A/N: I wrote this entire chapter one way, set it aside, wrote it again in an entirely different plot direction, then once more in a third. This is the second, and best (I think). I don't know if this is how authors normally work, but throwing away writing is painful. Still, it's hard to argue with the results (unless this chapter is rubbish, I suppose, then it's easy).

Edit: Thanks to monstrousbird from r/rational for the Britpick on "bleachers"!

o-o-o-o-o

Chapter 10 - "...a Poor Sort of Memory…"

Hermione did not wake, per se - she simply found herself to be not asleep. She was no longer in the Library… In point of fact, for a moment she wasn't certain where she was, so unfamiliar was the scene, though the general architectural style suggested she was somewhere in Hogwarts. Many people moved about, a few with urgent speed, but most slowly, bearing obvious injuries or a deep weight of sorrow. No one paid any attention to her whatsoever. It was the ceiling that made her realize this was the Great Hall, its powerful enchantment showing the dark, star-filled sky beyond, streaked with smoke and flashes of strange magical after-effects.

But the tables and seats were all gone, save a couple turned onto their sides as makeshift barricades. Many of the people present stood or knelt over wounded, or even-

Hermione tried to grasp what she was seeing. One of the Weasley Twins was lying terribly still, and beside him, her face and hair unmistakeable, Tonks, the Hufflepuff from the train. Her unmoving hand was clasped in the hand of an unfamiliar man, equally lifeless. What she could only presume was the rest of the Weasley family was crying over the dead boy - except he wasn't a boy… Even prone, it was obvious the Twin - and it bothered Hermione a great deal that she wasn't sure which one - was even taller than she remembered, sturdier...adult. Tonks too, for that matter, though it was less obvious from the position of her...her b-

Hermione started to walk closer, solemn but desperate to understand, but stopped in her tracks. Another young brunette woman - who had been embracing one of the Weasleys - had turned her head slightly to face Hermione. For a bizarre moment, she thought it was her mother. But she was too young, and there were differences here and there. In fact, now that she thought about it, the woman actually looked more like-

The Great Hall went dark and swimmy.

o-o-o

She was in a strangely decorated living room, cramped and a little cluttered - from the slightly askew style, she presumed it was a Wizarding home, but very comfortable, for all that. There were a bunch of adults, and young adults, standing in a rough circle, each holding aloft a small glass of liquid, all swirls of rich amber and orange.

"Mad-Eye," said a flame-haired man, and everyone else repeated it. Including both Weasley Twins, and Tonks, looking very much alive but distraught, and from the scar and glasses what was clearly an older and much more put-together Harry Potter, along with an equally older but still not-terribly-put-together-looking Ron, and that same woman who she was almost certain was-

"Mad-Eye," added the Groundskeeper, Mr. Hagrid, with a maudlin hiccough. The room went dark and swimmy.

o-o-o

She was outdoors, near a small cottage. There were people standing near an oddly tiny grave. She was just close enough to the edge to make out the caricatured features of a house-elf, a woolen hat crammed onto his head. The strange older Harry and Ron were there - Harry looking devastated, Ron looking awkward in bare feet. His arm was around a brunette in a dressing gown, looking an absolute mess, her hair everywhere, her eyes puffy and reddened from tears, her face terribly pale. There was also a young blonde woman in a coat, looking a little disheveled, another thin blonde woman in an apron who was somehow almost offensively pretty, and the orange-haired man who'd started the toast in the previous...whatever was going on-

"Good-bye, Dobby", said Harry, terribly quietly.

The unnamed-but-probably-Weasley gave a solemn wave of his wand and a nearby pile of earth gracefully filled the grave, piling up to slightly above the level of the ground, and the scene went dark and swimmy.

o-o-o

She was in her parents' living room. They were sitting beside each other on the sofa, and staring almost directly at her, but they didn't seem to see her, or indeed anything.

