Summary: Slashy. Post-Hogwarts. War is coming and everyone is picking sides. Even a gardener in the country can make a difference in the battle between Good and Evil. But are Good and Evil ever who we think they are?
Rating: PG-13, no swearing, a little physical contact, gratuitous jam making.
Characters: Neville Longbottom, Granny Longbottom, Colin Creevey, yellow callas, blackberry jam.


Transplant
It was the middle of July, the clouds were holding back just at the next hill, fields were covered in the last sunlight and only a few unwise bees had not yet taken cover in their cozy scups to wait out the coming rain.

Neville was in the kitchen, covered in jam, there were spatters on his forehead, raspberry seeds under his fingernails and there was a dark purple smudge around his mouth where he might have been sampling his concoction or playing with dark lipstick.

When he had first transplanted to tiny Quill he had felt root-bound, like a plant that has been kept too long in a pot, stunted and incapable of putting roots into the earth. On the bad days, he still felt like that, cut off, self-contained, completely alone. On the good days he remembered that he wanted that. He wanted to live alone with his green houses. He wanted to live past the roads of the village, he wanted a cottage surrounded by fields and his orchard and the rambling gardens.

Even on the good days there was a silver whisper in his head. Root-bound. Walled in. Trapped.

He had soon discovered that in a provincial village Sunday was the best day for avoiding all human life. It had easily become his favorite day of the week. It was his baking day, his washing day, and his thatching day. He usually avoided the greenhouses except to water; he had to distance himself from the plants before he started talking to them again.

He liked to pretend, on Sunday, that he was completely Muggle, rather than completely lonely. His forays into blackberry picking and church-going and talking to his distant neighbors had all happened on Sundays. He liked to think that he was getting good at blending in, but it was just that his checkered flannel coat had become a regular sight at the grocery and in the streets of Quill, no one had to point him out and glare at him as a new-comer.

Though he lived three miles from the village proper he had Muggle-proofed the farm to the best of his ability, and surprisingly no one had ever been bitten by his special Snapping Snapdragons, and no one had ever commented on hearing strange celestial music coming from his greenhouses, the Lily Flutes and the Bells of Britain became a little orchestra on moonlit nights.

He had successfully transplanted. He hadn't died in the process. He had even tamed the garden, somewhat, and managed a good crop of spinach, some wormy broccoli and, after trimming back the blackberries in the spring had been rewarded with a multitude of glorious ripe fruit for jam. Of course, at the moment he couldn't be sure how much of the red in the jam was raspberry and how much was his own blood from tangling with the meaner blackberry branches, but it certainly didn't spoil the taste.

The oven was hot, he was nursing one accidental burn where he had forgotten to fireproof his hand before dipping it into boiling hot berries and he was getting frazzled, even his hair was beginning to crimp with the uncomfortable humidity, but he was bound and determined to fill at least six pint jars before he stopped for lunch. He had almost come to the third jar but was emptying seeds out of the strainer when someone rung the bell in the front yard.

"Interruptions! Interruptions!" Neville squawked, throwing the strainer into the sink in disgust. He would never finish at this rate and he would be stuck with jam the consistency of soggy oatmeal, gloppy, lumpy, like puddle mud.

He stamped towards the front door bothered and impatient. He would not have been pleased if he had noticed that he left purple fingerprints on the white front door as he pushed through and stood on the porch staring at the man under the bell.

Along his front walk stood a great iron bell that had been there since before the house, back when there had been a church or monastery on the grounds but in spite of its age and a little rust, it gave a deep throaty knell that rolled through the house tinkled the windows. It appealed to the ancient, wizardly part of Neville, it was better than a squeaking Muggle doorbell.

This man certainly wasn't one of the village ladies that sometimes came by to poke around the farm and buy a few cups of petunias. He was wearing a knitted tam-o'-shanter pulled to the side. He had on a loudly printed shirt and was grinning like a Cheshire cat. The feeling he gave Neville was disconcertingly animal. Cunning. Fox. Wolf. Crow.

