Scars

"You know I enjoy seeing you on your visits to Hogwarts. I would, however, like to see you just once when you were not bleeding, sneezing, or broken out in a rash from messing about with some dangerous plant. I cannot imagine what you and Pomona were thinking."

Neville finds it oddly comforting that Madam Pomfrey still chides him the way she did when he was a first year. (Since Gran died two years ago, no one but Madam Pomfrey has chided him - it's not the sort of thing one does to a war hero.) The only note that throws him - still - is hearing her refer to Professor Sprout by her first name. He has finally stopped hesitating before addressing her as "Pomona," but he still thinks of her as "Professor Sprout," even six years after his graduation. Just as he still thinks of the Hogwarts nurse as "Madam Pomfrey." Never, ever, as "Poppy."

"We were thinking that Hogwarts was the safest place to experiment," he says, managing to swallow the "ouch!" he wants to add as she dumps a potion over his right arm. The thin gash that spirals from his wrist to his shoulder stops bleeding.

"There is no safe place to experiment with cross-breeding."

"I didn't say 'safe.' I said 'safest.'"

"You two are getting as bad as Rubeus. What on Earth possessed you to cross a Devil's Snare with a Razor Reed? They're both already dangerous enough on their own," she says, as a bandage winds itself (under her careful direction) up his arm.

"We're trying to breed a defensive plant. For the borders of Hogwarts. The ones that are hard to get to from the castle."

"The war is over."

"Yes, but you can have to defend things in peace time. And a Razor Snare would work well for that."

"Except for the part where it attacks the person it's supposed to be defending?"

"I just got too close."

"Humph," she says. "I'm afraid that's going to leave a scar."

"Razor Reed usually does," Neville agrees.

"You don't seem concerned."

Neville shrugs. "It's not like we don't all already have scars."

"Humph," she says again.

He realizes a moment too late that she might consider it a criticism. After all, she performed much of the healing that left them all with scars. But that had been battlefield healing - rushed, with no time for finesse, no care or thought for the cosmetics of life after the war. It had been don't-let-him-die, others-are-waiting, fix-it-fast, move-on. And the result is that most wizards over twenty have some scar or another. At least, most of the wizards in the circles Neville moves in.

If Neville were to look around the table at the group that gathers every Wednesday night for dinner, he could easily catalogue their battle scars. He could do it here and now - he doesn't need to see them. He has two of his own, a small one just below his right eye, and another - much larger - an angry stripe across his chest. Harry has one that crosses his forehead (dividing his earlier, more famous scar) and another that covers the whole of his right palm, from something that happened to his wand in the fight with Voldemort that he still doesn't talk about.

Hermione's is on her left leg, perfectly straight, an inch wide, and running from her ankle to her hip. Ron is missing two fingers on his right hand, and there's a place on his head where the hair still hasn't grown back and probably never will. Ginny keeps her hair long and wears scarves to cover all the scars on her neck and shoulders. Luna still limps, and keeps her hair short so that the world can see her missing ear.

In the early days, Neville paid attention to these things, stole glances at the others' scars just as they stole glances at his. But now he doesn't really see the marks, or rather, he doesn't seen them any differently than he sees Ginny's red hair or Harry's green eyes. He's more struck by the people like Madam Pomfrey, who don't have scars, who spent the war in the relative safety of the hospital wing, waiting for the evacuated wounded.

And then he realizes that she does have scars. That the danger in learning not to see the scars that show is that you soon forget to look for the ones that don't.

"You kept us from dying," he says.

"Not all of you," she replies, and he knows that he was right, that his comment had upset her. "Cedric Diggory, Fred and George Weasley, Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil, the Creevey brothers, Katie Bell, Ernie Macmillan and Justin Finch-Fletchley, Albus, Minerva . . . all dead in my hospital wing." She says the names like a mantra, a litany, the beads on a rosary of loss.

"Ginny Weasley," he says. "Charlie Weasley. Remus Lupin. Susan Bones. Dean Thomas. Oliver Wood. Padma Patil. Filius Flitwick. Alastor Moody. Nymphadora Tonks. Hermione Granger. Me. All alive because of you. And we all probably ought to be dead." He places his good hand on her shoulder. "You kept us from dying."

"But not from getting hurt. Not from having scars."

"No one could have, Poppy." And for the first time, it feels right and easy and natural to use her given name. "No one could have," he repeats. "So, thank you. For all the scars."

"For all the scars?"

"Yes. For the scars. We have them because, yes, we got hurt. But we also have them because we're still alive. Because our wounds healed."

Poppy looks at him for a long moment, then briskly wipes her eyes. "Well," she says, "in that case, you're welcome. But do stop trying to undo my good work messing about with dangerous plants. Razor Snare, indeed."

"Yes, Madam Pomfrey," he says, just as he would have said it at the age of eleven.

They'll always have scars, seen and unseen. But given enough time, they'll fade, and eventually even no one else will really see them (the bearer will always know where they were - or still are). The problem, Neville knows, is that these aren't the sort of scars you outlive. There won't be enough time in their lives for these scars - his arm, his chest, his cheek, her heart, her mind, her spirit - to disappear completely. But Neville thinks Poppy's have just faded ever so slightly.

And really, that's the best you can hope for with scars.