Names

NAMES

Hermione sits on a chair by a bed, in a room with white walls. She looks at the chair, touches it and thinks "chair"; she looks at the bed, touches the cold metal of the headboard and thinks "hospital bed". Then she looks at the young, tortured face on the pillow and her brain stops working. She reaches out a hand and touches the burning skin, but her brain fails to label her feelings, fails to put a name to her pain. Her eyes wander around the white walls and she thinks "St Mungo's". That's when she starts crying.

She leaves the room to walk around the corridors for a while, to go to the staff room and get some coffee although she doesn't really want any. Trivial things like deciding whether to use a green or a yellow mug help distract her; pouring fragrant coffee into the mug and stirring it with a spoon is real and touchable. Concrete things, objects, help her relieve this nameless distress. Abstract wounds, convulsions of the mind. She's a healer unable to heal even herself.

In the metal bed in the room she has left, Harry lies twitching and thrashing, muttering in his potion-induced sleep.

* * *

Hermione stands in the drab staff room, holding a yellow mug between her hands, staring at the sickly green linoleum floor without really seeing it.

"Linoleum", her brain tells her numbly, from afar.

Logic and emotion, brain and heart. She has spent all her life trying to reconcile them. The naming of objects, creatures, concepts and phenomena - it's a way to understand the world. The intricacy of human language, of names, of terminology and definition, of semantics, connotation and perception, fascinates her. Names make the world manageable. They frighten her, all the things she doesn't know, but it comforts her to know that there are names for most things. Somewhere, at some point, someone has been there, seen and touched and analyzed, and named it all. So when she encounters a concept that is new to her, she only has to find its name to know she is not alone. Someone else has been there before her; someone else has had the same experience. There is great comfort in history, and there is great comfort in classification.

* * *

Hermione has always believed that everything can be looked up, defined, described and diagnosed. In her world, there might not exactly be sense in everything, but most things can be explained. She knows this is an odd view for a witch to hold, an odd view for someone who is able to perform magic. Perhaps she holds this view because she is Muggle-born. Her Muggle upbringing has taught her to be sceptical towards the very feature that makes her so special, so different, in that world.

Ever since she was very small, she has wanted make sense of everything, but she has often been overpowered by emotion; she has had to give in when there was no label that seemed to fit her emotion, and when emotion itself stopped her from labelling it.

That is how she feels now, when she jumps as Harry cries out in his sleep and she suddenly sees tears ooze out from under his lashes. There is no name for her pain then. Just as they still haven't found the name for what ails him.

* * *

There are two kinds of scientists, she finds.

There are the explorers, who look for the Great Discovery, the Breakthrough. Often, their enthusiasm for exploration is combined with a willingness to take great risks - more than willingness; the risk-taking gives them pleasure, excitement and satisfaction. And above all, there is the promotion of their ego. As genuine as their love for science may be, the greatest desire is for their name to be known and noted in the history books.

Then there are the archivists, the categorizers; the ones who are like herself. The ones who classify things because the world frightens them. If things have names, they become less frightening.

Harry suddenly opens his eyes as if he's been shocked awake, and he is present. Awake and aware. His eyes are filled with fear.

Hermione looks down at the white face, meets Harry's eyes and is struck by the realisation that he is going to die. And then, within a split second of that realisation, she also realises there is a very obvious and very commonplace name for what she feels.

Harry's hand clutches hers and she is amazed at how strong he is, even now. She holds it in both hers and hopes he will stay silent, not tell her his fear, not ask her any questions. She looks into his panicked eyes and wills her brain to forget any language there is.

For the first time in her life, Hermione has found something she wishes she didn't know the name of.