Dedicated to lokilette
"Do you want to die?!" someone asked him, voice sharp as a razor blade.
Neville simply stared out at the dark sea, which was reflecting only a few, sparse lights on the night sky. A rush of blood and the slow drip-drop from his clothes were the only sounds in his ears. The person in front of him shook him, and he rattled in her arms like a ragdoll. One slap, across his cheek. Neville continued to stare, his eyes dead and his gaze lost in the horizon, until he heard a desperate sob.
Jerking his head to look at the woman crumbling in front of him, his eyes widened as Augusta Longbottom slowly seemed to fall into herself, folding at the middle like a worn-out note. Her entire frame shook with grief and despair, every choked sound from her throat rippling on her skin. Her back quivered and heaved with her inconstant breaths and Neville felt his heart break.
A trying hand reached out to her, but he drew it back when he realised he was dripping on her. She was sitting on the sand now, legs bent beneath her, keeping the ground at arm's length.
"I can't lose you too, not you too!" she wailed.
In response, Neville's fragile voice sang out to her.
"Gran?"
Immediately looking up, Augusta stumbled to her feet and hugged him. It was a bone-crushing hug, something akin to loving incarceration, and Neville knew she would never let him go again.
.ooo.
They were sitting outside on the porch. His gran was shuffling breakfast into her mouth with mechanical autonomy, quick, deliberate movements serving as a means to an end. She had always been no-nonsense, and Neville had always been full of it, but Augusta Longbottom knew two ways of dealing with nonsense; one was corporeal, the other was feigned ignorance.
Neville counted himself lucky that she was employing the second this time.
He was sitting in the chair opposite her without appetite, a blanket tugged around his shoulders and held fast with a single, crippled hand. He'd been hit by a spell cast by Mulciber during The Battle─capitalised B, because it would always be a capital plot point in his story─and now sat, bitter and lonely, with more loss than joy in his heart.
Staring at the crooked, windswept trees that framed the garden, Neville thought idly about how they bent and twisted in mockery of his own ailment. His gran had encouraged (read: forced) him to put his Herbology skills to good use, and these miscreants was what his broken mind had been able to produce.
His frown grew deeper at the thought, and Augusta slammed her knife against the porcelain passive-aggressively.
Neville ignored her.
These days, he dreamed of train rides─long ones, away from Europe's bastardized island. They were unhappy dreams, filled with more escape than relief. Every so often, the train would be a red steam engine, and Neville would scream in horror. He had been invited back to teach by Headmistress McGonagall, her voice full of pity, and he had responded with a dull 'no'. McGonagall's floating head in the fireplace had pursed her lips, but Neville hadn't acknowledged her reaction; he had learned too well from his grandmother.
"Are you just going to sit there and stare all day?" Augusta snapped, forcing Neville to acknowledge her. He turned his head and looked at her angrily, matching her aggression. His was a cold ire where hers was hot rage, but she had brought him up with all the Longbottom weapons in his arsenal.
"Yes," he said simply.
Someone─Hermione most likely─had told him how Harry had reacted to the pressure in their fifth year. He didn't know whether to take it as a comfort or a cautionary tale, but he did know one thing: their situations were nothing alike.
Harry had been widely seen as a saviour, a prophesized Messiah; Neville had simply been a poor understudy, reading Harry's lines when he wasn't there. Neville amused himself at the thought of Voldemort as a musical director, but that was as far as his humour went. Neville, on the other hand, had worked hard and earned nothing. When the war ended and the pressure disappeared, so did Neville. He was an inflated balloon someone had popped, a sudden hero with no one to save.
When Neville arrived to the party, the police had already shut it down.
So instead, he was sitting on a porch belonging to a summerhouse by the sea, looking at a garden of misfits he'd grown himself.
Something about creating these honest reflections on his own image made him proud, and a small, rebellious grin appeared on his face.
"What are you laughing at?" Augusta barked. He could hear the desperation in her voice, the plea for something humorous that they could share, but the grin disappeared and Neville shrugged. Augusta harrumphed and turned away in disappointment, but it wasn't long until she found something else with which to badger him out of silence. "I still think you should take that job."
Neville looked at something undefined without answering, forcing her to explain further.
"You've always loved Hogwarts. You told me it was like home."
"It was," he said in tone of voice poised to hurt, "It was just as toxic and bullying an environment as home."
He was looking away when a flash of pain crossed his grandmother's face.
"Well, I don't see the reason why you can't go back to something you loved."
"All I loved is gone," he said with finality.
"The sun's shining; the birds are singing," Augusta retorted emptily; she always needed the final word, "What's not to love?"
.ooo.
It was chaos. Spells flew in colour codes: a red to guide them to more helplessness, a yellow to light their path to pain, a green to lead them to their deaths.
Neville was running, his spells thrown left and right. Frustrated, desperate sounds rose from his chest. One of the younger Hufflepuffs (he remembered she was a Muggleborn; the Carrows had made it so easy to distinguish) were standing in the crossfire between one of the werewolves and Colin Creevey, and Neville fired a Diffindo. Anger fuelled his charms, coursed through his veins like poison, and Neville kept running, grabbing the young girl and placing her somewhere─anywhere─safe.
One second later, he heard a cry of─surprise, fear, pain, Neville couldn't tell them apart anymore─and he swung around to see Creevey lie on the ground, clutching his chest.
Neville ran. He didn't remember looking at anything but Creevey, though he must have sent a dozen spells in the werewolf's general direction. He must have defended himself, but he remembered nothing but that boy, that friend, that Gryffindor, only sixteen, and the fear, the crippling fear that he bit back.
