Disclaimer: The ideas are mine, the characters belong to JK...

"Every day there's a boy in the mirror asking me... / What are you doing here? / Finding all my previous motives / growing increasingly unclear. (...) Homesick. / Because I no longer know where home is"

Homesick, by Kings of Convenience

The Savage Curtain

Once upon a time, somewhere in Britain, there was a little boy.

He had been wrapped in a couple of thick, fluffy blankets. It was not a particularly cold night, but he was just a baby, barely one year old, and quite small for his age. Even the crisp winds of an autumn evening might give him a cold.

He was in a dark room, a very small room, in fact, but since he couldn't stretch his little arms too far away from the blankets, he barely noticed it. There was some light coming into the room through a crevice directly ahead, and although there had been some urgency in the voices that whispered words he couldn't possibly make sense of a few minutes back, now there nothing but silence. He was completely alone.

The boy was wide awake. He noticed the shadows growing in the ceiling – visible through that small crevice – and he watched their movements with interest as they danced over the walls. In time, those shadows – could they be angels? - were joined by lights, as something started flashing blue frames in the wall, much like a telly in a room with the lamps out, although there were no television sets in that house. Every now and then, blazes and balls of coloured light cut the air at high speed, swooping above his head. The one he saw most often was a beautiful purple bolt.

While he was growing up, that blinding flash of purple light was everything he could recall from that evening. He treasured that old memory, even though it was so old that he sometimes wondered whether it was a memory or a dream. When he got a little older, whenever he had had a particularly challenging day, he would often close his eyes and see that beautiful bolt of purple light, wishing he could go back to that moment, whatever it was. He didn't remember any sounds, but it felt like he was seeing music. The boy suspected that was the reason why purple became his favourite colour.

A few months later, he learned to say his own name. Neville, he repeated over and over again, whenever somebody cared enough to ask.

Neville grew to be a round-faced young man, strongly resembling his mother. Or so they said. His mother and father were not around much. Whenever his grandmother took him to St. Mungos, to visit, he studied Alice Longbotton's face carefully, looking for anything he could recognize in himself, but he really couldn't see the resemblance. Alice – his mother, he forced himself to think- always looked so sick. Her face was bony and her hair extremely short, unlike Neville whose hair would have reached shoulder length if his grandmother didn't hunt him down across the house with a pair of scissors every three or four weeks.

When he was old enough, his grandmother explained what had happened to his parents. First she told him they were sick. Later she explained that their sickness was actually secondary to some spells. In a few months time, she told him about the war. She explained that they were aurors, that it was an important, but dangerous job. And just before he left for school, she mentioned the word torture for the first time. His grandmother told Neville everything she knew about the night his parents had been attacked, or everything the wizards from the Department of Magical Law Enforcement had been able to reconstruct from the scene.

Neville learned that he had been there when they were attacked. He learned that he was a baby wrapped in lavender scented blankets, and that the small room he'd found himself in - not that he could remember it at all - was actually a drawer in his parents bureau. He learned that his parents saw the Death Eaters coming and stalled them just long enough to hide their baby in that drawer. He learned that the words he could not make sense of were actually spells isolating the drawer acoustically, so that the baby wouldn't be scared by the sounds of the fight. The spell also made it impossible for the criminals to hear the baby's cries. Everybody always assumed the baby cried, and because Neville couldn't remember of any of that, he believed what he was told.

He learned that the drawer had been left slightly open so that the baby could breathe properly, hence the crevice directly above his head, and that the blazes and balls of light were actually curses, hitting and missing their targets. He learned that the shadows that dazzled him dancing on the wall belonged to his parents and that they were moving so quickly because Frank and Alice were in pain. Neville learned that they must have screamed because the pain was so intense that it drove both victims to insanity. His grandmother told him that only one spell could do that. It was a curse, a forbidden curse. It was called Cruciatus.

When he was fourteen years old, he witnessed a teacher casting that curse for the first time. His hands clenched upon his desk, not because of the way the engorged spider seized and twitched, its legs bending upon its body. He had always guessed that would be what it looked like, he was prepared for it when he raised his hand, something he so rarely got a chance to do in class. What startled him, what got him by surprise was the fact that when Professor Moody casted the spell, when he pointed his wand at the spider, a flashing bolt of purple light came out of his wand.

Purple. His favourite colour.

Author's Note: I had this idea for a Neville story in my head for a while when I stumbled upon the Hogwarts Classes Category Competition. I entered The Savage Curtain for Herbology (Write a story about Neville Longbottom). It was around the time Neville became one of my favorite characters... This story actually won that competition. I think it's still a good story... It would be nice to have some reviews to back that claim.

I am including this story in the If you dare challenge (prompt 217: Thick Blanket)

LLAP