"That's a lovely bell you've got there." The feral man called out with such enthusiasm that Neville worried for a flash that he was American and here to make an offer to buy the house or the bell or the whole grounds and turn it into a marvelous amusement park with a hedge maze and a pick-your-own-fruit orchard.

"Oh, thank you." Neville was going to remain subdued and unhelpful, he had decided that as soon as the bell interrupted his Sunday peace, but he wasn't going to chase the man off.

"It said 'Ring Bell For Assistance.'" The man pointed at the sign propped against the bell.

Neville knew what it said, he had painted it there himself. With the help of some stencils. He especially like the rosebuds in the corners and would have been horrified to learn that the man thought they were toadstools.

"Can I help you?" Neville sucked in his cheeks.

"I saw the sign." The young man pointed towards the road where Neville had posted another sign-this one he hadn't had the courage to paint by himself, he had hired a local man to do it for him--it said in rather grand blue and red, Longbottom Nursery and Greenhouses.

Neville glanced around and realized what was missing. A car. There was no car. Had the man been hiking?

"Well, I usually do mail order." Neville wiped his hands on his apron and started moving towards the green houses. "But if there's something you're particularly interested in then I'll help you find it. Did you come all the way out here just to see the farm or were you just passing?"

"Don't you recognize me?"

Neville felt a lurch. Oh, dear. This was his least favorite guessing game. At least when he was trying to guess for, say, a number between one and ten he had a decent chance of just getting lucky. When it came to faces and names and people he was hopeless.

"We've met?" He squinted, but the tam-o'-shanter cast a shadow down the man's face like a sundial resting at twelve. He paused, twisting the tie of his apron around his fingers. "Oh. I'm sorry! I thought you were a Muggle, I was looking around for your car!" He gave a hyena yip of a laugh but offered up no guesses.

"Colin."

"Colin." The name started ringing the big black bell in Neville's mind where the sign hung, stating, 'Please Ring Bell For Assistance.'

"Creevey." Colin supplied the surname, grinning good-naturedly.

"That's right, Creevey!" Neville beamed, as if his suspicions had been correct and he knew all along it was good old Colin Creevey.

Colin reached out and offered Neville a friendly handshake. Neville shook his head quickly.

"You'll have to forgive me, I'm all sticky. I've been making… jam." It suddenly seemed like a silly thing to be doing on a Sunday afternoon, making jam, hah, of all thing, how domestic, how Muggle, how squib.

"Oh, that's fine. Lovely day for it." Colin gave a snort of laughter that was almost unkind, but at the same time quite apt. "I was just thinking about you the other day." That was a little lie, the last time he had thought of Neville was three months ago.

-------------------------------

"You know who I never see in London or at any of the parties?" Seamus was trying to solve the logic puzzle he had given Colin for his birthday but ended up tugging viciously on one ring, trying to pull it out of the other ring by brute strength.

"Who? You've probably seen her, just forgotten." Colin was watching Seamus and failing utterly to offer an encouraging word or hint at how a solution might be found.

"Not her. Neville. You remember him? Round face, sort of… goggly, like a doll."

"He's fallen out of touch?" Colin topped off Seamus' drink.

"Fallen off the world is more like, Neville crossed over, I hear that he lives almost like a Muggle! And I /never/ see him anymore. He has a nursery somewhere way out in the country."

"He takes care of children?" Colin remembered Neville being the sort of person that he would put on the top of his list of people not to take care of small, fragile things like children or expensive china plates.

"Oh, hah! No, that'd be funny. He does things with plants, I think. Makes cabbages larger and gourds less suggestive looking."

"Fascinating line of work!"

"I'm not sure he really does anything fascinating, just waters the plants I suspect, there's got to be a mastermind behind him, don't think he could manage a business all by himself. You remember how he was. Setting the bed afire."

-----------------

Since there was no one present to disagree with his version of events, Colin ploughed on. "I saw the sign and I don't believe in coincidences, so I stopped to have a look and it is you after all! I didn't think there were two Neville Longbottoms in England running exotic plant nurseries."

