Author's Note: Read this chapter if you feel like being depressed.
Prompt 4: Dark Room
Somewhere deep in the depths of nothingness and horror, there exists a place where every painfully mortal man, and his every bleak thought of despair comes to the surface, so dark that that thought can only hope for the blessings of death, the promise of hell's sweet redemption. Even the most undeserving and unexpected people have seen this place. Some make it out alive, and others remain trapped for years and decades and ages until time no longer continues.
Neville found that place the day he stood in his train compartment, his deputy, Luna, sitting at his side.
It wasn't a tangible place, he would soon learn.
As Neville sat on the Hogwarts Express, the happy location of many childhood memories, he had a sudden feeling that a darkness was creeping along the edges of his mind, a darkness that would not dare release him.
The Death Eater's came that day awash in black cloaks, and masks so distorted that they could blithely hide the faces of killers from the eyes of the innocent.
They came for Luna.
The dark shrouded figures grabbed hold of her hair with brute hands, and stealthy hatred, demanding her to control what her father was writing in his editorial. And she yelled. Merlin, she yelled. She yelled bloody murder as they cast spell upon spell into her dove-like body, trying to put on a show for those Hogwarts students who had managed to disobey them.
But to see them take it upon her, upon Luna, who lived in a world of dream-like fantasy, who represented the same serenity that the D.A. was fighting for…It was too much.
Flaring curses leapt into Neville's brain, but where was his wand, oh where, oh where was his wand? He was just a moment too late. He watched with glistening tears as they tore her from the train and Disapparated, leaving him with nothing but an aching emptiness of his failure as a Captain in Dumbledore's Army, his failure as a friend.
And then the darkness engulfed his mind like a wave, like a room well hidden that no one would ever want to seek. And hot, bitter tears of outrage were pouring down his face, and Hannah was wrapping her arms around him, and he felt her tears mingle with his on his shoulder, but he could not push away that dark room in his mind. Not until he felt Hannah sleeping at his slide, her eyes empty of tears, and he knew that he had to go on with his mission. He had to do something to keep her safe.
He always thought that he had lost her. Luna. But when she arrived safely with Dean at the very end of all ends, the day of the Battle, he finally learned to hide that Dark Room away. It was a sinister, morbid place of nightmares, but often it came up in times of trouble, to comfort him and to remind him that death and hell would surely be better than the place where he was.
But Neville knew one thing for sure. He would rather have one day in that Dark Room with a light at the end of the tunnel than a thousand in a place where there were only hues of grey. And he would always strive for the light.