LOST PERSPECTIVE 7
PAYBACK TIME
By Bellegeste
A/N: Reviews: Wow! Some of you seem to think I have gone over to the Dark Side... and that Snape is my instrument of vengeance... Well, we'll see.
As I said at the end of Ch.8, we now cut to another part of the castle where Harry and Hermione are filling-in time since their return from St Mungo's. (But we get back to Snape soon...).
At last! A long chapter!
Chapter 9 : A LANCASHIRE LAD (1)
"Halt! Ye pribbling, pottle-deep pumpion!"
"What?"
"Stand fast, I say! Thou art a dankish, fen-sucked giglot! Fie, Sir! A plague on both your houses!"
"We're both in Gryffindor, that's why we want to come in," said Hermione, addressing the portrait calmly.
"Aha! Milady, forsooth! I defy thee for a yeasty, folly-fallen flax-wench!"
"Sir Cadogan, have we done something to offend you? What's happened to the Fat Lady?"
"The doughty damsel? The full-gorged, pink paunchette? Chivalry forbids me to divulge the details of that fine lady's toilette, but I have it from rumour's lofty lips that she is - and, prithee youngstrels, keep it close – e'en now absorbed in shiny happenstance."
"What are you talking about?" Harry couldn't be bothered to enter into conversation with the picture. The knight leaned precariously across the neck of the stumpy pony and lowered his voice.
"For all that thou art a craven, mammering, milk-livered, minnow, I vouchsafe unto thee, she and the winsome Lady Violet are being re-varnished."
"Oh, right. Now will you practise your abuse on someone else and let us in, please?"
X X X
In the Common Room Harry threw himself down onto the sofa.
"That picture's getting worse!" he exclaimed irritably. "What kind of a stupid password is 'Beef-witted bum-bailey', for God's sake? I bet McGonagall will have something to say about that."
"Didn't she have to authorise it? At least she's got a sense of humour! Unlike some people I could mention. Don't be such a grump, Harry. Sir Cadogan's just bored. He's had all Christmas to think up those new insults - you could try being more appreciative. Though 'yeasty' is a bit unpleasant. Never been called that before. What is a flax-wench, anyway? I'll have to look it up." Hermione was being unusually tolerant - etymological novelty serving to dilute the offensiveness. "Oh look - the house elves have sent up tea. That's nice. Want some?"
"Haven't those house elves ever heard of Butterbeer? Or has that piss-artist Winky drunk it all?" gloomed Harry, accepting a mug nonetheless.
"You're welcome!"
"What? Oh, yeahsorrythanks."
"So, Harry, what are we going to do? It's a bit dull with nobody else here. Have you finished your holiday assignments?" She had pulled what looked like a new reading list out of her pocket and was skimming through the titles. "We could always make a start on some of these books for next term - get ahead of the game…"
"You are joking?" Harry never failed to be alarmed by Hermione's diligence. His face had assumed the sulky, aggrieved expression that, Hermione now recognised, often heralded a complaint about his father. She was not wrong. "It's so unfair!" he burst out. "He's gone swanning off to the cottage and we have to stay here, stuck indoors, not even allowed to go into the grounds. Why can't we go to Hogsmeade?"
"He's just being protective, Harry. Taking precautions."
"Precautions? There's being careful and there's being bloody paranoid - we can look after ourselves. Why can't he ever get that?" Same old complaint.
"You'd be paranoid, Harry, if you'd nearly been… if, um, you'd been attacked. He's probably still in shock. We don't even know if it's safe for him to be at the cottage… For all we know, there could be - " She stopped, mid-sentence, her body tensing, narrowing her eyes and squinting into the corner of the room. Then she lifted a finger to her lips and motioned Harry to keep very still. "There's something under the cupboard," she whispered.
"What sort of something?" Harry mouthed. The hairs on the back of his neck frosted with apprehension. He felt no twinges in his scar; the temperature in the room was comfortably warm; he heard no hissing death threats in his head. Hermione's eyes widened and she gave a tiny shake of her head.
"I don't know, but it's watching us. I saw it blink. Harry! What are you doing?"
For he had rolled off the sofa onto his hands and knees and was creeping on all fours towards the cupboard, head low to the floor.
"Well, if it's blinking that means you've seen it's eyes, so it can't be a Basilisk or a Dementor, and it's not likely to be a Boggart otherwise you'd be having the heebie-jeebies about exam grades or something, and it's got to be small if it's under there, so…"
"So, what? Oh, do be careful, Harry!"
"So I'm going to poke it with my wand and see what it does."
"You can't! It might be a Pixie, or a Gnome or an Imp or something. Or a Doxy - Harry, it might bite you. Or one of Hagrid's nasty animals – a Murtlap or a Red Cap or… or a Jarvey… You can't just poke it!" Hermione, she was embarrassed to admit afterwards, had climbed onto the sofa, an instinct for self-preservation compelling her to get off ground if there were minute, scuttling creatures on the loose. Her eyes were still riveted to the dark corner.
