.
##
She rouses slowly to bright lights, her mind dull, insensate. Consciousness unfolds slowly, sensations coming piecemeal. It's warm. Her skin is itchy. She feels bruises at her wrists and ankles. The muscles in her lower back are terribly sore. She's wearing a coarse garment open at the back. The ceiling is high and the lights above are fluorescent. She's in the Muggle world. It's daytime. The place smells of antiseptic. There's an IV tube taped to the crook of her left elbow.
"Where am I?" she rasps.
She's lying upon a bed in a four-point restraint, hands and feet held fast by cloth straps. She hears a rustle by her head as someone stands up beside her.
"Jane?" It's a woman's voice, vaguely familiar. Hermoine's eyes are blurry and it takes a few blinks to clear them. When she does, she doesn't quite understand what she sees.
"Lavender?" What is her classmate doing here?
"I'm Janet, Love. We've been through this before?" The woman pats her on the cheek, showing the sort of detached affection that nurses everywhere seem to have. She's older than Lavender by a few years, an older sister perhaps, and her voice is weary, almost bored. She's holding a fashion magazine beneath a clipboard.
Hermione feels a sense of unease as the nurse measures her temperature and blood pressure. Though it seems far away, somehow, she wonders where Harry and Ron are. Are they still trapped at the Malfoy mansion? What of their quest? How did she find herself here?
She clears her throat in an attempt to get the woman's attention. "Please, can you tell me what am I doing here?"
"You don't remember?" The nurse's voice is laced with pity.
"No."
Lavender's clone just hums to herself as she walks to the doorway and presses a button on an intercom.
"Janet here in 311. The patient is awake and coherent, finally."
"We'll send the doctor over."
"Can you have her hurry? I need to use the loo."
"I do too," Hermione says. "Can you unfasten me please?"
"That's for the doctor to decide."
"Where am I?"
The woman sighs. "Saint Mungo's Hospital, mental ward. The answer hasn't changed since the last times you've asked."
"But this is the Muggle world."
The nurse ignores her.
There's a knock at the door and then it opens as a short, heavyset woman enters. She has a round face with a wide mouth set in a perpetual scowl. Her hair is grey and trimmed short, ending in loose curls. She has small, dark, sharp eyes.
Hermione gasps. "Madam Umbridge."
The woman looks at Hermione and clicks her tongue in disapproval, looking almost as if expecting something of the sort.
"It looks like we've suffered a bit of a relapse, haven't we dearie?" she says, sitting on the bed beside Hermione and smiling. It's a clinical, predatory smile, cold in its delivery. She turns to the nurse and says, "Put the patient back on thiothixene and ready another IV with haloperidol."
"Doctor?" the nurse says, surprised.
"The patient is clearly still delusional, suffering from acute psychosis. We'll leave her restrained until we know otherwise."
"Right."
"And send an orderly, please. She'll need to be cleaned up. Jake might do." Hermione wonders how invasive this 'cleaning up' will be, especially if done by a man.
As soon as they are alone, the woman turns her sharp eyes onto Hermione, offering her a hand. "Doctor Margaret Huxley. Pleased to make your acquaintance yet again. Oh, I'm sorry. It appears you're rather tied up, aren't you."
"Why am I here and why am I this way?"
"I know you hate to be restrained like this, but we simply had no choice, dear. I'm afraid you were hurting yourself and we can't have that."
"I don't understand."
She pats Hermione's head condescendingly. "Of course you don't. You were too busy shouting about 'dark wizards' or some such and fell into a screaming fit."
Hermione feels confused, her thinking slow and imprecise, not at all like the laser-like focus she's used to.
"Are you feeling up to answering a few questions?"
Hermione looks back at the woman suspiciously. The doctor takes a pen from the breast pocket of her coat.
"Can you please tell me your name?"
"Why?"
"Well, because I'm the doctor and you're the patient." The woman's high-pitched voice is unnaturally pleasant and Hermione has the feeling she's being spoken to like she's a tot.
"I don't trust you," Hermione says. She'd fold her arms if she weren't tied down.
"I don't expect you to, dear, but I do expect you to answer me without too much fuss. It would be such a pity to have to leave you like this until tomorrow."
"Fine. Hermione Jean Granger."
The woman writes something down, not looking at Hermione.
"And your parents?"
Hermione pauses for a moment, waiting until the doctor looks up at her, annoyed. "Steven and Emily Granger. Dentists."
"Where do you live?"
Another pause. "Coventry."
"Hmm," the doctor says, writing.
"And how old are you?"
"Eighteen."
"Where did you go to school?"
Hermione turns aside.
"I asked you where you went to school."
"I'm sorry," she says, turning away.
"Would it be fair to say the answer is still 'Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?'" the woman asks sweetly. "I thought so."
Hermione purses her lips and continues to look away. The woman continues to write on her clipboard.
There's another knock at the door and an orderly enters. He has dark hair and is dressed in a blue uniform with a plastic ID badge clipped to the pocket of his shirt. It reads, 'Jake Dixon,' and has a laminated photo of a bespectacled man.
He looks at Hermione and she recognizes him.
"Harry?"