"Exotic?"

Colin gestured to the big yellow flowers sitting out on the porch in large, drab ceramic pots. The yellow was so bright they might better be called yeller.

"Oh, it's just callas." Neville gave Colin a demure smile.

But Colin pretended to be mightily impressed, going on and on about the color and the vividness and how it should all be photographed and pieced together as a mosaic of light and color and healthy green leafage. He begged Neville to give him a tour of the gardens and the green houses and kept up a steady stream of complimentary comments that made Neville's head spin.

It wasn't even a surprise to Neville when he found himself inviting Colin to stay for lunch.

Neville went all-out, as he was fond of doing when preparing a meal on an empty stomach.

Celery salad, almond butter, raisins, fresh corn sliced off of the cob, spinach and more spinach, bread with melted provolone, hot chamomile tea and peppermint drops for desert.

Colin took all of it in with courtesy and grace, pointing out the crispness of the red cabbage leaves and how they complimented the brilliant orange carrots perfectly. He calmly ignored the blade of grass he found in with the mixed greens, perhaps it was there for extra vitamins, and that little black speck on a spinach leaf that might have been a drowned midge, he just moved casually to the side of his plate where it languished, uneaten.

Colin was serious about his food, though and as soon as he dealt everything a colorful he tucked in and opened his mouth only for his fork. There was no conversation for some time, and when it came again it washed in and out like a fidgeting tide, short content commentary on the meal, the weather and how nice everything was.

"You do know how to put out a spread." Colin grinned.

Neville was still ashamed of the sticky disarray that filled his kitchen, though Colin had sat uncomplainingly in it before lunch while Neville tossed salad and toasted croutons and sunflower seeds but Colin's praise had an immediate cheering effect on him, he smiled and his wormy little worries of seeming like a bad housekeeper crawled to the back of his brain and curled up, uncomplaining.

"Well, when you live alone and like to eat you either resort to tins or learn how. And I do like to eat."

Colin laughed politely at Neville's joke.

Neville would have liked to show Colin his greasy cookbooks now stained with the proof of his experimentation. But he has the restraint to realize not everyone shared in his culinary passion. He was right to resist, too, because Colin would eat whatever was set in front of him, sometimes with grim mechanism and sometimes with real enjoyment, but always leaving a clean plate. When it came down to the details of cooking, he couldn't have braised a fish to save his life and he didn't know the difference between and shallot and an onion.

After a moment of repose turned into an uncomfortable dry spell in conversation Colin rose and stacked the plates together, pushing them into the middle of the table and thrusting the silverware unceremoniously into an empty water glass.

"Oh, I'll get it." Neville began to rise but Colin put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down with a real shove, not just polite protest but one with force behind it.

"Let me, I have something to say that I don't want to shout above the din of clattering dishes." Colin moved the dirty dishes to the sink, removing even the unused butter knives so that Neville would have nothing to fiddle with. He would have no choice but to listen.

Colin thought that he had Neville perfectly read, written and pegged in place.

Once the dishes were dispensed with he stood next to the table, a hand resting calmly against the back of his chair. He was a composed speaker; he would have been as comfortable buttering toast over his own breakfast table.

"I may have led you a little wrong. This is not a visit solely for pleasure. I am, well, recruiting, for lack of a better way to put it." Colin even smiled.

Neville had the sinking suspicion that he was going to be offered a time-share on a lovely bit of oceanfront property and he felt a quiet disgust stirring in him. Here he had shared his meal and showered his hospitality on someone who just wanted one thing: a commission.

"I would only ever ask someone who I knew, because I can't go bandying around the information I have, treating it like it were for sale." Colin smiled coldly, Neville could practically see the frigid little puff of his breath as he exhaled. "I know I can trust you to keep whatever I say within the confines of this room and your own head. You're clever enough to understand the need for secrecy."

"Clever enough…" Neville repeated. The rusty black bell of the brain was ringing again, tongue clacking as if caught in a gale-force wind.

