Chapter 2 - Hermione
London, January 10th, 2004
Filthy Mudblood!
Hermione Granger woke up, startled, bewildered, in darkness, to the the sound of desperate screaming; shadowy images, smells, sounds filing her mind.
Mudblood! Bellatrix Lestrange's grating voice had been shrieking; then her touch, clammy, her fingers playing tauntingly with Hermione's hair, running down the length of her face, her neck, her arm; Bellatrix's smell - a peculiar reek of acidic, musky sweat. Hermione had never smelled anything like it before, and hoped she never would again; she thought of it as the perfume of insanity.
CRUCIO!
Again and again, the Cruciatus curse, the contorting, shattering, writhing agony. The heartrending screams, over and over. Then —
Hermione finally emerged from the nightmare to full consciousness. She could still hear the echoes of Bellatrix's triumph as she carved the word — Mudblood — into Hermione's left arm with that cruel, cursed silver dagger. Hermione's breathing was still fast and terrified; but at least now she knew it was only a dream.
She opened her eyes: she was in her own bedroom, in her flat in London. She could even feel the reassuring weight of Crookshanks curled up at the end of the bed.
She was perfectly safe. And yet —
She sat up quickly, reached out a hand and scrambled it over the surface of the small table next to the bed, feeling for her wand, pathetically relieved when her fingers closed on it.
"Lumos!"
The wand's tip glowed, its dim light revealed the room, the bed, the cat, the furniture — normal, current reality; and Hermione closed her eyes again and took a few calming breaths while counting to ten slowly in her mind.
When she opened her eyes again, she glanced at the clock: 2:49 a.m.
Damn it!
She had been so hopeful these nightmares had stopped. Now the dreams had recurred three times in the past seven days.
Mudblood.
A chill ran down her spine as the the word came again in her mind, and she couldn't help herself, couldn't help the compulsion to look at her left arm. The scar was now faded, almost the same colour as her own skin. But it was there, the word still visible, a constant reminder of everything she had undergone.
Stop it! She commanded herself. Just stop it now! She pushed aside the duvet and got out of bed, walked to the chest of drawers and pulled out the first thing she could find with long sleeves and put it on rapidly, then pulled the left sleeve all the way down to hide the scar. A silly ritual, really, but she had found it helped. Then she went back to bed and huddled under the duvet, knees drawn up to her chest and arms clasped around them.
Why was this happening again? She had worked so hard to overcome it.
A year after the war, these nightmares and a constant feeling of panic had been at their worst. Utterly desperate and, frankly, deluded that she could be clever enough to make it work, she had gone to some trouble to find a Muggle therapist with a good reputation. She had liked him and, in the first few sessions, they had started to build rapport.
"Don't worry, Hermione. You needn't give me any details just yet," he had said. She had been banking on this; that they could deal with the symptoms and not need to look too much at the facts.
But as the therapeutic relationship developed, naturally he wanted more to work with.
"Do you have a close relationship with your parents, Hermione?"
"We did . . . but I haven't really seen them for a while." Not since she obliviated them and sent them to Australia to escape from a war waged by a Dark Wizard who had split his soul into seven fragments.
"Can you pinpoint an especially frightening experience that might be causing your anxiety?"
"Uhm . . . I was captured in a . . . and I was . . ." Not really a useful basis for treatment, was it? But even if she had made a complete statement — I was captured in a war and tortured — he would have wanted to know which war, tortured how, by whom.
"I understand this is a lot to take on, Hermione, but you are safe here. It's okay to be vulnerable."
What could she possibly say to a Muggle that was open and vulnerable? She had sought therapy for self-diagnosed PTSD; she wanted help to get through her issues, not to come out of therapy with a new diagnosis of psychosis.
And, of course, wizards were worse. That's why she had even considered Muggle therapy in the first place. In the Wizarding world, struggles with mental health were automatically ascribed to curses and dealt with by magical cures; and if a curse couldn't be uncovered or reversed, just turned a discreet blind eye to until they reached such a crisis the authorities gave up and locked the sufferer up in the Janus Thickey Ward at St. Mungo's.
While they were still together, Ron had always tried to comfort her when she woke up screaming. But she always felt she had to hide some of it from him. Not because he would have been unfeeling about it all; but because every time she tried, she realised she didn't actually want to share her problems so intimately with him. There just wasn't a deep enough connection; and in the end their relationship had amicably fizzled out.
Her last resort had been Harry. She even took him out for a drink, armed with questions about how he was coping. But when he started talking about how happy he was with Ginny and how much he loved his job as an Auror, she didn't have the heart to open the can of worms that was their wartime experiences. Even if he was in denial, which she strongly suspected, who was she to break down his defenses?
After this, she had taken Harry as a kind of role model, thrown herself and her problems into her career at the Ministry of Magic and worked until overload, exhaustion and the fact that she really did love her job in Magical Law Enforcement became an effective bandaid.
I'm fine, she told herself. It's all fine. It's just stress, and she almost convinced herself.
Her recent appointment as Kingsley Shacklebolt's Ministerial Aide carried so much responsibility, and more public scrutiny than she had been used to since the early days after the war. She was just going through a period of adjustment, that was all. Of course old memories would surface; it was inevitably part of the process of change.
