The Fight Inside – Ch. 2

I do not own these characters (except Nona, but you can have her), and I am not making any money from them. This chapter, and probably the whole story, is rated G. Thanks for reading.

Christmas holidays were only a few weeks away, and soon enough (or too soon) Neville found himself walking into his parents' ward in St. Mungo's. His grandmother took a seat beside his dad's bedside, and gestured firmly for him to sit with his mum.

He pulled a chair up to the bed and sat down quietly. She was asleep, and two small, very fuzzy kittens were sleeping on her chest. They were curled up like cinnamon buns, but as Neville watched, one of them yawned and stretched one white paw toward her sister. The other cat slept on.

After a moment of failure at raising her sister, the little cat opened her mouth again in a calculated "rowl?" His mum's eyes fluttered open, and her gaze fastened immediately on the lonely cat. She didn't say anything, but she picked the cat up and cradled it against her chest until it began to purr. Then her eyes picked out Neville in the visitors' chair.

"Hullo, Mum," he said softly. After a moment of awkward silence - probably awkward only for him - he added, "Those are nice kittens."

She still didn't say anything, but for the first time in Neville's memory she looked as though she'd heard him - his words, not just the noise. She gave him a tiny smile and hugged the cat closer to her. The other one twitched her ear and started to stretch.

Fumbling for something to say, now that what he said might actually matter, Neville said tentatively, "Um - can I hold one? Please?"

His mum paused for a second, then smiled again and glanced down at the kitten in her lap. Neville reached over and stroked the kitten as it woke up, and then asked, "Will she scratch me?"

His mum seemed to shake her head microscopically, so he very carefully lifted the cat off her lap. The little kitten looked at him with a face so serious it made him smile, and he cradled it gently in his arms. After a moment she gave a tiny, contented squeak and settled into his lap.

He looked back up at his mum and smiled, feeling the warm, soft fur under his fingertips. "She's just a baby, isn't she?" he asked. His mum was still smiling at him, so he went on, saying whatever came into his head. "I saw a kitten even tinier than this once. It was at our neighbor's house. They found one little kitten all by itself, too small to live alone. It must have gotten lost, or something. They brought her home, and she lived in a little box lined with an old fur." His mum looked interested, so he continued. "They tried to feed her out of a baby bottle, but it was too big for her to suck. So they gave her milk out of a dropper, like we use for potions. One little drop at a time. And she would only eat if they held her really close, so she would think her mum was there. And she got bigger and stronger and started to run around the house, and then she grew into a regular cat, and she was fine. Except she always thought our neighbor was her mum, and she would follow her around all over the place."

"Where was her mum?"

The voice was so soft and whispery that for a second Neville wasn't sure he'd heard it at all. "Sorry?" he said without thinking.

He looked in some alarm at his mum, who was licking her lips purposefully. "Where was the kitten's mum?" she whispered again. Her voice was raspy and low but it was musical to Neville, who could not remember ever hearing it before.

"Um," he said quickly, looking down at the cat in his lap. "I guess maybe she went away - or maybe she was hurt, and she couldn't come back to her kitten. Or maybe this one kitten wandered away, and her mum couldn't ever find her." His mum looked troubled at that, so he added hastily, "But probably the mother cat found her kitten a bit later, when the kitten was all grown up, and they were quite good friends."

There was another moment of quiet while they both petted the kittens, and then his mum said softly, "My mum doesn't come. I think she went away and she's not ever coming back."

Neville didn't know what to say to this. His other grandmother, his mum's mother, had died before he was born. If his mum had been right in her head, she would have remembered. He looked over at his remaining grandmother, but she was whispering something to his father and didn't see either his dilemma or the miracle of his mum speaking. Finally he said, stroking the kitten and concentrating on her purr, "My mum's gone too. She - she got hurt, and she can't get home." He buried his face in the kitten's fur for a moment and then added, "But she might come back. Sometime."

"Sometime," his mum repeated, looking down at the cat in her own lap.

Later he said goodbye and returned the second cat to her arms, and said a few words to the unmoving form of his father, and when they left it was the first time his mum didn't give him a candy wrapper. She was petting a kitten with each hand as they walked out of the ward.

* * * * *

The kittens were so warm, and so soft, and their baby faces were so adorable. And they loved her. They slept on her bed, purred in her arms, kissed her nose, and licked her hands with their rough tongues. When the pain came she cried into their fur and held them close, and they let her. The quiet one wrapped its furry body around her shoulders and hugged her with its whole self, and the other one looked at her with a troubled face and licked her tears. But she cried less, because whenever she wanted her mummy she would watch the kittens and hug them and feel better. Because she could be their mummy, and it made her happy to keep them from being sad and lonely. Best yet, the kittens knew nothing about the darkness and they weren't scared. In the night they purred on her chest, and she knew that everything was safe.

* * * * *

Certainly there was enough to worry about when Neville returned to school - Voldemort's resurfacing had everyone on edge, especially because nothing major appeared to have happened since the Department of Mysteries last year. Neville didn't like to think about that very much, nor did he like to think about Voldemort at all, and so he had ample excuse to be distracted from the problems of the rest of the world by thinking about his mum instead. Of course she was . . . the way she was, because of Voldemort. But he tried not to think of that, especially not now when he could picture her cradling her kittens like a little girl and smiling as though she actually saw him.

He was fortunate when he reached dinner on his first night back to see that Ron and Harry were engaged with the other Gryffindor boys in an animated discussion about the next Quidditch match, and that Hermione was alone at the table reading. He slid onto the bench across from her and whispered, "My mum talked to me."

