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She yawns and steps out of the doorway, and the world begins to t i l t
She has enough time for a brief flash of dismay edged with irritation, and
She blinks.
Everything’s a soft golden and red, familiarly unfamiliar. It takes a few long, slow blinks to realize that it’s because she’s seeing the room from a different angle.
She’s on the floor. Why was she on the floor? It wasn’t particularly comfortable but she didn’t feel quite like moving yet.
“Accio,” she summons her quilt from her bed. She’d woken up early for a head start on the day. May as well sleep a little longer, she muses, her body heavy as darkness softly pulls her under.
She doesn’t know how much time has passed, only that it has. But it’s time to get up.
She is on the floor. Why is she on the floor? She remembers being at the top of the stairs by the railing, then waking up on the floor below. It concerns her because she must have fallen and that’s a rather long way to go, but it’s a concern in a vague sort of way. She doesn’t feel hurt, no sharp pains or aches that one would expect, just a dull throb of a headache.
She supposes she must have hit her head on the way down, and wonders if she should worry about that. It’s a distant throb, though, so she waves the thought away.
The right side of her face feels a little fuzzy, and tiny pinpricks flash as she gently feels her cheek. There’s a little bit of blood when she pulls her fingers away but no more than a scratch.
A bit of rug burn from the carpet, probably.
It’s still early, the morning light drifting through the windows. Nobody’s up yet, no soft murmurs and shuffling of people beginning their day.
Her stomach growls, and she rises to her feet. She will surely feel more awake after some breakfast. She’d never been much of a morning person, much as she’d tried.
She stops by the second-floor bathroom on her way to the Great Hall to clean up her scrapes. There’s some abrasions above the corner of her eye, layers of skin missing across her cheekbone, and some patches below, where the corner of her mouth and chin meet. It’s a small mess of purple and grey, bright red in places where the skin tore.
She cleans it as best she can with cold water, distantly remembering that leaving such scrapes open to the air helps the healing process.
It doesn’t look too bad.
She wets a handkerchief from her bag and dabs it to her face as she continues on her way.
Breakfast is the usual fare of eggs and toast, with a little bit of potato. The heavy fare used to be too much, but her stomach has long since gotten used to it, and now she appreciates the extra energy for when she occasionally misses lunch.
She adds some cheese to her eggs. Delicious.
She’s out of her spot and headed through the halls to class as the rest of the school begins to trickle in.
A few portraits whisper as she passes, one or two clucking their tongues and shaking their heads. It’s easy to ignore them.
Arithmancy goes by as it always does, the professor droning on and drawing diagrams on the board that the class scrambles to copy down. The class is notorious for its fast pace and uncompromising stance on students that fall behind: keep up, or fail. The class is half the size it was when it began, and even more will drop out before the year ends.
She clutches her head as it begins to begins to throb. It feels like her brain is trying push its way out of her skull, and she grits her teeth. The dim lighting in this room is less than helpful, as she has to strain a little harder to read the board and the pounding intensifies.
Her notes expand five pages more. She doesn’t understand them now—she wonders if anyone does—but in the hours she rereads them again and again on her own time is when everything will click into place. For now, she needs to write down everything.
The side of her face begins to feel tight, stretching uncomfortably over the cheekbone, and she takes a brief break to dab at the skin with her damp handkerchief before picking up her quill to finish the runic integration sequences.
Finally class is over. She shuffles her notes and quill into her bag and slides out the door.
A few of the fourth years coming in give her some long side-glances. The scrapes don’t look awful, she thinks to herself, but they don’t look very pretty either.
She’s feeling a little self-conscious about it now.
A snack (no time for lunch), and she’s on to Herbology.
She arrives a few minutes early and takes the time to pull out the textbook. They are discussing magical parasites this month, specifically wormwood beetles today, which is objectively fascinating but also something she really doesn’t care to know the gruesome details of. She’s not all that fond of beetles anyway.
Her best friends hurry in at the last moment, as usual. The class is having small group discussions today, so they get shuffled in along with two Hufflepuffs to the other side of the room.
Neville is in her group, so she won’t have to carry the discussion by herself… again.
