Divination

"You fell down the stairs, dear?"

"Yes. I fell down." Pause. "The stairs. I fell down the stairs."

He's lying, of course. She might have been a Hufflepuff, but over fifty years of being a school nurse have given her plenty of experience in detecting falsehoods, from an attack of chicken pox cleverly disguised as some fatal disease to a broken arm that isn't really broken, so can I please play Quidditch today, Madam Pomfrey? She knows, moreover, that however erratic and downright bizarre the stairs at Hogwarts can be, they never would have left a trail of long, thin scratches along nearly all his exposed skin - very little, thank Merlin, but just enough to require more help than a first year's experience. And it doesn't take a genius to figure out where he went after running out of dinner tonight. This isn't the first time the normally-fearsome forest has served as a haven for a hurt, lonely student; when the scratches left by branches somehow don't hurt nearly as much as verbal lacerations. This isn't the first time she's found herself facing a tired old man who stares out at her from behind an eleven-year-old's face.

Perhaps she's being foolish, to want to heal more than just the physical wounds. But she doesn't like how exhausted he looks, doesn't like the way even his careful impassivity can't quite hide just how deep even three months of total isolation can cut. Too brilliant to ever be average, too prickly to ever be well-liked, too proud to ever be pitied, and yet too lonely to be content in isolation... How many people, she wonders, have ever considered the possibility that this child, however strange, cold, or awkward, might still be a boy like any other? That he really can cry? That the insults really do hurt him? That no matter how many Dark Arts manuals he might read, he still needs a hug sometimes?

She knows the eventual result, even if he doesn't yet. He'll spend seven years here, each day heaping ostracism upon insult, until finally he'll do the inevitable - the inevitably human response - and seek out some place where he can be valued. And for a Slytherin wizard whose family is firmly grounded in the Dark Arts, there's only one place he can possibly go to.

She knows this because it's the same pattern, always the same pattern that begins and ends in the faces of never-innocent children who she once tended to. Always the same squandering of gifts by a wizarding world too blind and stubborn and arrogantly sure of its absolute superiority to accept any differences. Hardly any wonder that it's always the bright ones, the powerful ones who turn Dark, is it? And it doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't have to be that way. But when they're cast out, hurt and alone, what possible reason do they not have to turn their back on the Light that shunned them? Some are strong enough to resist that acceptance, of course, but for those who can't find the motivation to resist, well...

She's seen it more times than she cares to think about, seen it and grieved over it, for these unacceptably exceptional people who were simply too bright for any of the accepted boundaries to hold. Grieved not so much for the wasted lives and trampled gifts, but for the fact that no matter what she knows, she can't do anything. She can speak up, but in the end, the cycle will keep repeating until there's no one left to repeat it.

She's seen it play through, the whole vicious cycle that always begins as the procession of scared, closed-off children who don't have the learning to heal themselves yet, and ends in the obituary page of the Daily Prophet. What can you do, in the end, besides love them and heal their wounds as best you can?