Title: Ward Forty-Nine
Author: quietliban
Rating: T
Disclaimer: The Harry Potter universe, characters and concepts contained therein belong to JK Rowling and her associated publishers. No copyright infringement is intended.
Summary: He had another visit to make before he could leave and feel at peace. One-shot. AU.Written pre-HBP. No spoilers.
Ward Forty-Nine
Neville Longbottom walked sadly down the hallway. The hospital was quiet, and he found it eerie. He had been walking down this hallway since he had been a little boy, clasping to his grandmother's hand, his eyes bright with uncertainty staring at the white washed walls. The medi-wizards and –witches would nod at his grandmother with sympathy as they went past, and Neville would wonder why. He had hated visiting his parents when he had been small child, barely five years old. His parents had scared him, with their blank faces and hollow eyes. He recognised them though, and saw how his features had been derived. As he grew older, he began to grow proud of them, and what they had sacrificed. He began to think that he was such a lucky boy to have such brave parents.
When he went to Hogwarts, as a bumbling forgetful boy, he did not want anyone else to know. It was too painful. Parents like his, did not deserve a son like him. He had thought they would be ashamed. He could not hold up their legacy of bravery, even though he had been sorted into Gryffindor
Thin paper was crumbled in his fingertips, and he paused in the hallway to look down at it. It was nothing really. His grandmother had been right to tell him to throw out the wrappers he had always been given. They meant nothing.
They were not the grand gift he had fancied his mother bestowing upon him. They were an absent minded thing. He had seen Alice Longbottom give one of the medi-witches the same green wrappers many times. He knew that they were not reserved especially for him.
Neville sighed, and wondered if they would be proud of him. He had abandoned the cause that they had essentially given their lives to. Would his parents be glad that he had stood by his beliefs, or would they brand him coward like Harry had done the night he left?
He kept walking, and turned right down in the ward's second corridor. He had another visit to make before he could leave, and feel at peace.
He never felt peace now, and why should he, when all the world was at war?
An orderly stood outside the room, and Neville's heart sunk. It had been a bad day for Severus Snape. For that was what the broad and heavy medi-wizard signalled. Neville paused for a moment mid-stride and then shoved the green wrapper into his pocket. He still kept them, even though he knew they were meaningless. They reminded him of her, and her bravery, and he didn't have many things left to remind him of that particular trait.
The orderly nodded at him, as he stopped by the door. Neville had long since stopped wondering why he was permitted to visit this man that he no particular affection for. He guessed it was because he was the only one that bothered to visit the spy. No one else, Order or Slytherin or both, came to visit the man who had intimidated him at school. The potion master's sneering lectures had actually given him nightmares during his first year, and Neville had always feared the dark volatile man who had wandered the halls of Hogwarts with macabre bitterness.
On Snape's good days, the orderly would be absent, and Neville would have to search for one of the hospital staff to let him into the observation area. In some ways a bad day was easier. Neville waited for the medi-wizard to cast the unlocking charm to let him in. The door hissed open, and he crept through, knowing that the door would remain unlocked behind him.
Neville sat, and stared through the glass shield that revealed a sterile room fitted with cushioning charms. The dark figure in the centre looked out of place amongst the sterile whiteness, and Neville wondered at the way the man still emanated darkness, even with his long greasy black hair gone.
It was one of the first things to go, when Snape had been committed. Neville remembered the first time he had visited the man. He had still belonged then, had still been part of the inner cadre of the Order, but his duties had not kept him away from his parent's ward. Snape had been committed within the week of losing his mind, with the Order still mourning the heavy deadlier loss that had accompanied his spiral into insanity. The shorn hair had shocked Neville, and he had stared at the man whose black eyes were dead. Snape's short hair had not made him look any less fearsome. Instead, to Neville it had made his hooked face more severe, more battle worn and more lost.
Six had died two weeks before that first visit. Six of their own, some that he had known well, others just vague acquaintances, but they all had died. They were, after all, just mere mortals.
Snape doesn't look up at Neville through the glass. He never does. His lost and lifeless eyes stare at his left forearm, the fingers of his right hand tracing an invisible pattern. Neville knows that Snape's fingers continually trace the Dark Mark. It's not there for him to see, but he knows that it's there all the same.
Learning that Snape was spy for the Order had shaken Neville, and it did not lessen the fear Neville harboured for the bad tempered wizard. If anything it had increased it, for Severus Snape had been the one man that could bring them all down by accident or direct choice. Dumbledore, Harry and Voldemort had nothing compared to the power that had lain in this man's hands until the day that he had snapped.
Six had died that day.
Six had screamed and writhed under the curses of the malevolent Bellatrix Lestrange, who had appeared suddenly, not even giving even one of them a fighting chance. Six dead, transformed into more nameless statistics in a hateful game, and that was what it was to Neville. It was just a hateful game. He could not call it the war, as everyone was prone to do. There had been no battles, just mass murders. There had been no struggles, just slaughter. There had been no casualties to heal, just deaths to mark. And there had been so many, so many deaths of those on both sides, and of those who stood in between suddenly caught in the firing line. It was just a hateful game that no body could afford to lose and yet so many had.
The six deaths could have been prevented, could have been avoided, but the man who held that knowledge had screamed, screeched and sobbed. His own hands tearing at his skin, and hair; his own blood crusted beneath his fingernails. It had taken Dumbledore to subdue him, and the knowledge had been lost along with his sanity, and six other people's lives...
Neville stared through the window, a glimmer of his own reflection shimmered. He looked upon the faces of two war-ruined men.