The Matron

Night.

Saturday, Sept. 14

Poppy Pomfrey generally liked her job, stressful as it could sometimes be. Children could be quite... dumb, you see, and in the twenty-four years that the witch had worked at Hogwarts, she had become all too familiar with that headache-inducing (and oftentimes, rather amusing) truth.

Every week, there was at least one potential recipient of the Darwin Award walking into her infirmary looking shifty-eyed, and sporting some sort of self-inflicted magical malady or other effect.

More aggravating, were the ones who abstained from coming to her by themselves for whatever reason, hoping that whatever was wrong would simply fix itself, while the absolute worst were those who tried to fix the problem by themselves. Emphasis on tried.

One such student, a third-year Gryffindor boy, had come in a few years ago, his tongue a wriggling, two-foot long tentacle sticking out of his mouth, and his nose missing.

Apparently, he’d tried to transfigure his tongue for some sort of prank, but had botched the spell terribly. Then, despite that his transfiguration skills were wholly lacking even when his tongue was fully functional, he’d tried to fix it himself, only to end up cursing his nose off too.

Fortunately, whether from accidental magic or just accidental luck, something he did caused him to start breathing with his ears instead, saving the poor fool from suffocating.

And that was simply one of many such occurrences that Poppy had had to suffer through over the years.

As bad as the ones who were victims of their own stupidity were however, nothing beat the ones who were simply victims, and, paradoxically enough, they were also the ones who made Poppy like her job the most.

In the twenty-four years that Poppy Pomfrey had worked at Hogwarts, there had only ever been five incidents that counted as a medical emergency, and two of them had happened within the last twenty-four hours, with, amazingly enough, the same two students at its epicenter; first-years, Hermione Granger, and the boy-who-lived, Harry Potter.

When Minerva had brought the two in earlier in the day, after their ill-fated battle with the basilisk (and was the revelation that there had been one of those things sitting under the castle for centuries not simply terrifying?), Poppy had run some preliminary diagnosis of the two and shuddered.

There had been the clear signs of phoenix tears having been used as a first response treatment, and while it was a wondrous substance, as well as the only reason the children were still alive, there wasn’t enough phoenix tears in the world to mask the leftover traces of the litany of injuries both had suffered from Poppy’s skilled eyes.

Shattered bones, pulverized organs, extreme blood loss, shards of the skull embedded an inch deep into a swollen brain, and that was just for the boy; Poppy had found such high concentrations of inert basilisk venom in the girl that it was like someone had hosed her down with the stuff.

Simply put, it was bad, but thanks to the phoenix tears they’d received, it was (relatively) easy to fix, especially in Miss Granger’s case.

So, she’d fixed them. Patched them back up, good as new, thankful that the excitement for the day had passed.

Then night had come, and with it the worst attack on Wizarding Britain in recent memory, and as Poppy Pomfrey stared at the same two first-years being carried back into her infirmary, again with grievous wounds, she remembered why she liked her job; it was because of the good she could do.

Poppy Pomfrey just wished that the world would stop giving her opportunities to do good.

★★★

The Auror

Morning.

Sunday, Sept. 15

Barely anyone remembered it now, but once, not too long ago, the brilliant, paranoid, and scarred man now known to the world today as Mad-eye Moody, was a brilliant, cocky, and—dare I say—good-looking boy called Alastor Moody.

Alastor Moody (Al to his friends) had graduated from Hogwarts like most of his peers, at eighteen. Unlike most of his peers however, Alastor had registered for the Auror Academy entrance exam right away.

He’d passed with flying colours on the first try, and been accepted into the Auror Academy, an undertaking which took three years, and this was the first step on the journey of a thousand miles that led to the man named Mad-eye Moody.

Three years passed, and Alastor came out of the academy not the cocky boy that had gone in, but a confident man. A leader.

Soon he’d won the respect of his colleagues, the admiration of his subordinates, and the love of a beautiful witch he’d had every intention of spending the rest of his life with.

Then his friends began to die.

They’d been told the risks of the job back at the academy, made aware of them; but it was one thing to know that you might have to watch your friends die, and it was something entirely different to live it.

Fifteen years into his career as an Auror, Alastor was the last of his graduating class. His love was long gone by then, and somewhere along the way, he’d lost an eye, a leg, and much of the man that he’d been.

He could have stopped then. He should have stopped then. But it was the only thing he had left. And he was very, very good at it.

So Moody kept fighting. Through Voldemort’s war as it came and went, and for a decade after it, he fought.

He fought and fought, until one day, he saw the witch who he’d wanted to spend his life with all those years ago, shopping for school supplies with her thirteen-year-old in Diagon Alley, and suddenly, Moody had realized just how tired he was.

That was one month ago, in August. And it was the day that he’d made the decision to retire.

Being the wizard that he was though, Moody could not just bring himself to get up and leave the Auror Corps, so the decision was made that he would stay the remainder of the year, and come January, for the first time in some three decades, he would be an unemployed man.

So, naturally, here he was in Albus’ office not even one full month later, on the morning after Death Eaters set Hogsmeade on fiendfyre, successfully burning down half the village.

It was a disaster.

Thirteen dead and fifty-four injured, eight of whom were in critical condition at St. Mungo’s.

Moody had seen many terrible things over the years, and while some of them trumped this in ghastliness, few could compete with the sheer scale of this disaster.

In fact, the only one in recent memory that he could recall would be Sirius Black’s decimation of that muggle street the night he killed Pettigrew.

Moody’s lips involuntarily curled with distaste from the memory, then it curled even further from the incessant rambling of the Minister.

God, the man was an incompetent idiot. One who, like any proper idiot, seemed completely incapable of seeing that he was in fact an idiot. Actually even going so far as to consider himself some sort of savvy diplomat.

Ironically enough, Moody knew that this was the only reason why the Wizengamot had assigned Cornelius Fudge the position of Minister in the first place, and why his assignment as Minister has been the only unanimous one in... probably a century; the man was an idiot. More importantly, the man was a pliable idiot. And everyone but him knew it.

Fortunately, Moody could see the kids of the hour ascending up to Dumbledore’s office then, so he knew he wouldn’t have to put up with Fudge for much longer.

Before today, Moody had never given the Potter boy much thought. Sure, the events of that Halloween night were remarkable enough, but the scarred Auror had been fully aware that the boy had been a toddler at the time.

Consequently, if the tyke had had anything to do with that night’s events, then it had been completely accidental, and no one deserved praise for something they accomplished accidentally, in Moody’s opinion. Not even when it’s offing a Dark Lord.

So Moody observed the boy, and his friend, the Granger girl, when they came up into the office, and while they weren’t the only reason, they were a not insubstantial part of why, when, after the kids had left, Dumbledore suggested he take the newly open position of Defense professor, Moody didn’t immediately blow off the old wizard.