QLFC Round 8
Kenmare Kestrels
Beater 2
Prompt: What would life be like two years after Voldemort rises to power?
Optional Prompts: 1) allegiance 4) revolution
Word Count: 1579
BETAs: Queen Bookworm the First (Sanchita) and Ari :)
-0-
Every part of his body ached.
His hands were cramped and worn raw, slashes of ragged flesh tearing across his fingers and wrists like red ribbons. Dirt was caked under his fingernails, perfect half-moons from the scum of the earth. For the scum of the earth, he should say.
Dried sweat clung to his body like sticky tar—his neck, armpits, and joints were coated in the stuff. It set into his uniform, once clean and pressed. The white of the fabric had stained to a mottled tan, with sweat stains like hanging bags drooping from all parts of his body. His hair was matted with a nauseating mixture of sweat and blood from when the overseers decided their quotas were falling a bit behind. The stench was enough to make anyone gag, a foul cloud of misery and odor that hung over the field like a mist, but he had gotten used to it.
The worst of it was his back, pain lancing down his spine when he bent down, when he stood up, even when he scarcely moved. The memory of hot fire racing from the small of his back was enough to keep him frozen in place, breath shallow. He didn't dare budge an inch, didn't want to lift a bloodstained finger for fear that he would be paralyzed by the agony.
The overseers didn't understand. They would notice, of course. He had the unfortunate curse of a large build, and he caught their eyes easily. The overseers were Death Eaters, low in old Voldy's ranks when he came to power. Maybe they were simply bandwagon wizards, turning coat when the Boy Who Lived abruptly changed titles to the Boy Who Died And Landed Us All In This Bloody Mess.
Bloody, no kidding, he thought as he set the curved end of his knife against the thick, gnarled stem of the cabbage. He could see the macabre glimmer of red against the blade, fresh from a recent wound.
"Longbottom!" a voice bawled above the roar of the wind, thrashing Neville's hair in his face and stirring a tumultuous rusting among the crop beds. "Get a move on, yeh worthless lump!"
A pointed boot kicked him swiftly in the rear and Neville toppled, muscles too stiff to break his fall. He gritted his teeth as the pain overwhelmed him in waves, and the world was lost to a blanket of red and the roaring of his own blood in his ears. Tears trickled down his cheeks as the overseer laid lashes down on his shoulders, the switches stinging like a thousand devils.
"Get off yer rear, yeh bloody coward! I should let yeh rot where yeh lie!"
Soon the overseer's face swam into a hazy sort of focus. Neville whispered a few prayers to whoever was listening that it wasn't Crowley, but the hawkish nose and too-small, piggish eyes caused his heart to sink. He had stared into those eyes before—first defiantly, and now with the stink of defeat souring his stomach.
Crowley was infamous among the fieldworkers for being one of the cruelest overseers in northern Britain. His eyes were black holes, darker than the demons in the twisted fairy-tales his grandmother used to tell him when he was a child. 'If you don't know how to cast a simple protective spell, the Grindylow will get you!'
Pain was Crowley's fuel, the spark of pleasure in his eyes a reward from grinding the workers into the dirt. He really did grind them into the dirt, be it lashes raining down on your back with your face pressed to the mud or your coffin being lowered into the grave. Rumor had it that the overseer had clouted an elderly witch over the head and had inflicted fatal trauma, just another murder of many.
Neville didn't know if the story was true, but he knew that Crowley was sure as hell capable and willing to do such a thing.
As the lashes painted his back with welts and bloody bruises, Neville wondered about Crowley's eyes. Maybe the pain staved off the demons that vied for his soul, feeding them his agony to keep them from swallowing him completely.
Stupid, stupid, stupid thought.
"Get up!" Crowley barked, his voice too loud and painful in Neville's ear. He winced, feeling the dirt crack across his face, still damp from the tears. Pain shrouded his body in a wave, heat pressing down on his body in a suffocating embrace. Even barely moving his shoulder sent a firecracker of sparking fire down his side.