"We're being Muggled, we're being oppressed and there is only one way to escape the encroaching doom that faces all wizarding peoples."

"What are you talking about?" Neville is aching for something to twiddle between his fingers.

"I'm talking about the coming war, and how the side you default to might not be the right one." Colin still smiled.

"What?"

"I think you know what I mean. I am here on behalf of the good fight, we want you to join. I think you would be a valuable asset." Colin's calm hands remained on the back of his chair, perfectly still and composed.

Neville stood up so fast his chair spun away from him and almost tipped onto the floor. "No, He's evil! He wants to destroy the entire world as we know it!" Neville groped for the table to keep himself standing upright.

Colin looked steadily at the little salt and peppershakers in the middle of the table and began his spiel. "He's not frightening, he's just a man with a plan! He has a vision; his ideas for the world are radical so of course there are people who say that he can never achieve what he says he can. And maybe not all of his ideas fit completely with your idea of the perfect universe but they don't match up with mine completely either, but I believe he has the strength to carry out the greatest revolution there has ever been that, if he succeeds, will stretch forward and change the lives of our children and grandchildren, changing the future forever, making life easier, more meaningful, simpler-" Colin paused for breath, leaving the future dangling tantalizing and unfinished in the air.

"I want you to help us." Colin smiled squarely at Neville, a salesman smile, a convincing, beatific smile. He was as certain as a Gabriel carrying a lily and a message in a Biblical painting.

"What does that mean?" Neville's adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed.

"It might offend your sensibilities to think about it /now/, but spying. And maybe nothing more than a little paperwork. It's like a volunteer job."

"I can't do that! You have no idea what you're asking!" Neville's hands twitched up to cover his mouth as if he would say something horrible and unforgivable if he only gave himself permission. But Colin was ahead of him and cut in to make the worst suggestion yet.

"Would it be so bad really?" Colin spoke as smooth as silk, like plastic his voice had no grain to it.

"Yes, really!" Neville sounded horrified and angry, but he only set his jaw in a line and reached out to fiddle with the potted strawberry decorating the kitchen table. One of the strawberry's 'daughters', the roots that shot off from the main plant was dangling over the brim of the pot and he fiddled, trying to tuck it back into the pot, smoothing soil over the stem.

"--Why would it be a bad thing?" Colin was surprised by this argument and vehemence, was it really coming from Neville? He wouldn't have thought it, not this morning when he first saw Neville, tucked into his apron and quite domesticated, but there might still be a magic spark of human decency in him. Colin felt horribly satisfied, knowing that he could pinch that spark between thumb and forefinger.

Neville hesitated for a moment and then mumbled. "Because he would kill… Muggles." But his conviction and horror were gone after the initial flash, Muggles weren't his reason.

"You don't know that." Colin was surprisingly persuasive, Neville found himself wondering why he didn't just give in to avoid the argument, but then he recalled the seriousness of the situation and the very thought of acquiescence disgusted him, he couldn't just roll over and admit defeat.

"It that your only argument?" Disagreeing terrified Neville, the whole situation terrified him but he had to fight back.

"Have you ever heard of overpopulation?" Colin began like a man on a podium, only without the shifting through his notes and clearing his throat and the bad jokes and the dreadful 'ums'. "Deforestation?" He rhymed, which undermined the seriousness of his words. "Pollution. That's the world I live in, you might think you're in a little wonderland here, you can escape the consequences, but the animals are dying, the oceans are dying and the Muggles don't care. They're doing it out of complacency, it's easier for them not to care or take any action. They're worse than Voldemort, at least he has a cause." He said the Dark Lord's name as most Muggle-born wizards do, without the trepidation of those who had grown up under the shadow of that first war.

Neville felt a lurch, what about his parents? He didn't know what to say so he fumbled, rising from the table and pacing to the sink, staring out the window. He turned on the tap and collected a glassful of water, dripping it slowly over the colorful row of brassicas sitting on the windowsill, purple, red and orange cabbage and broccoli plants.

