Written for the Snakes and Ladders Challenge on HPFC. Prompt: Pomona Sprout (character). Quite AU, it appears...
She was born in Scandinavia. Daughter of a fisherman and a greengrocer, she grew up a child of the earth. She was one of a brood of seven, a bright young girl concealed from civilization by her own existence ─ when the Sprouts had their fifth child, they moved out into the country. She was a wild child, who roamed the countryside as she pleased, not having to go to school, or to have any cares in the world. All children think that way to start out, but Pomona never stopped being a free spirit. She was one of those children you hear about in stories and legends, but never really meet: those who, like Peter Pan, are truly free.
Independent of bedtimes and school bells, she managed to take in more of her little corner of the earth than most people ever do. People are concerned with university, and money, and jobs and the future; they rarely put such a value on being a part of the world. Pomona was one with plants, animals, even the ground itself ─ don't you know the way? Here's another thing children know that grown-ups don't ─ that lying on the ground, smelling the earth, listening to the animals, just playing in the grass ─ it brings them back to their surroundings. But I digress. That was how Pomona lived her early life: absorbing the world, little bits at a time, until she could tell you the name of practically everything outside her front door. Not the scientific names, but the real names, the ones that people have been using for hundreds of years.
So, you see, she was versed in everything the world had to offer, and more so, at the tender age of ten.
Which was highly convenient, because a few months later Pomona alone received a letter from a school of magic. No one in the family could believe it, they were sure it was some joke. They had sent no application letter, Pomona didn't go to school ─ the whole business seemed rather unlikely. But the letters kept coming. Until one day, Pomona's mother told her that she would be going to a school named Hogwarts, far away in London.
To make a long story short, Pomona went to Hogwarts. School was an entirely new experience for her ─ she couldn't wander the forest, or the grounds ─ she had to do homework in the afternoons and weekends. She had to sit still for hours on end, eat strange, fussy foods, and sleep with children she hardly knew. Pomona knew her letters, of course, but scarcely anything else, so school was plain hard for her, harder even than for the other Muggle-born children who suddenly became witches and wizards. And Pomona had no spending money of her own, so her new friends in Hufflepuff always made sure to treat her to things. Pomona didn't like being treated special ─ the animals and plants of her youth weren't discriminatory! But she got used to it. Life was different as soon as she left her home and her six jealous brothers and sisters.
After her schooling, she returned back to her home in Sweden to visit her family before finding a career and making her own life in England. But to her surprise, there had been an undocumented, unmentioned blizzard of sorts, that last far longer than a normal winter. The snap freeze devastated the village, killing the crops, driving everyone away. Her family simply left, giving up their home for lost and moving south. When Pomona returned to her childhood house, there was no sign that such a blizzard had ever existed, besides the tales of locals.
Pomona used her newfound magic to aid her, she tried every means possible to find her missing six brothers and sisters, and her parents. But they were nowhere to be found, as if they had disappeared off the face of the earth.
Of Pomona Sprout's life before Hogwarts, nothing was let but a kind of ghost town, a memory, frozen forever in time.
Maybe that's why she ended up as a teacher of Herbology: to show children the power of the earth on our world.