lavanya_six | Variations on a Theme - Part 1

A new project...

Title: Variations on a Theme
Author: Lavanya Six
Genre: Drama, AU
Rating: T for Teen
Summary: "Squibs were usually shipped off to Muggle schools and encouraged to integrate into the Muggle community... much kinder than trying to find them a place in the Wizarding world, where they must always be second class." A series of one-shot AUs.

          Dear Doctor Fitzbottom,

          My brother and I were having an argument over the Blood Classification System. A Muggleborn is obviously a witch or wizard born to Muggles, and a Squib is practically a Muggle born to magical folk, but is it possible for a Squib to be born to a pair of Muggles? My brother says yes, I say no, and we need your sage wisdom to find out which of us gets the right to the Sickle we're wagering on this argument. Help us, Dr. Fitzbottom!

Sincerely, Stumped from Hogsmeade

Dear Stumped from Hogsmeade,

Excellent question! And one that has bedeviled the scholarly community for generations, I might add. The issue of Blood Classification is a fraught one, no less today than it was at the height of the war with You-Know-Who. While official Ministry policy denies the possibility of Muggleborn Squibs (to coin a term) several experts in the fields of Experimental Magic and Advanced Muggle Studies believe that, yes, it is possible for Squibs to be born to Muggles. Such a person would likely never come across actual magic in their lifetime, thus never partaking of the few passive and recessive magical talents available to Squibs. If they were to come across something overlooked by their Muggle compatriots I wager they would pass it of as a hallucination or temporary insanity. However, since no firm evidence exists of Muggleborn Squibs, the idea is as-yet unproven. Might I propose that you and your brother split the Sickle and call it a day!

Yours,

Dr. Fitzbottom, DFA

From the Daily Prophet's ASK DR. FITZBOTTOM column, 11/28/1988

VARIATIONS ON A THEME:
MADNESS

October 10, 2003

"Wotcha, Granger."

"Evening, Swales," she said, slipping off her autumn coat and hanging it in her locker. "Morgenstern still on a rampage?"

"Nah. She kicked off a few hours ago. Shame too. They found another one."

Hermione Granger, medical student, froze. "Where?"

"Piccadilly Line," replied Oliver Swales, squirting a bit of lemon onto his fish and chips. There were rules against eating in the dressing rooms at the Victorian Hope Hospital but none of the students paid any attention to them. It was one of the few perks allowed to them by the senior staff. "Found the bloke face down in one of the cars."

"Let me guess, he was coming from King's Cross?"

Oliver nodded.

"So he's—"

"PVS, yeah." Oliver popped a chip into his mouth. "The PET and fMRI haven't come back yet but you don't need to be a rocket scientist to guess what they'll say."

They would tell them nothing, Hermione knew, just like all the scans done on all the other PVS cases popping up all over London. A few months ago it had just been some eccentrically dressed homeless people found in alleyways and in street gutters. Now there was a new one practically every day. Average ordinary Londoners found all over the city, every one in perfect health save for being in persistent vegetative states. Stranger still, nearly every PVS the police brought in had no ID on them and most didn't match anyone in the NHS records. The few that did either were either people found near ID-less bodies (bad luck?) or their paper trail had stopped when they were children.

The cases were being kept out of the papers and off the Internet, though that didn't stop word-of-mouth among medical colleagues. Hermione and the rest of the staff at Victorian Hope suspected the government of being involved, though there was no proof. No one had any explanation for the spike in PVS cases. Though there were rumors – of alien abductions, of MI-5 experiments run amuck, of bodies found in Underground trains frosted over in the dead of summer – but Hermione knew well enough to ignore them.

"More bedsore duty," she muttered, thinking of all the half-dozen unclaimed PVS cases upstairs that needed care, care that the staff shit onto the students. "Great."

"There was something else… what was it… Oh!" Oliver snapped his fingers. "They actually found ID on this one!"

Hermione slipped on her white lab coat, then slipped her ID badge around her neck. "They do that sometimes. The family come by yet to p–"

"No, no! This was one of the Double-Us!"

Unidentified, Unregistered – the PVS cases where the patient had somehow slipped outside the all-seeing eye of the National Health Service.

"With an ID?" She turned. "They did? What's his name?"

"Weasley," he said. "Ronald Weasley."

______________________________

Hermione Granger loathed garden duty.

