A/N: It's not mine.
Harry Potter and the Way of the Healer
Prologue
People call me the best Healer who ever lived. People compare my abilities in my chosen field of magic to those of Albus Dumbledore's in Transfiguration or Nicholas Flamel's in Alchemy. That's just crowd mentality. I ain't that good. Not even close. However, I worked very hard to achieve my level of skill for long years. It took me over 50 years to achieve the qualifications needed to be accepted into the position I currently occupy. You, dear reader, have the privilege of reading the life story of the Head Healer of St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, Harry James Potter. If the malady is possible to heal with current knowledge, I can probably do it. If it isn't possible, I can try to find the way, provided there is enough time.
If someone knew me before the summer after my fifth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, they wouldn't have believed the course my life took when the school year began. They'd have said that I was born to be an Auror, that this profession was the only one suitable for me, that it was the only job I'd enjoy doing. After my first Wizarding battle at the Department of Mysteries, however, I understood that if something smelled like roses and looked like roses, it was still possible that it wasn't roses at all. Not even close.
That was the case with battles and Aurors. Their job was held in highest regard, they were the role-models of every kid who lived in the Wizarding World. I wasn't an exception. My biggest dream was to enter Auror Academy and help the community by protecting it from evil. So naive... One battle was all it took for me to think if I really wanted to experience these kinds of situations every day for the rest of my life.
I started to wonder if I really wanted to fight every day, if I really wanted to see people die every day... It didn't matter, that Sirius died. I would have been just as upset if someone else, Kingsley Shacklebolt, for example, had died. It didn't matter. I didn't want to see anyone die at all!
What can I do to avoid that?, I wondered.
The first idea was to get better, much better, at fighting, to get more powerful. The problem is that I suddenly realized that it isn't possible to protect everyone. That was a foreign concept for me, but longer I thought about it, more sense it made. I'd be fortunate to get skilled enough to defend myself from Voldemort's Inner Circle. I realised that the idea of me, able to protect others from Death Eaters was just youthfully arrogant. For Merlin's sake, I haven't finished my NEWTS yet! The skill to protect myself was within my grasp, I just had to dedicate myself to it. Patronus Charm was the proof of that. With some luck, a healthy doese of talent and a lot of work, anything is possible. Now, if only my friends would be able to protect themselves too... The problem was that it wouldn't really be probable, because, frankly, Ron was too lazy to work his ass off at training and Hermione loved books and new spells too damn much. Who uses Silencio in a real fight against a wizard who quite recently escaped from Azkaban? Yes, she obviously knew her spells, but the performance when dangerous situations came up was severely lacking.
No, I understood that it's impossible to protect everyone.
What choice did I have, then? I didn't know the answer at the time. The Eureka moment came upon me after a week of thought. I was walking around the park, thinking about my life, about the prophecy, about my friends. I noticed a little girl swinging on a tire that was hanged on a tree branch. She suddenly slipped and fell down. A long pain-filled wail sounded around the area. I ran to her.
"Are you okay?", I asked, worried.
"No, my arm hurts," she answered while bravely trying to stop sobbing.
I asked her to let me see her injury. She tenderly lifted the arm and extended it towards me. It was already starting to swell. I thought that she must have broken it. Damn. Broken arms are painful. She shouldn't have to feel that pain, I thought. I meant to reach for my wand to heal the arm, but then remembered that I can't really use magic. Plus, I didn't know any appropriate spells. Madam Pomphrey was always casting them silently. Bugger. I vaguely remembered Moony casting Ferula on Ron's leg at the Shrieking Shack, but if the memory served me right, that spell only conjured a cast. It didn't really heal. Damn. I didn't really know what to do, so I asked the girl where she lived. She managed to stutter her address between sobs. I took her by the healthy hand and turned towards Wisteria Walk, where she lived.
When I brought the girl, Natalie, home, Elizabeth, the mother of the hurt child, suspiciously looked at me. She must have heard Dursley's stories about me. She warely asked her daughter what happened. When the girl explained her accident, the mother started thanking me profusely for bringing her little one home and insisted that I should come in and have some tea with chocolate biscuits. I pointedly looked at Natalie. She sobbed at the right moment and the gratitude the mother was feeling towards me evaporated in an instant, replaced by overwhelming concern for her daughter's well-being and health. As I often whisper to myself after an examination nowadays, Youngsters...
After I came home, I lay down on my lumpy bed and tried to sleep. That wasn't as easy as it sounds, because the vision of the little girl falling from the tire-swing and starting to cry kept repeating itself in my mind's eye. I remembered the feeling of uselessness that overcame me when I realized that I couldn't help her even if I actually was allowed to use magic. This sensation of helplessness I felt was really similar to the feeling I experienced when Dolohov struck Hermione at the Department of Mysteries, only not that intense.
Suddenly, an idea struck me. It's true that I can't hope to protect everyone, but what if I could at least try to be able to heal them when they actually get hurt? That idea seemed somehow attractive to me. For a short time, I was blown away by such a wave of enthusiasm that nothing could have stopped me from becoming the best healer the world has ever seen. I believed that it couldn't be that hard. You point your wand, say a spell and voila, your patient is healthy again. This "cloud nine" feeling took ten minutes to evaporate.
Then I was struck by the grim reality. I remembered Hermione telling me that Healer training's very gruelling. They also needed Potions. That really blew the balloon of my enthusiasm. It wasn't likely that I managed to score Outstanding on my Potions OWL. Exceeds Expectations? Possible. Acceptable? Likely. Outstanding? When Hell froze over. But then I realized that I didn't need the training for the name and prestige it would undoubtedly give me. I needed it for the skills. Madam Pomphrey would surely teach me some spells, right? The potions aren't really practical in a battlefield too, right? That's what I thought then, of course. It's hard to believe how naïve I was, but that's for the later parts of the story.