Disclaimer: The world and characters of Harry Potter are J.K. Rowling's.
The section separators are quotes from The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot, which you should read as soon as possible if you haven't.
This fic is for Paula (Exceeds Expectations), because she's worth it.
the eyes are not here
This.
She lingers over dandelions, lips pursed just so. She passes wells and fountains and her fingers brush coins in her pocket that are too large and too strange to throw in. She watches faithfully each night from her window for stars.
But deep down, she knows what magic is, and there is none in the air or the water or pitiless sky.
You are too old for wishes, she thinks with a stinging voice that isn't hers, but her eyes stay locked on the clock in the infirmary until it ticks past to 11:12.
Poppy closes her eyes.
there are no eyes here
This is.
He never calls her Madam Pomfrey, but simply Poppy, her name (called, she thinks roughly, because he's dead to me and to the world). And that is wrong, improper, but she likes to be Poppy. It has been so long since she's been just herself. It's been so long since she's been herself at all.
What makes her heart ache all the more fiercely is the knowledge that everything could have been okay. It could have been right for a while, that sense of terrible wrongness gone once he'd graduated (but he was of age the whole time!).
No, it had to be ruined by explosions and fingers and Azkaban, oh Azkaban, and she wouldn't have believed it except that it had to be true, because Albus Dumbledore believed it.
But still, even when it's not the first star of the night, she always wishes on Sirius.
in this valley of dying stars
This is the.
She sees him after he's escaped. He's a member of the Order of the Phoenix again, somehow, and while everyone panics to see him before Dumbledore explains, she's quiet.
Too quiet, really.
If he had come to me, she thinks, not really taking in Dumbledore's words as he speaks to the Order, would I have turned him away? Even if he was guilty?
Poppy looks at the man in front of her - no longer the handsome, arrogant, prankster young man she knew, but hardened and broken with too much in his eyes - and it worries her that she doesn't know the answer to her own question.
He follows her outside as a dog one day during the summer, when an Order meeting's held at Hogwarts, but she doesn't notice.
She lifts the dandelion to her mouth, and almost -
Sirius wuffles, and the seeds scatter in the Scotland wind before she knows what to wish for.
Oh, no, she always knows what to wish for - but she can't say, or else it won't come true.
in this hollow valley
This is the wish.
It's silly for a witch not to believe in magic, so Poppy does. The kind with her wand, at any rate, fingers twirling, words murmured so wounds stitch themselves together again. Like magic, don't you know?
But she doesn't believe in fate, because she can't, because her wishes have never been granted in all these years she's tried and tried and tried.
"Star light," she says, because she's Poppy Pomfrey and she does not give up. "Star bright, first star I see tonight. I wish I may, I wish I might, have this wish I wish tonight."
She pauses, but she wishes what she always does.
For us to be whole again.
If fate does exist, it'll know who and what she means.
(She hopes.)
this broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
The curtains in her room mock her.