"No? Wanna bet? Anyway, if it was a Jarvey it'd be swearing at us by now," Harry muttered, inching forwards. He stopped an arm's length from the cupboard and slowly extended his wand…
There was a shrill squeal and a croak, and out of the blackness came –
"Trevor?"
With a sigh of relief Harry let his forehead drop to the carpet, and he knelt, prostrate, while his heart stopped racing. Then he scooped up the disgruntled toad.
"But if Trevor's here, that means…"
x x x
"Eighup, Harry, Hermione!" Neville appeared at the doorway that led up to the dorm, and stumped into the Common Room. "What's amiss? Spun up and stuck fer bobbins (2)?"
"Huh?" Didn't anyone in this castle speak normal English any more?
"Neville! What are you doing here? Nobody's due back until next week - hey, we found Trevor… Come and sit down - I'm afraid you'll have to squeeze in, next to Crookshanks - have some tea. Biscuit? It's all right - they're not Canary Creams. Harry and I were just saying it was getting dull in the castle on our own… So, how're you? What have you been up to since we saw you at the hospital? Did you have a good Christmas with your Gran?"
Neville slid Trevor carefully into his inside pocket and squatted on the edge of the chair-cushion, half on, half off. He wrapped his hands around the hot tea mug and nursed it pensively. The cat's ginger tail flicked in annoyance and the tipped ears flattened back at the ignominy of sharing space with this sweaty human and his toad. Neville perched; his thigh muscles were starting to quiver; the mug shook in his hand. Harry couldn't watch.
"Oh, for heaven's sake, Neville, shift the wretched cat. Sorry, Hermione, but unless Nev's got legs like an Olympic skier, he'll never keep up that position."
Sensing a more determined incursion, Crookshanks took the initiative and stood up, arching his back, stretching. Aiming a haughty, yellow, disdainful glare at Neville, he jumped down and stalked away, bottle-brush tail erect, dignified to the last.
Hermione noticed how Neville slumped himself more fully into the depths of the squashy armchair. He looked pleased to see them, but there was something slightly limp and faded about him today - he seemed washed-out as though he had been once too often through the Dolly Tub, scrubbed thoroughly against an unforgiving washboard and repeatedly mangled. He did not look like a boy who has just returned to school after a jolly Christmas holiday.
"Neville, is everything all right?" she asked.
Neville drew in a long, deep breath, his cheeks puffing out and growing chubbier and pinker until he began to bear a disconcerting resemblance to Dudley Dursley. Then he exhaled slowly, deflating back into himself.
"Ah'm fair worn out!" he declared with a sigh. He emptied his mug with a swig which ended in a splutter. "Ugh, Hermione - this tae's like pinklewater!"
Harry peered doubtfully into his own mug as if half-expecting a scalded pinkle to come crawling out and nip him on the nose.
"Neville, why - " he began. He could feel Hermione's warning glare, severe with political correctness, but he wasn't going to tread on eggshells just for Neville.
"Why are you talking like that? You sound all… …all 'ecky-thump'…"
"Harry!" Hermione was scrupulously outraged. "If Neville wants to speak in a Lancashire dialect as an expression of his regional identity, or as a demonstration of his pride in his Northern origins, then we've no right to make fun of him. We should be supporting him, not undermining his cultural heritage."
She gave a brisk nod to end her little speech, satisfied that she had clinched the issue before anybody took offence. Looking to the boys for some sort of acknowledgement, she was piqued to catch Harry and Neville exchanging a circus of 'snooty-tooty', 'hoity-toity'faces at her expense.
"Hey - do that one again, Nev - you went completely cross-eyed just then," laughed Harry.
"Eh lad, tha sken (3) like a basket o' whelks!" giggled Neville in his broadest 'Lanky', grinning and looking considerably more cheerful than when he'd come in. "Ee by gum, ecky peck, shape yersen else al purr thee wi' mi clog - tha's sat 'ere like a piffy on a toadstool…(4)" he chortled.
"Well, now you're just being silly!" snorted Hermione. She would have flounced out in a huff, but there didn't seem to be much point - there was no one else to talk to in the castle apart from ghosts and elves and besides, Neville was definitely behaving oddly and she wanted to get to the bottom of it. It wasn't like him to be interesting. And after all the trauma of the last few days, it was a relief to have someone other than Professor Snape to worry about.
