New Perspective 1

THE CHOSEN

By Bellegeste

Chapter 4:NARCISSA

"But that wasn't why I asked you to come," said Neville.

"It wasn't? Oh, brother! You mean there's more?" Hermione leaned forward on the bench, hardly noticing how the rough, splintery, wooden slats were digging into her legs. She didn't know how much more she could take.

"It's about Narcissa - you know, Draco's mum."

"I know who Narcissa is! What about her?"

Hermione was starkly reminded that they were trespassing in the Malfoys' garden. Enthralled by the Borometz, she had forgotten.

"She says that it's fine if I - " Neville began, but he got no further.

"Whoa! Stop! Stop right there, Neville. You're telling me you've spoken to Narcissa Malfoy? Next thing you'll be saying you pop up to the Manor for tea and cakes every afternoon at three o'clock. You don't, do you? You've not actually been inside the place? No? OK, I'll shut up. So, you've spoken to her then? Didn't that strike you as being a trifle risky - not to mention dangerous, irresponsible and unbelievably stupid? I suppose you were wearing your camouflage hat - hey? - so that's alright then. I despair of you! …So, what did she say? What happened? When was this? Start at the beginning…"

XXX

(flashback)

His gran had offered to tell them, but Neville had wanted to do it himself. He hadn't tried to analyse why it was so important - he just knew that the news had to come from him. Was he secretly hoping that the shock of hearing about Dumbledore's death might trigger a response, exhume memories, awaken those inert cells long lost to the coma of the Crucio?

Afterwards, as the lift juddered him down to the ground floor of St Mungo's Hospital, Neville pretended to himself that he was not at all disappointed, that he hadn't really been expecting any sort of reaction, and that he knew better than to hope for miracles… He had left his parents sublimely untouched by events, his father, Frank, contentedly finger-painting his chin with drool, and Alice, his mother, systematically plucking the petals from the flowers he had brought.

By the time the lift doors wobbled open Neville had unclenched his jaw and allowed his features to sag into acceptance. Unremarkable and unremarked, he had stepped out into the foyer and into the throes of a major commotion.

The usual, well-ordered queue of patients waiting patiently at reception had coiled itself into an avid circle of onlookers. Some of them were clearly gunning for blood, like punters at a cockfight; others were more like amused shoppers, stopped in their tracks by an exceptionally talented, scene-stealing pavement busker… Neville craned his neck to see what especially grotesque case of magical malady could have generated such interest. There was a lot of shouting.

At the centre of the ring, a slim woman was arguing loudly and vehemently with a nonplussed Healer Smethwyck. Neville couldn't see her face, but he was struck immediately by the cascade of silver blonde hair that flowed down her back like a waterfall, turning in an instant from a smooth stream to a churning Niagara as she tossed her head in annoyance. It was not so much the length or rippling silkiness of the hair that attracted Neville's attention – it was the colour: a delicate, creamy blonde which reminded him of a bank of pale, wild primroses in the Spring; a meadow sweep of comfrey heads or cowslips; or the bark of the silver birch, luminously yellow in the morning sunlight.

"You rhinoceros lover!" the woman shrieked. No, that couldn't be right. Surely she wouldn't have said that?

"The Barber of Seville?" she exclaimed. Neville couldn't hear properly. He made a shushing face at two small girls next to him - ex-best friends – who were squabbling and whining, their hands bound together in a brainteaser of knotted twine, twenty fingers mottling to varying shades of pink and grey and purple as they struggled and the cords correspondingly tightened. They appeared to have been playing Cat's Cradle with a loop of Strangling String. Neville strained to listen above their petulant wails.

"Fresh air! Fresh air? My good man, do I look suicidal? Am I a zoo keeper? An equestrian coiffeuse? There are people whose job it is to undertake that sort of lunacy," the woman remonstrated, clearly outraged by Smethwyck latest suggestion. The long-suffering Healer put a professional arm around her shoulder, trying to draw her away into the privacy of an office, but she pushed him brusquely aside. Neville wished the two girls would shut up.

"Just dewdrops? Dewdrops! Is that some absurdity that passes for humour in your pathological echelons?"

Smethwyck mumbled something else which Neville failed to catch, something which was obviously no consolation to the distraught woman.