Completely awake now, she reached a hand out from under the duvet to switch on the bedside lamp, to make the light in the bedroom bright enough for reading. At the end of the bed, Crookshanks, who had been observing her with one barely open eye, shifted to a new, more comfortable position and immediately went back to sleep.
If only she had the elderly cat's powers of going to sleep whenever it suited her! She would kill for a decent night's deep, dream-free sleep.
She sighed, and reached again for the bedside table, this time to pick up the Ministry report she had been reading before she drifted off: A Better Path Forward for Wizarding Criminal Justice: A Proposal for Prisoner Eligibility for the Sirius Black Memorial Wing at Azkaban. If she wasn't going to get back to sleep, she might as well work. Long-winded, stilted and painstakingly detailed, the report honestly wasn't very interesting. But it was an interesting subject, and an important one, not to mention the Minister of Magic's highly controversial passion.
Kingsley had started slowly and subtly in his efforts to reform Azkaban, with the decision to ban the dementors from the prison. The Wizarding public had had no very great reaction. Many of those who thought the wizards and witches incarcerated in Azkaban deserved the most extreme of punishments, nevertheless found the dementors and the Ministry's long-standing relationship with them to be questionable. After that, nothing public happened for several years, but throughout that time, Kingsley was having quiet talks behind the scenes with experts on prison systems that promoted prisoner and societal welfare. All of these experts had Muggle family members — some were Muggle-born, some half-bloods, one was married to a Muggle; the Muggle penal system was not perfect, but was far more advanced than the Wizarding system.
Of course, eventually The Daily Prophet had found out via a Ministry leak, and had alarmed everyone with the incendiary, deliberately exaggerated headline:
Muggles to Run Azkaban!
Followed the next day by:
Shacklebolt Proposes Soft Options for Dark Wizards!
Now the entire Wizarding world, irrespective of blood-status or political leanings, was appalled and shocked. Kingsley had to announce his plans publicly and comprehensively. In his statement, he said that he believed Wizarding public policy was anachronistic where incarceration was concerned. That the conditions in Azkaban diminished and shamed the whole of Wizarding society. The past was the past, of course; the reforms would take time; and the Wizarding public could rest assured that no hasty or ill-considered measures would be instituted. Current prisoners at Azkaban would, for the most part, be kept in the same conditions to which they were sentenced. But going forward, there must be radical change.
The statement went down surprisingly well, and Kingsley's approval rate went up substantially. Many wizards and witches, especially Muggle-borns or half-bloods, saw it as much needed improvement of an antiquated system, and a fresh and hopeful start.
Then —
Last August, the Minister visited Azkaban for the ground-breaking ceremony for the Sirius Black Memorial Wing and, to put it bluntly, the shit had hit the fan.
Because, when he returned home, he had invoked the Ministerial Prerogative of Mercy and summarily released Lucius Malfoy from prison.
The Daily Prophet had devoted several days of front-page outrage to the release; conversation in the Ministry canteen had been about nothing else. Kingsley declined to explain his action: it had been quite literally his legal prerogative. Like many others, Hermione had not agreed with the decision, but she had great respect for the Minister, and knew he would not have taken it lightly. Although, she had to admit, it certainly didn't good: it seemed to be exactly the kind of 'hasty and ill-considered measure' Kingsley had promised not to take.
From a healthy approval rating, Kingsley's popularity hit an all-time low.
That was when the Minister approached Hermione about joining his private staff as a Ministerial Aide. He was honest with her: he wanted her zeal for reform and keen mind; but he also wanted her status as a much-loved Muggle-born war-heroine. If she was invovled in the changes, it would help turn public opinion back in their favour.
And that was when the extreme public scrutiny of her every word, action, item of clothing and lunch-time sandwich filling began, along with the stress and, now, the latest development, the recurrence of the terrifying dreams.
Hermione shook her head to clear it, then turned the pages of the report to where she had left off, and began to read again, making notes and highlights as she did so.
Tap! Tap! A delicate but insistent staccato sound woke Hermione up. The report was now splayed on the duvet, content side down, and her quill had fallen on to the floor beside the bed. She must have fallen asleep! Thankfully, there had been no nightmares this time. The clock said 5:35 am. Perhaps she had slept for an hour or so — that would be wonderful!
The tapping sound started up again, coming from the window, and she turned to look. It was Kingsley's huge and beautiful Tawny Owl, Agnes. Hermione got up and let her in. The owl was as dignified, enigmatic and patient as her owner. She never clicked her beak irritably like Harry's owl Hedwig, or nipped — she just had a habit of looking at you with the suggestion that you were not quite living up to expectations whenever you kept her waiting. She lifted her leg up, offered it pointedly to Hermione, and Hermione removed the piece of parchment tied to it.
My office, please. Eight o'clock. Important. KS. (Please don't feed Agnes, she is getting fat.)
Hermione found herself smiling for the first time in hours. The note was typical Kingsley: a blend of quiet, pragmatic authority and open friendliness. She couldn't ask for a better boss; or a more interesting and necessary role - one in which she was at the forefront of important change, just as she had always wanted.
She gave the owl a brief, courteous stroke to thank her, and sent her away, then went to the kitchen and put on the kettle to make tea. Crookshanks followed her, and she put out cat food for him. It was all so normal, so peaceful so . . . perfect, really. She let out a long sigh: apparently the only fly in the ointment of the life she had made was herself!