A/N: I'm being purposefully vague about hospital procedures in this chapter. Even though I work in one, I stay well away from the areas where people are put back together again. I also have no idea about British policing procedure.
Early morning
Muggle London
D.J. X-Rated was an up-and-coming disc-spinner in the so-called wilds of the outer-London party scene. He hadn't yet received an invite to mix it in the hallowed halls of the Ministry of Sound, but one day, that summons would come, he knew. Meanwhile, he'd bide his time with family parties and twenty-firsts in community halls.
But ever since his missus told him they couldn't live on his DJ-ing tips, and she was far too busy with the baby to get a job herself, he went out and found himself daytime employment, where he was humbly known by his real name: Xavier Booth.
This job started so early in the morning he'd sometimes driven straight to the depot from a gig. Yeah, so, grounds maintenance for the City of London parks wasn't exactly glam, but if it fed his baby and put clothes on the wee one's back, all to the good.
Besides. He was almost sure it was his baby. The cute little tyke.
Occasionally, when he was picking up litter in one of London's lovely parks before starting up the mower, he'd find passed-out pub or nightclub revellers slumped on benches, pitched headfirst in flowerbeds or halfway in the water features. A shout and a shake on the shoulder usually roused them, blinking blearily and belatedly realising they weren't home, sleeping on a rather wet and/or uncomfortable part of their bed after all. They'd shamble painfully off to the nearest exit, usually never to be seen again.
Mostly it was blokes, but occasionally it was birds. Like this one he'd discovered underneath a spreading elm. Sighing, he headed over. "Come on, sweetheart, rise and shine!"
The girl didn't move.
He squatted down and did the obligatory shoulder shake. "Come on, love, sleep off your hangover at home, eh?"
No response whatsoever.
Frowning, he let go of her shoulder. It didn't seem... right, somehow. He peered at her face. It was bruised and swollen, and was that...dried blood in her ear? He glanced at her fingers, lying uselessly on the grass. Jesus H Christ. More than one was broken, and – Xavier turned pale – a fingernail was missing on her pinkie. The whole fingernail.
He pulled out his phone with shaking fingers, and dialled the depot number. "Frank?" he said to the burly man who answered.
"Fuck's sake, Booth, yer only just started yer shift! If yer've run the mower into the pond again, I'll skin yer alive!"
"Frank!" Xavier cut in, too discombobulated by his discovery to take umbrage at Frank's impressions of his driving prowess. "I found an unconscious girl in the park. She's not breathing too good, and she's been beaten up. Like, really bad. She needs an ambulance."
"You're not having me on?" Frank asked suspiciously.
"Nah, mate, I swear!"
Frank heard the wobble in young Xavier's voice.
Shit.
Standing up, he grabbed the depot's first aid kit. "I'll head over. Give me your coordinates."
Once Frank was in motion, Xavier knelt next to the young lady and gently covered her with his warm, bulky high-viz jacket. He wanted to give her his beanie, too, but he was too scared of making one of her many injuries worse if he moved her head while putting it on.
He sat on the grass next to her and wished he could hold her mutilated hand. Jesus. Whoever did this to her should be lined up and shot.
"Don't worry, Miss," he said with false cheer. "Help's on the way. Hold on."
The Royal London Hospital
Eyebrows were raised when the non-responsive girl was sent through to the Emergency Department from the hospital's ambulance bay. Snipping off her wrecked clothing, the junior doctor and nurse attending her shared a quick moment of shock before securing her vitals.
A senior doctor was quickly paged, and when he arrived, it was to find the patient coding. The staff were already attaching the paddles of the defibrillator to her beaten, emaciated chest.
Once the young woman stabilised, the senior doctor took in every visible injury with a practised eye. What he saw shocked even him, a former Army doctor once stationed in Afghanistan. "Shit," he breathed, "she looks like a torture victim."
After making arrangements to get her to the top of the queue at X-Ray, MRI, then emergency surgery, the senior doctor instructed the nurse: "Notify the Police. Some bastard's worked her over something rotten."
The next day
Intensive Care Unit
Two detectives looked down at the young patient lying on the bed – one doubtfully, one sorrowfully.
The doubter, bearded and boisterous Detective Sergeant Putney, had just scrutinised her chart. "She had all these... things... done to her?" he asked. "What, just recently?"
