Opening her eyes was As he grew older, Dumbledore had become more sensitive to dark magic. He could feel when its shadowy presence was within Hogwarts, inimical and taunting. So when the troll situation had been handled to his satisfaction and he had just dismissed the teachers to their normal posts, the insidious wisp of dark magic had caught him by surprise. Very little caught Dumbledore by surprise anymore.
Following the wisp, dark magic surged into blazing, screaming existence, buffeting his mind in harsh jolts. It seemed to demand his immediate attention by declaring its explosive birth, mildly introduced by a mere wisp but then cataclysmically shouted to his senses. He had very rarely felt magic so raw and furious; the fact that it was also dark disturbed him. The fact that its origin was within Hogwarts was most disturbing.
He had stiffened so perceptibly that Minerva had glanced at him in worry. Her question was interrupted by the swift flurry of movement in one of the portraits hanging behind Dumbledore's desk.
Morgan le Fay settled into Phineas Nigellus's portrait, shoving the irate wizard to the side as the eagle shook feathers from her form to stand haughtily before the assembled teachers. Amber eyes didn't acknowledge any except the headmaster before her.
Dumbledore was not well acquainted with the infamous Slytherin witch, but he had spoken to her portrait on rare occasion and had studied her advances in magic extensively. He knew she had been an exceptionally intelligent addition to wizarding society, despite the way that society had looked down on her for being both lowborn and a woman. She had risen through the ranks of wizards to claim a seat among the Sacred Twenty-eight due to her sheer, indomitable power and frightening pragmatism. The mysterious figure of Morgan le Fay was historically shrouded in intrigue, lending her an air nearly as mythical as Merlin's. Those professors that recognized her from around the castle held their surprise admirably, excepting Quirrel, who anxiously patted his turban and tittered to himself.
"Two boys are attacking the witch Hermione Granger in the Slytherin Common room as I speak. Hermione is my descendent, claimed as my heir by laws of blood and magic. I demand her immediate rescue!" Morgan le Fay's amber eyes flashed gold in command, like shining Roman coins, squared with Dumbledore's benevolent blue gaze.
The headmaster's mind worked quickly, connecting the sudden use of dark magic with Morgan's claim. Although he wished it weren't true, he could imagine several of Slytherin's more dark members using forbidden magic to assault a student. Especially a student those Slytherins reviled for her blood status.
Dumbledore had his own machinations afoot, but he was first and foremost a teacher; at the thought of one of his charges being tortured, he was spurred into immediate action. "Severus, Minerva, follow me to the dungeons. Filius, alert Madame Pomfrey that she may be expecting patients very soon. We must move quickly."
"Then move!" Morgan le Fay hissed from the wall. "If the daughter of my blood, the last witch of my line, is hurt, I will rain a storm on this crumbling castle like Merlin could not himself!"
Dumbledore swept from the room, Minerva and Severus on his heels, rather than question how a painting could carry out such a threat.
The teachers and headmaster reached the door to the Slytherin common room more quickly than old bones would have liked, but the destruction behind the door made the headmaster wish he had moved faster.
Fiendfyre reigned over the emerald room, transformed into a vision of gold and crimson by the flames that devoured the furnishings with impunity. While comparatively weak for Fiendfyre, the chaos in the Slytherin common room was complete. Minerva's hand clenched her wand tightly as Dumbledore thundered a spell to halt the dark curse.
"What student would cast such a curse?" she queried, almost to herself in the sudden quiet. Once the roaring of the spell had been silenced, they were able to hear the muted whimpers of several students.
Severus rushed to the heavily burned figure in the middle of the room, puddled on the stone in tattered green robes. "Marcus Flint," Severus said, turning the boy to his back. At the movement, Marcus gasped, pulling tenderized skin in a gruesome twist.
"He needs to go to St. Mungo's immediately," Dumbledore said. "Minerva, use the floo in my office. Go quickly!"
The Gryffindor head levitated the Slytherin with a wave of her wand and disappeared from the scene, her rushed footfalls pattering out of the dungeon. Severus quickly sussed out another source of whimpered pain, finding a badly singed, but uninjured Draco Malfoy concealed behind the edge of the fireplace.
"The Fiendfyre hardly touched him, but he is caught in the grip of shock," Dumbledore noted of the trembling boy. "Why did the curse choose to focus upon Marcus Flint instead, I wonder?"
"You can find answers to your questions that I am sure you already strongly suspect the answers to later," Severus interrupted. "One more of my students, the target of this attack, is not accounted for."
"Th- there," the trembling first-year whispered, pointing a finger toward the far glass wall. "He thr-threw her over th-there…."