He didn't think she had exactly heard him, but she looked up from her book and said, "Sorry Neville, she did what?"

"She talked to me," he repeated. "Over the holidays. I went for my visit, and she actually talked to me, and heard what I said, and everything."

"Wow," Hermione said with interest. "Really? That's great, Neville! What did you talk about?"

"Her kittens," Neville said, blushing slightly. "She started talking to me when I mentioned her kittens. Then - we talked about why they didn't have any mum, and she said - she thought her mum had gone away."

"Did she?"

"She died before my Mum went in the hospital," Neville said, concentrating on the plate of chops which had appeared between them. "Mum didn't remember."

"But she remembered you, right?" Hermione beamed across her plate. "She recognized you."

Neville felt his face growing hot, and he dropped his eyes to the table. "No," he said quietly, then cleared his throat and said more distinctly, "She didn't know me. She just talked to me like a stranger."

"Oh," Hermione said softly.

"But that's still good," he said, trying to sound more cheerful than he actually felt. "I mean, she's never talked before. At all. I didn't even know what she sounded like."

"Oh," Hermione said again. "So - so she is getting a little better."

"I guess," he said. "If she can talk - and, you know, tell us what she's thinking . . ."

"What did she exactly say?" Hermione asked, looking at him with what seemed to be new interest.

Neville didn't have to think very hard. "I was telling her about our neighbor who found and raised a baby kitten. She asked where the kitten's mum was. I said she must have gone away, and she said her own mum never came, that she thought her mum had gone away and was never coming back."

Hermione frowned. "It sounds like she does know her mother is dead."

Neville shook his head. "It wasn't like that. She didn't seem to know where her mum was. It was like she was expecting her to visit, and was getting really upset because she never showed up."

Now Hermione was biting her lip thoughtfully. "I wonder what the Muggle doctors . . . what have they done to treat your parents at St. Mungo's?"

He shrugged. "Potions. Healing spells. I think at first they also tried some weird talismans from Turkey or something, but they gave up on that a long time ago. When I was still little."

"I wonder," Hermione said. "Muggles don't have potions or anything, but Muggle doctors are actually pretty good at treating people with psychological problems. I mean - if your mum's body seems healthy, and she can talk, and eat, and walk, and everything - maybe her mind is the only thing wrong with her."

"But how can you fix that, if spells don't work?" he asked, and he hated himself for the despair he could hear in his own voice.

"You talk to her," Hermione replied. "I mean, I suppose you can't get Muggle psychiatrists into St. Mungo's, but maybe you could try helping her yourself. You could try asking her questions, about for example . . ." Then she trailed off.

"For example what?"

She shook her head. "It sounds - from what you said, it almost sounds like she's - like she's gone back to a time before she was hurt, before her mum died, before anything bad had happened to her. You could ask her stuff like - like how old she is, or what year it is, or something. Then maybe you'd know where her mind was."

A thrill of hope ran through him. "You think that might help?"

Hermione shrugged. "If you knew where she thought she was, maybe you could help her get back to now."

"I can have my Gran ask her," he said excitedly. "I'll owl her right now!"

As it turned out, Hermione affixed a note to the bottom of Neville's enthusiastic letter, explaining to Mrs. Longbottom that this was how Muggles treated such problems, that it often worked quite well, that in fact she had read something about a disorder that came from having had a very stressful experience, and that perhaps Neville's mum could be reached by the right kind of talking - especially now that the kittens had drawn her out of her shell, now that she was able to hear and respond to talk.

The owl brought Neville a reply the very next day at breakfast. His eyes met Hermione's over toast and he said in a hushed voice, "Yesterday wasn't her day to visit. Do you think she's angry?"

"Or she's excited," Hermione said. "Open it!"

With a quick glance to ensure that no one else was paying attention, Neville ripped open the envelope. The note inside was very short. It read:

Neville -

She didn't know what age she was, or the year. She became very confused and upset when I asked her about it. Perhaps I was too forceful. Miss Granger did not give instructions on the manner of my questioning. But your mother says she has never been to Hogwarts.

-Grandmother

When he showed her the letter (carefully), Hermione's first response was, "She talked a lot! She must have, to tell your Gran about Hogwarts. And not just about the kittens."

"But she thinks she's only ten. Or younger. Or else she would have been to Hogwarts."

"Maybe she just has amnesia about Hogwarts."

"Then she wouldn't have known about it at all," Neville said, feeling his stomach sink. If his mother had gone back to being a child, if she didn't remember Hogwarts or anything that had happened after, she wouldn't remember him at all. She would have forgotten he ever existed. "No wonder she never knows me," he muttered.

"But this happens to Muggles all the time!" Hermione said excitedly, barely remembering to lower her voice. "Without memory-altering charms or anything. Just because they get hurt, or they have a mental problem. And the doctors talk to them, and make them less afraid, or less hurt, or whatever, and then they help them remember. It's possible, it really is!"

"It sounds too easy," Neville said doubtfully.

"Well, of course Muggle doctors go to years of school to learn to do it. But you could try! You could make friends with her, and - and tell her she's safe now, or something like that. Talk to her about mums, and let her remember she was a mum once. You could try!"

Neville couldn't help but feel that this would all get his hopes up, and then turn out not to work at all and his mum would be just the same. Nevertheless, he found himself writing another letter to his Gran, asking to be taken from school to visit his mum again the following weekend.

* * * * *