The ICU nurse shook her head. "Some of her injuries were inflicted months ago. There's evidence that some of her broken bones had healed, then they – or whoever – broke them again."
"Jesus," the sorrowful one said softly.
Ignoring his partner, the great big girl's blouse that she was, Putney cleared his throat. "Was she raped?" he asked baldly.
His partner winced.
"We found no evidence of her being raped, vaginally or anally," the nurse replied.
"Well, that's one thing, at least," Putney muttered. He peered at the patient chart again. "Says here she's a 'Jane Doe'," he noted. "Is there nothing on her that identifies her?"
The nurse shook her head again. "Her belongings are in that bag over there," she said, nodding to a sad-looking brown paper bag with a clear strip running up the middle. "She didn't have a purse or wallet, not even a phone. Just what she was wearing, and they were filthy, practically rags. What tags we could find were from the major chain stores, or probably home-made."
He glanced at the girl again. She was hooked up to all myriad of machines that beeped and oohed and aahed at every moment. Her mouth and nose were obscured by an oxygen mask. Tubes snaked in, out and all around her body. As for that body, what little he could see of it that wasn't bandaged was obviously emaciated, and sporting a Jackson Pollock-esque display of red, black, blue and green bruises. Her tawny hair was shaved, so the surgeons could investigate the damage to her cranium.
Putney nodded to the Detective Constable, who retrieved the paper bag, then carefully wrote out a receipt and handed it to the ICU nurse. "Well," he boomed with false cheer, "perhaps when she wakes up, she can tell us who she is, eh?"
The nurse shrugged doubtfully. "I hope so."
"Guess there's not much to be going on with now, is there?" Putney asked his partner. DC Sonya Schiller knew it was a rhetorical question. The only thing he'd shown an interest about her in were her tits. So she kept quiet. "Until she tells us what mongrel did all this to her, we're stuck."
Schiller handed a business card to the nurse. "Please contact us when, or if, she's in a position to talk."
"Righto." The nurse pocketed the card. "I'll put it in the Nurse's Station."
Putney and Schiller exited ICU and headed down the corridor.
"Want me to get a statement from the bloke that found her?" Schiller asked.
Putney shrugged. "If you want. Me, I fancy a pie." He picked up his feet and headed to the hospital's nearest cafe without bothering to see if she was coming with him or not.
Schiller let him go. Every cafe on hospital premises only served food that was 'good for you,' and pies, especially the steak and cheese jobs he was used to, didn't make the cut. Let him suffer.
Weeks later
Recovery ward
Putney and Shiller, roused by a phone call from the hospital that Jane Doe was awake and lucid, headed over and attempted to enter the Recovery ward, except a small, important-looking man in a white coat and armed with a clipboard barred their way.
"Do you mind, Doc?" growled Putney.
"Actually, I would like to speak to you both before you talk to Ms Doe," the man returned. "Doctor Martin, at your service," he added, whipping out a couple of business cards from somewhere and conferring them upon the policing duo. "Chief Resident Psychiatrist. I'd like to brief you on the patient before you converge upon her."
Putney kept his sigh to himself and he and Schiller followed the psychiatrist down the hall into an empty meeting room.
Once everyone was settled, Dr Martin pulled no punches.
"The patient, Ms Doe, is recovering at pace from her physical injuries, of which I'm sure you know were many," he began. "Now that she is in a position to communicate, I'm afraid I have quite devastating news. She has both retrograde and anterograde amnesia."
"Which means what in English, Doc?" Putney yawned.
Dr Martin frowned at the uncouth man. "She can't remember anything. Not even her name, where she lives – nothing."
"The poor thing," Schiller said sympathetically, ignoring Putney's eyeroll.
Dr Martin, twigging he was going to get more intelligent conversation from the Detective Constable, swivelled his chair towards her.
"How long is that likely to last?" Schiller asked.
Dr Martin puffed up his chest a tad. He loved explaining things to people. "It's impossible to say," he intoned earnestly. "Some recover their memories eventually; others, only partially. But there remain a stubborn minority that never do. The brain is a mystery to us all."
"Shouldn't be a mystery to you," Putney retorted.