"Mum? Dad?" Hermione, alarmed, waved a hand before their eyes, even leaned forward and poked her mother's knee, but there was no response whatsoever. It was quiet enough in the room that she could hear their breathing, and nothing else. But something made her turn her head, and in the doorway to the kitchen, out of their line of sight, the woman from the Great Hall, who kept drawing Hermione's attention, was casting spells on them, and she was using Hermione's wand or one that looked unreasonably like it, which pretty much clinched her impossible suspicions if she was willing to accept them.

The woman wasn't saying anything aloud, just making gesture after gesture, complicated swoops and curls and nested twists that Hermione could barely follow, let alone identify. But she finished with a very simple gesture, one Hermione did recognize, and a single word, rough with emotion but precisely enunciated.

"Obliviate."

Hermione lunged forward to try to shield her parents, but the spell somehow ignored her, and the room went dark and swimmy.

o-o-o

She was in a room she didn't recognize, but it was very finely appointed in a Wizarding way, all crystal and mahogany and tapestries. There were various people standing about - a hunched little man with a silver hand, a much taller man wearing a ragged fur coat who had strangely stretched - almost bestial - features. A trio of mutually light-haired people stood close to each other, a man and a woman and an older boy, who - despite his inexplicable age - was quite recognizably Draco Malfoy...looking not appalled, exactly, but neither entirely sanguine.

But all eyes in the room, Hermione's included, were focused on the last two people present. A woman in a tattered black dress, somehow both beautiful and sickly at the same time, her hair black and wild, eyes crazed and fixed with her wand towards the same young woman from the Great Hall, dirty and disheveled in casual clothes, her face terribly pale and streaked with tears.

"What else did you take, what else? ANSWER ME! CRUCIO!" shrieked the dark-haired witch, and the younger woman writhed under the Unforgivable Curse, releasing a horrible extended scream, which broke only just long enough to draw enough breath to begin the scream anew.

Hermione couldn't bear it and turned away, covering her ears with her hands, and she could still hear it. But mercifully, after a moment, the screaming - her screaming - faded away as the room went dark and swimmy.

o-o-o

She was on the grounds of Hogwarts, near the Great Lake, beside a white marble table. Dozens, hundreds of chairs faced it, in neat rows. So many people, many she didn't recognize, but a few she did. All the school staff, a great many students, the grown versions of which she was starting to find familiar, including herself. Her other-self's face was streaked with silent tears quite different from the ones she'd just seen. There were centaurs present, and Mr. Hagrid was at the back, next to a giant, and Hermione wondered what that was about, but at the same time she knew she was deliberately focusing on irrelevant details, the implications of the sombre mood and arrangements were obvious even without the benefit of her earlier...whatever-they-were's…

Hermione forced herself to look at the table, and saw the Headmaster's body. Even as shock struck deeply into her, she wondered how it could have happened - he wasn't that old by Wizarding standards and he was widely acknowledged as the most talented wizard in Britain, if not the world. As she watched, uncomprehendingly, the table erupted in shockingly intense white flames, though even as close as Hermione stood, they seemingly gave off no heat, and there were screams of startlement from within the attending crowd. The blinding fire rose higher and higher, until there was no sign of the body, or indeed the table. But as quickly as they'd started, the flames vanished, and only a white marble tomb was left behind.

The gathering went dark and swimmy.

o-o-o

She was on a small grassy clearing, at the edge of what seemed to be a large hedge maze. Facing it were a large set of seats set in stands, packed full of people. Most were too far away to make out, though she could vaguely recognize herself, sitting next to Ron.

Directly before her was Harry Potter, still looking older than he ought to, but not nearly so much as before. He was clutching a shining trophy of some sort in one hand, while his other was latched firmly around another boy she didn't recognize, perhaps a couple years older than Harry - this Harry, rather.

Harry looked dazed and pale, his left leg was bleeding badly, and his right arm nearly as much. The other boy bore various small injuries, but his eyes stared sightlessly. The Headmaster was leaning over them, alive, obviously, but his face ashen.

