Hermione lay on a hard bed. She took in a rattling breath and twisted her neck to look at both her sides. The room had three more similar beds, the right corner one by the wall occupied by someone with their back turned to her. The other two beds towards her left were empty and stripped of sheets and pillows. The mattresses looked yellowed and stained, a hard level of filth to achieve with magic at their fingertips. The people in charge simply hadn't taken the trouble to clean up. The room was semi dark, the light from the two hanging lamps muted. The narrow single beds, small bed stands and metal stools against a wall, all looked like standard hospital wing furniture, metal painted in sterile white, the metal rusty with paint peeling at a few edges.

Hermione fingered the sheets beneath her fingers. They were scratchy, cheap cotton and a yellowed white. The walls were off white. As was the ceiling.

She noted that her throat was parched. There was a metal water jug and an overturned glass tumbler on her bedside table. She tried sitting up to get herself a glass of water and found that she couldn't move. The witch struggled. It was like Pomfrey's body-bind curse was still in effect. A bell went off in the room. The door towards her left swung open, revealing a witch clad in lime green robes. She smiled at Hermione.

"You're awake dearie," she chirped. "Let's look at how you're doing, shall we?"

The medi witch raised her wand and cast a spell over Hermione's prone body. She was silent as she studied the light pattern her spell made.

"Hmm." the medi witch finally said as she chewed on her lip, "You are one interesting little muggle."

"I am a muggle born witch." Hermione croaked with as much outrage as she could muster. Not much as it happened, but there nonetheless.

"Same difference, as you muggles say." the medi witch said absently, her bright smile dropping a little, as she moved her wand in a complicated pattern, and a faint green pattern started circling around Hermione, "Not this bloody green again. My spell is foolproof. I cast it last night."

"What spell?"

The medi witch put away her wand. The light show disappeared.

"Well, no matter." The medi witch clapped once and moved towards the door. She pressed a button right by the door, before turning back to face Hermione again.

"We will just have to try again. Imperio."

The sudden spell hit Hermione and everything became hazy.

"You have muggle parents. Yes?" The medi witch asked Hermione, coming closer to sit on the stool by her bed.

"Yes."

"They have no magic?"

"No."

"Is anyone in your family magical?"

"No. I am a muggle born."

"Then by extension, magic in you is a fluke. Right?"

"Oh?" Hermione asked in a daze.

"Of course it is." The medi witch nodded briskly.

She placed her wand tip at Hermione's sternum.

"Cincinno anima."

Hermione shuddered. Her mouth contorted in a silent scream as magic and something dark ran through every vein and pulled at her. It felt like the spell was siphoning her life out and filling her up with black sludge. Her limbs felt heavy, her head starting filling up with wool. She couldn't see with her eyes, couldn't hear with her ears and couldn't feel anything but the excruciating stripping sensation of the nurse's dark spell.

"Now dear, are you a muggle?"

"No." cried Hermione, trying with all her might to move, to get away from the torture.

"Are your parents muggle?"

Hermione screamed. The medi witch dug her wand in the young witch's stomach in warning.

"Yes," the muggleborn panted.

"Do they have any magic?"

"No."

"Which tells us that your magic is unnatural. Unnatural things must be cured. Cincinno magicae."

Another wave of the dark spell ran through her body, draining life and magic, leaving darkness in its wake. Adrenalin made some awareness return to Hermione's eyes. She shook her head to clear the fog.

"You are unnatural."

"No." whispered Hermione.

"Imperio." the medi witch reinforced, sweat dotting her forehead, the serene smile still on her face, "You freak! Repeat after me like a good little mudblood. I am a freak."

"I…am…a…freak." grunted Hermione, struggling on each word, realizing that speaking the words would make them true in some way.

"I am unnatural."

"I…am…unnatural."

"I am not magical."

Tears slipped the bewildered eyes of the muggleborn.

"I.. am.. not.. magical." she repeated nonetheless.

"Silencio. Cincinno anima. Cincinno magicae."

This time, the scream was not heard, nor were the sobs. No other words were spoken.