Halfway through a comparison of infections at different stages of beetle development, Neville pauses to look at her. “Are you okay? I mean, you’re—“ he gestures towards his own cheek.
She shrugs it off. “I got a little scraped up. It’s fine, barely even stings.”
He remains unconvinced.
“I’ll go to the infirmary later to get it checked, but really, it’s nothing.”
“Well okay,” he says slowly, then turns to correct Seamus on his life cycle diagram. “No, the alternate host is the bay laurel because that’s what it needs to reproduce…”
Dean makes an off-color remark and the time passes quickly.
She just has an essay for Transfiguration left, and a Runes worksheet. It should be fairly straightforward, she thinks, since she had already planned it out in her mind the day before.
It takes three hours before she admits that had been optimistic of her.
The longer she reads and rereads the passage, the less she comprehends as the pain begins to sledgehammer the inside of her skull. She covers her eyes as it becomes unbearable, the darkness helping only marginally.
Her essay is nearly done, having taken five times as long as it normally would have, despite being a measly foot in length. Her concentration’s shot, but she’s determined to finish. The stupid headache will go away soon. They usually do.
She doesn’t feel like eating, and so dinner drags by.
She’s ready to admit defeat by the end of it. Concentrating has been absolute hell, with words drifting off the page and the war drums sounding through her brain. She’s had to rewet the handkerchief six or seven times already and she can feel the uncomfortable stretch as her slowly scabbing skin dries and pulls tight across her cheek.
At least the bleeding stopped hours ago. It’s very hard to feel grateful at the moment, though.
The other Gryffindors avoid directly staring at her face, but she can feel their eyes when she’s not looking.
Eventually she calls it quits and sighs as she shoves her pitiful attempts at work into her bag and slumps up to the infirmary.
It’s a relief to see Madam Pomfrey bustle over. She can have this headache cleared up and the scrapes fixed up in no time.
“What on earth did you do to yourself, Miss Granger?” the nurse clucks, gently grabbing her chin and turning her face this way and that.
“I fell, I think.”
Madam Pomfrey’s eyes sharpen. “You think?”
“I was at the top of the dormitory stairs, at the railing,” she shrugs, “and then I woke up and was at the bottom. I don’t remember actually falling, but I must have.”
“Well, have a seat, then.”
She is ushered to a bed and made to sit as Madam Pomfrey runs a few diagnostic charms.
“Just a moment, dear. I’ll be right back.”
Madam Pomfrey calls in another healer, a mind specialist from St. Mungos.
“Can you tell me the names of the months, backwards?”
It takes a few moments, but it’s no real difficulty.
The healer looks up from her notes. “I’m going to list off five words and I need you to repeat them back to me.”
She nods. That sounds easy enough.
“Okay. The words are elbow, apple, carpet, saddle, and bubble,” she said, speaking the words clearly and slowly. “Elbow, apple, carpet, saddle, bubble. Can you please repeat them back to me?”
“Elbow, apple, carpet. Saddle. …bubble?”
“Good. Remember those words.”
Elbow, apple, carpet, saddle, bubble, she repeats to herself. Elbow, apple… carpet… saddle… oh god, what’s the last word, she had just said them… bubble! Elbow… apple, carpet… saddle, bubble. Bubble. Saddle, bubble.
The healer nods, scribbling down a note, before standing up and moving before her. “I want you to follow my finger with your eyes. Don’t move your head, just your eyes.”
She tracks the side-to-side, then up-and-down, movement and the healer smiles. “Good. That’s good.” The healer holds out a hand. “Now squeeze my hand.”
She hesitantly reaches out and squeezes—“Harder, as hard as you can”—and squeezes as the healer smiles encouragingly.
“Now the same with your other hand. Good.” The healer has her push, palms out, against the healer’s palms, then pull them back towards her. Everything seems to be functioning normally.
When the healer pulls out her wand, lighting it with a small lumos, checking her pupil dilation, she makes approving noises, so her eyes seem to be in good shape.
The standing exercise is a bit trickier. Keeping balance on her feet toe-to-heel with her eyes closed is difficult under normal circumstances, and absolutely hellish now, but she manages that too.