"Not likely! I'll be bored to death!"

One of the little girls let out a sudden yelp, causing Neville to miss the beginning of the next sentence.

"… - - talent!" she was screaming. "I'm certainly not bowing and scraping for you or him or anyone else. There must be something suitable here - off the peg, so to speak. Isn't that what you types are for?"

Mumble, rumble…

"Tailor-made? Sensitive? Variables? What size? Large, of course. Aren't they all?" She flung her arms wide in an exaggerated gesture of despair. "Age? Is that relevant? No, I cannot divulge the weight… Oh, this is farcical. I can see I'm wasting my time here."

From her defiant stance it looked as though she was about to storm out, but Smethwyck bent forward to make one last, low-frequency suggestion.

"Stinking hypocrite!" she hurled at him.

With a final, furious toss of her palomino mane, she whirled round and flounced off, her audience shuffling and jostling to move out of her way like penguins in the path of an enraged polar bear. Only Neville stayed where he was, his feet gummed to the floor. The woman striding straight towards him was Narcissa Malfoy.

Neville had only glimpsed her a couple of times in Diagon Alley accompanying Draco on pre-term shopping trips, and she had appeared then as the epitome of pureblood decorum: smart, sophisticated, dignified - the perfect partner for the aristocratic Lucius. A far cry from the screeching, dishevelled fish-wife he had just witnessed.

"Out of my way, boy," she barked, barging past. Neville dodged the wrong way, directly in front of her and they collided heavily. She clutched at his coat to stop herself falling.

"Clumsy oaf!" she spat, and swept on towards the exit. Belatedly Neville moved aside; something crunched under his shoe.

"Excuse me! Excuse me!" he trotted after her and, without any thought as to possible repercussions, tapped Narcissa on the shoulder. "Excuse me, you dropped your Datura stramonium. I – er – I'm afraid I trod on it. It's crushed. I'm sorry." He held out a wilting, mangled plant.

"Oh, really! That's all I need!" She wasn't remotely grateful. "Keep it. It's no use to me. Disgusting, dirty weed. What did you say it was, boy, a date?"

"Datura stramonium," Neville repeated, quaking, waiting for the malicious dawn of recognition to stain the clear, periwinkle blue of her eyes. Up close, in her heeled boots, she was taller than Neville, her figure beneath the impeccably cut cloak still attractive for a woman her age - dangerously lovely, like Datura itself, reflected Neville. He pictured the pale, elegant, draping bells of the Devil's Apple flower, unexpectedly exotic on wizened, spiky stems…

Changing her mind, Madam Malfoy snatched the bent stalk and made as though to stuff it into her handbag.

"I'd be careful if I were you," advised Neville, unable to drag himself away. "You don't want to get the sap on your skin - it burns."

"Ugh. And that hack of a Healer expects me to grind it up and stew it and Merlin knows what! Sheer madness. Oh dear. What do I do now? I refuse to go crawling back to that clueless charlatan. Where do I get another one?"

A note of appeal had crept into her voice, defiance displaced by desperation. Neville's mouth felt as though he had been sucking sloe berries and he swallowed nervously.

"Datura's not so difficult to cultivate," he told her. "If you sowed the seeds now, with regular applications of Magigrow, you could be cropping within three weeks. It's the harvesting that's the tricky part - it all depends on whether you need the leaves for an infusion or a decoction… Or, if it's the roots you want, you have to remember not to use iron tools when you dig them up. Then again, if it's the pods you're after, you'll need to wait for them to set and ripen…"

Narcissa, composure regained, raked him with critical, cornflower calculation.

"You seem to know an awful lot about it," she said. "What are you, another quack?"

"No. I'm just… I'm a gardener," Neville replied, feeling every moment more like a traitor, a collaborator.

"Good for you, sonny." The unmistakable trace of class condescension was already erecting its invisible wall. "A gardener, you say? Can you lay your hands on some more of those nettles? You can? Excellent. I shall expect you first thing in the morning. Bring the plants with you. Ask for Narcissa Malfoy."

This was a woman accustomed to having her instructions obeyed. If he had been wearing a cap, Neville would have doffed it.

"And you are?"

"Er - pardon?"

"Your name, boy. Your name."

For the first time in the entire conversation, Neville Longbottom thought quickly.

