I'm trying desperately to get this finished before I go to the Art museum with my Mutter in….20 minutes!
Disclaimer: Don't own anything except Neville's POV, I think….
"So…do any of you know which curses are most heavily punished by wizarding law?"
-Barty Crouch masquerading as Mad-Eye Moody, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire page 212
He knew one. Actually, he knew of several, but one in particular occupied his mind. It was a vile spell, a spell that never should have been invented, a spell that took his parents from him. Instead of a loving mum and dad, he had two empty shells that lived a pathetic semblance of a life that consisted of droobles gum, four plain walls, a bed, and a plethora of potions that were completely useless.
All of that was because of a single spell, a six-letter incantation that had, long ago, been screeched by three mad people over and over again until the people occupying the bodies of Frank and Alice Longbottom were gone. That one curse had stolen from him a family that he had been too young to remember
He raised his hand to everyone's surprise, even his own. He desperately wished he hadn't, fearing right away that people would laugh at him. It was silly, there was, at this particular moment that is, no reason for anyone to laugh at him, but he was still afraid they would.
It was too late for him to put his arm down; the paranoid and possibly mad auror had spotted him.
"Yes?" he asked, his electric blue eye rolling in its socket to stare at him, sending a silent shiver down his spine.
"There's one---The Cruciatus Curse." He said slowly, his voice quiet from shyness and yet he still felt as if he had accomplished something.
The eye was still fixed on Neville; he felt as if it was looking right past his skin, muscles, and bone, and right into his inner being.
"Your name's Longbottom?" the auror asked.
He knows…of course he knows, all the aurors know what happened…
It was a given that Moody knew all about his parents but the thought still closed up his throat so he could only nod weakly in response. Moody made no reply, instead he turned and retrieved a spider from the jar.
"The Cruciatus Curse…needs to be a bit bigger for you to get the idea." Moody said, pointing his wand at the spider and enlarging it.
Neville stared. Get the idea of what? What was Moody going to do? He blinked.
Surely…no, he couldn't be…but he had already demonstrated the imperius…No, he wasn't possibly going to-
"Crucio!"
Like shadows of a fragmented dream half-forgotten, Neville heard another voice say the forbidden words; a voice that was filled with a kind of flee that signaled the beginning of insanity in the speaker. Another voice, deeper and filled with disgust echoed the words. A third voice rung in his head after the second, younger then the other two, and drenched in anxious, breathless wonder. It was the voice of someone caught up in circumstances that they weren't quite comfortable with.
Neville clenched the desk, digging his nails into the old wood. The pads of his fingers feeling the bumps and indents of carved graffiti from students that had come before him.
He should look away, he shouldn't be watching this…this abomination of magic; but he didn't. His wide brown eyes couldn't look anywhere but at the demonstration, the only thing that existed for him at that moment was the tortured spider.
It's legs twitched and it's body spasmed maniacally, as if the poor creature was attempting to flee the pain, escape the agony by escaping it's own body. It rolled desperately across the table.
When-ever Great Uncle Algie lit at fire, he would insist on doing it the muggle way.
"It's a manly thing," he would say, arranging the logs in the fireplace (logs that had been chopped with magic, so it really wasn't a very good display of masculinity).
Then he would have Neville crumple up old copies of 'The Daily Prophet' and 'Witch Weekly' (which no one read and was subscribed too for the singular purpose of letting Great Uncle Algie take sadistic pleasure in destroying the 'worthless trash of words')
Neville would be allowed to strike a match and light the paper.
(Great-Uncle Algie probably let him do this because was hoping he would catch on fire and then put it out while remarkably unscathed due to magical ability, magical ability that didn't surface until he was eight. Great-Uncle Algie stopped letting him do this after he bounced out the window, which really proved Neville's suspicions).
Once on fire, the paper would twist, writhe, twitch, and even move as the flames burned and destroyed it.
That was how the spider moved, as if it was on fire.
Unbidden, a horribly sick and twisted thought waltzed into his mind: had his parents looked like this?
Had the handsome face of his father mutated into a monstrous visage of agony? Had his mother's limbs twitched and flailed like a macabre puppet with demons pulling the strings? Had they screamed?