##
"I need to get out of here," she says, repeating the mantra that has driven her for weeks now. Her slender arms wrap about her body and she rocks back and forth on her bed, the springs creaking rhythmically.
She's dreadfully bored, as the place has been intentionally made devoid of stimulus, just another of the litany of cruelties she's made to suffer at the hands of the "good" Doctor Huxley. Hermione wonders at the woman's motivations, whether there's an underlying purpose or whether she's just evil.
The Bitch, of course, had taken her books and newspapers, even her notebooks and crayons, as they've continued their battle of wills, leaving her nothing to do, no means of occupying the long tedium between medications.
It's even more maddening to know that the woman is winning, that Hermione has been adapting slowly to the restrictions, learning to live within their confines, learning to play the reward-punishment game.
It's dark outside, past midnight, and only a square of silvery light shines in from the parking lot outside. The wall opposite the window is illuminated in a cross-hatch of squares and will remain until six twenty am, when the mercury lamps turn off. Hermione finds herself staring at the squares of light, listening to the quiet ticking of the clock and the unsettled frenzy of a mental hospital at night, slumbering madness punctuated by the occasional screams.
Her own had joined them that evening. Another late-night visit, as she was held down and violated. She feels like vomiting.
It was the Bitch's doing. It had to be. Nothing happens in this place without her say.
She finds herself wishing desperately for release-even a return to the Malfoy's dungeons would be preferable to this aimless existence. Before, she at least had purpose, not this slow strangulation, every day losing a bit more of Hermione Granger to the humdrum plainness of Jane Wilkins, dutiful, if not so bright daughter of Wendell and Monica.
Most painful, perhaps, is that the orderly wearing the face of her best friend has made a point of avoiding her.
"Dammit, Harry. Why won't you help me?"
##
"Are you going to eat that?" The voice is airy and belongs to a blonde girl her age with stringy hair and large, pale eyes. The girl is new and looks emaciated, as if she's been living on the streets. Her skin is pallid and she has tracks of needle marks running up the insides of both of her arms.
There's sadness about her, but also a sense of kinship.
Luna.
By now Hermione has learned to stop saying the names of those from her former world. It only brings pain. And then more punishment.
"Go ahead," she chokes out, offering the wheat roll to the girl. Truth be told, she's long ago lost her appetite.
"I remind you of someone, don't I?"
Hermione nods, finding herself unable to take her eyes off the other girl.
"What was her name?"
"Luna," she whispers.
"I can be Luna for you," the girl says, smiling brightly. She stands and kisses Hermione on the forehead. "It'll almost be like having a friend."
##
"We love you, dear. We always have." Mum or Monica hugs Hermione again, showing a clinginess that Hermione doesn't recall from her life before. Every hug hurts Hermione a bit more inside, stirring guilt at remembering what she had done to her real parents those months ago.
"I know, Mum," she says, hating herself for using the appellation.
"Don't worry about the rustication," Wendell says. "The Dean says you can return next term-if you're well, that is. They say it also happened to John Milton and Oscar Wilde, so you're in good company, right honey?"
"Wendell!" Hermione's mum says, scolding her husband. "We agreed that we wouldn't talk about—"
"Look, Janey did her best and she's a good girl. She knows we're proud of her, no matter what happens. She'll always be our little girl, and we love her."
The Bitch is present—she always is when her parents visit—and she nods in satisfaction at this display. Hermione knows the man's putting on an act, though, pretending to be the doting, supportive father that society expects of him. But she also knows she'll never truly please him.
Some things are the same, no matter what world one finds oneself.
##
Snow collects softly upon the sill outside her window and the world beyond is cold and colorless, a contrast in greys, much like the world inside. It's been a year and she barely remembers who she was, narcotic cocktails having washed away a life of magic and wonder. And friendship.
"Gryffindor courage," she whispers to herself, steeling for a final attempt at freedom. She must leave this place, no matter what the cost.
##
"Ma'am, please, I can't be alone with patients like this. They'll sack me for sure."
"Just stay for just a bit, please?"
"I'm really sorry, ma'am, but I can't." The orderly pushes her away.
She clings to him. "No! Don't go! I see how you look at me, Harry. You want me, don't you. You want to have me like the others have had me."
"I'm Jake, not Harry, and I can't stay, ma'am, no matter how much I might like to."
As he says this, he looks around, as if to see if anyone is watching them. She knows then that she has him.
Some minutes later, he finishes in her mouth and she finds it warmer and a little saltier than she'd imagined.
"I love you, Harry," Hermione says as she watches him race off.
He's sacked that evening, though not for being with her, as they'd taken pains to avoid discovery, but rather for losing his security badge.
##
Stolen badge in hand, Hermione races across the roadway, freed at last. She's barefoot in the snow and she tries to flag down a passing auto.
There's a loud horn and bright lights. A lorry skids sideways toward her and she doesn't even have time to scream.
##
"Hermione?" Harry's voice is pained. He's holding her tenderly to his chest.
"I'm going to bloody kill Lestrange," Ron says. "I don't care what it takes, I swear it Harry."
"You and me both, Ron."
Though she's shivering, the after-effects of the Cruciatus, Hermione feels warm and loved. She smiles as she stirs, wondering for the moment what is real and what isn't. And deciding that it doesn't matter in the end.