Her eyes were crusty when Hermione Granger woke up next. She would have loved to know the time, or date, or just whether it was day or night. Maybe that would ground her a little, because right then, she felt as if she was floating, separate from her body, even though she knew she was lying down on the bed and there was no floating away from her predicament. Whatever the mediwitch had done, she had shaken the very foundation of Hermione's magic. What used to live within her, filled her up with a sense of being, a sense of pride, Hermione couldn't feel it anymore. She hadn't even realized it was there, till it wasn't anymore. The repercussions of the missing living magic in her heart were too huge for the tortured girl to process at the moment. Hermione refused to think her magic was gone or inaccessible in any way. She refused to consider that she might not be able to use magic anymore, or complete her education, or never return to Hogwarts.

Hogwarts…

A tear escaped the witch's eye, followed by a dry sob.

"You can cry." A voice, devoid of all emotion, came from the end of the room. "Crying will pass the time for a bit."

Hermione followed the voice to its source. Katie Bell sat in the middle of her cot, clad in pale frayed robes of an indeterminate color, legs folded, thin arms hugging her knees. Her eyes looked owlish on her thin face, the expression in the eyes as blank as her voice had been.

"Hello Katie." Hermione croaked.

"Hello Hermione," Katie replied.

"How long have you been here?"

The other witch stared at Hermione, some emotion coming back to her eyes as she worked through the question.

"Long." Katie finally whispered, "I had some magic when I was brought here for treatment. I don't think I have any now."

"Why do you say that?" Hermione asked, dreading the answer and yet unable to not ask.

Katie let one knee go and brought her right hand in front of her face. She stared at her bony fingers. She was quiet for so long that Hermione started suspecting that Katie wasn't all there anymore.

"They don't glow anymore." Katie said, lowering her hand and clutching both her knees once more. "This was the first magic I did. When I was four, my fingertips would light up if it was too dark in my bedroom. I could always do it. I didn't need a wand for it. I can't do it anymore. Can't. Can't."

Katie visibly shuddered and started rocking herself back and forth.

"I lost little things.. with the treatment. Small things. They took my wand first. The glowing fingers were the last to go. I feel empty now. Just skin and bones over nothing."

Katie went quiet and rocked some more. Hermione was too scared to ask any more questions, a personal first for the ever curious and practical witch.

"I want to go home like the Creevie brothers. They gave up their magic soon after they were brought here and agreed for a memory wipe. They live in the Muggle world now. At Least, I hope they do."

"Is that the only way?" Hermione murmured, almost to herself.

"Justin went back. To Hogwarts. They said he was successfully conditioned. He won't be able to do many spells after the conditioning, especially with the wand they gave him after his own stopped working for him. But he can study there. They've adjusted the tests for muggleborns, more written less practice. After graduation, he can find a menial job. Maybe he will find a nice muggleborn to marry. Or he can go back to the muggles and have a life."

The outrage of her fellow students and the headmistress over Hermione's avis curse started making sense. If muggleborns weren't supposed to be able to do much, that must have looked like sinister magic. But why was this happening? How did such drastic atrocities become the norm for people of her heritage? There were so many muggleborns and half bloods in their world. How did no one protest against this blameless persecution of muggleborns? It seemed as if the Wizarding world was hell bent on getting rid of all muggleborns. It seemed the Wizarding world was being run by blood supremacists and the half bloods were blindly supporting their agenda of hate.

Harry was a half. Did he protest? Was his mother even a muggleborn in this crazy universe?

"That's horrible, Katie. Who gives a few people the right to dictate whether someone will use magic or not? Magic is in me, in my blood, in my soul. I should not have to seek permission to lead a life with my magic. Why should we agree to this horror?"

Katie stared at the other witch, body very still.

"Do you want to leave this place?" she finally asked Hermione.

"Yes."

"Giving in is the only way. Have you no memory of the last few years Granger? There is no one to fight for us. No one to protect us when we are brought here in twos and threes and tortured for having magic. If you don't want to be tortured, you give in."

Hermione was too outraged to say anything else. Katie seemed to have run out of things to say. She started rocking again.

Katie had been having trouble breathing. She'd been having bouts of fainting. She'd reported a pressure on her chest that wouldn't go away.

