Chapter 3: Playing With Fire

D led Neville back down the hallway towards the blackened doorway. Neville was starting to understand now why it looked that way.

"Er… Neville… um…"

D looked around. "Yeah?"

"Er… A said… he said that where you come from, they don't have Hogwarts. Is that true?"

D's expression darkened. "Yeah, sort of. The building was still there, but it wasn't called Hogwarts. It hasn't been Hogwarts since almost before I was born."

"What's it called then?"

D turned away and opened the door to his room. "It was called the Slytherin Academy. Now it's not called anything."

"Why not?"

D turned back to him with fire in his eyes and Neville immediately regretted asking. "It got burnt up," D said eventually, as if daring him to ask any more questions. "About six weeks ago."

"Oh." Neville blinked and turned his attention to the room. It was a lot like his own, but there were black smudges all over the place where little fires had obviously broken out. One was still burning, in the corner. D went over to it and emptied the glass of water over the flames. The fire hissed angrily, but he stomped on it and it went out. "Er…" Neville said, regretting more than ever his decision to live on the fourth floor. "Do you get angry a lot?"

"Recently? Hell yeah. Aren't you angry?"

Neville blinked. "What?"

"Come on. Being dragged away from home, away from your family, friends, everyone… that doesn't piss you off?"

Neville stared blankly back at him. "I don't have any family," he said eventually. "My friends are all dead… mostly. The only people who are going to miss me are the ones who want to kill or torture me. I'm not going back," he added firmly. "Hermione said I don't have to. I don't want to go back."

D cocked his head to one side, regarding him curiously. Neville realised that he was perhaps the first person in this place who didn't look at him with pity in their eyes. "Who wants to kill and torture you?"

Neville shrugged. "Who doesn't?"

To his surprise, D laughed. "Mate, I feel you, honest I do. Up until a few months ago, I probably would have said I didn't want to go back either. People here think they know what torture is..." He shook his head. "They said you were all over blood when you arrived," he said, giving him that curious look again.

Neville shrugged. "Yeah, I guess."

"I was in a bit of a state, too. Not bloody, but I had burns, and I didn't know where I was. Talk about your full blown panic attack… I've been sick, see. I was out of control."

Neville nodded, through truthfully he didn't feel any the wiser.

"Poor A. I very nearly exploded his bedroom. He's a good bloke, A." He sighed. "Still, this world's all well and good, but I've got to get home. My dad was supposed to be teaching me how not to explode things, and… my girlfriend… well, it's just easier when she's around. I feel on edge all the time, here."

Neville didn't know what to say. "You… have parents?" he asked after a while.

"Mm? Yeah they're alive. Sane. You wouldn't know it though, some of the stuff they've done recently. Like father like son, I s'pose."

Neville sat down with a thump in the scorched armchair. "This is crazy," he moaned, burying his head in his hands. "I can't keep it all straight."

"You get used to it," D said again, sitting back on the bed and flicking ash off the pillow.

"But why me, I mean, us? This isn't happening to anyone else, is it?"

"Not that we know of. Course they hardly ever tell me anything, but Hermione knows more about it than anyone else - do you know Hermione? I mean, from before?"

Neville nodded. "Yeah, she was my… is my friend." She could still be alive, he reasoned. It was just unlikely.

"Huh. I'd seen her around, but we weren't best pals, or anything. She's pretty close to A in this world, though. At least, they seem tight."

Neville's brain was spinning. "They're not… like…"

"What? Oh no, I don't think so. She's with Ron, Ginny's brother. I think A has a girlfriend, but funnily enough he hasn't introduced her to us." He smiled wryly.

Neville decided D was definitely the most confusing out of the four. He spoke differently, with a kind of cynical confidence that was more like C, but not unkindly. He sounded like he was used to taking care of himself, and was angry at himself for his magic being out of control. And the way he said Ginny's brother was odd, too. Neville had always thought of Ginny as Ron's sister, not the other way around.

"Anyway, you look fine now. You could do with some sun, though."

Neville nodded. "Yeah, I keep hearing that."

D hesitated. "Were you… locked up?"

Neville jumped. "What?"

"I know the look. My world… well it's not much fun if you're on the wrong side, put it that way. I know what it's like to be a prisoner."

Neville looked at him and saw the truth in his face. He wondered if his world was not so dissimilar from his own.

"I was… underground," he admitted carefully. "Dunno how long."

"Ah." D nodded as though he understood. "Well, at least three of our worlds' suck so far, so you're not alone. This one's all right, and B's I could probably stand to live in. C is basically royalty where he comes from, the way he tells it, so it must be hell on earth."

"No one wants to live in mine," Neville muttered. "Except You-Know-Who's lot, and they -"

"Hey there."

They both flinched and looked up. Neville relaxed as he saw it was just Neville B looking in at them from the open doorway, but D was already beating out a flame that had sprung up in his duvet. "Damnit!"

"Good to see the two of you are getting on like a house on fire…" B said, leaning against the door jamb.

"Oh, that's hilarious," D muttered. "Don't startle me like that."

