Thicker than Water (Marauders Era)

28 September, 1989 - Pride

In the weeks after Bertie's death, the Mungo Bonham ward felt quiet and empty, like the room itself was mourning the passing of a man who had walked over its floors for more than fifty years. The atmosphere wasn't helped by the fact that three of the five healers who worked there had known and loved their gentle coworker. The end result was that the silence in the ward seemed to stretch and bend and ache, seemed to live and breathe and strangle them all.

Lavinia had no doubt that it was very strange for the younger two workers in the ward, a man named Issac Brooks who had just recently been promoted to a full healer and a young woman named Heather Thomas, who had only recently finished her courses and was now a full time trainee. Neither of them had ever met Bertie as the old man had preferred to stick to his home after his retirement, a choice informed largely by the decline in his health that had made apparation more strenuous than it was worth.

Lavinia kept wishing she could have introduced them to Bertie so he could have offered them the wisdom she had so appreciated every time he'd spoken to her. She kept wishing she still had him to visit in the evenings that sometimes felt endless now, thanks to his absence. Most of all, she kept wishing he was somehow still here, somehow still able to pass on his many years of experience.

But he wasn't. So Lavinia did her best to teach the younger healers what she knew, even as a nagging voice in her head kept telling her that it wasn't enough. That Bertie would have done it better, would have added some life lesson to go with a new spell or technique. Lessons she didn't think she was at all qualified to give. But she tried anyway, especially with Heather Thompson, who was so young and so new and so... caring.

Without really meaning to, Lavinia rather took the girl under her wing. Perhaps Robert noticed this because their shifts started overlapping almost every day that they worked. Lavinia didn't mind at all. Heather, as it turned out, was a hard working girl and an astute pupil. It wasn't really that the girl was particularly intuitive, as Lavinia came to learn, but rather that Heather simply worked harder than anyone Lavinia had ever met. She seemed to come in every day having practiced whatever spells and potions and theories Lavinia had taught her until Lavinia simply ran out of useful things to teach because Heather never seemed to need to be told anything more than once.

So Lavinia started showing her other things when work in the ward was slow, which it almost always was these days, something Lavinia had to keep reminding herself was a good thing even if it sometimes left her rather bored. In those quiet afternoons, though, Lavinia filled the time by teaching Heather her best cleaning spells, little tricks to get sheets and clothes to fold themselves, how to press a shirt or dress, how to mend holes in clothes with a wave of her wand and so on and so forth. They were always small things and more often than not came up because Heather asked. Because Heather seemed to want to know everything that could ever possibly be useful.

So it was that by the time the girl had been working in the ward full time for a few months, Lavinia was more than slightly fond of her and she liked to think that the reverse was true as well. She wouldn't really have called the girl her friend, simply because they had never met outside of work, but they had talked during the more mundane tasks of their shifts and gotten to know each other reasonably well.

Heather, as it turned out, had not lived an easy life and had had to work hard every single day to get where she was, which explained what Lavinia thought was a mildly insane work ethic. The young woman had grown up without much money, a situation made worse when she was eight and her mother had died shortly after giving birth to her little sister. They'd been raised by their single father until a year ago when he had passed and Heather had been left, newly graduated from Hogwarts, to take care of her ten year old sibling.

All this Lavinia pieced together from passing comments and conversations along with information about the sort of person Heather was. And that person was dedicated beyond all belief. She worked hard to scrape by and didn't mind the stress of it all as long as her sister was happy and healthy. She was a determined young woman, not ambitious, really, because she didn't care if she made her mark on the world, but rather absolutely devoted to making the best life she could for the people she loved. She was actually a bit like James, if James had been hard working and a bit less prone to crude jokes. So really, she wasn't all that like James, but the loyalty... Lavinia had been fortunate to know one person in her life who had that kind of loyalty. To find another... she didn't know who had blessed her, but she was sure that someone had.