And then it begins to fall apart.
“Alright. Now, remember those five words I gave you earlier. Could you list them for me please?”
“Apple” is easy. “Carpet” comes quickly, too. A few moments, and then “saddle” surfaces with a little prodding. She can’t remember the others.
“Saddle,” she repeats slowly, brows furrowing as her mind screams in panic. She should know these words, she should remember these words, it had only been five minutes!
The healer makes a few notes, and says, “Okay. Let’s try counting backwards from one hundred, counting back by sevens.”
She blinks. That seems fairly straightforward. She doesn’t use mathematics much anymore, but subtraction is simple enough. “Okay? Uh, one hundred. Ninety-three. Eighty-six. Seventy-nine.” She starts off confident, but begins to slow as she does the figures in her head. “Seventy-two. Um, sixty-five? Fifty-eight. Fifty-two. Forty-five. Uh… thirty-eight. Thirty-one.” She looks over. The healer is writing something, face blank, with no hint as to whether she is passing this test or not. She gets the sinking feeling the answer is, not. “Twenty- twenty-three. Um, sixteen. …Wait. That’s not right.” The healer looks back up at her. “Uh, should I start over?”
“No, that’s alright,” the healer tells her. “Let’s move on.”
“Well, you have a minor concussion,” the healer states, shuffling her notes together. She likely sees the mounting panic in her eyes and smiles encouragingly, “nothing too bad. We’ll just keep an eye on it and you should be right as rain in four to six weeks, with some rest.”
“What about classes?”
“I’ll write you a note, but you shouldn’t attend lessons for at least three weeks. The brain needs rest and time to heal. It’s not something we can fix with a cast or a potion unfortunately. Our brains are much more complicated than we often appreciate, and research into concussions and brain trauma is still relatively new. But our brains are resilient, and they’re very good at fixing themselves as long as we give them the time to do so.”
She tries not to wince at the words brain trauma. It’s surely not that serious? Most of what she knows about it is from the telly, and likely incredibly sensationalized.
The healer taps a wand to a sheet of parchment, and officious-looking words form, with a fancy seal materializing at the bottom. “I will speak to the Headmaster and Matron for you, but you will need to make a decision.”
She drags her gaze up from the parchment. “A decision?”
“Yes. For the first three weeks, you need to rest your brain. No reading for the first two weeks, and after that only for short periods of time. If you listen to music, it should be quiet and calming- no Weird Sisters for a while, I’m afraid. If you decide to return to the muggle world, absolutely no screen time. This is the critical time for your brain to heal, and any overstimulation could delay your healing. After three weeks we can meet again and decide what to do from there.”
“Return?” She parrots, feeling off-kilter. It feels like she’s following a good three steps behind everything the healer says.
“If it is possible, I highly recommend you spend those three weeks at home. Most of that time will be bed rest, and I would prefer you have someone with you at all times. You may stay in the dormitories, but arrangements will have to be made to have your food brought to you. That is easy enough to arrange, but you will have to consider whether the surroundings might feel overwhelming.”
She is about to protest that she’s lived in the dormitories for years now, but stops as she thinks about it. It’s calm now, but the day had been horrible, surrounded by people and bright light and noise. And right now she really wants her mother. “I’d like to go home, if that’s okay.” She looks down and to the side, eyes suddenly watering as she begins to understand the magnitude of what is happening. Her brain is not okay, and she wants her mum right now.
“I will contact her and have her pick you up, then,” the healer says softly. “I will give her the information that I have discussed with you, and we will set up an appointment in three weeks, alright?”
She nods minutely, trying not to sniffle.
The healer nods and stands. “I know it seems like a lot right now, but I firmly believe you will make a successful recovery, dear. You are young, and our brains are so much stronger than we think. We will have you back in class and your normal activities in no time, though you will need to ease into it.” A pause, and then, “While I contact your mother, is there anything you would like me to ask Madam Pomfrey for? Anybody you would like to see?”
She hesitates. She should really tell her friends that she will be gone for a few weeks, so that they don’t worry, but she really doesn’t think she could handle that right now. It feels cowardly for a supposed lion, but, “Could I have some parchment bits? To owl them?”
