A series of Neville-centric drabbles about his encounters with Bellatrix Lestrange.
Chapter One: The Cold
Neville, aged seven, grasps on to his grandmother's cloak as their boat nears the island. He doesn't want to be here. He dreads this trip every year, he hates it, why does she make him go? Grandmother does not look down; when he pulls on her cloak hard enough so that she stumbles, she merely shakes him off. He notes that she never looks like Grandmother when they come here—her face is hard and unrelenting.
"Gran?" He asks, voice wavering, "Can we leave now?" His eyes glisten with tears. He doesn't like this place, and he especially doesn't like her. She scares him each time he visits.
"Don't be silly, Neville." Grandmother says, not looking down at him. "We haven't even arrived yet," Her tone brooks no argument.
So Neville stands and waits until the boat docks, feeling the chill surrounding the island burrow itself deep into his bones. He thinks that he can hear the cold—that it is an entity, not simply a feeling. He stands and listens for a moment to the murmuring, but the words are dull, muted. He hurries to catch up to his Grandmother—she is striding quickly away from him, enshrouded by fog.
All too soon, they are nearing the cage ("Cell, Neville, it's called a cell") and the person who lurks inside, just out of the reach of the light.
"Visitors?" The voice, hoarse from disuse, asks. Neville hides behind his Grandmother's robes. "Has it been a whole year, Augusta?"
"Bellatrix." Grandmother's voice cracks. She draws Neville out from behind her robes and holds his hand.
"Oh, and you've even brought along Ickle Baby Longbottom! He's so grown up! Looks just like his parents—oops, sensitive topic, is it?" The voice cackles. The hair on Neville's arms stands up. A shape lunges at the bars. He recoils, terrified. "You were brought to look at the face of evil, so LOOK!" She bellows, reaching out with claws that graze his cheek.
He looks, reluctantly, at her, noting the gaunt face and lank hair, the filthy robes, but mostly the eyes. Her eyes—the color obscured by the dim light—are rolling, like he has occasionally seen in a dying animal. The chill burrows even deeper into him, filling his bones with ice.
"Ahh. You feel them, too." It is a statement. "The little insects, burrowing in, spreading the cold. Do they whisper to you as well?" She asks, voice going quieter. Neville takes a step back, wanting to get away from her, wanting to get away from that voice, which stars in his nightmares. "Can you tell what they're saying now?" She asks, even more quietly.
Neville listens. He can barely make out the voices, they whisper, whisper in his brain, laying eggs that will hatch and take him over—Neville screams, putting his hands to his head.
"Now imagine living with them." She says. "Clawing their way through your brain, telling you things—horrible things. Within a year, they have you seeing things." She leans close, very close, to the bars. "Sometimes," she whispers, "I think of clawing out my own eyes." Then she retreats back into the dark of her cell and laughs and laughs. As Grandmother carries Neville out of the hall, the laughter transforms into screams.
Augusta sets a sleeping Neville down once they reach the boat. She is too old to be carrying him for any length of time. He is growing into a strapping young lad. She looks down at him, smiling bitterly. If only Bellatrix had not taken her family from her...
"Don't you think that's a bit hard on the boy?" The boat captain asks as they get further away from Azkaban.
The look in Augusta's eyes makes him go silent. "He needs it. He needs to encounter evil." If, so help her, he ever had to deal with evil, these experiences would help him. He would never make up for the loss of her son and daughter-in-law, but it was her job to make sure he would not succumb to the same fate.
She does not twitch when he wakes up screaming in the weeks following the visit.
Yay! My very first-ever series!
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