Just a little drabble series revolving around Madam Pomfrey. I might write more stories with her sometime, i'm really obsessing over Poppy lately and I have a serious Poppy/Remus headcanon haha.
"Poppy, this is the good ol' muggle way of fixin' hurts." Her father waved the bandage in the air with a grandiose flourish before wrapping it around her arm. Sometimes, her father liked to pretend he was a muggle. She always thought it was odd but brushed it off as an occupational hazard. As head of muggle liaisons he was always oft to teach Poppy about the muggle world. Aren't they silly? He would always ask to conclude each lesson. Poppy would nod obediently, her small hands reaching out for her father. As if charmed, her father always managed to be there when she needed him. A self-sufficient yet clumsy child, every so often Poppy would suffer from some mishap. But for every scrape, scratch, or scuff her father was there to scoop her into his arms and patch her up. She thought of him when she handled the course white cloth, could summon images of him from the small patterns of red soaking in.
She had seen boys bleed and they were all the same. No blood ran thicker, nor did any blood flow with greater purity. All boys bled and they had needed her to mend them. Bawdy and loud creatures, they taunted her gap-teeth and pushed her to the ground. But when they bled, they asked Poppy to help them. She never asked questions, only quietly took out the kit her father had given her and went to work. A boy that had had incessantly teased her one day fell off of his brother's broom. Swearing her to secrecy, he asked Poppy to help him, his leg covered in blood. She had agreed, cleaning the wound and taking out her needle and thread she used for cross-stitching. As he screamed in pain, tears pooling in his eyes, she had expected to feel a sense of vengeance. Yet, she understood he was a boy, and boys couldn't be changed.
Poppy had never been married. While she trained in St. Mungo's she had been proposed to several times but none of such instances had ever been taken seriously. She had never really wanted a family, not one for the white picket fence dream. The Pomfreys were small and close knit; just Mum, Dad, and Poppy. Her fragile adolescent heart's hope for love had been dashed by the cruelty of her peers. Who would marry such a mousey, buck-toothed girl? She assured herself she was married to her work, that Hogwarts and its students were all she needed to be happy. Poppy tried to keep from being bitter but the constant reminders of students never helped. Madam Pomfrey. Madam Pomfrey. Madam Pomfrey. Without a ring on her finger, the title insinuated matronliness. The other faculty, recognizing her distaste with the unflattering honorific, would lovingly call her Poppy. And yet, she missed the days of Healer Pomfrey. The sense of importance, the lack of underlying shame, the unification with others of her craft.
Welcomed into the house Ravenclaw with a tentative applause, she sat herself awkwardly between a group of boys that had spoken over her. In wise old Ravenclaw, where those of wit and learning, will always find their kind. But Poppy's kind was an entirely new kind and she found that friends were sparse over the years. She might have hoped to be a gallant Gryffindor or a helpful Hufflepuff or perhaps a sagacious Slytherin. She had no intention of being ostentatiously bright or particularly witty and preferred to blend into the background. Poppy proved skilled at anonymity, keeping mostly to herself but lending her kindness when needed. Throughout her first years she was a wisp with straight blonde hair and disproportionate teeth. She matured when her father left, focusing herself wholeheartedly on pursuing a career in healing. The competitive nature of Ravenclaws resulted in her victimization as her marks rose. Never much for the spotlight, her prowess in potions and charms marked her as an unwitting rival. To belittle classmates for personal gain was unfathomable for Poppy, who often martyred herself.
Sometimes scars were unavoidable. Small reminders of past tumbles and falls, Poppy had learned to gauge which injuries would create lasting memories. The quidditch players were speckled in little pink and white lines, barely standing out against their sweat slicked skin. She saw them all the time, minor scratches and scrapes that hadn't warranted a visit to a healer and resulted in faint lines. But then there were the wounds that would never heal. The great gashes that marred smooth flesh eternally, raised and jagged, horrifically permanent. She saw them on her father, his left side mangled and grotesque. His face was a patchwork of atrocities that told of one dark night, his surviving brown eye devoid of passion. The boy that became a man had unfading scars, too. She wanted to reach out to brush his cheek, to run her fingers against the tissue damage spanning across his face. Maybe she could heal them with a touch, she thought, maybe she could erase them. She didn't want him to feel the pain her father felt.
His classroom always had a faint scent of smoke from a potion gone wrong. She loved that strange mixture of scents, knowing that they could turn into something extraordinary, something for good. The bubbling of cauldrons played a gentle soundtrack to her work, her hands busily working. Mixing and stirring and pouring and mixing and stirring. Carefully, so carefully, it all took such precision. She had a talent, he had said. He called her brilliant, rested his hand in between her shoulder blades. And on certain occasions, she would gather with students like her, students who were brilliant. Pure of blood but unimpressive in lineage, she felt minuscule compared to the others of the club. She began to hate it, the table garnished with ambitious young wizards and witches. Poppy never minded her professors' praise, she wanted to do her best, but she couldn't boast about it. There was more to her than potions and charms, more to her than some silly little club.
She knew she should like poppies but she never had. Poppy had always liked sunflowers. They reminded her of home, of the little yellow kitchen with the little table wearing a sunflower adorned table cloth. When she thought of a beautiful world, she did not envision seas of green generously sprinkled with pops of red. No, she saw oceans of bright yellow, of gold and brown and green. She imagined herself running through fields, dodging through the tall stalks, and finally falling against a bed of the beautiful flowers. Poppy never wanted to be a poppy, a plump little red blossom so easily trampled. She never wanted to be the awkward one that no one really considered a great beauty. She never wanted to be easily attainable and ordinary, a quick pluck from the garden. Poppy wanted to be recognized as something extraordinary, as a force in itself that leapt from the ground and reached for the sky.
"do you like them, healer pomfrey?" the patient asked her with a nervous smile. The eighteen year old nodded, cradling the indigo vase with two single sunflowers that seemed to grow before her eyes. She gave him a chaste kiss on his scarred cheek once horrifically burned by a chinese fireball.
During her second year away at hogwarts her father was attacked, morphing from man to beast. The change she witnessed was never exclusive to the full moon; rather, it encompassed his entire being. He no longer could feel the way he used to feel, the passion had dissipated and left a lonely and broken shell. She loved her father despite it all. Albus had called it her strength, her infallible love. She could never fear the wolf, it was part of him. She could never fear her father. Poppy wanted to cure him, to ease his pain, to bring back his smile. But he left her and her mother, unable to put them in harm's way any longer. Years after her father had vanished, she found herself charged with safeguarding a young wolf. Albus entrusted her, despite her inexperience, to help the boy have the happiness she had wanted for her father. She watched him grow from boy to man, ever waiting in the ward to heal him and his friends. In that boy she had sought a resolution to her past but instead found hopes for a future.