The healer nods understandingly. “We’ll bring the parchment right over, and Madam Pomfrey can send them for you.”
“Wait,” she says suddenly, urgently, and the healer stops and turns, expectant. She rushes the words out before she can take them back. “What were the five words again? The ones you asked earlier.”
The healer blinks at the seemingly non-sequiter, then consults her notes. “They were elbow, apple, carpet, saddle, and bubble.”
Elbow, apple, carpet, saddle, and bubble, she mouths to herself. “Thank you.”
The next hour flies by. She writes her notes, apologizing for not being there for the next three weeks and remaining hopeful that things will return to normal after that. Her mother comes in, worried and fussing over her, and saying that her father will meet them at their house and not to worry, she won’t be left alone. The practice doesn’t need both of them, so appointments can be shifted around to accommodate their daughter’s recovery. They leave via some sort of special floo, that apparently is a lot less violent and thus easier on her head and potential nausea, and go home.
Recovery is hard. It’s the first time she has to silence her brain, to not have twenty thoughts whirling around her brain at once. It’s very difficult to think of nothing, when there are so many thoughts and ideas calling her attention. She finds out quickly that she can’t listen to any music whatsoever, even the calmest classical makes her head feel like it’s splitting.
She sleeps a lot. She’s never really napped before, not since early primary, but there is nothing else she can do.
Two weeks in, she begs for a book, a picture book, just something to do. She receives a book on video game worlds, borrowed from a neighbor. It’s full of nonsense and strange pictures, and she has a strict half-hour limit per day, but it’s better than staring at the ceiling. Guessing pictures in the off-white popcorn-like material above her head had gotten old by day three.
She finally finds something she can listen to. It’s some classical guitarist she’s never heard of before, and honestly a miracle that her father found it in his enormous mass of CDs and records, but it’s music. She’s pretty sure she listens to it hundreds of times, stereo turned low, as the soft guitar and quiet percussion floats through the air, her mother rummaging in the kitchen to refill the water glass at her side.
Near the end of the three weeks, she starts talking to herself. Not exactly, but more practicing, testing how much her brain has supposedly been fixed. There are a lot more stumbles than she’s happy with.
It’s terrifying, it feels like she’s fishing for her words in a deep lake with only a tiny aquarium net, the words she is usually so quick and easy to use easily eluding her grasp.
In one of her worse moments, she fills a box with words she’s forgotten, with words she’s afraid to forget. It makes her unhappy to look at, but unhappily relieved it’s there.
She wonders sometimes. The healer had said minor concussion, but wouldn’t she be completely fixed by now if it were minor? She hasn’t lost any mobility like a stroke patient, no amnesia, no slurring or significant brain damage like those rugby players who sometimes end up on the news, so it could be worse. But was “minor” really what she had, or was the healer just trying to keep her from panicking at that moment?
The only thing she’s even remotely grateful about is that she still can’t remember the impact. It’s upsetting that her memories of the event are gone—absolutely blank—but she can’t bring herself to be too disappointed that that is what she can’t recall. She doesn’t particularly want to remember her head hitting the floor, even if she does have questions.
After the three weeks, she can return to classes, but only one or two a day, and she returns home afterwards. She still gets headaches easily, but the progress makes her optimistic even as the slow pace frustrates her.
Most professors are accommodating. Others… not so much.
“I’m really sorry, sir, but I was out for three weeks with brain trauma,” she says earnestly on her first Monday back. “The healer wouldn’t let me even read until a few days ago, so I couldn’t even study or review the lesson materials. An extension even a few days or maybe a week would help me catch up to the rest of the class.”
The Arithmancy professor is unsympathetic. “I’m sorry, but I do not make any exceptions to my exam policy. The second exam will be Wednesday, no extensions, and will be 25% of your final grade. If you do not feel able to complete it satisfactorily, you may drop the class and retake it next year.”
She tries for another few minutes, offers the healer’s note as proof, but soon gives up. The professor will not budge and she needs to stay on his good side if she wants to pass the class.