When he reached the boy, he saw that the cry had been more surprise than anything; the cut wasn't deep, and Neville soon lifted him back on his feet. He felt a rush, shaking Colin quickly, panicked, screaming at him to follow.
"I- I can't," Colin stammered, "They're everywhere! I'll die! We're going to die, Neville!"
Neville gave him a hard look, yelling, "We're not going to die!" feeling the bitter lie hammer in his chest. If he gave himself a second, he'd fall apart himself, but they had to fight. They'd chosen this, the only sure way to die was to stop.
"I promise, I'll get you to safety!"
Everywhere in the dark, people were fighting, but the colour codes didn't manage friends versus foes, and they ran blindly. Neville wanted quick and safe, but Creevey had stopped suddenly, and when Neville looked back, he saw him standing back to back with his younger brother. Three Death Eaters were advancing upon them from different directions, smiles on their lips, wands at the ready.
"Colin, run!"
Sending a spell towards one of the Death Eaters, Neville attracted their immediate attention. The one he'd attacked turned towards him, but the other two kept closing in on the Creevey brothers.
His next spell misfired, and he was hit in his left arm. Clutching it for a second, Neville cast something, anything, hurtful. The Death Eater was thrown back, and Neville turned towards the brothers just in time to see Colin, a green flash in his throat silencing him.
Neville heard a horrible cry, something unhuman, and when his body started working again, he saw that it wasn't him, but Dennis, who had made the sound.
.ooo.
Neville woke up under the starry sky, his grandmother standing over him and looking at him sadly.
"I'm a Gryffindor," Neville offered as his only, misunderstood explanation.
"Isn't it time you start sleeping inside again?" Augusta said, her voice soft and unrecognisable.
Neville was sure he was dreaming, still.
"The night reminds me that I didn't dream it." He had dreamt it though, over and over again; it haunted him so often, death so pungent in the air that it felt more like a memory when he dreamt, and more like a dream when he remembered.
As she moved back towards the summerhouse, he thought he heard his grandmother give a single sob.
.ooo.
"We should go to the beach," he heard himself say.
"Why?" Augusta asked harshly.
"Because I remember enjoying it as a child."
"Really? I remember a scared boy, who never learned how to swim."
Neville looked away bitterly. "I can still learn."
.ooo.
She took him one day, wordlessly grabbing his hand and leading him down there. He had been watching the faded greens of the garden for hours, restless and paralysed at the same time, his crippled hand shaking with fried nerve ends.
Augusta hadn't known how much that trip had influenced him; he saw them bathing as if the water was nothing, as if it was simply a fun adventure, a welcome addition to a family vacation. Neville felt the contrast between the last body of water he'd seen and this one; dead bodies strewn all over the lake, the fallen and bloated, their faces staring downwards into the abyss with unseeing eyes. He was reminded of the dark and the cold of that night, the sweat and the tears and the blood.
It confused him that all he saw now was a searing sun and happy faces. No one was screaming, and Neville realised he wanted them to.
.ooo.
He was walking, his feet dragging along the dirt and the grass. Above him, the moon shone from clear, dark slate grey skies. Everything lay desaturated and bathed in light, and Neville felt timeless. He was caught in limbo; the trees didn't move, no person or animal reminded him of his spatial boundaries.
Neville felt as though he was floating above ground, eternal and weightless.
Slowly, marvelling at everything─familiar, but unseen; this was a new world, one they had tried to reinitiate him into, one they had failed to acquaint him with─Neville made his way down the pebbled path towards the sea.
His gran had taken him the way she would have taken his five-year-old self: begrudgingly, pending between grandmotherly overbearing and a might-as-well attitude. Now, Neville walked the path himself, paying as much attention to the ghostly shrubbery as he had to the war cries of the battle. Walking with destination, but without hurry.
As he approached, he heard the gently sloshing waves, frothing, lonely, onto the beach. The grown man─when you were old enough to die in war, you had no claim to youth anymore─hugged himself in imitation of when he felt cold.
These days, he felt nothing.
He'd been so afraid of the water as a boy, it had seemed inevitable. It was luring him, its siren song upon the lips of its surface, the sea beckoning with a cruel will of steel. It was calling him like fate, but Neville had fought it back at Hogwarts.
Now, having seen death in the eyes made Neville curious. Death had been his if only he'd accepted it, and he felt as if he had missed something. Perhaps it was fate that he should die with water in his lungs, perhaps that was why he had fought it back in the chaos of the castle grounds.
Perhaps, here, he could die and feel at home.
Neville was already feeling the cold seep through his socks. It was probably silly that he hadn't taken them off, but socks seemed like a superficial thought to have when facing death, and so Neville kept walking.
He came to his navel, his heart in his throat. The cold, blank moon seemed to guide his way disinterestedly. Walking further, further, suddenly the sand disappeared beneath his feet; it fell away, and Neville, feeling the gravity of the metaphor, let go.
Automatically, his legs kicked away from the bottom; it was instinct, and he trained all his attention on acceptance. It didn't matter, his feet kicked, and it wasn't enough. His hands, as if imagining that the surface was a solid object, came down flatly, trying to hold on to something, but they went straight through and he gasped.
Water streamed into his lungs and he coughed and gasped again, a vicious circle. Neville, trying to let go, gasped for his life.
After moments of struggling, he went under fully, his eyes closed as if it still mattered. Willing them open, he saw nothing but darkness, still coughing, but there was a strange, warped serenity to the situation, as if it was no longer him in that situation, no longer him struggling; he was watching himself from behind, whispering in his own ear to stop fighting.
He thought he felt something clasp onto his shoulder, and then he faded out.