Harry released the trophy and grabbed Professor Dumbledore's wrist, not releasing the other boy's body. He still seemed dazed, but he pulled his face close to the Headmaster's and whispered with a fearful intensity.

"He's back. He's back. Voldemort."

Everything went dark and swimmy.

o-o-o

She was in the hospital wing. She was lying on the floor, facing the ceiling, and a young woman in healer's robes was leaning over her with a concerned expression, her wand out. Nurse Wainscott?

"Mobilicorpus," said the nurse, and Hermione felt her body grow light and drift up from where she'd apparently collapsed to the floor. She glided easily over to one of the beds and drifted gently down upon it.

Hermione, fearing the worst, looked around anxiously to discover who was dead now. But the other beds were empty of bodies, living or otherwise, there was no one else here other than the healer.

"Wait," she murmured. "Something is...you can see me...you can hear me?" Madam Wainscott nodded, her expression uncertain but reassuring.

"Yes, just relax, take slow, deep breaths. You apparently got here just in time. I should've been faster to get you into a bed, but...does anything hurt, did you hit your head when you fell? Revelo volnus." This last was murmured as she waved her wand over Hermione's body from head to toes. Hermione didn't feel any pain, though her head felt a bit foggy, as if she'd just woken up from an uneasy sleep. Sleep.

"Something put me to sleep," Hermione said, suddenly. "Something possessing me, a ghost, maybe? But then I saw...I don't know what...visions of horrible things...I think of the future. People dying, maybe me dying...You-Know-Who coming back...and I was always there...older me, I mean..." Her voice dropped a bit as she continued, mostly to herself, "I really ought to have read more about Divination, but most of the books implied it was extremely unreliable at best…" Madam Wainscott nodded, as if what Hermione had said were the most normal thing in the world.

"Yes. None of it was real, only a nightmare, best just not to think about it at all…" she said, in a tone that Hermione had come to recognize from adults, one which she - ever so slightly - loathed. She tried to sit up angrily in the bed, but light pressure from the nurse's hand against her shoulder was sufficient to make this impossible - she must still be a little weak, shaking off the sleep.

"No. I'm not sick, this is important," she insisted, trying to make her voice stern in lieu of whatever confidence came from being upright. "Something is happening to me, and horrible things are going to happen...it's not a hallucination, it's…" she trailed off for a moment, realizing she still wasn't entirely sure it wasn't a hallucination. What if she did have a brain tumor or something? "There's a note, in my bag, upside down...it says things…" Though Hermione once again remembered that the cryptic notes had been in her own handwriting, and wouldn't really constitute evidence of anything one way or another - even to herself, if she were honest about it.

"Do you...what is the last thing you remember?" asked the nurse, looking...concerned, but not exactly alarmed.

"I'd been in the Library, studying, then I saw these strange notes appear - or re-appear, I think - on the bottom of the parchment, and I was trying to understand them and I had some sort of...memory isn't exactly right, but I don't know what to call it, and I thought I might be possessed and I should tell an adult, but then it put me to sleep on my way out of the Library. I saw a bunch of horrible things, mostly people being dead, and then I woke up here." Madam Wainscott's eyebrows rose, but she still didn't look as alarmed as Hermione thought she ought to. Come to think of it, Hermione herself no longer felt that strange sense of alarm that had affected her so strongly in the Library when she'd announced her intention to tell someone.

"You don't remember hearing a spell cast on you, or walking here, or speaking with me?" Hermione blinked.

"I...no. What?" The nurse turned a bit, examining the labels on a variety of potion bottles on a rack against the wall as she spoke.

"You walked in just a few minutes ago. You said that you'd heard someone - you didn't see who - cast a spell on you…'Confundo Oraculum Maximo', and you weren't sure what it had done but your head 'felt peculiar', so you came here, and explained, and then you collapsed before I could get you into a bed."