"I have to think." He scolded himself, 'There is nothing to think /about/, I can't consider an offer to… help the dark side? No, that's the bad people, they're against everything good and everyone I love.' But he thought of the dead gardens and the waste of London, all noise and smell and nightmarishly impossible to ignore. Whenever he found himself in the city he felt like a mite stuck in an empty wasp's nest that was caught in a hurricane, wrapped in noise and only insulated by a thin layer of wasp-spit paper.

Neville picked seeds out from under his fingernails. "I have to think about it." He repeated, but this time was weaker than the last.

--------

"I forgot your name this morning." Gran whispered guiltily. "But I have it now."

"Who am I?" Neville clutched Gran's blue hand where the skin hung loose and full of veins, he wanted desperately to know if Gran recognized him, truly, she passed in and out of memories and the present like her needles dipping through the loops of her knitting.

"Linda's fiancé." She smiled from a great distance.

Neville felt his stomach lurch, Gran thought he was his father. He had pictures of his father in his youth, though not many and most of them somber posed pictures where the boy only fidgets with his collar nervously. He never thought he looked like his father at all.

"He's going to marry my girl, you knew her when she lived here, didn't you? You used to come up the hill and look over into the garden, I saw you all the time." Gran's eyes cleared. "You aren't Frank, are you? No, no, you're Quent, come to visit me, how sweet, I know your mother has been ill."

His instincts were to protest, "No, that's not who I am!" but he nodded instead.

"I miss Linda." She said softly, holding out her hand and rubbing it across Neville's cheek.

Neville felt cold all over. "I miss her too, Gran."

Once he had set his Gran up with her bowl of oatmeal and raisins for lunch he went and sat down on the porch swing, rocking disconsolately. He has eaten before his flight down to see her, but it had been a long morning and his stomach rumbled with discontent. He felt too fluttery to eat and too hungry to walk so he sat fidgeting, trying to think of somewhere he could put his Grandmother where she would be safe. The shadow was broadening, he had heard rumors of Dark Wizards in America, a place the war had not spread to during the past battles. He felt his stomach clench. That would be his side now, wouldn't it? The Winning Team, Colin had assured him but now Neville wondered how he could abandon his Gran and his life to join the epic struggle. He would be no use in the fight, not to either side. He wished, for a moment, that he had been a squib without an ounce of magic and been left out of all these big plans, but he could have ended up where he was now anyway, and then he wouldn't even have Colin to drag him into the middle, the eye of the storm where things were safe. Or at least quiet.

Out of his meager collection of relations, at least none were in any condition to disapprove of his plans. If he became infamous than at least he couldn't disgrace anybody who was still coherent enough to mind. At least his parents were gone. At least Gran was going.

Justify. Justify. Justify. There, three justifications, which should be the perfect number to wind up the charm.

----

Just like Neville knew when to sweet jam, Colin knew when to sweeten the deal with something more than mutual admiration and partnership.

Two weeks until the end of summer Colin came again, to visit and to talk. He had been so kind when he left Neville at his purple and white berry fingerprinted door. He had left laughing and claiming that Neville could "think about it until you come up with the right decision. I know you will."

Late summer heat made the garden a jungle. Especially the far end of the garden, the end that Neville had neglected for that perfectly wretched week at the beginning of August, rained every day and every night and the earth turned so green that it felt putrid, rotten, glutted, bloated with growth. At least the weeds had grown.

They stood under a bower of climbing roses on the jungle edge of the garden, a sweet thunking sound as apples from the orchard blew into the grass every few minutes. Windfalls made the air smell heavy and faintly alcoholic, like strong cider.

None of the roses were in bloom, the beetles had gnawed through almost every bud, so Neville clipped the flowers religiously, because the wicked little insects seemed to leave the foliage alone. The leaves cast a sweet green shade on the two figures, sun slanting at them with a greenish tinge.

Neville's hands were dirty from pulling weeds away from the roots of the roses; his lawn wasn't for grass but just to break up the different gardens.