“That cannot possibly be allowed!” Her mother is outraged on her behalf. “You had extenuating circumstances, serious medical reasons for being out! That is the best reason to have an extension, and you’re not asking for a month or to entirely skip the exam! I can write the headmaster and—“
“Please, mum,” she interrupts, tired. “It’s not worth it. I’ll do my best, and if it— if it’s not enough, I’ll take the class again next year.”
Her mother frowns, but reluctantly concedes.
In spare moments, she recites them like a prayer: “Elbow, apple, carpet, bubble. Elbow, apple, carpet, bubble… saddle. Saddle. Elbow, apple… carpet… bubble, saddle. ...Carpet, apple, elbow, bubble, saddle. Elbow, apple, carpet, bubble, saddle.” She won’t forget these words again.
It feels a little like cheating.
On her third checkup she confesses and has a new set of words: candle, paper, sugar, sandwich, and wagon. It takes longer than she likes to recall them, but this time she remembers them all.
It doesn’t feel like a victory.
She hates when it comes up in conversation.
“Oh, a concussion?” they say. “I had a concussion once. I was out of school a whole day.”
It’s a little frustrating. She knows brain trauma is different for everyone, but really? She’s missing a month and counting.
Or worse:
“You’re so lucky. I have a friend” or a nephew, or an aunt “who had a concussion, and they had to stay in a dark room for months, doing absolutely nothing” or “who has had four concussions and is afraid to hug people now because the slightest impact can cause irrevocable brain trauma, because they get worse after the first, you know” and again, “you’re so lucky.”
She can only smile and nod, but in the privacy of her own brain (bruised as it is), thinks very uncharitable thoughts.
Conversations still drag. There are pauses where she loses her train of phrase or thought and has to forge ahead (and hope they don’t notice) or change the path of conversation into a new direction (and hope they don’t notice why). Nobody seems to have noticed--or if they have they haven’t told her--but it’s still grating.
She lets them complain about her study schedules expanding, adding a few weeks on to the beginning, lets them think it’s due to the increasing workload and amount of material they are expected to know. And maybe part of it is. But she’ll never tell them that it’s mostly because her concentration slips away from her sometimes, and that some days she can’t focus no matter how hard she tries, and ends up staring at her unwritten assignments, unable to even begin to put words to paper. Her essays are still up to her usual quality, of course, but it takes a frustratingly long amount of time to complete them. She’ll never tell them how terrified she is that one day she’ll be completely unable to concentrate enough for even the simple assignments- or worse, that she’ll lose her words again, and never get them back.
It, as all things tend to do, does get better. She still feels fragile sometimes, is very suspicious of when she can’t quite find the words she’s looking for—is this something she’s lost, or merely something she’s never noticed before it became so important to take note of?—but, it gets better.
Essays become less frustrating. Lessons take less time to comprehend, making connections in her mind once again become as easy as breathing. Her friends stop hovering so much.
There are backslides.
She’s never had a migraine before, but this surely must be one. It’s agony. Her brain feels as if it is on fire, swollen and pressing unrelentingly outwards against the inside of her skull.
She sinks her teeth into her quilt to keep from whimpering, restlessly moving her head around her pillow in an attempt to get rid of the vise-like feeling around her temple.
It’s a long time before she can sleep.
A few weeks later, it happens again.
And again.
She owls her parents, and soon, every few weekends she visits a psychologist from a counseling service in London. She learns techniques for stress management, mediation and how to stop from winding her brain up when it is stressed and her thoughts painfully beyond her control (she calls it her stress-pain spiral, and she fears it and hates it like she’s never hated anything before, though she’s working on not being so afraid). She’s very grateful to have these tools at her disposal now, even if she doesn’t always have the patience or mental capacity to utilize them. Even just having them is like a comfortable security blanket for her peace of mind.
She’s even more determined to never get on a broom, and exceedingly careful on the stairs or around potential projectiles. She knows the second concussion is always worse than the first, and she can’t even fathom how much worse it can possibly get.
Her mind is her pride and her fortress, and to have it crumble is a hell she never wants to experience again.
Sometimes she still counts backwards by sevens, just to prove to herself that she still can.
One hundred.
Ninety-three.
Eighty-six.
Seventy-nine.
Seventy-two.
Sixty-five…