"I said…? But...that's not right…"

"'Confundo Oraculum' is a nasty variation on the Confundus Charm, called the 'Seer's Hex'," explained Madam Wainscott as she turned back to Hermione, a bottle in her off hand. "It makes you convinced you can see the future, you see, as well as fogging your thoughts and memories around to prompt you to see things you want, or more often, fear. Normally it the certainty fades away of its own accord in an hour or two, along with most of the 'visions'. But that Maximo makes it something quite beyond that, I don't even know the name and I...ah...don't know the proper countercurse, assuming, hopefully, there is one...I'll have to do some reading and consult the Professors." The young woman was clearly trying to portray confidence, but she couldn't hide a bit of nervousness. "Honestly, I'd just use a Forgetting Charm, but-"

"No!" shouted Hermione, and this time she was able to push herself up, sliding back in the bed away from the nurse. She made a calming motion, which, given it was with her wand hand, did not reassure Hermione in the slightest.

"Easy, Miss Granger, easy. I was just saying I can't Obliviate you because that sort of magic doesn't interact well - or safely - with Confunding effects. And the effects are lasting, but the spell itself isn't sustained, so there's no point in a Finite. If we can't find a specific countercurse, well, you may just have to do your best to put all this out of your mind."

Hermione stared at her as if she were insane, and immediately recognized the irony in that thought. Either way, getting angrier and pointing out how impossible a task she'd casually suggested probably wouldn't help. And she still wasn't sure what to think...if she was possessed, it actually sounded like a rather clever story to discredit anything she might say afterward - the only confusing flaw in that was that it had discouraged the nurse from just making her forget the whole thing. On the other hand, if schizophrenia or something was the problem, it was a way for the illness to conceal itself, by steering her away from proper care, and preventing her aberrant thoughts from simply being removed. It still seemed implausible that she could be having these sorts of rational thoughts about it if she were mentally unwell, but, again, it's not as if she really knew what it would feel like from the inside.

"All right," she began, trying to make her voice calm. "Is there some way you could verify that I'm not possessed by a ghost or something? Just...you know...for my peace of mind?" Madam Wainscott frowned, then tucked the potion bottle away in a pocket of her apron and moved a few beds down to crouch by a short two-level bookshelf, running her finger over the spines. As she did so, Hermione opened her bag - its strap still over her shoulder - and began pulling out her notes. Not furtively, but matter-of-factly, as if it should be of no concern to anyone, particularly a nurse. The woman did glance at her, but only briefly before continuing to peruse the books.

Hermione flipped through the thick sheaf of pages quickly, looking for the tell-tale sign of mutually inverted sections of handwriting, but didn't see the page. She frowned and went back through more slowly, then stopped. She'd found the page, all right, but it held only her notes on potential library magic, and there was no sign of the mysterious additional lines. Option A - that never happened, and I just imagined it, equal evidence of mental illness or an oddly specific and aggressive Confundus. Option B - something is possessing me, and after putting me to sleep, it just used a spell to wipe those lines off the page. Hermione scowled and shoved the notes back into her bag, with slightly more force than was strictly necessary.

Nurse Wainscott returned, holding a pair of books. She'd clearly noticed Hermione putting her papers away, but chose not to remark upon it, about which Hermione was both grateful and slightly irritated. Instead, the woman set the books down, holding one open to a page marked with a thin blue ribbon, and began casting a series of spells from them over Hermione, many which included the words spiritus or effigia, and once, usurpator. As the nurse flipped from page to page, switching books halfway through, Hermione tried to memorize each spell as best she could, but some of the gestures were not ones she recognized at all, and a couple spells had been cast non-verbally. Though at least one of the gestures seemed familiar from the extended prelude to the spell her older self had...would?...might?...cast on her parents. Was that evidence of anything, that she'd seen an apparently real spell element she had no way of knowing?

Maybe...but maybe a sufficiently strong Confundus can actually impart some information that the caster knows and the victim doesn't, and it sounds like a strong caster would've been required. But why would an upper-year student do such a thing to me anyway? Bullying - her books had said - was a complex dance of status and dominance, and tended to operate within narrow age ranges. A child might well torment significantly younger children out of pure sadism, but that was supposedly rare. Much more often victims would be children sufficiently younger or weaker than the the bully to be vulnerable, but still close enough to their age that the bully wouldn't lose status among their own peers by attacking too weak an opponent.