"I said get up!" A rough hand grabbed his uniform, smeared with dirt and stained with a mixture of blood and sweat. In one motion Crowley dragged Neville to his feet. Neville would be impressed at the overseer's strength if his head wasn't spinning so badly from shock and a thousand other emotions boiling within him.
Anger, panic, denial.
But most of all, fear.
"If you slack off one more time I'm sending you on a one-way trip to meet Hades himself." Crowley growled into Neville's ear, foul breath snaking along his neck. The point of a wand buried itself in his side and Neville winced.
Crowley, of course, had fitted his wand with a steel-tipped, sharpened head.
The pressure from his arm released and Neville fell to his knees, feeling his new wounds stretch and pop as he pulled himself on all fours. Snarling back a muddled mix of curses and every powerful hex he knew, Neville reached for his curved knife. It sat innocuously next to a round, plump head of cabbage, half-buried by dirt and gnarled roots. Growling and wincing, he sat back on his haunches and lowered the blade to the stem, cutting off the life of the plant. In one twisting motion Neville reached over his shoulder, causing the welts on his back to screech in protest, and tossed the cabbage back into a canvas bag.
The life of wartime survivors laid bare.
He remembered the promises like candyfloss—sweet for an instant, then vanishing with only a lingering taste of what used to be. Voldemort promised rewards for his followers. Mansions, land, wealth. They flocked like moths to his power. Without the Boy Who Lived, who could stop him?
Neville knew he couldn't hate Harry, but it was difficult not to. Perfect Harry Potter, the Chosen One.
He didn't choose to be carried back to Hogwarts in Hagrid's arms, blanched in the clammy pallor of death.
Some of Harry's friends and members of the Order of the Phoenix, a secret society that Voldemort had crushed within a week of his coming to the throne, had deserted. They lived in the lap of luxury for all Neville could guess, a thousand miles away from the endless fields of hunchbacked workers, where the crops were watered with blood.
Neville remembered his short hearing in the Ministry of Magic, chains biting into his wrists and ankles. A thick, bulging file sat in the judge's hand, stuffed full of pictures and reports.
Insurrectionist. Allegiance to Harry Potter and the Cause. Belligerent.
They had shipped him off to the north, where he joined the ranks of the cripples, the fighters, everyone Voldemort deemed unfit for service. Neville would have never joined Voldemort even if he was offered to. A sick feeling curled in his gut and he gritted his teeth in a scowl. Never, not even to save his own life, would he do anything to help that wicked man.
He shuffled to the side, smarting coils of wounded muscle pulling tight in his shoulders. If the rebels came here, where did they send the ones who couldn't work? The residents of St. Mungo's, sustained by the kindness of witches and wizards? Kindness wasn't a word anyone used anymore. Kindness had been abolished and send to the fields to cut cabbage.
Neville's mind wandered to his mother, her wide eyes and flowing hair. A cherub-like face, innocent and still beautiful after all these years. His hands trembled, making the knife slip and nick his wrist with the sharp edge. His mother and father weren't a threat. Maybe Voldemort had sent them to a remote hospital or institution, out of sight and out of mind.
He was kidding himself with thoughts like these. Neville had seen the mass graves along the road, waiting to be filled with another round of Voldemort's victims. His parents were gone.
In one furious motion Neville severed the stalk of another cabbage, feeling the sharp snap like a broken neck between his dirt-stained fingers. He hated cabbage with a passion, its gentle fragrance that clung to his clothes like a cloying taunt. He hated the people crouched beside him, dreams of revolution replaced by tears and pain and a hopelessness that stung more than any beating Crowley could ever deliver. He hated Voldemort most of all, hated every bit of his twisted soul, those red-flaring eyes watching with an incomprehensible mix of rage and pleasure as his people were left to rot.
Left to rot, Neville mused as he worked his way down the endless rows of cabbages, the world narrowing to his hands and his knife and the soil that he would return to. It's only a matter of time until we rot.
Neville Longbottom was no more. Just another worker in another field, a figure on a report. He was next to nothing, faceless in the world of anonymity.
Dust in the wind.