In spite of herself, Constance Merriweather was rather excited about the young university student coming to visit her that afternoon.

She spent her morning cleaning house, partly with her wand and partly the old muggle way, sweeping and doing the dishes manually while her wand minded the lunch she was preparing and tidied up a bit in the parlor. A quarter 'til Tibirius Rosenblat was scheduled to arrive, she took fresh cookies from the oven with gooey chocolate chips and piled them onto a three-tiered tea service, and with a flick of her wand, a steaming pot was on the parlor table, along with the notes she had carefully compiled the night before - things she wanted to be sure to tell the young, aspiring mediwizard about the things she had found most helpful while studying and during her time at Mungos.

Remember that each patient you serve is not just a project for you to work on, but someone's mother, father, sister, brother, daughter, son, friend... They are people with lives and stories, ambitions and sorrow. Never overlook them in the name of practice.

That she had circled and underlined thrice to be sure she got that information deposited securely into the boy's mind. It was, after all, the most important, often untaught, element of becoming a mediwitch or wizard that there was.

Prompt to the schedule, there came a ring upon the door bell and Constance waved her wand to vanish away her apron, tidied her hair nervously, and went to answer the door.

There on the step was a young man and a young woman. "'ello, you must be Tibirius," she greeted them, then looked to the young woman. "And you are...?"

"This is Constance, my girlfriend," Tibirius said, turning to smile widely, his eyes twinkled in a very lovely way and Constance Merriweather thought he was a very nice young boy, and how she would have been delighted by him, too, had she been their age. "I told you about her in my owl?"

"Yes, yes you did - the namesake." She smiled and held out her hand to the young woman. "It is lovely to meet you, young lady... It isn't often that I've met another Constance - it isn't a very common name."

The younger Constance smiled, "Not at all! I believe you're the first I've ever met. Constance Kirkkengaard," she said, taking the woman's hand fondly.

A bit of a tingle went up the elder Constance's arm at the touch of the young girl's palms. Such a lovely young couple, she thought, how pleasant they both seemed. It warmed her heart and she felt a spark of joy and nostalgia for memories she thought she had long since lost... memories of her late husband, whose smile had warmed her precisely the way the young girl's did. 

"Everyone calls her Connie, though," Tibirius put in. "Isn't that right, Con-Con?"

Connie looked at Tibirius, "Why, yes that's true Tie."

Tibirius laughed.

Constance waved for the pair of them to come in, and she led the way from the door into the parlor, waving her wand to close it behind them once they'd entered. 

"You have a lovely home," Connie said, looking about.

"Why thank you, dear," Constance Merriweather said. She was rather proud of the little home. It was the first that she and Archie, her late husband, had shared and it had been a long forty-seven years that she'd worked at making it homey and special to their tastes. It was clear that she enjoyed the colour yellow, for there was a great deal of yellow shades that filled the home. The couches were yellow and the carpets were a deep gold colour. Orange and brown knitted throws hung upon the backs of the couches and a large flowering plant grew on an end table with yawning yellow petals. She directed them to sit on the couches and offered the tiered tea platter to them, the cookies still warm from the stove. "Now don't spoil your dinner, son," she clucked in amusement as Tibirius heartily took two cookies at once.

"Oh I won't m'am," he assured her, chomping into the first of his cookies with glee.

"He's a bottomless pit," giggled Connie. 

"Positively bottomless," Tibirius agreed once he'd swallowed.

Constance was pleased - it had been some time since her cookies had been so greatly enjoyed by anyone. Her son, after all,  was off traversing the world some where in hunt of dragons and adventure- and Archie himself was gone these three years now. She smiled, "Help yourself to as many as you'd like."

"Thanks," Tibirius said with enthusiasm.

Constance turned to Connie. "Any relation to Soren Kirkkengaard?" she asked.

Connie shook her head, "None that I know of. Is he a friend of yours?"

"We went to school together," Constance replied. "We lost touch after he dropped out of the internship at Mungo's, though. I suppose he probably took up a different residency elsewhere."

"I wish I knew of him," Connie replied, "I'd offer to reunite you."

Constance smiled.

"Thank you again for meeting with me... er, us," Tibirius said. He was reaching for a third cookie as he spoke. "It really will be a big help as I write my paper. You've no idea how big a help." He cleared his throat and pulled out his own notepad, which he balanced on the arm of the couch he was siting on. 

"It's funny that the university is assigning so many papers of this sort," Constance said with a chuckle. "I reckon they must have only recently declassified my cases, seeing as I've had two different university students reach out in the past month."

Tibirius looked up from his notepad and glanced at Connie, then back to Constance. "You have?" he asked in surprised.

