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Poppy set her trunk down on her bed and turned away without unpacking it, moving briskly through the rest of the Hospital Tower. In the main wing, all was exactly as she’d left it at the end of term. Bill Weasley had been the last of her patients; she still found herself at fault when she thought of his lined face. Not everything is mendable, she muttered in her head.
Every year started more or less the same, and there was a comfort in that. The files were her first priority. The crisp student roster sat expectantly at the front of the locked box, medical charts from prior years obligingly shifting back to make space for the new files—one for each first year with known healing needs. Twenty-seven new students was rather on the low side. Only two conditions needing ongoing treatment, and neither a malady that a Muggle-born might have.
A knock on the office door pulled her from her musings: Pomona, with an ample wicker basket set to her left side. Poppy schooled her features to what she hoped was a look of warm unconcern and invited her in with a bright tone of voice.
“Good holiday?” Her social obligation, a checking of the vitals. Images came to Poppy unbidden: the whites of Pomona’s eyes and the pulse point of her wrist below the pushed-up sleeve.
Pomona answered softly, shifting the basket against her broad hip as she moved towards the counter on the other side of the room. “I missed you.”
Moments passed in silence as Pomona began to reach into her basket. Poppy, not watching, pulled out two chairs for them to sit before sighing and, at last, lowering herself into hers.
“You made it clear that you would be…occupied.” Another silence. “Were you? No, wait, you can’t say.”
“Mostly in the greenhouses, like always, to be honest. As I told them—as I told you—not every soldier needs to be on the front lines.”
Poppy pursed her lips. “That’s a Muggle metaphor anyway. Hogwarts isn’t Bosnia.”
“More’s the pity. That war’s over.” Pomona paused. “I’m sorry, I’m bringing it up again, aren’t I?” She reached into the basket again, withdrawing a muslin cloth wrapped around four sandwiches. A mint-green pitcher followed, along with two cups. “You don’t eat on the train and supper’s not for two more hours.”
Poppy rose from her chair, turning her attention to the first things Pomona had unloaded. Goldenrod, star grass, dittany—ingredients for salves to make before the start of term. A coarse burlap sack was also set on the counter, plump with something she hadn’t requested. Poppy scrunched her nose against the acrid smell and inspected the plant within—flat leaves on reddish vines and tiny white flowers standing up like pins.
“What’s this one?”
“Knotweed. For swelling.”
Poppy pulled her mouth slightly to one side. “That’s not a proven remedy.”
Pomona shrugged. “Wouldn’t hurt to add a bit.” Ice clattered in the cups as she poured from the pitcher.
Poppy scrutinized the woman before her. “Pomona, what do you know?”
Pomona seemed to consider the question before asking her own. “You want good news, or bad news, or no news at all? And…eat,” she continued, thrusting forth a sandwich.
“Might as well lead with the worst of it,” Poppy answered. A slice of cucumber snapped beneath her teeth as she bit in.
Pomona nodded grimly. “Scrimgeour didn’t resign.”
“Sorry?”
“The Ministry has fallen, Poppy. It’s being kept quiet, but…the Death Eaters are in charge. Did you notice the school roster has been changed from the June one?”
“I didn’t study it well before I left.”
“Nor read the Prophet,” responded Pomona, a reproach in her voice that Poppy knew had been gentled with difficulty over time.
“Not past the first page,” she admitted.
“Attendance at Hogwarts has been made compulsory for every half-blood or pure-blood of an age to attend. The others…aren’t allowed.”
Poppy scowled. “The Headmistress won’t stand for that.”
“I don’t know how much power Minerva has in this: the biggest decisions are up to the Board of Governors.”
“Death Eaters on the Board?”
“You know it wouldn’t be the first time.” Pomona’s nut-brown apron lifted and then flattened as she seemed to take a deep breath to steady herself. “We knew, when we lost Albus, that dark times were ahead for us. It’s darker than we thought, I’m afraid.”
