It was 2nd September, with the dull heat of summer's dying strains still permeating the castle, the first time Neville Longbottom felt true fire. He hadn't woken up that morning intending to stir the pot, intending to fall into an exhausted sleep that night as a hero. But, then again, true heroes never really do.

The seventh years filed into Muggle Studies on their first day, and the same room they'd inhabited for years somehow felt too small, crammed with ghosts – of dignity shattered, of security swept aside, of chairs emptied by friends scattered too soon by untrustworthy winds. Neville sat between Pavarti and Lavender, painfully aware of their uncharacteristic silences, each caught up in their own world of swirling uncertainties.
"Despicable creatures, Muggles," the Death Eater hag – Neville wouldn't dignify her with the title Professor, even in his mind - trumpeted, her attempts at gravitas almost comical. "No sense of pride, no understanding of life's mysteries – mysteries we've mastered, by the way." Neville noticed she was reading from a paper, and almost laughed, but thought better of it. " I am here to purge you, of the defiance and deviations that a lack of careful breeding have allowed to enter our sacred blood. It is a travesty, a travesty, I tell you, how these Muggles seduce innocent witches and wizards and rob them of their untainted legacy. Children that could have been pure magic are now defiled. You, Finnegan, what does your useless father do, after all? I guess some magic families raise their daughters to sleep with anything that hobbles in off the street and be lucky for the chance at it, eh? And you, Thomas, what was it like for your father, I wonder, pureblood that he was? Your ignorant whelp of a mother probably tossed him out of the house when she realized he was one of us, fearful of his power, and left him to die alone, isn't that what happened?"

Both Dean and Seamus tensed, hands on wands, but Neville – half unconscious of what he was doing until the deed was done – chose words as his weapon. "Stop," he commanded, his voice shaking but fury-strong. "Dean's father is dead, you obviously know that, and torturing him like this is just low. I thought," he finished - ignoring the inner voice championing self-preservation and throwing his words to the ground like the gauntlet they were - " that you were supposed to be a teacher, and not just a glorified bully."

Silence fell over the classroom, and Neville suddenly became the epicenter of a web of stares. He could hear his heart racing wildly; its rhythmic thumps seemed the only noise for a split second. And then, the crystalline edge of the moment tipped, and the world exploded.

Neville was still sitting, in the chair he'd occupied through years of peace and normalcy, when the curse hit. Spasms began coursing through his limbs before the last syllable had even dropped fully from her lips. The chair, the desk, the stones of the floor had all seemed so commonplace mere seconds ago, but they were now abstract shapes and surreal edges, as he tumbled to the floor, propelled by muscles brought by agony into revolt.

A thousand needles seemed to score his flesh simultaneously, a poisonous never-ceasing burn infiltrating the sanctuary of his skin and dancing between tendons, sizzling on the edges of bone, leaving no place unscathed by the sensation of utter annihilation. Neville was hardly aware of so mundane and tangible a fact as his own sobbing, so forcibly had he been divorced from the world of tears, until his eyes became so blurred that he blinked, unconsciously trying to clear his vision. The fading world of reality vanished, replaced with the terrain of his mind that he'd begun to discover during his summertime Occlumency lessons: a garden fenced by heavy-thorned roses, rife with bluebell and thyme and sprawling proud grapevines, a garden now being devastated indiscriminately by the whirlwind of the pain.

His eyes flitted open momentarily, running from the terror of seeing vanguards of his sanity ripped to shreds, and glimpses the lazily cruel smile distorting Alecto's face. He saw no blood in that moment to dignify his agony, no visible manifestation that would have least have given the him reassurance of physical cause. That was almost the worst part of the curse, Neville thought in the half-delirium it induced, that it's all a trick of the mind. It doesn't physically mar you; it leaves your skin deceptively free of scars – those it leaves for the clouded windows your eyes become. The curse turns your own body against you, making your synapses and nerve endings into vicious turncoats intent on reporting agony where there was none, near-death bodily devastation when in fact, only the mind was near its end.

Because Neville understood, now, what his parents had suffered, understood in a way he never could have before. He heard the siren song, telling him that this was all in his head, that none of it was tied to reality, that if he just retreated into a deep enough sanctum, pain would cease to matter, and he would be in bliss. Rationality cried out against it, but the seductive voice grew louder, and he began to follow, because in that moment, he would have given anything, anything, just for a second's piece from the anguish tearing him apart. He followed its notes down a path, saw the tunnel, had one foot into its silky citadel of savior-darkness – and then it stopped.

Neville's world goes white as his eyes fly automatically open, his body still twitching on the stone cobbles, the beginnings of bruises blossoming from the collisions that had felt like mere whispers in the symphony his pain had been only moments ago . Neville trembled as he lay there, letting the sobs he cannot and would not control convulse his shoulders as they burn through him with cleansing heat.

"Tut, tut, boy. You'd think by seventh year, you'd remember we don't allow sleeping during class, don't you recall? Or maybe you think you're back in primary school, is that it? He probably thinks he's five years old again, dotty as his Daddy, I'm sure, little brat. Got what was coming to him all along. If you can hear me, boy," Alecto yells, a little louder, as if she thinks him deaf, "then bow. Get up now, and show me a nice little bow, just like old Granny taught you, eh?" The class looks on, still recovering from the shock, still digesting the rabbit hole they've all been thrown into, this new paradigm that will make them all old before their time, before the year is even out.

Neville looks up, and faces her, phoenix fire dancing behind his eyes. If she had seen - if she hadn't been too busy gloating - she would have cowered, even with the weight of a Dark Lord supporting her. Because out from behind the bloodshot blue there was a man who'd just been thrown off the precipice at the farthest end of his every childhood nightmare, and found himself on the other side, in a land free of the fears that had defined him from the moment he had first understood his parents' story.

He got up from his side to his knees, but refused to stay there more than a second before rising shakily to his full height.

"Good!" the hag cooed. "Now bow."

A room full of eyes stared, and he felt the weight of all these lives, each bound up and isolated in their unique lonelinesses, shackled by their individual terrors. They'd probably call what he did next recklessness, later, those Slytherins and dispassionate cynics that played the long game. But he knew it wasn't the meaningless show they'd proclaim it to be, knew it deeply as he fingered the ridges of the gum wrapper that had given him fire and the coin that had given him strength. He knew it, because if Neville Longbottom knew one thing, he knew that symbols mattered.

So, just as his spine began to bend, and Alecto began to look insufferably smug, Neville turned, still shaking from remembered pain and from the reflexive echoes of the fear Alecto had so successfully purged, and instead bowed to the three empty seats on the Gryffindor side of the room, inclined his head and his heart towards the only hope he could believe in.

As Alecto raises her wand again and Neville sees sparks of dissension and mutiny begin to catch and erupt in first one pair of eyes, and then two, he shoves out the words through gritted teeth, bracing for the pain. "I will never bow to you."