"You seem to - rest, sometimes, in a peculiar manner. This has also been reported. And you seem to be resting more and more frequently, as time goes on." The old witch's fingers tapped the leather folder again. "I cannot recall reading of such a symptom, but when one hears of such a thing, one imagines... Dark Wizards fought, and terrible curses received..."
The Defense Professor remained expressionless.
"Do you require a healer's help?" said Amelia Bones. Her own mask had slipped, clearly showing the pain in her eyes. "Is there anything at all that can be done for you?"
"I agreed to teach Defense at Hogwarts," the man in the cell said flatly. "Draw your own conclusions, Madam. And I am missing my classes, of which there are not many left. I would return to Hogwarts, now."
When Hermione woke the third time (though it felt like she'd only closed her eyes for a moment) the Sun was even lower in the sky, almost fully set. She felt a little more alive and, strangely, even more exhausted. This time it was Professor Flitwick who was standing next to her bed and shaking her shoulder, a tray of steaming food floating next to him. For some reason she'd thought Harry Potter ought to be leaning over her bedside, but he wasn't there. Had she dreamed that? She couldn't remember dreaming.
It developed (according to Professor Flitwick) that Hermione had missed dinner in the Great Hall, and was being woken to eat. And then she could go back to the Ravenclaw dorm, and her own bed, to sleep the rest of the night.
She ate in silence. There was a part of her that wanted to ask Professor Flitwick whether he thought she'd been Memory-Charmed or she'd tried to kill Draco Malfoy of her own will -
- like she remembered doing -
- but most of her was afraid to find out. Afraid to find out was a warning sign, according to Harry Potter and his books; but her mind felt tired, bruised, and she couldn't muster the strength to override it.
When she and Professor Flitwick left the infirmary they found Harry Potter sitting cross-legged outside the door, quietly reading a psychology textbook.
"I'll take her from here," said the Boy-Who-Lived. "Professor McGonagall said it would be all right."
Professor Flitwick seemed to accept this, and departed after a stern look at both of them. She couldn't imagine what the stern look was supposed to say, unless it was don't try to kill any more students.
The footsteps of Professor Flitwick faded, and the two of them stood alone outside the doors of the infirmary.
She looked at the green eyes of the Boy-Who-Lived, the mess of hair that didn't quite obscure the scar on his forehead; she looked upon the face of the boy who'd given all his money to save her without a second thought. There were feelings inside her - guilt, shame, embarrassment, other things as well - but no words. There was nothing she knew how to say.
"So," Harry said abruptly, "I did a quick skim through my psychology books to see what they said about post-traumatic stress disorder. The old books said you should talk about the experience immediately afterward with a counselor. The newer research says that when they actually ran experiments, it turned out that talking about it immediately afterward made it worse. Apparently what you really ought to do is run with your mind's natural impulse to repress the memories and just not think about it for a while."
It was so normal for the way she and Harry usually talked that she felt a sudden burning in her throat.
We don't have to talk about it. That was what Harry had just said, more or less. It felt like cheating, maybe even like a lie. Nothing was normal. Everything wrong was still horribly wrong, everything left unsaid still needed to be said...
"Okay," said Hermione, because there wasn't anything else to say, anything else at all.
"I'm sorry I wasn't waiting when you woke up," Harry said, as they started to walk. "Madam Pomfrey wouldn't let me in, so I just stayed out here." He gave a small, sad-looking shrug. "I suppose I should be out there trying to run damage control on public relations, but... honestly I've never been good at that, I just end up speaking sharply at people."
"How bad is it?" She thought her voice should have come out in a whisper, a croak, but it didn't.
"Well -" Harry said with obvious hesitation. "The thing you've got to understand, Hermione, is that you had a lot of defenders at breakfast-time today, but everyone on your side was... making stuff up. Draco tried to kill you first, things like that. It was Granger versus Malfoy, that's how people saw it, like a seesaw where pushing his side down meant pushing your side up. I told them you were probably both innocent, that you'd both been Memory-Charmed. They didn't listen, both sides treated me like a traitor trying to play the middle. And then people heard that Draco had testified under Veritaserum that he'd been trying to help you before the battle - stop making that expression, Hermione, you didn't actually do anything to him. Anyway, all people understood was that the pro-Malfoy faction had been right and the pro-Granger faction had been wrong." Harry gave a small sigh. "I told them that when the truth came out later they'd be embarrassed..."
"How bad is it?" she said again. This time her voice did come out weaker.
"Remember Asch's conformity experiment?" Harry said, turning his head to give her a serious look.
Her mind was slow to remember for a few seconds, which frightened her, but then the reference came back. In 1951, Solomon Asch had taken some experimental subjects, and each one had been put among a row of other people who looked like them, seeming like other experimental subjects, but actually confederates of the experimenter. They'd shown a reference line on a screen, labeled X, next to three other lines, labeled A, B, and C. The experimenter had asked which line X was the same length as. The correct answer had obviously been C. The other 'subjects', the confederates, had one after another said that X was the same length as B. The real subject had been put second-to-last in the order, so as not to arouse suspicion by being last. The test had been to see whether the real subject would 'conform' to the standard wrong answer of B, or voice the obviously correct answer of C.
75% of the subjects had 'conformed' at least once. A third of the subjects had conformed more than half the time. Some had reported afterward actually believing that X was the same length as B. And that had been in a case where the subjects hadn't known any of the confederates. If you put people around others who belonged to the same group as them, like someone in a wheelchair next to other people in a wheelchair, the conformity effect got even stronger...
Hermione had a sickening feeling where this was going. "I remember," she whispered.
"I gave the Chaos Legion anti-conformity training, you know. I had each Legionnaire stand in the middle and say 'Twice two is four!' or 'Grass is green!' while everyone else in the Chaos Legion called them idiots or sneered at them - Allen Flint did really good sneers - or even just gave them blank looks and then walked away. The thing you've got to remember is, only the Chaos Legion has ever practiced anything like that. Nobody else in Hogwarts even knows what conformity is."
"Harry!" Her voice was wobbling. "How bad is it?"
Harry gave another sad-looking shrug. "Everyone in the second year and above, since they don't know you. Everyone in Dragon Army. All of Slytherin, of course. And, well, most of the rest of magical Britain too, I think. Remember, Lucius Malfoy controls the Daily Prophet."