Unable to Help
For the Snakes and Ladder Challenge (Character: Pomona Sprout), the If You Dare Challenge (Prompt #316: Children), the Hogwart's Classes Category Competition (Herbology: write about a Hufflepuff), and the Greenhouses Competition (Begonia Category: write a story without dialogue). All challenges are from HPFC.
Pomona Sprout loved plants. Plants fascinated her, how many of them had powers that even witches and wizards did not, how some could live and grow without the help of any other being, how they could live peacefully amongst themselves without thought, how none of them fought to hold the highest title. Humans certainly weren't like that. If the entire world were plants, there would be no violence or fear. And even when a plant did die, it wouldn't care; it wouldn't have ever known it was alive. Plants didn't have emotion.
If the world was all plants, she thought, this war wouldn't be happening. Hogwarts would still be safe. She wouldn't have to worry about what was going to happen to those poor, poor children who would be in her class again tomorrow. She wouldn't have to worry about what kind of torturous punishment the students would have to face from Snape and those vile Carrow siblings.
She wouldn't have to worry about students like Ginny Weasley, who showed up every day with bruises littering her body and a limp that never went away. She knew why, of course. The stupid, brave girl was in detention almost every night, and though nobody said anything, everyone knew what happened. They were tortured.
Ginny Weasley wasn't the only hurting student in her classes. Neville Longbottom, who used to be her best student, rarely finished his work, and could scarcely stay awake in her class. Luna Lovegood, who had once floated through her class with an ever present smile, now sat next to Ginny with a grim look on her face as she no doubt tried to convince Ginny to stop getting herself landed in detention.
And there were so many students gone, missing. Hermione Granger, who was always the first to volunteer information, who always seemed to know the answer. Ronald Weasley, home sick with Spattergroit, they said. Harry Potter, on the run, off on some secret mission that he supposedly got from Dumbledore. Their only hope of winning this war, gone, maybe even dead.
All the muggleborns were gone too, forced into hiding by the Ministry's new law. There was 27 muggleborns missing from Hufflepuff alone. Nearly every house was missing students, with Gryffindor and Hufflepuff missing the most. Only Slytherin seemed not to be missing any.
She was supposed to protect the students of Hogwarts. It was part of her job as their professor. But how? Snape had already reinstated Umbridge's old rule that professors couldn't speak to students about anything other than the subject they taught. She wasn't allowed to talk to students who kept getting in trouble, to tell them that staying alive is more important than making a stand. That regardless of how angry their restarting Dumbledore's Army made the Carrows, it wasn't worth the risk. That Ginny Weasley was stupid to take the fall for the rest of the group when they had proof it was someone in Gryffindor leading it. That they needed to focus on staying alive, rather than rebelling.
But she couldn't do any of those things. The only thing she and the other professors could do was not give any detentions.
She just hoped that would be enough.