"You know, I'm really not a half bad Healer," B said modestly. "And I specialise in mind healing… if you'd just let me take a look at you, I'm sure I could help."

"So you've said," D muttered. "And I don't care how good you are, no one is messing around in my head."

"Fine. Dinner's on the table," B sighed. "You haven't eaten anything all day."

"All right, sheesh dad." D scrambled off the bed. "C'mon E. Hope you like take out."

Neville struggled out of the armchair and hurried after them. "Take out?"

"None of us can cook," B explained as D thundered down the stairs ahead of them. "Can you?"

"A bit…" Neville said dubiously. He wasn't sure if heating leftovers in the fireplace counted.

"I lived on my own for a year and never learned to make more than beans on toast. Since then I've relied mostly on House Elves."

Neville stared. "You have House Elves?"

B snorted. "Well, sort of. My wife has House Elves."

"Your wife?"

B sighed. "Yes, I'm married. And I haven't seen my wife in over a month, so I'd rather not talk about it, if you don't mind."

"Oh. Sorry."

C, still wearing his heavy-looking robe and boots, was already seated at the table in the kitchen, eating noodles gingerly off a plate with a silver fork. "I'm getting sick of this food," he complained as they came in.

"No one cares," D said, reaching for a cardboard box and ripping it open.

"You eat like an ape," C told him, watching him dig into the box with chopsticks.

"This is how you're supposed to eat it, your highness," D said, rolling his eyes. "You should try it."

"If you think I'm going anywhere near that heathen cutlery -"

"Calm down, both of you," B sighed, taking the remaining two boxes and passing one to Neville. "Here you go."

"You should see him try and eat pizza," D chuckled. "It's hilarious."

"Animals use their fingers to eat," C snapped. "How did you all get so uncivilised?"

"Mate, there was a time when I would have been glad to eat off the floor," D said pointedly.

"I'm sorry about this," B said, passing Neville a fork, for which he was grateful, as he had never used chopsticks in his life. "I'm sure it's very overwhelming, with all of us… it was bad enough in the beginning when it was just me and A."

"I'm okay," Neville lied, poking at the noodles with his fork and somehow manipulating them into his mouth. "It's good!" he said with surprise.

D chuckled. "I practically grew up on this stuff. Dad loves it." There was a brief, awkward silence. "Sorry," D mumbled after a while. "I forgot."

"It's all right," B said politely. "We don't resent you, or anything. You're very lucky to have both your parents around."

"Lucky, right," D said darkly.

The rest of the meal was only a little uncomfortable, with B doing his best to include E in the conversion while he paced himself through his dinner. Neville hardly noticed. By the time he had got to the bottom of the box, he was yawning and his head was nodding onto his chest.

"Go to bed," B said kindly.

"But…" Neville looked at the mess of cardboard boxes and chopsticks all over the table. "I should help…"

"It's take out, we just throw all this away," D explained. "Go on, before you fall down."

Even C grunted agreement. Neville remembered suddenly, that first day back at the hospital, when C had tried to stop him hurting himself by moving too much. He had taken it as a threat at the time, but now he realised the so-called 'Dark Wizard' had been trying to help him. He felt some unnamable emotion well up inside him, and he was almost too tired to stop tears coming to his eyes. But he did. "Th-thanks," he managed to say, and fled the room.

Lying on his bed, later, he realised that no one had said or done a single unkind thing to him in a week, ever since he had come here. A was stern, and C put on airs, yes, but no one was unkind. And yet before this week he couldn't remember the last time someone had been kind to him. He felt he didn't deserve kindness. Not when he had lived, and so many others had died, in defence of the light.

He lay there, in darkness except for a single fluttering candle that kept the terrors of the dark at bay. He remembered the day Harry had died. The way everything had fallen apart in a matter of days. The way they had been rounded up - men, women and children - and marked with the sigil brand, and their names magically engraved into the silver bracelet and sold to the highest bidder.

He held up his bracelet to the candle and stared at it. Neville Longbottom, it read on one side, and on the other, Narcissa Malfoy. It had changed only a few weeks ago. Or months, he wasn't sure. It felt like a lot longer.

~*-NNN-*~

~*-NNN-*~

In his dream, he was in a cage. It was just big enough to stand up in and wide enough to curl up in, but at least it was outside. The market at Diagon Alley was a dismal, pathetic sort of place. He had never been here before. He had been sold in almost every other market in the country, but always in the countryside, never the big cities, and certainly not London, where Voldemort and his main followers lived.

He must be mad, he thought. He had all but organised to get himself here, using every trick he knew to get himself sold closer and closer to the city, until here he was. It was, he reasoned, the best place to find other Hogwarts survivors. Harry was dead, yes. Ron too, everyone knew that, though he hadn't seen it with his own eyes. He knew of a few other names - Colin Creevey, Justin Finch-Fletchley, Padma and Parvati Patil, Ernie MacMillan, Lavender Brown - all dead. But some of them - some of them HAD to still be alive. Either in slavery, or… well. He had heard rumours. It was said there was a secret resistance group building, gathering strength and numbers and planning to free the slaves and end the darkness the plagued the wizarding world.

It was impossible, but if it was true, Neville wanted to help.

