Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter. All rights go to respective owners.
Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition / Season Six, Round Six
Team: Puddlemere United
Position: Chaser 3 (written by the Captain)
Prompt: You must choose a character born in that month to write about from the list provided next to your team's chosen month.
Team month/character list: July: Harry Potter, Neville Longbottom.
Word Count (not including title and author's notes): 1276 (Google Docs)
Betaed by: gr8rockstarrox (Ad) and JBrocks917 (June). Thank you!
A/N: This is a Deaf!Neville AU. While I am not Deaf, I am hard-of-hearing/have auditory processing disorder. Hopefully, I portrayed Neville's experiences accurately and/or realistically.
Different (Never Broken)
Neville didn't hear the owl carrying his Hogwarts letter peck at the glass of the window.
How could he?
He was deaf.
It was one of the first—and only—words his grandmother wrote down on parchment and taught him. He struggled with making the connection at first because his grandmother didn't know how to teach him. Eventually, though, it clicked. He was deaf.
In his mind, there was a lot that he could not do. He was a disappointment to his grandmother for unknown reasons. She communicated her displeasure through longing looks at photographs of his parents and frustrated glances at him. Neville knew they were his parents because they looked like him. In some pictures, they were holding a baby, which he supposed was him. He spent many sleepless nights wondering where they were, and why they left him.
Neville could also barely read. No one had bothered to teach him, so he had learned a few words by himself. It was only a few simple things, like water, food, apple, magic, but it was enough.
It bothered him, more than he could ever describe, that he could not read more. There were a handful of books with pretty pictures that were far beyond his grasp or understanding. There was one that he especially wished he could comprehend. It had images of three men creating a bridge to cross a river, and one man vanishing underneath a cloak.
Neville wished he could read. He wanted to know what kind of magic could make a man disappear.
So he disappointed his grandmother; he couldn't read more than a few easy words; he couldn't hear. The cherry on top was that his family seemed like they were out to kill him.
He wished that he wasn't telling the truth.
Men and women who seemed to know his grandmother would sometimes visit the manor. Neville didn't like any of them, because they all looked at him with sad eyes. Out of all the visitors, though, there was one man that gave him the creeps.
The man seemed pleasant enough. He would ruffle Neville's hair and smile at him. But when his grandmother would turn her back, the man would become cruel. It was little things at first—scaring him by jumping around corners or pushing him into some of the more dangerous plants in the Longbottom greenhouse. Each time, the man seemed sad—almost like he was expecting something to happen besides Neville crying.
When that didn't change, it quickly became worse.
During a family trip to something called a 'pier'—his grandmother had written the word and pointed at it a bunch of times when they arrived—the man pushed him into the water. It was freezing and deep; Neville couldn't touch the bottom. It tugged at his clothes, pulling him down, down, down. He couldn't breathe.
Suddenly, arms wrapped around him and pulled him up to the surface.
A young woman, her black hair plastered against her cheeks and green eyes worried, held him tightly. Her mouth moved; she was speaking to him. Neville shook his head and tried to tap his ears, but ended up splashing them both with water instead. She seemed to get the message, however; she nodded and began swimming towards the shore, towing him along.
They were both shivering by the time they left the ocean. His grandmother ran up to them, waving her arms frantically. It was the first time, in his entire life, that Neville saw her look worried. They talked with each other for a moment. His grandmother's face changed from concerned to disappointed, and he expected the woman to look the same. Instead, she shook her head and smiled.
Turning back to Neville, she passed him a blanket that someone had offered to her. He smiled at her, and she winked and ruffled his hair.
He found that he didn't mind when she did it.
The next attempt on his life was much, much worse. Neville knew that he would have nightmares the rest of his life.
It was a few months after that incident when the man was once again visiting the estate. He cornered Neville and grabbed his arm, dragging him to the fourth floor of the manor. He was too scared to scream, but even if he had, no one would have come. People tended to ignore him. Neville still fought back, but it was useless.
A minute later, he found himself hanging upside down, the man holding his ankle, staring at a four-storey drop. Neville stopped wriggling; he didn't want to fall. But luck was not on his side, and suddenly, he was plummeting to the ground.
He should have died.
Instead, he bounced, all the way to the end of the garden. His grandmother and the man ran out of the house moments after he stood on shaky feet. He was terrified; his heart beat painfully against his chest. He was breathing erratically, and so was everyone else. But strangely, everyone else seemed thrilled.
They mimicked bouncing motions with their hands, and his grandmother hugged him. She was crying, but somehow Neville knew that it wasn't because he was alive. Okay, maybe a little because of that, but it was more because he bounced.
If they had wanted to see strange things, they should have seen him make his toys and books float around his bedroom. It was the only thing that occupied his time since he was left alone for hours on end.
Now, though, he wasn't going to show them. He was upset.
So during Neville's life, he found that there weren't a lot of things that he could do. He couldn't hear, and he couldn't please his family. He was afraid of a lot of things—and for good reasons.
Even though he couldn't hear the owl's arrival, he saw the fluttering of the wings in his peripheral vision.
He let the owl in and took the envelope from it. Copying what he had seen his grandmother do, he gave the bird a treat and bowl of water. He recognized his name on the parchment, but couldn't read the rest of the words.
Opening it, he scanned the parchment. A few words jumped out at him—magic, owl, and school—but what grabbed his attention was the crest at the top. He had seen it before in old photos of his parents. It took him a minute, but he finally made the connection.
This was the school his parents had attended.
Grabbing a bottle of ink and quill, he wrote one word that he knew on a scrap piece of parchment.
Want.
Giving it to the owl, he opened the window, and the bird flew away with his note. Neville hoped that whoever got his note would understand.
Yes, there were some things that Neville could not do. But there were also many things that he could.
Even though he was scared, Neville climbed to the fourth floor every morning and looked out the window. It made his stomach turn, and he cried the first few times, but he was determined to not let fear stop him.
He could make plants grow and thrive in the greenhouse, almost as if he had a magical touch. No one else could manage the little green shoots as well as him. He could also continue trying to teach himself how to read.
But most importantly, he was going to a school for magic; the same one his parents attended. Maybe there was someone who could explain to him where they went.
It was going to be difficult—maybe even impossible. But he was a survivor and brave.
He could do anything.
A/N 2: According to Pottermore, Neville did accidental magic as a newborn (wrapped the blankets he had been swaddled in a little tighter/more comfy), and no one noticed. Also, if you take away explanations and understanding of situations, Neville would probably view them much differently.
(Even still, there's a lot of lowkey child abuse in the wizarding world, in my opinion. Honestly, it's never okay to drop a child out of a window or push them off a pier [another canon event that happened to Neville], let alone the little bits of neglect that occur.)