“Is it just that you know more now? With the Order?”
Pomona shook her head. “There’s more—and worse—to know.”
Poppy briefly searched herself and came up, again, unready. “Tell me the good news. Please.”
Pomona lowered her cup, a faint smile on her dampened lips. “You told me about the scene in the hospital wing at the end of last term. Between Mr. Lupin and Ms. Tonks.”
“What of it?”
Pomona flashed Poppy a satisfied smile. “They married a few weeks ago.”
“They did?”
“Did he not tell you?”
Poppy looked down at her half-eaten sandwich. “We aren’t in frequent contact.”
Pomona regarded Poppy, a soft look in her eyes. “You were close, I remember. When he taught here, and…before.”
Poppy let her thoughts travel through Pomona’s words. Knocking on the door to Lupin’s office the first night after September’s full moon; he’d tried to decline the salves and analgesics, insisting he wasn’t her patient anymore. But she’d felt her heart warm at his small, careful smile, and gladly sipped the tea that he offered her in trade.
Before…Merlin knew, it wouldn’t do to have one favorite patient. Still, he needed so much and he needed it so often, and even then, she knew that few others got that close with him. She remembered Remus, age eleven, stopping on the path to the Shrieking Shack. He’d looked up at where the moon would be as though it were a thing he’d have to carry by himself. Then his shoulders bent a little: he breathed deep and then kept moving.
She remembered, at last, Remus months ago in the hospital wing. Covering his scarred face with desperate, trembling hands, sinking into the chair when they realized Albus was dead. His lack of control in that moment reminded her of his past transformations. His voice, moments later, had been chilling in its steadiness; as Ms. Tonks gripped his robes, his eyes stayed fixed on the floor.
Something had changed his mind, it seemed, to make him able to love in the midst of a war. Although a coiling sheath of bandages had been wrapped thick around his heart, one scab upon another scab until it was almost impossible to even imagine healthy tissue beneath all the abrasions…something, it seemed, had somehow cut through.
Poppy realized with a jolt that Pomona had stayed quiet, watching her, throughout all her musings, her sandwich barely touched and her position unchanged. She wondered if Pomona was thinking what she was.
Poppy gave a small nod and bent her lips into a smile. “If that’s what they want, what a blessing that they have it.”
“Even now?” There was something in Pomona’s voice–a possibility, an allusion. A swooping, furtive feeling, as the suspicion came again. That the both of them were thinking of a thing held more closely than a wedding somewhere else.
Poppy pushed the thought aside and set her own jaw. Her answer, she decided, was for Remus and Ms. Tonks. The question, therefore, must have been for only them, as well. “I remember what Minerva said, about a little more love in the world.”
“If you mean that…” Pomona had spoken in a small voice and now looked away. Poppy was suddenly aware that the light outside was fading, dusk shifting into night. She rose and tapped the gas lamp wordlessly with her wand.
Warm yellow illuminated Pomona’s face as she looked up, then down, then up again. Poppy finished Pomona’s overture with an offering of her own. “....why not us?”
Pomona nodded. “If you really have an answer, I think it’s time I heard it. We’ve danced around enough, over the years, don’t you think?”
“Danced.” Poppy paused, one eyebrow furrowing. “Is that what we would call it?”
“We’re neither of us much for dancing.” Poppy smiled sardonically at Pomona's response. She remembered her girlhood, waltzing with the boys that her father would approve of. The crinoline slip under her dress had felt as stiff as bedsheets. She’d wondered when it would happen, the flush in her cheeks and the quickening heart, the physical tells of the love she had always been trained to expect. The feelings that came instead were quiet, inconclusive—all less insistent than the shame that hit her when at last she realized what it meant to have felt them in her dorm and not her classroom.
Less insistent, indeed, than the pulse in her low center, twelve years prior at the staff table, when her hand had collided with Pomona’s as they reached for the same dish. She’d pulled back as though burned and Pomona had smiled, squeezing her shoulder with light reassurance, before dropping three spoonfuls of bright peas on the edge of Poppy’s plate.
