“Now now, dear. I'm not entirely callous. Look at it from a medical perspective. If there was anything in your past that would be logical for your mind to protect itself from, it would be the aftermath of the war — which you are clearly traumatised by. Instead, what did you subconsciously decide to protect? The identities of your parents, and the Order's war strategy. Your magic didn't choose to protect your psyche, it chose to protect everyone else. That is very interesting.”
Hermione supposed it was, but it just all felt like too much.
Just being able to see again was overwhelming. Being able to speak. Being out of her cell. Everything felt like it was too much. Too raw. Too bright.
She didn't say anything else. After a few minutes of scribbling, the healer looked up again.
“Unless the specialist has an objection, you'll stay in the infirmary for a week for recovery before we process you. That will give you time to acclimate to light and sound again and undergo the therapy you'll need for your torture recovery and that concussion you got during your check up.”
The healer started to walk away but then paused.
“I hope my saying this is unnecessary, but I suppose given your house and history I should say it nonetheless. You are at a crossroads currently, Miss Granger. What will happen to you next is inevitable, but you have a choice in how unpleasant you force it to be.”
With that parting — advice? A threat? A warning? Hermione wasn't entirely sure. The healer disappeared behind the dividing curtain.
Hermione glanced around at her surroundings carefully. She was still in Hogwarts. She had been changed out of her prison clothes into a set of hospital pajamas. Pulling up the sleeves, she noted with disappointment that no one had made the mistake of taking off the manacles locked around each wrist.
She held a wrist up in front of her face to inspect them. They had been snapped onto her immediately before she had been imprisoned in her cell, and she had never gotten a chance to really see what they looked like.
In the light, they simply appeared to be a pair of bracelets around each wrist. They shone like a new penny. They were copper-plated, as she had guessed.
In the darkness of her cell, she had spent an untold amount of time trying to ascertain exactly what they were. The simple answer was that they suppressed her magic. How exactly they did so, and how she might get around them while blind and mute had taken much thought.
When she finally admitted to herself that it was impossible to get around them, she began to figure out how they worked.
She both hated and admired whoever had developed them. She was positive by the way the copper conducted her magic that they had a dragon heartstring core in each of them, possibly even taken from her own wand.
The manacles felt specifically attuned to her.
In her cell during all her attempts to wield wandless magic, the magic slipped down her arms toward her hands to be cast and then just — dissolved when it reached the manacles. Confirming for herself now that they were copper-plated, she understood immediately how it worked.
Copper sucked the magic into itself. She remembered Binns lecturing in History of Magic about the attempts to use materials other than wood for wands. Copper had been one of the obvious choices due to its natural magic conductivity. Unfortunately, it was too conductive. It sucked up any flicker of magic that it detected, whether it was meant to or not. Spells exploded out of copper wands before a wizard could finish casting. They could barely touch the wands without having them go off. Two blown up wand labs and the loss of four toes convinced wand makers to try something other than copper.
The core of the manacles, Hermione felt positive, was iron. The copper paired with dragon heartstring snatched up her magic and then deposited it into the iron core where it was effectively neutralised.
The ingenuity made her seethe.
Iron manacles were common enough in Wizarding prisons. They dampened magic enough to keep prisoners from casting anything powerful. It had always been impossible to fully neutralise a witch or wizard's magic with iron. They could always push a little bit of magic past it or just let it build up until a wave of accidental magic exploded from them. The copper solved that. With its eager conductivity, especially aided with a magical core matching the prisoner's wand, the copper sucked up almost every bit of building magic inside Hermione.
It effectively made her a Muggle.
Chapter End Notes
Additional Illustrations:
Hermione under Hogwarts by customcraftsbyjudy
Hermione in the Infirmary by customcraftsbyjudy
Hermione under Hogwarts by saharok_illustration.
Ghost of the past by saharok_illustrations
Cover 1 by Flyora.
Cover 2 by Flyora.
Manacled Cover by irinakulish_fanart.
Cover Art by imperiness.