Following the shaking finger, Severus and Dumbledore finally noticed the small shape huddled against the floor, unmoving.
Severus's black robes snapped in his wake when he crossed the space in half a heartbeat to kneel at Hermione's side. Inky eyes took in each of her injuries with frozen, lethal temper. Blood pooled beneath her head, leaking from her ears and steaming in her curls from the heat. Her limbs were bent in awkward, unnatural directions. One arm looked as if a centaur had purposefully pulverized the bone into infinite shards. Her body seemed so much tinier when it was broken.
Seeing the blood- so damnably red- reminded Severus strongly of another time that he had been too late.
"The girl lives, but she has been tortured by Cruciatous curse, among more physical abuse," Dumbledore said, looking down on the witch gently.
"You could have prevented this," Severus seethed. He carefully slid his hands under her knees and shoulders; he would carry her to the infirmary himself. "You knew something like this would happen!"
The headmaster was quiet for a moment. "I truly did not expect this," he responded quietly, seemingly lost in himself. "I strong suspected an outburst was forthcoming. Many parents have written letters expressing their opinions on a muggleborn within Slytherin. But this is nearly beyond belief… I must confiscate their wands. I must know who harbors the darkness in their heart to cast Fiendfyre and Cruciatous without care."
Severus cast his mentor, the wizard who had given him new purpose, a thoroughly disgusted look. Then he left the Slytherin common room with no further comment, delicately carrying the broken witch in arms that struggled not to tremble with grief.
Madame Pomfrey enjoyed her work of healing.
She absolutely hated, within her most inner heart, when people were hurting. It made her entire soul ache in sympathy. So when the broken first-year witch was entrusted to her care, Madame Pomfrey began to weep.
The older witch carefully cleaned each abrasion, drawing her wand along each cut with personal attention to every bloody rend in porcelain skin. She feathered dry kisses on the blossoming bruises that stained the young girl's ribcage like clumsy water colored paint. She used damp cloths to gently wipe the blood from a beautiful, fine boned face, pursed against the pain not even potions and spells could successfully eradicate. Madame Pomfrey held the slim fingered hands in her own and whispered the healing spells she had used for decades; never had she been so desperate for them to work.
Every time Hermione Granger began to stiffen in her magically induced sleep, Madame Pomfrey coaxed more numbing potions down her throat. When the girl finally had slept a full twelve hours without beginning to seize, the medic breathed a sigh of relief and began the laborious process of bathing the comatose witch.
Madame Pomfrey summoned a large wooden tub and conjured water, heated with a murmured spell to an acceptable temperature. Carefully, she levitated the girl and lowered her body slowly into the bath. Wrinkled eyes clinically catalogued the injuries Hermione's naked body revealed. A dark splash along her ribcage denoted bruising from where her ribs had been broken harshly, likely by a kick if the medic's trained eyes knew anything. Countless scores of cuts from thrashing on the stone floor marred her skin, but those were the easiest to heal.
The older witch was confident Hermione would make a physical recovery. The most challenging injury had been the remarkably damaged vertebrae, but some complicated spell work learned from a St. Mungo's healer over floo call had enabled Madame Pomfrey to heal the girl's shattered spine. While that had been challenging, the Hogwart's healer had healed many challenging injuries over her career, all successfully, even that time a boy had accidentally vanished his own skull.
No, what worried Madame Pomfrey was Hermione's mental recovery. The child was only twelve, and she had been tortured by her fellow housemates at wand point with forbidden curses. It deeply pained the older witch that she could not cast a fancy spell to heal the girl's inner turmoil that was sure to erupt when she finally woke up. She knew it was the innermost injuries that were the hardest to heal.
Blood clouded the water as Madame Pomfrey set to the task of washing her patient. Strangely, the long curls that had been darkened to deep ebony with dried blood were not fading to their usual hue of warm, spiraling browns. The healer changed the bath water dirtied by blood and murk, but even once the water was clear, the young witch's wet hair did not lighten.
Frowning, the healer cast a scouring spell. It had no effect. She had not been around the bright young student often, but when the girl had come into the infirmary wing with her many questions and inquiries, the healer had definitely noticed that Hermione's hair was brown, not pitch black.
Leaning back on her folded knees with a huff of frustration, Madame Pomfrey looked her patient over. She paused in confusion. Hermione's hair was not the only thing that had changed since the healer last saw her.
Hermione's skin had changed from pink-toned and freckly to a lustrous porcelain. Madame Pomfrey had not noticed at first because of the extensive scratching and bruising that distracted from the pale glow of her complexion. Even the previously spattered sweep of her cheekbones had been cleansed of sunny freckles. Also, Hermione's slightly arched, thick brows were the same ebony her hair stubbornly insisted upon. Something about her features, now enhanced by the changed coloring, tickled Madame Pomfrey's memory.
