"I-I love you Mum. I'll visit soon."
She nodded vaguely and hummed, and pressed a candy wrapper into his hand. He smiles sadly and shuts the door behind him quietly.
She strains to hug her son, to tell him how proud of him she is. Thank him for the sweet and kiss him. She wants to say how much he looks like his dad, and how brave he is.
The woman's humming gets a bit louder, but she shows no recognition that her son has left the room, or even that the boy is her son. She just rocks herself back and forth and stares blankly at the wall.
A nurse comes in, pulling a cart behind her with two bowls of porridge. She looks at the couple with pity in her eyes. Poor Alice and Frank Longbottom, tortured past insanity by Bellatrix Lestrange. She plastered on a smile and held up a spoonful of tasteless porridge. "Open wide! Here comes the food train!" Alice Longbottom doesn't react to the prospect of food, doesn't react except for a string of drool escaping the corner of her mouth.
She hates that she can't even feed herself, can't even control her own motor functions. It's like being stuck in someone else's body, watching the world from foreign eyes with no power to do anything. Her arms are weighed down with lead, and she tries to move-and fails every time.
The nurse finished feeding and wheeled the cart away. She shuts the door behind her and shakes her head. They had been so young, Aurors, and with their whole lives ahead of them.
She hates the white walls, hates the white robed doctors. She hates the mindless boredom and staring at the same wall, all day. And, most of all, she hates this no colour world and her monochrome life. Her son is her only colour and even though he tries, he visits rarely. Alice feels like screaming, crying, and when she can't even do that it makes her even more frustrated.
It is a vicious cycle.
She cannot even look to her husband for comfort, because he is in the same drooling, pitiful state.
And she misses the colours, the laughter and vibrant love that she and Frank had shared. The warm summer days and life before the war. And their happiness when they found that she was having a baby boy.
Alice sometimes wishes that she could end it all, end the suffering and pain of seeing the people she loves and not being able to do anything. But the image of her boy, her Neville comes to mind, and pushes her thoughts away. And she can't even end her own life, even is she wants to.
How pitiful.
She still holds hope in the very dredges of her heart that they will find a cure, and things will be back to the way it was before. But the smidgen of hope is hidden behind grey clouds and gloomy rain, and she prefers not to think of it to spare herself at least a little bit of pain. Because time cannot be reversed and what is done is done.
Alice Longbottom dies a day after they find the cure, while it is still being approved by the Ministry. And if sometimes Neville will see his father staring out the window with a blank face, and watch one crystalline tear fall down his face, he does not comment. Neville will close the door gently and leave Frank to mourn.