He sat in his cage with his legs stretched out in front of him, trying to ignore the stench of human filth and despair on the air, closing his ears to where, only a few paces away, a bigger cage was crammed full of children under seven. The pitiful cries were hard to ignore, but there was nothing he could do. Not yet.

There was someone approaching. One of the market guards, with a customer, Neville guessed. Carefully, he turned side-on to the front of the cage, not wanting to be overly visible, and wrapped his arms around his knees.

"… doesn't have to be able to cook - or clean, for that matter!" a woman's voice shrieked with laughter. "I just want something to play with. The last one didn't last nearly as long as I would have liked."

Neville felt his blood run cold. He knew that voice. He shrank further back in the cage, wishing there was more space to hide in.

"You're too rough with them, Bella," said a second female voice.

"Oh stuff," giggled the first voice. "There's no such thing."

The market guard launched into a speech about the current selection. Neville concentrated on making himself invisible. Sometimes they wouldn't buy the ones who looked too weak, or timid. On the other hand, some of them wanted the weak ones. It was a gamble, except that he was fairly sure Bellatrix Lestrange wouldn't pick anything pathetic.

"This one's new in this morning," the guard said, and Neville realised they were standing right outside the cage. The woman in the cage opposite him was whimpering. Neville hid his face even more with his arms.

"You don't want that one, Bella," said the second woman. "Look how scrawny it is." Neville could hear her moving off, looking at the occupants of the cages to his right, but he could feel the other one, Lestrange, still standing there, looking at him.

"Let me see his face," she said, and Neville felt his heart sink. The guard uttered a spell.

The next thing he knew, he was forced into a standing position, his arms stuck down by his sides. Unable to stop himself, he looked up at the woman on the other side of the bars. She was pale, her dark hair flowing in waves over her shoulders. A far cry from the woman who had escaped from Azkaban all those years ago, perhaps, except that her eyes were still totally mad. She laughed. "Cissa!" she cried out excitedly. "Cissa, look who it is!"

The other woman came back, as pale as her sister but with hair as blonde as her son's. She smiled evilly when she saw Neville. "I see him, Bella," she said patiently as her sister started clapping her hands with excitement. "We'll take him," she added to the guard.

"Oh good," Bellatrix gushed, reaching through the bars to touch Neville on the chin with her long fingernails. He was clean shaven - one of his old mistresses who cared about such things had put a shaving charm on his bracelet, long ago. He hated it, it made him feel like a child. He could not move, the guard's spell holding him in place, so he was forced to stand there while the paperwork was organised, as Lestrange stroked his face and giggled.

Eventually the guard came over to her with the enchanted parchment, and she signed her name gleefully. Then the guard opened the cage door and took the spell off, and Neville fell to his knees, unprepared. "Get up," the guard growled, and dragged him out by the collar of his shirt, which was little more than a rag by now. He knew what was next - he had been sold nearly thirty times since the end of the war - and held out his hand reluctantly. It was a lot easier if you didn't struggle, as much as he wanted to, the knowledge of who he had been sold to making his stomach churn. But there was no way he was going to panic now, not with Lestrange and Malfoy looking on as the guard sliced a shallow cut into his hand with his wand and held the cut over the parchment. As the blood hit Lestrange's signature, he felt the bracelet grow hot, and looked down at it with trepidation. Bellatrix Lestrange, it read.

They apparated him to the big house where the Lestrange's lived. In the dream, they seemed to go straight to the dungeons, though he knew there had been more to it in real life, maybe they taken his clothes, given him some speech about being good, he couldn't remember. He remembered the chains that anchored him to the wall, and he remembered the cupboard in the corner where Lestrange kept all manner of horrible, bloodied instruments. The first time she threatened him with one, he spat in her face. He had been strong, once. Before she had made him feel pain in a way he had never before experienced.

"I like it when you scream, pet," she would say, and he bit through his lip to keep from making a sound. It made no difference. He always screamed in the end. "I like it when you bleed… there's a good boy, now…"

He lived in a place that seemed to be between life and death, a never-ending agony that broke him down until he would beg and plead for her to stop. But she never did. She liked him to beg. And then she would heal him and it would start all over again. In the dream, it passed in a blur of pain and terror and brief blissful bouts of unconsciousness.

Then, it had all stopped. For days he had laid there, in his own blood, without food or water, wishing for death, waiting for it, but it never came. And neither did she. He didn't know how long he had waited, flinching at every tiny noise, until finally someone came for him. But it wasn't Lestrange, it was Narcissa Malfoy.

"For Merlins sake," she said, treading gingerly over the blood and filth that lined the floor. "I buy her presents and this is what she does with them. Get up."

Neville peered blearily up at her past blood-encrusted eyelids. "What… where…"

She kicked at him, and he grunted in pain. "Did I say you could ask questions? Get up. We're leaving. Honestly, there's not even any food. I had a feeling something like this would happen - get UP, I said."

"I can't," Neville finally managed to say, his voice coming out hoarse and not his own.

Narcissa rolled her eyes and brandished her wand. "She healed you before she left or you would be dead by now," she said. "Get up, if you want to live."