A week after her symptoms went from bad to worse, Hermione found the girl dead in the small shower stall of their shared bathroom. She screamed and screamed. But little Katie stared with milky eyes and said nothing.

When the medi witches rushed in to shut Hermione up, they had to almost break her fingers to remove Hermione's hold of Katie's hands.

The mediwitch said that Katie died of a heart attack. They said it was hereditary and something she got from her muggle parents. They didn't explain why all the windows, looking glass and porcelain of the bathroom lay broken around her still form, or why her fingers were singed and still smoking when Hermione found her body.

Her eyes had been open, staring sightlessly at the door, where a terrified Hermione stood and tried to gather breath enough to scream. The horrible emptiness of Katie's dead eyes would haunt Hermione, would send her into a cold sweats, for a long time after. Katie's eyes would stare at her in her dreams, imploring her to do something, anything. To find a way. Because Hermione had been the brightest witch of their age and if anyone could find a way out of this fresh hell, she was it.

The day after they took Katie's body away, Hermione started working on hiding her growing magic. After each torture session with the green clad mediwitch, magic started to grow in drops and trickles inside her again. She surmised it couldn't be suppressed for too long. Finding out what was happening and hiding it wasn't easy without access to her beloved Hogwarts Library. But the witch was nothing if not well informed and well read. She knew the theory behind disillusionment charms and hiding charms. Those charms used the magic of the body to cover up the physical form. She'd also read about magic blocking charms, which had been used for punishment or banishment hundreds of years ago. That magic was no longer legal, but she didn't know it for a fact in the current time. After all, that was roughly what the medi witches had been trying to do to the muggle borns in the name of rehabilitation. That was probably what was being done to her.

Contrary to what she'd believed in her studies, the process was not fast or painless. It went against every natural instinct her body and magic had. Whenever she thought about giving her magic up, whenever a curse was used to lock her magical core, her magic reacted with strong emotion, pushing away medi witches, breaking things around or levitating heavy objects. Then there was the new dark magic that was in her but not her's at all. It was violent, angry and strongly connected to her. A few times when she'd been so exhausted and in pain and had felt the curses draining all the warmth inside her, that dark presence had reared its head like an avenger and smashed all furniture of the room into the medi witch who'd been trying to curse Hermione. Her magic had limits. The dark presence seemed to have none. It also vaguely looked like a huge green snake, although that might have been an image her exhausted mind conjured up.

Hermione glanced at Katie's empty corner bed. The bedding had been stripped off it. Only the thin yellowing mattress remained. And the specter of Katie Bell that only Hermione got to see. Even now, she saw Katie sitting on the mattress, arms hugging her knees, dead eyes staring at her.

Hermione had to get out of there before she ended up haunting her bed as well. To never leave the rehabilitation center…The witch shuddered at the thought.

It wouldn't be easy to accept the locks within her body and magical core, but she had to do it. She decided to focus on getting away first, putting living without access to her magic a problem to be solved on another day. And so Hermione tried to find the source of her magic in herself, figuring that if she knew the source, she might be able to find a way to cloak it. It was complicated magic and it needed raw strength. But whenever she tried following the golden streams of her magic through her body, she could find no source, no end and no beginning.

The torturous reconditioning sessions continued, having progressed from spell casting to bouts of debilitating pain to reinforce the spells. During these sessions, Hermione learnt to withdraw within herself.

And that gave her the first idea of what to do. To withdraw, to give in to the pain and become so disconnected, that she ceased to be, that her magic ceased to show, that the green snake withdrew to circle the small cocoon of her conscience deep within herself. Hermione practiced making the cocoon smaller and smaller. The magic showing up on her scans became more negligible with each effort.

She faked, lied, used what power she had. Bent to her will, her magic started to recede more inside than manifest outside. The snake took to roosting in her mind, now small and contained, but no less powerful. Then one day, nothing magical came up to greet the scans of the mediwitch. It didn't come up after an hour, a day or a week.

And so at last, Hermione was deemed fit to rejoin Wizarding Society, Hogwarts in her case. One evening, a Ministry worker floo-ed her to Umbridge's office without any fuss or procedure, and left the little witch to her fate.

Next chapter, Tom and Hermione meet again...Do share what you think...