Yes, they must have screamed and screamed and screamed in pain, screamed their pleas for mercy and salvation at the hands of their torturers.
The pleading had to have come later, much later.
His parents were, no, had been too strong, too brave, to beg until their minds had started to slip away.
The monsters had not relented…had ignored their cries and willingly, happily, continued.
Absolutely delighted, were they, to steal the sanity of Frank and Alice Longbottom, to make their son, for all purposes, an orphan.
They'd enjoyed it…they'd basked in their screams, watched their writing bodies with joy! The monsters!
They'd burned his life to the ground and laughed, dancing in the flames, their hearts as black as the charred remnants.
He could not look away, transfixed by the demonic magic, the knowledge that this, this was what his parents had endured at the hands of those demons who loved to torture, to maim! Parent-stealers! Orphan-makers!
"Stop it!" a shrill voice broke the chain linking Neville's mind to the darkness.
Moody stopped the spell and the spider seemed to deflate and lay there on the desk, completely exhausted as it's legs twitched out the last little jolts of pain.
Neville didn't see the spider; in its place was his father, eyes wide and blank, his face a portrait of madness. Then the spider became his mother, her eyes bulging and her mouth open in a silent scream.
He closed his eyes and blocked out the classroom, blocked out the curses, the spiders, and the imaginary bodies of his mother and father.
Distantly, somewhere far away from him, he heard the bell ring. Without even having to think about it he leapt from his seat and darted out the door with the mass of students, pushing past them to run down the hall. He was desperate to put as much space between him and that classroom as he could.
He didn't get far. He came to a stop halfway down the corridor, right in front of a stained glass window that portrayed a monk. The monk was looking up at the sky, as if trying to express his devotion to a god that Neville doubted was even listening.
It was raining outside, and the rain hit the glass and trickled over the glass eyes of the monk and down his cold and flat cheeks. He looked like he was crying the tears that Neville didn't dare let loose for fear of being called a wimp.
It was funny, in a twisted way, that the son of the courageous aurors, Frank and Alice Longbottom, who had been part of a secret resistance against He-who-must-not-be-names, who had, according to his gran, three times defied and escaped the Dark Lord, would have a son whose greatest fear was being teased (that and thunder storms, Professor Snape, crocodiles, heights, renegade death eaters, werewolves, vampires, lethifolds, manticores, pixies thanks to Lockhart, giant snakes, the bloody baron, Filch, pointy objects, black-pool pier, his Gram, boggarts…a lot of things really).
Once again, Neville Longbottom found himself doubting that he was brave enough to be in Gryffindor.
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Oooooh, four reviews!!!! Haha…I guess asking for people to review really does work. Now I wrote this last night around 12ish and, at the time, I thought it was really good; but now, reading over it, I don't think it's dark enough…I wanted it to be very intense, I wanted Neville's thoughts to become more and more extreme and wild and for the readers to be able to feel the complete and total anger and hatred he feels for Bellatrix, Rodolphus, and Barty Crouch jr. right before Hermione makes Moody stop the demonstration. I do not know if I got it…
Anyway, I have a whole three-page list of different events I want to write from Neville's perspective so…expect many chapters. I AM ALSO OPEN TO IDEAS ON EVENTS PEOPLE WOULD LIKE TO SEE WRITTEN I wrote that in caps because people don't read these things…I know this because no one guessed at what Neville's middle name meant. Only Mackenzie guessed and that's because I forced her to, and we did that through text messages and not reviews. Sorry Mack, I can't remember which account is yours and which are Mere, Steph, and Jess's!
So here it is you unobservant…people who review and …don't guess. If you haven't read the seventh book, this is a spoiler, and you should leave, and you should know that you fail for having not read the book. Yes, I went there, go fail in a corner! Oh, and read the book!
Glanmore was what I made Neville's middle name by. It is taken from the name of a wizard called
Glanmore Peakes- (1677-1761) who was famous for slaying the sea serpent of Cromer.
I figured it was sort've clever to do this since Neville totally sliced and diced Nagini in the seventh book.
Okay, so, next chapter is going to be up in three days, and it will be a lot less dark. See you then! Don't forget to review!