"Yes, yes - perhaps you know the other student...." Constance paused, trying to recall the lad's name. She frowned - it was suddenly escaping her. "Oh what was his name? Mind, he wasn't as much of a gentleman as you are..." she winked at Connie, who giggled, and then continued to press herself. "Oh dear, I'm just so terrible with names, I do declare I'd completely forget my own if I hadn't worked it so deep in my mind in my seventy three years..." She tapped her chin, then said, "I believe it was... Barnie or Barnaby."

Tibirius shrugged, "I'm not sure... I thought Professor...er.. Leg.. I thought Professor Leg made it so that everyone each had a unique assignment. I didn't realize there was more than one per case." He hesitated. "What sort of questions did... Barnaby... ask you?"

Constance thought a moment, "Mostly the same sort of questions I expect you'll ask me." She smiled.

Tibirius nodded.

"So. What sort of questions do you want to ask me?" she asked.

Tibirius said, "Well. I'm - er - coming at my paper from a bit of a unique way, so they may not be exactly the same sort."

"Very well." 

"Ok. Well. I... First of all, I wanted to ask you how long did you work at Mungo's?"

"Fifty-two years," Constance answered. "I started when I was only twenty one. Can you imagine?"

Tibirius shook his head, "You moved through uni rather quickly then?"

"I did." Constance nodded, "I was always a top student at Hogwarts. Ravenclaw." 

"Oh I was Ravenclaw too," Connie squealed.

Tibirius looked at Connie. "You were?"

"You knew that, you silly man," Connie said, rolling her eyes. She looked at Constance. "Hufflepuffs," she said with a sigh.

"I  --" Tibirius started, but Connie coughed and he stopped and looked at Constance. "Did you always want to be a mediwitch?" he asked. 

Constance nodded, "All my life, I wanted to be a mediwitch. Now, mind, my ambition was less to do with healing others - which is the proper purpose of desiring to become a mediwitch... No, for me it was the challenge of it. I wanted to become the best at it. I took a tricky specialty on purpose, just to show off my intellect. I went into spell damages of the mind." She tapped her temple.

"Oooh very interesting," Connie cooed.

"Indeed!" Constance said. "It's the hardest area of magical medicine there is. And what's more is I desired to work primarily with unidentified cases, where we weren't sure what sort of magical spells had been cast to cause the damages. You know, there's several levels of spell damage that you can specialize in. The best may go into spell damages, but only the best of the best go into unidentified damages. You see, it's much easier to diagnose and attempt to heal spell damages when you know precisely what's been done to the patient... but it's entirely different when your project is to not only heal the damages, but to discover what, precisely, the damages are in the first place!"

Tibirius was in awe, "It must have been quite hard to do such a thing - I suppose you must be very, very clever to do it. Yeah?"

"Oh very clever!" Constance answered, thinking back at some of the hardest cases she'd ever worked through. "We had so many times that we simply didn't know what sort of spell had caused the spell - you have to go along by identifying symptoms and see what sorts of spells cause the symptoms you can identify and cross-study what the patient is capable of doing or not doing. For example, if they've no problem with motor skills but they can't recall what they've done or who they are, you're likely working with a confundus case. But that one is of course an easy example. Some are a great deal more difficult to diagnose."

"And how do you go about it?" Tibirius asked.

Connie was just raising a bit of cookie to her mouth when Constance answered - and she stopped mid-lift in incredulity. "Well, you have to experiment, don't you dear?"

"Experiment?" Tibirius asked as Connie's hand dropped back to her lap, cookie unbitten.

"Yes," Constance replied.

"But how do you experiment?" Connie asked.

Constance replied, "Well, there are... times... when it's important to diagnose a patient that could be healed and... well, there are many that cannot be healed of their ailments... There's nothing that can be done for them."

Tibirius said, "What do you mean?"

Constance looked uncomfortable. "There's a reason that I left the unidentified damages department," she said hesitantly. "I - It's more important to remember that every patient is someone's -- that they're people, they - they aren't just projects." She cleared her throat. Then, "Oh dear, I forgot to set out the cups for the tea. Silly me. I'll be right back."

Hurriedly, she got up and rushed into the kitchen, leaving Tibirius and Connie in the parlor. She caught herself against the counter and took several shaking, deep breaths. 

She'd told herself she wouldn't allow Tibirius Rosenblat to bring her in the same conversational direction that the other student - Barnaby? Barnstable? Barnabas? - had taken her. She'd relived her cruel deeds enough - she'd done her pennance for those days... 

Her eyes travelled to a small, framed photo of her late husband, smiling at her from the counter over the sink.

"Oh Archie," she murmured. "Give me strength."

With shaking hands, she reached up into the cupboard and withdrew three common tea cups - yellow with a tiny white polka dotted pattern, and returned out to the parlor to find Tibirius and Connie whispering quietly. They broke apart the moment Constance returned, their conversation ending abruptly as they turned to look at her.