"Well, after all that, I'm quite positive there's nothing in your head that didn't originate from your own mind," said Madam Wainscott suddenly, breaking Hermione's gloomy train of thought. "Though that does include whatever your mind invented based on the Confundus, of course." She put her hand on Hermione's shoulder sympathetically. "I hope that does make you feel a little better?" Hermione considered the question, and upon reflection, it didn't. At all.

"I appreciate you checking for me," said the Ravenclaw, with carefully true wording. "So...what now? May I go...at least until you find a countercurse, I suppose?" The nurse shook her head, once again withdrawing the potion she'd held before.

"It's clear you're still suffering secondary ill effects from such a strong hex, so I'd prefer you got more rest. And it may help in another way - I have a potion to allow dreamless sleep. It should ensure you get good quality sleep, but it should also make your memories of the hex less distinct, and help you put them aside?" Hermione was a bit surprised to hear that witches apparently knew about memory consolidation during REM sleep, but she supposed the proper magic ought to be able to tell you as much or more about what was happening in someone's head as an EEG or MRI machine. It's not as if science had any reliable ways of making people forget things, and magic apparently had several.

"Okay," Hermione said, with a slight sigh.

"I'll make sure you're excused from classes for the rest of the day-"

"I don't have any left today," interrupted Hermione.

"Oh, well, good. But I'll still inform your Professors and the Headmaster of the incident, so they can be properly accommodating if you have any...er...lingering issues."

"That's...really not necessary," Hermione objected, warily. If she does that, then effectively everyone I might go to will have a plausible excuse to not believe a single thing I say about any of this…

"It's no trouble, and it's school policy anyway - I must. I'm sure they will want to go to some lengths to discover who hexed you in any case, it's a bit beyond the normal sort of student shenanigans." Hermione nodded. It wasn't as if she could stop her. "I'll fetch you a set of pyjamas and let you change so you're more comfortable, and then you can take the potion - you should sleep clear through to tomorrow morning." Nurse Wainscott did as she'd said, altering the apparently generic pyjamas with a few quick spells so they properly fit Hermione, then pulling the curtains around her bed and withdrawing to let her change.

Hermione made enough of a production out of removing her robes to hopefully mask the sound of also fetching a quill, blank parchment and her wand from her bag. A general Silencing Charm was far beyond her, but she leveled her wand at the quill and parchment in turn, adding a whispered Quietus for each, then gingerly tested one against the other, and nodded in satisfaction as the normally quiet scratch was nearly inaudible.

Hermione quickly began to transcribe everything she could remember about everything that had happened starting with the Library - including as faithful a reproduction as she could of the missing notes - alternating hands so she could awkwardly continue to undress and change while she did so. When she'd finished - after going back and adding a quick note at the top - she took up her wand again and whispered Impervius at each page, folded them in half, then again firmly crosswise. She hesitated for a moment, second guessing herself, but then followed through with her hopefully-not-mad plan. She cast one final spell at the bundle, then flung the tight square of parchment directly out of the partially open window behind the bed.

Immediately, the "sourceless" irrational panic from the Library flooded back into her, and her hands shook as she put everything back into her bag and then climbed into the hospital bed. But even as her nerves betrayed her, she steadfastly pushed them down and essayed a wavering smile, equal parts uncertainty and grim determination. The return of the feeling was a tiny piece of evidence, and Hermione was choosing to interpret it as progress, rather than mental illness. If she wasn't sane, well, this shouldn't do any harm. If she was...

"Nurse Wainscott? I'm ready for the potion now," she said, loudly. But before the woman had reached the curtain around Hermione's bed, she lowered her voice and in an almost inaudibly soft whisper - yet somehow simultaneously full of iron - added two more words.

"Your move."