"I'm sorry, Hermione," Neville said in a voice approaching normal, the accent flat but intelligible, though sounding rather more nasal than usual. "It comes of spending too much time with Great Uncle Algie. First thing he does is slip me a Lingo Lozenge… It kind of makes me drop back into talking 'Northern' when I'm there. Takes a while to wear off. I don't rightly mind - anything for a quiet life. He wants me to be true to my roots, you see. E's got a bit of a thing abaht it." He relapsed back into himself, subdued and reflective, his smooth cup-cake face now pocked with grievances. "E's on at me all the time; never lets up. It's like, 'Give over mitherin' - th'art nobbut a big jessy',(5)" Neville quoted sadly, as if he suspected it might be true.
"We thought you were staying at your Gran's - like you always do," said Hermione, not daring to speculate what might have been going on.
Neville's shoulders sagged even further - his Gran wasn't a happy topic of conversation either, apparently.
"You know we'll winkle it out of you sooner or later," coaxed Hermione at her most persuasive. "You might as well tell us now - before we apply the thumbscrews or would you prefer a quick Tarantellegra or maybe… the dreaded 'tickle-torture'?" She knew Neville hated being tickled. "So, what's up, Neville?"
"Well…" He was rubbing dejectedly at his fingertips which appeared to be an unfortunate, olivey shade of green. "Well, I don't rightly like to say this, Harry, what with him being your dad an' all - "
"Snape?" exclaimed Hermione. "We might have known! What's he done to you now?"
"Nowt worse than usual," said Neville, phlegmatically. "It was my end of term report. When my Gran read it she got really cratchy (6). Said I was a disgrace to the family and that the name of Longbottom would become a standing joke, and that it was an insult to the memory of - you know - of my mum and dad."
"Not good," commiserated Harry, painfully familiar with the concept of upholding wizard family honour. "But you were a hero at the end of last term, Nev - I know it was your wand that started all the trouble, but it wasn't your fault - it was that creep Malfoy, sabotaging everything. Surely they're not blaming you for that?"
Hermione also leaped to her friend's defence.
"I think it's really mean of Snape to have given you a bad report - after all that work you put in trying to find the cure. It's worse than mean, it's vindictive! He's always got it in for you! I've a good mind to go and tell him so!"
Neville, however, didn't need rescuing just yet.
"No, Hermione. It wasn't so much what Snape put - it was more how my Gran took it."
"So what did he say then?" Harry and Hermione spoke simultaneously.
"It weren't anything really. He said, 'Mr Longbottom's return to the Potions class has been a salutary experience for us all.'"
That silenced them. No one knew quite what to make of it.
"That doesn't actually sound so bad," said Hermione slowly. "It's not as though he said you were hopeless, or threatened to have you expelled, is it?"
Frowning, Neville nodded back at her.
"Exactly. But my Gran got the idea that I had to spend the whole of my holiday practising potions, and as if that weren't bad enough, after Christmas she suddenly cooked up this scheme to send me to stay with Great Uncle Algie. Something about needing a male role model…"
Secretly, Hermione agreed that Neville could do with a little toughening up - he owed it to himself to be more assertive, and to have more confidence in his abilities - but she doubted whether packing him off into the clutches of an uncouth relative was the answer.
"And then," Neville continued with a colossal sniff, "yesterday she got an owl from Snape…"
"No!"
"Aye, she did. And it put her in all of a pother - he said I had to come back to school early."
"To catch up on your Potions?"
" 'Appen so."
"Blimey! What a miserable swine! Ruining your holiday!"
Harry came out in sympathy and felt justified in slating his father on Neville's behalf. He and Snape both had the unsettling habit of divorcing events that occurred in school from their personal lives. Hermione was less quick to condemn the Potions master - in the midst of all his own troubles it was, she thought, very dedicated of him to be considering the welfare of any student, let alone Neville.
Neville sniffed again. His nose seemed to be completely bunged-up, yet with a persistent drip. Hermione wondered if he had been crying. The problem, however, as Neville endeavoured to explain, could be traced back to his Potions practice.
"Me nose 'as never been the same since Dolohov broke it last summer. I think when Pomfrey patched it up she made it even more sensitive than it were afore. And now, when I do Potions… It's my Gran's fault really - she had me working with that many recipes, and trying them out on myself and then having to brew up the antidotes… I've been Shrunk, Enlarged, put to Sleep, Woken-up… I've been given Aches and Acne, Boils, Blisters and Buboes, Cricks, Cramps and Colic… I've induced Drowsiness, Eccentricity, Energy, Flatulence, Gratuitous Generosity, Hiccoughs, Invisibility…"
"Wow! You've done Invisibility? That's really advanced." Harry was most impressed. Neville waffled his nose sideways, retrenching…
"I'm still working on that one…"
Hermione was growing anxious that he had ploughed his way through the entire, alphabetical potions index. And if he was receiving all this private tuition from Snape too, he might get really good… That was a worrying thought.