If only it were raining. If only he had built that brilliant white gazebo for this end of the garden. There could be the proper moment, then. But instead, it was a fumbled, nuzzled, stirred up mess like an attempt at surprise pancakes by someone who doesn't know the difference between a whisk and an egg. It didn't make any difference, though. It was the thought. It was the effort. It was the attempt that mattered. Colin felt him up.

Neville always thought it was a sordid expression, to 'feel someone up' sounded dark, back alley, very covert. But, then, it wasn't something he had experienced first hand, unless an alarmed hour in the girl's bathroom with Ginny Weasley counted as being felt up. And that had been more mutual. And inexperienced. And it hadn't made him feel raw and naked, like poison ivy and chicken pox and hot peppers rubbed all over.

In among his roses, he realized, Colin's hands were soft. Not gardening hands. Not muddy, calloused, thorn-scratched hands with thick strong wrists for making pancakes and planting trees.

He didn't allow himself to enjoy the moment, he felt guilty that he wouldn't be able to reciprocate the gesture, he was far too muddy.

He found himself protesting, like the not-so-easy heroine in a novel, "Why?"

Colin advanced, just a step at a time, but five more steps would have Neville back against the trellis, with thorns in his shoulders. "You have no idea what a crush I had on you in school." Colin was close enough that he would whisper, and he was good at whispering, as though he had a lot of practice being covert. It wasn't sibilant, there was no breath of tickly hot air in Neville's ear, just words, words that were soft, so that Neville had to crane to listen.

"You didn't." It was not beyond Neville to be suspicious, but he wants to believe very badly. He has always wished to be in someone else's fantasy.

"You have no idea what went on in my head." Colin winked, took another step, there, four more.

"Do I want to know?" Neville inched backwards.

"Through the eyes of babes… through the eyes of the camera. I saw a lot of things that I stored away for later uses."

"Uses?" Another step back.

"I know…" whispering again, "What you used to wear under your robes."

"Oh, Merlin."

"I was so perceptive."

"How do you mean?…" Neville's voice caught in his throat, snagging on laughter.

"You and your string of crushes, obvious as little hearts drawn on bathroom walls, I knew you."

"You don't have to tell me this." Neville said nervously.

There. That last step into the trellis. Neville gasped as he felt a thorn against his neck. Colin pressed against him, flat, vertical.

"You have always been wonderfully obvious, Neville. That's how I know you will make the right choice. The obvious choice. It cannot escape you."

"It sounds like it's hunting me." Neville shuts his eyes and felt the thorns like combs in his hair.

"Don't worry." Colin's voice was shocking out loud, no longer whispering. "You have to trust. Trust me."

"I do." And Neville knew he shouldn't.

"When we need you we will send for you. Our path is clear." Colin said soberly. Neville's expression was the tuning fork to his tongue; he knew he must have been playing the right chord.

--

"Gran, I'm going now." Neville said softly. He had spent the long afternoon watching his Gran alternately sleep and knit. Conversation had been impossible, when she slept she wasn't listening and when she was knitting she had to count rows, pay attention to knits and perls.

"Frank…" Gran set her knitting down abruptly. "Is it a girl or a boy?"

Neville felt a creep of guilt at his father's name. "It's…" but he never had the strength to tell Gran, 'no, that's not who I am!'. "The baby?" That seemed to be the only thing her question could mean. "It's… it's a boy. We're calling him Neville."

"Neville." Gran looked dreamy. "It's a boy. Of course it's a boy. I always knew it would be a boy."

Neville felt a sudden tug. "It's a boy." He answered, this time for himself, this time speaking for Neville, not pretending to be his father, the madman, the hero. It was like weight melting away from the bent branches of a tree covered in snow, encased in clear binding ice. He could feel his fingertips begin to twitch as if with spring. "It's a boy. His name is Colin."

And it didn't matter that Gran wasn't all there to listen, because it' was the least he can do before he left her completely. It was the smallest truth he could tell. Even if it wasn't the whole truth.