Not Only Now
As he shivered and wrapped his jacket around him in a futile attempt to shield himself from the harsh December wind, Neville remembered the first time his Grandmother had ever lied to him.
Well, not quite. That time hadn't been the first time—but it had been the first time little Neville had expanded his foggy toddler brain to allow for the fact that things weren't always as they appeared…but his grandmother had been lying for years, and Neville still couldn't decide if he should condemn her for it or not.
"Visiting," he told the mannequin in the window. The glass slid around his body as he stepped through, all silk and pearly mist. The waiting room was lit for the holidays in too-bright tones of gold and ruby and emerald; Neville didn't feel up to doing what he did every Christmas just now—not yet, anyway—and so he picked a chair in the lobby and fell into it.
"Your parents are on a vacation," his grandmother had told her grandson, sixteen years previously. If he had been older, perhaps Neville would have seen her eyes silver with tears, her hand reach up to thumb them away even before they had a chance to fall; as it was, Neville crawled up onto her lap with all of the bottomless compassion of a four-year-old, chuckling as his mind wound its way around a thousand disconnected thoughts. His grandmother stiffened and her mouth thinned; she hefted her grandson up and set him on another chair instead.
His parents extended their vacation week after week; his grandmother molded herself into a stringent taskmaster, responsibility and grief lying heavy as lead on her aged shoulders.
Neville lay in his bed at night and wondered when they'd be back.
He wanted to go home and hear his father laugh, see his mother smile. He wanted stories and songs and the good lunches Alice made with a flick of her wand.
When he saw a shooting star he wished on it with all of his heart, some vague and blurry dreams sent up to reach his parents on the ends of the earth.
- - -
"Your parents sent a board game," she'd tell Neville when he came home from a playdate; "They've sent chocolate for their favorite son…"
Neville would laugh and run up and snatch the treats and spend the day in his room toying with the new presents.
It had been a month; although he wasn't aware of it, his grandmother would creep into his room before daybreak and wipe the dried tears from his face before he woke.
- - -
Neville's grandmother twisted around from her position at the sink to stare at her grandson, a strange emotion buried under her irises. "What did you say, Neville?"
The five-year-old was sitting Indian-style on the rug, tossing around a few jacks. He mumbled something about nothing; when he caught her eye, he paled.
"Voldemort," he said, with no clue of what the word meant.
Neville's grandmother held herself back from jumping over the breaking point. She inhaled sharply through her nose.
"Where did you hear that word, Neville?"
"…I think my parents used it, once. I was just remembering."
They had kept up this façade for months now; Neville cried himself to sleep almost every night, acutely aware that something in his world was horribly off-kilter. When he woke in the morning, he pretended to be pleased with the new present that had arrived at their doorstep overnight.
His grandmother was too bowed with grief to notice that her plan was failing miserably.
"Well, that word is a bad word. Don't ever use it again, Neville."
"It can't be bad," the boy argued. "My parents used it—I heard them!"
His grandmother sighed, gave up the battle temporarily. "Neville," she said, "I found another present from your parents last night."
She expected his face to change, to lighten like it normally did; instead, it stayed dark and stormy, thunderclouds furrowing his small forehead. Neville didn't feel like pretending today. She sighed again and got up; he could hear her shoes tap-tapping onto the porch and back out again as she emerged, carrying a small package.
"They told me to wait until your birthday, but I think now is as good as ever," she explained, handing it over. Something wriggled inside.
Neville eyed the box wearily, half-jumping when he went to open the lid and the package shuddered.
"Frog!" the small boy yelled as the lid popped off and a green jumping thing landed in his lap, straining with folded legs to climb its way up his pant leg. Neville gave his grandmother what she knew to be his first true smile in months.
"What do you say?" she prodded, smiling in spite of herself as the frog made a dash for freedom and the boy dove after it. He straightened, squirming amphibian clasped in his folded fist.
"Thank you…grandmother," he said finally
…and all of a sudden, the façade was gone.
- - -
Neville had been intimately familiar with St. Mungo's ever since the age of five. He knew which days the staff served the best tea; he knew several of the portraits on the walls on a first-name basis, and had even utilized their suggestions when it came time for a quick solution for a headache…or for spattergroit.