"It wasn't so bad until I was practising the Boil Cure Potion, and I added the Porcupine Quills and this whopping cloud of green smoke came out… It got right up my nose - stung like billy-oh - and made my eyes water and…"
"Oh, Neville, not again!" Hermione despaired, but felt that perhaps her classroom supremacy was not under threat after all. "That's first year work - didn't you learn anything from your mistakes? That's precisely what you did wrong before…"
"I remember that now." Neville was on his dignity. "Anyway, then my Gran decided I was looking a touch peaky, so she started dosing me with all these concoctions out of Old Wives' Herbal - By 'eck! If you think Snape's potions are vile… She gave me a mustard bath one day and my skin went all itchy and yellow. I tell thee, if I weren't badly to start with, by the time she'd finished wi' me I'd welly woven mi piece…(7) Ooh er, sorry - there I go again! In some ways it was a relief to go to Great Uncle Algie's."
And in other ways it wasn't.
Ever since Neville had been a baby, his Great Uncle had delighted in putting him through his magical paces. He had a theory that magic was like a muscle - in order to develop it needed to be flexed and exercised; the greater the challenge, the stronger the magical ability would become. If that were true, reflected Neville glumly, a few weeks with Algie and he'd be as powerful as Dumbledore!
The trouble was, 'challenge' to Algie encompassed all manner of obstacles, threats or difficulties, the more life-threatening the better. When Neville's gran had suggested that, as a gesture of gratitude and appeasement, it might be useful to take Professor Snape a present - some unusual, freshly caught potions ingredients, for example - Uncle Algie had been alarmingly enthusiastic. And Neville had felt a chill of foreboding…
Since retirement, Algie's interests had led him more and more often to the coast where he would meet up with his friends - an assortment of ancient but irreverent wizard cronies. Shuffling along the sea-front together, like down-at-heel relics from some wartime travelling repertory theatre, they would relive their glory days, over a shared bag of steamed cockles, tossing the empty shells skywards and shooting them down with their wands like miniature clays. On warm days they might conjure deck-chairs on the sand and entertain themselves with a spot of harmless Muggle-baiting, the favourites being to divert Frisbees and send them skimming out to sea, or to stampede the plodding, moth-eaten string of donkeys with a couple of strategic Stinging spells…
So they'd taken a row-boat into the bay, much to the concern of the hire-boat attendant, who hadn't even been open for business on that blustery, Boxing Day morning, and clearly thought them insane, insisting that it was more than his job's worth to let them have a craft in this weather. Mumbling something which sounded oddly to Neville like 'wigwams'(8), Uncle Algie had clasped the attendant's hand and shaken it heartily, until a mazey, glazed expression came into the Muggle's eyes and he fetched them the oars and removable rowlocks without further protest. Algie wasn't much of an oarsman. He powered the boat by dipping his wand over the side and casting some form of the Reductor curse which sent them scudding over the waves in erratic bursts, leaving a trail of stunned fish floating in their wake.
Despite feeling increasingly sea-sick as the little boat bucked and bounced, Neville had managed to gather a whole jar of mucoid slime from a worm-pink, wriggling, slip-knotted Hagfish, as well as the defensively expelled entrails of three sea-cucumbers.
"Getting the sharks' teeth was a lot trickier," he explained with false modesty, savouring the look of admiration on Harry's face. "Every time I tried to get it with a 'Stupefy!', the spell missed. It took me ages to work out that it was getting refracted by the water. I thought I was just a lousy shot. And I wasn't used to Algie's wand either…"
His Great Uncle had scoffed, but Neville had stuck to his refusal to use his own wand, fearing Ministry repercussions.
"I suppose I ought to take the stuff to Snape now, so he can pickle it, or eat it, or whatever he does, before it goes off. Pongs like a dead dragon already! Is he down in the dungeons do you know?"
Neville made a half-hearted move to get up, very reluctant to make this particular goodwill gesture. There was a silence as both Harry and Hermione waited, expecting the other to answer. Then they both spoke at once.
"I think he's gone to Snape Cottage today," said Hermione.
"Did you hear he was attacked by another Death Eater?" said Harry.
Neville promptly settled back down in his chair…
End of Chapter
1 Lancashire - The Harry Potter Lexicon suggests that Neville's family hails from Lancashire. I have merely built on this.
2 Spun up and stuck fer bobbins - at a loose end. A lot of Lancashire sayings are based on cotton mill terminology.
3 Tha sken like – you are as cross-eyed as
4 shape yersen – pull yourself together; purr thee – hit you; piffy - pixie
5 'give over… jessy' – stop whining; you're just a big cissy
6 cratchy – irritable, grumpy
7 badly – ill; welly – well nigh; woven mi piece – finished (my piece of work) i.e. come to the end of life
8 'Wigwams' - from a Lanky retort 'Wigwams for lame ducks' meaning 'never you mind'…
Next Chapter: INTO DARKNESSE. Cut back to Snape. Returning to the burnt out remains of Snape Cottage, Snape has to deal with old demons...