She thought hard on all of the students she had had under her care in her decades as Hogwarts's nurse. Some rough and tumble students had spent more time in the infirmary than others; if Hermione's delicate features were to remind her of anyone, it was likely one of those students the healer had been around more often. What previous student had the same black hair and amber eyes?
Tapping her wand to her chin, Madame Pomfrey discarded the thought that she had seen Hermione's eyes before. The amber, tiger-stone shade was wholly unique to the muggleborn. But the hair paired with the slim, defined jaw and upturned nose… she had seen that combination before. In fact, when she thought of the riotous curls Hermione boasted when her hair was dry rather than clogged with blood or waterlogged, the features seemed even more familiar.
As she levitated the girl from the water and dried her, spells mechanically left her lips to re-bandage wounds as her mind strayed to the question at hand. The girl's expressive mouth that turned up at the corners with fey humor tugged at Madame Pomfrey's wits as she struggled to think through all of the students she had known over the years.
A drying spell caused Hermione's hair to blossom into wild curls, swallowing the pillow beneath its mass. Madame Pomfrey looked at the injured witch in the repose of potion induced sleep, ebony curls framing the slender edge of her jaw and the curve of pitch lashes on a porcelain cheekbone.
The witch paused in astonishment. Her gaze flickered over Hermione's face; the delicate jaw, the upturned nose, the large eyes and the mouth that rose on the edges in a manic grin when faced with a challenge—
Bellatrix Lestrange!
The healer scrabbled to her feet and darted across the room before she finished the thought. Staring at the ghost of a brilliant madwoman, yet also a young girl just entering Hogwarts, the older witch forced herself to calm down enough to lift her wand.
The collie patronus gave Hermione a lingering look before sprinting to retrieve Dumbledore.
The headmaster of Hogwarts gazed down upon one of his first-year students and admitted to himself that she was indeed identical to the imprisoned Death Eater Bellatrix Lestrange. When Minerva had mentioned that Hermione resembled a Black, he had agreed, but did not truly believe in any relation. But now, confronted with such damning evidence, he was forced to reevaluate what he knew about the Blacks and about the girl bound in bandages before him.
"Her hair—it won't go back to brown, no matter what cleaning spells I try! And her skin has changed too—"
"I will discover what has occurred to your patient, Madame Pomfrey," Dumbledore interrupted, withdrawing his wand. A moment later, a silvery phoenix soared from the room to find Filius Flitwick. "I have a certain suspicion in mind already."
"It's almost eerie, Albus! Even the way they smile…."
Filius Flitwick, who had been close by in the entrance hall when the patronus had found him, entered the infirmary and stepped up to Dumbledore and Madame Pomfrey. He looked sadly on the bright student that shifted slightly in her sleep, brows pinched as she dreamed. Then he frowned. "Her hair wasn't always that dark, was it not?"
"It was not, indeed," Dumbledore answered. "Remember the day earlier this school year when you approached me with concern for the heavy charms work you had detected surrounding Miss Granger?"
Filius's eyebrows waggled in confusion. "Yes," he answered leadingly, "of course. But now," he gestured slightly with his wand and his face crinkled in confusion, "there is nothing there!"
Dumbledore looked at the student who was proving a curious puzzle. A muggleborn in Slytherin, the heir of Morgan le Fay, and now she was not even as she had looked originally. Just who was Hermione Granger?
The approach of loud arguing caused the three adults to look to the doors as Lucius Malfoy stalked into the infirmary, followed closely by a frustrated Minerva and ghostly looking Severus.
Lucius Malfoy strode right up to Hermione's bedside without a single glance at the comatose girl and angrily thrust a thick tome at Dumbledore. "Explain the meaning of this!" the irate wizard demanded.
"You must tell me what has you so flustered, Lucius," Dumbledore said. "It is sure to prove titillating."
With a haughty sneer that was truly ineffective compared to Morgan le Fay's, Lucius Malfoy opened the tome he had brought with him and pointed one long, imperious finger at the bottom of a page covered in illustrated miniatures of witches and wizards. "Right there," the man seethed between clenched teeth, "is an impossibility!"
The gathered witches and wizards looked past Lucius Malfoy's pale, spindly finger to where his manicured fingertip ardently stabbed into a tiny portrait of a dainty witch. "She should not exist! I know this is some plot of yours!"
"Oh dear," Dumbledore murmured aloud. "This certainly complicates things."