So now Neville was able to find his way very quickly up to his parents' ward, dodging as many "Happy Christmases" as he could. His was a famous face, associated with the trio and those courageous Order members who had fought the good fight. Neville wished they could see the Order now—half broken, nearly gone, and stubbornly clinging to life—fighting harder to beat the blackness than they had when Voldemort had been shooting his Dark Mark up into the clouds.
He knew better than to run up to his parents' beds, as anxious as he was to see them. They startled easily. Neville slowed his pace until his footfalls fell softly upon the starched linoleum floor; the door to the ward exhaled and let him in.
"I brought you a present, Mom," he said as soon as he peeked around the corner to their rooms. Frank was kneeling on his bed, trying to force pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together. In the other bed, curled in on herself, was Alice. Her shoulders shook; her hands grasped at the bedcovers in a desperate sort of way, as if she'd lost something in the folds and now it was gone forever.
Neville rushed over, but when he reached her side he stood awkwardly, hands at his sides.
"Shh, Mom…It's okay, really…"
Alice whimpered and pressed her hands more firmly to her eyes, but she couldn't prevent a tear from leaking from behind the barricade. Neville sat down beside her on the bed, patted her shoulder.
"Mom…Mom, I brought you a really great present…"
Alice finally looked at him. Her eyes were painfully empty, as always; she sniffled and made jerking motions with her hands that Neville knew from long experience he'd never be able to decipher.
Neville knew what his grandmother would do, if she were here and not in London on business. He didn't feel like pasting a grin on his face, however, and chatting about the weather. Frank had finally risen from his puzzle (half of which was scattered on the floor); he wandered over and looked vaguely concerned, mumbling under his breath.
Neville sighed, resigned. He got up and started digging around in the sheets. He pulled up a metal slinky; Alice didn't react, but she looked as if she was beginning to forget her torment already. He came up with a bookmark, a rubber ball, and an old Christmas card from way back when Neville had still believed in Santa Claus and midnight miracles.
Alice knotted her fingers together and stared up at the ceiling, puzzling out the nooks and crannies.
Neville dug more frantically—a yo-yo, a pack of saltines, some Drooble's—Alice gave a low moan when he pulled out a tangled string lanyard and reached out her hands, eyes full for a single moment with an awareness that slipped away as soon as she touched the yarn and fell back out of reality.
Neville's mother made a soft noise, torn from the back of her throat; she patted the thing absently and then yawned and placed it, very purposefully, on the nightstand.
Neville stared at his mother.
He remembered making the lanyard, on a summer day filled with too many hours to spend them all lethargically. He remembered picking out the strings, first asking his grandmother which colors Alice would like the most.
He must've been eight or nine, Neville reasoned.
And she had kept it, all this time.
Neville didn't know whether to laugh or to cry; he knew he wasn't supposed to hug his parents unless they initiated the embrace but Neville rushed forward, filled with fire and emotion and the fiercest kind of love. Alice's face melted into a confused sort of expression; she wriggled away and shuffled back to bed, running a hand through grizzled gray hair. Frank looked over his son's head and patted it absentmindedly.
Neville watched them resume their lives without him as he paused at the edge of the curtained cubicle. Almost too late, he remembered the box in his pocket. He tiptoed in to place the little white square on the nightstand, lid off so that the harsh hospital lights caught the glint of gold.
Neville wasn't allowed to give his parents any pictures of the family as it used to be. He couldn't give them his school reports, yearbook photos, or any fragments of the past that might upset them. He knew the rules as well as the wizards who had written them—and, unbelievably, he understood, though sometimes he thought the world was so unfair that he wanted to scream and rage and destroy the ward, destroy the years and years of disappointment...
But this—this gift was from the present, and it meant as much as any family portrait. He thought it might be better than all of those pretend packages his grandmother had given him all those years ago.
A ring, goblin-crafted, stamped with Order of Merlin, first class. Neville had carried it around the entire year since the fall of Voldemort, feeling wrong-footed the whole time it jangled around in his pocket or dangled on a chain beneath his robes. He hadn't done it for the ministry. He hadn't done it for himself. The award for the capture of Bellatrix Lestrange was a surprisingly empty thing.
He thought he finally knew what to do with it.
Maybe his parents would lose it; maybe it would take the place of the lanyard under the bedcovers and disappear. Neville found he didn't really care. Instead of leaving it on the nightstand he went over to his mother and knelt beside her, sacrifice and redemption curled in his palm.
"I did it for you," he whispered, and folded her fingers around the ring.