Among the staff at Victorian Hope Hospital the small collection of persistent vegetative state patients had, in that time honored tradition of shop talk, taken on the nickname "the Garden". Anyone assigned to the duty of assisting in the watering and care of the Veggies – and at chronically understaffed Victorian Hope that meant the medical students – was only working there because they drew the short end of the stick. Today that meant Hermione, who had to take over from Oliver on planting the new Veggie in the Garden. That meant paperwork, and lots of it.

Careful not to look into his eyes, Hermione Granger reviewed Ronald Weasley's chart. There were the typical Double-U patient markers: old burns, scars that caught the light in a way scars shouldn't, a general state of malnutrition, and oddness in the patient's state of dress. Ronald Weasley, she noted as a pair of nurses stripped him of his clothing, wore his boxers backwards and inside-out. On a hunch, Hermione checked for signs of semen or other sexual trauma. There was nothing aside from the faint stench of urine.

"Why do they always piss themselves?" asked one of the nurses.

"Reckon he saw what was coming," said the other, an Indian woman named Nancy.

"That's enough," snapped Hermione.

"What's got your goat, Granger?" asked Nancy. "Did David stand you up again?"

Inside, Hermione seethed. Never again. Never go drinking with the nurses again, the gossipy bitches. "No. These cases are just—" She ducked her head down and scrawled something, anything, on Weasley's chart. "No."

"Hmm. I don't see why he would," said Nancy, face straight. "You're so—"

"Ms. Granger," interrupted the other nurse. "Do you want to take a look at his right hand?"

"Why?" Hermione moved around to look. There, written in chicken-scratch cursive on the top of Ron Weasley's right hand, were five words emblazoned in thin white scars over his pink flesh:

I SHALL NOT TELL LIES

Hermione traced a neatly manicured fingernail over the scars. "I shall not tell lies."

"Child abuse?" offered Nancy. "Or just a headcase?"

Hermione ignored the dark-skinned nurse. "Any other notable scars?"

"Old burn mark below the left knee, probably Second Degree," said Nancy clinically. "And he lost the fourth and fifth toes on his left foot."

Hermione wrote that down. "Let's see his back."

The two nurses worked together to take his flannel button-down shirt and white undershirt off, then flipped the sedate redhead over. Nancy gasped at the sight of the young man's back. "Jesus!"

Ronald Weasley's back was a mass of crisscrossing scars, one knot atop another. Hermione knew very well what caused this kind of injury. "He was whipped," she said quietly, probing the extensive scarring, feeling the hardened, uneven flesh under her fingertips. "They must have worked him down to his bones at least twice."

"How could someone survive that?" marveled Nancy, looking ill.

"You'd be amazed what someone can live through," said Hermione absently, her fingers dancing over the scars, probing for some clue hidden in the mass of white tissue. "I've never seen anything like this outside of old pictures from the slave trade. This must have taken them a while to do."

"Them?"

"Too much damage for one person to inflict and keep the victim alive," said Hermione, withdrawing her hand. She began taking notes on Ronald Weasley's tortures on his chart. The language was dry but precise. "He'd have needed constant medical supervision to survive that sort of treatment, especially if it happened to him more than once. We're talking months of recuperation between sessions. His captor or captors would need at least a one member support staff for round-the-clock supervision."

"Sessions?" echoed the other nurse.

She nodded. "We need to contact the police. Not that they'd do anything for a PVS patient."

Nancy asked, "Are you sure one person couldn't have done that?"

Hermione honestly considered the question. "It's possible," she said after several seconds, "but unlikely. I mean, it's not like whoever did this could magically heal his wounds right up and then go back to whipping him."

They finished up their inspection of Weasley, then cleaned and dressed him.

Hermione set his chart back in place and sighed in relief at being done with Garden duty for the meanwhile. Ready to leave, she still stopped to asked, "Did the officer from Metro say anything when he came to pick up his personal effects?"

"No," said Nancy, "they haven't stopped by yet. Jeff's got it all sitting in a box by his station."

"What?" The police, Hermione knew, were quick to confiscate anything found on a PVSer. "Can I see it?"

Weasley's possessions were bagged and packed in an old box that had been used to store bandages. Nancy left her with it as she had her own rounds to tend, a fact which relieved Hermione. Careful not to disturb any evidence like fingerprints or DNA samples, Hermione put on a pair of latex gloves and gingerly shifted through the eclectic mix of things.

There was a plain leather wallet with photo ID and driver's license – both fakes. Hermione, who had worked at a grocer to help put herself through college, was familiar with the telltale signs of a fake ID. Ronald Weasley's, if that was even his name, were top notch.

Variations on a Theme - Part 1 - Madness (Hermione's Tale)

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