They wouldn’t touch again for weeks; over a year went by before they kissed. A colleague, she had told herself—barely dared to think, a friend. What they had, when they had it, was quiet, undemanding. More restful than passionate, a soft jumper wrapped around her more than flames licking her heart.
It had been that way, on and off, for years, with tensions building gradually as the world darkened around them—neither one as brave as Minerva in facing things head–on. Pomona took the smallest risks available to her. Poppy bustled through the Hospital wing and took no risks at all. When the Diggory boy was pronounced dead on the old Quidditch pitch, when Potter was brought to her with glassy eyes and shaking limbs, Pomona shouted at her only once before two weeks without them speaking. Minerva had asked then, Poppy knew, and been turned down. It took Dumbledore’s murder to make Pomona join.
“And you?” Pomona had asked of her, three days after the funeral. Bill had been discharged; Poppy’s work was done for the school year. Pomona had taken her boots off at the door, a flash of one ankle before the cuff of her work trousers dropped down again.
Poppy had run her hand through her hair before she answered: it all still felt exposed without the need for her white cap. “I can’t. You know I can’t. They might go after my father, and he’s too old to move.”
Pomona hadn’t argued. She’d asked once again about the plants that Poppy wanted and set a bowl of fruit down on the counter. Poppy had closed her eyes for an instant, imagining her once-lover bent over the raspberry beds. Each fragile berry had been twisted from the stem and then held without bruising, dozens set gently atop the growing pile. She remembered Pomona’s strong, gentle hands on her vulnerable places—soft caresses, teasing touches, firm rubs of her bare shoulders at the end of a long day. An image, uninvited, of those hands around a neck, at war. Of course it won’t be like that. But how could she know?
“Be careful.”
“Stay safe.”
The two had faced each other at the hospital wing door and silence, for a moment, spread between them like a cloth. The hug before Pomona left had felt almost perfunctory; as the door closed in front of her, Poppy’d flashed back to Albus Dumbledore in that space two years prior, and the words he had spoken of a parting of the ways.
Coming and going and coming back again—it had always been like that, for the two of them.
Poppy snapped herself back to this night, to both of them, on this side of the door. This question.
Why not us?
Pomona was waiting. Had been waiting a long time. Had waited, perhaps, too long.
Poppy steadied herself and forced the words out. “I think….I think we’ve had our chance at it. There were reasons, don’t you think? If it didn’t work then…why should it be different now?” She sighed and picked at the sandwich she couldn’t seem to find an appetite for. “Love’s for the young ones. And these days, I’m not young.”
Pomona shook her head. “I don’t accept that.” She was looking at Poppy with a hard determined set to her usually mild face. “Do you think the young have their whole lives ahead of them? Is that why it’s right for them to love, and not for us? Cedric Diggory left behind a Ravenclaw girlfriend. Emmeline Vance was younger than both of us. You heard about the five year old that Greyback mauled to death last spring. Ms. Tonks is an Auror who risks her life constantly.” Pomona gestured around Poppy’s spotless infirmary, her eyes flashing. “This castle and all the young people in it…will see war.”
There was a pause, and Poppy felt Pomona watching as she scanned the infirmary, mind filled with awful thoughts of the way the beds might fill. But when she turned back, Pomona’s eyes had softened with pity, as she lifted the sack of knotweed and lowered it again. “I need things to live,” Pomona continued. “I need things to grow. If I’m going to fight, I need a bit of why we’re fighting. I want this—want us, want you— for as long as I can have it.”
Poppy’s gaze traveled the room one last time. A box half-filled with files that she now understood differently. Beds, curtains, instruments, all waiting to be used. The healing herbs, the food, the drink, all of the gifts Pomona had brought her. And finally, Pomona herself—steadfast, unassuming, beautiful, brave. Utterly impossible for Poppy to resist.
“Will it be long enough, if I kiss you tonight?”