"Trevor. Trevor Bluebottle."

(end flashback)

XXX

"Oh, Neville, what have you done? How could you? You do realise you're probably helping Voldemort poison the planet? Why do you think Datura's a restricted herb? You can't just go to any old Apothecary and buy it, can you? Not fresh, anyway. Because it's lethal. It's not like Chamomile tea or a Horsetail hair rinse. Why didn't you say 'no'?"

Dismayed, Hermione passed severe judgment. Neville stooped to snap off a bent asparagus fern, swished the air with a few swipes and then, disconsolately, began shredding the plumes.

"You didn't see her, Hermione. She was upset. She was almost hysterical when she was with Smethwyck. Deranged even. And then when the plant got spoiled she was angry, but she looked more scared than anything. I don't know why she needs it, but she's frightened of what's going to happen if she doesn't get it."

"Precisely! She's taking it to Voldemort. Anybody'd be scared of stalling him," Hermione reasoned. "Crucio job."

"Not for the first time," Neville muttered.

"What ?"

"I'd say she's already been Crucio-ed," said Neville flatly. "She's got that 'lost' look, a kind of emptiness behind the eyes… she loses track of what she's saying… and the jumpiness too - you know, twitchy, nervy… She's not like Snape, she wouldn't know how to block it - "

"You can't block an Unforgivable, Neville."

"Alright then, 'parry' it - isn't that what Harry said Snape did, when he tried to Crucio him that night?"

Hermione didn't have to ask which night.

"That day at St Mungo's she was in such a state, so out of her element - I didn't think about her being a Death Eater, or anything… And she didn't understand the first thing about taking cuttings… I had to help her. She were upset," Neville insisted.

His stout defence of the woman had planted a sickening suspicion in Hermione's fertile mind.

"Neville," she said as gently as she could, "she's Draco's mother, not yours…"

"I know that! Do you think I don't know that?"

Hands in pockets he strode away a few yards and stood scuffing his shoes in the gravel, stamping out the green slug of envy that had been chomping lacy holes in his common-sense.

Hermione's footsteps crunched on the gravel behind him.

"So," she began, as soon as she was sure she was within earshot. "So, you're working for Narcissa. And I'm assuming you've brought her the plants - yes? You've done what she asked. So now, please, Neville, leave her some instructions on how to pick the leaves and get out - while you still can. It's only a matter of time before you're caught. It's way too dangerous."

Neville looked her squarely in the eye.

"You wouldn't say that if I were Harry," he stated. "When Harry does something brave you think he's daring and courageous, and he's a Gryffindor hero. When I do something risky you call me stupid. That prophecy could just as easily have been about me, you know - maybe it's not Harry who's going to be the one who saves the wizarding world. Maybe it'll be me! Oh, you'd all hate that, wouldn't you? Squibby Neville getting something right for a change."

How much did Neville know about the Prophecy? What had he heard? Harry hadn't wanted anyone else to know – apart from herself and Ron. She wasn't sure if he'd even told Ginny. The trouble was, Neville could be so quiet and nondescript that sometimes you forgot he was there. Had he heard them talking about it? Today he wasn't unassuming though; he was primed with energy.

"Think about it, Hermione - it wasn't a coincidence that I bumped into Narcissa that day at St Mungo's - it was destiny. If I hadn't met her, I wouldn't have come here, and I would never have discovered the Borometz. It's all Fate. I've been Chosen."

He turned to face her, stubbornly assertive, his colour heightened with emotion, a deep brick red suffusing his cheeks, displacing the healthy pink.

Could it be true? Hermione had never doubted that Harry was the Chosen One, marked for fame and glory. But what if Neville was right? Or what if they had both been selected to play a definitive role in the history of wizardkind?

"Just supposing you're right, Neville," Hermione conceded. "What do we do next?"

The gardener answered confidently.

"There's a limit to how many Growth Charms I can use. There's only one thing we can do: wait for the Borometz to ripen and the Datura to mature."

You can't rush Mother Nature.

End of chapter.

Next chapter: BIRD BY BIRD. So who does Narcissa want to poison? Why does she need those herbs? Hermione has a theory. So does Hagrid.

A/N: Heartfelt thanks to my faithful reviewers.