"Not that it's really relevant to the case at hand," Dr Martin replied, looking down his nose at the Detective Sergeant, "but even today, we've only been able to discover how roughly twenty per cent of the brain works. And when it comes to amnesia, patients can react in so many different ways it's impossible to predict future behaviour with certainty."
He leaned in towards Schiller confidentially. "Ms Doe has experienced horrific levels of injury, commensurate with extended periods of torture. It's no surprise at all that her brain has taken measures to preserve itself by blocking her memories. In fact, I'd think I'd prefer it if she never recovered her memories."
"That's as may be, Doctor," Schiller said respectfully before Putney could loose off a volley of swearwords, "but we want to find whoever did this to her, not just so she can receive justice, but so we can make sure this person never harms anyone else again."
"True, true," the doctor nodded sagely.
"Is it all right if one of us pops in to say hello?" she continued.
"That will be fine," the doctor replied, "but ONLY one of you." He glared at Putney, who was already by the meeting room door. "I think Detective Constable Schiller will have the most appropriate bedside manner."
"Go and grab a coffee, Sarge," Schiller jumped in before Putney could react. His face was looking awfully puce. "I'll find you later."
Grumbling under his breath, Putney stomped away.
The patient looks so frail, Schiller thought as she approached the bed. Her arms look like twigs. Her skull-like features highlighted her sunken cheekbones and orbital-deep eye sockets. She almost looked like she was a life-sized pixie that had suddenly materialised in this world by mistake. She looked scared, and Schiller couldn't blame her.
"Hello," she said smoothly to the girl, who looked startled to see her. "I'm Detective Constable Schiller from the Police."
"I don't remember anything," the girl replied in a raspy voice.
"That's okay," Schiller replied. "I just wanted to introduce myself and pass you my card so that if you find yourself later remembering anything that could help catch whoever did this to you, you can give me a call. But if you don't remember anything, that's okay, too."
The girl solemnly took the card and read it.
"What do you see when you close your eyes?" Schiller asked, mostly out of curiosity. A nearby nurse frowned but said nothing.
The girl closed her eyes and bit her chapped lips. "A white light," she whispered. "And then blurriness. I can't make out anything. Then the next thing I remember is waking up in hospital." Her lip wobbled and she turned her head away.
Schiller knew her time was up, so she stepped back from the bed before the nurse could toss her out of the window. "I really hope you get better soon, Miss," she said sincerely. Whatever form it took.
No response from the bed, but she wasn't expecting one.
What would it be like, Schiller thought as she scoured the hospital's cafes for a sulking Putney, to have no memory of yourself? You wouldn't know your family, friends, even great big eejit work colleagues. You'd be all alone in a world where everyone knows someone.
A cold, depressing feeling of emptiness washed over her, and she decided that having both those types of amnesia would suck balls.
The Afterlife – Tolkien iteration (still)
The Cavern of the Scrying Scrolls
"Malfoy," Cedric said with exasperation as he finally located his charge in the first place he should have looked anyway, "what you're doing isn't healthy."
Draco (looking ghost-ish in white robes), as usual, ignored him. "Do you see how primitive Muggle Healers are?" he snapped, thumping the scrying screen in his agitation. "All this poking and prodding and shining lights into eyes, and don't even get me started on when they had to do to Granger just to find out what was actually wrong with her!"
Horrified but fascinated, Draco found himself glued to the scrying screen as surgeons opened up parts of Granger's body to fossick around inside. He'd never seen the like!
He also hoped that none of the Death Eaters would discover that such a barbaric practice existed and incorporate it into their already extensive suite of torture techniques. "How can the planet be overrun by such primitive creatures?" he wondered aloud.
Cedric crossed his arms. "You need counselling."
"Sod counselling."
"Lucy is a counsellor."
Draco paused, glancing away from the screen at his long-suffering... companion?
"Well, if you really think it's necessary," Draco pondered, "I suppose one counselling session won't hurt."
"Wonderful." Cedric grabbed Draco's arms and hauled him out of the chair, leaving behind a distinctly Draco-sized dent on the upholstery. "She's waiting in her cottage."
As Cedric frog-marched Draco out of the cavern and into too-bright daylight, Draco had a parting thought.
Why can't I stop watching her?
A/N Next chapter: Hermione tentatively starts a new life, and Draco isn't happy about it.