"So, what did you see while you've been asleep?" Alice asked.
"Quite a few things," Neville said, knowing that this wasn't very informative.
"Really Neville, I'm quite certain that I'm remembering it as well anyway. So tell me about it. I just want to know if everything went properly."
"Alright," Neville said. She'd probably mind more if he kept refusing to talk to her. "You didn't really want to see Dad go, did you? I saw what it was like when he said goodbye. You were worried about him but he persuaded you that he needed to do this."
Alice blinked a few times before answering. "Yes, that's right. I didn't want him to go for really selfish reasons actually. I was scared he might not come back and I didn't want to be without him. Now I've been without him for so many years."
A few tears were running down her face. "It's been worth it though even though he didn't kill Voldemort; he managed to save the lives of four colleagues. He was actually supposed to receive the Order of Merlin third class for this. Kingsley and Cordelia probably got it on their own now, maybe I should ask Kingsley about it."
"So Kingsley and Cordelia Savage accompanied Dad?" Neville asked.
"Yes, they did. A small team," Alice said.
Neville didn't ask the question that was on his mind. Why had the Death Eaters chosen his parents and not one of the others? He knew how unfair it was to think that, but he couldn't help doing so.
"Kingsley used to live in a village with a high magical population," Alice said. "Witches and wizards who might have come to his aid if he had been attacked."
Had he asked his question aloud after all? Or had his mother read his mind? He had never expected this from her but after seeing the memories; he knew that she was a Legilimens as well.
"Cordelia has proven that she doesn't give away information once before, they might have expected her to do so again."
Neville tried to keep his thoughts to himself. If his mother started to look into his mind, he had to take the necessary measures so he didn't upset her with any of his thoughts. He thought it quite possible that Lestrange hadn't wanted to attack his former patient Cordelia Savage. He still spoke about her very well.
"The fact that we did our best to get them into Azkaban might have been a reason too," Alice added.
"I remembered that too," Neville said. "You came home from work and told Dad that they let them go."
When Neville looked at his mother's face now, he saw a hint of the anger he had seen in her back then. "Yes, that's right. If they hadn't received special treatment because of their family's position you would probably have grown up with us." Her voice sounded very bitter now. Neville couldn't blame her. He had felt the same way after waking up.
"It's been my own fault as well though," Alice said. "I should have trusted my feeling rather than follow these orders without questioning them. No one would have blamed me for treating them a bit harshly if it had allowed us to capture Voldemort's right hand woman as well as her husband and brother. I wouldn't have broken any law, we were allowed to use any force necessary."
Neville bit into his pancake, thinking. This remark came rather unexpectedly. The question was out before he could stop himself. "Were you able to use the Unforgivable Curses too?" He wished he could take it back as soon as he had asked, but to his relief, his mother didn't seem to be upset.
"Yes, it was part of our training," she said calmly. "Every Auror had to learn how to use them."
So this was true, Neville thought. Bellatrix had claimed that the Aurors had routinely used Unforgivable Curses as well but Neville had never really believed that. Three of the eight Cruciatus cures patients he had treated after the war had been tortured at the Ministry but Neville had assumed that this had been an effect of the hopeless situation during the last months of Scrimgeour's time in office. Or the deed of people like Umbridge. Neville hadn't known any of the perpetrators; none of them had been close to Dumbledore or the Order.
He just had to ask. "Did you ever use them?" He didn't add "on people", she'd be able to guess that anyway.
"We've used the Imperius curse quite frequently," Alice admitted. "At the beginning, we were all very reluctant to do so, thought it was dishonourable. This changed pretty quickly though. The more people died, the less people cared about this kind of thing. It's extremely useful if someone tries to resist capture. Most Death Eaters weren't able to fight it off."
Neville could understand that. A form of magic very much like the Imperius curse if not called the same was used at the hospital as well and had been before Voldemort had taken over. It wasn't harmful in itself; he had experienced it himself without any damage after all. It depended on the way it was used.
"I've never been able to do the Cruciatus curse "properly". I used to use it on trainee Aurors at the beginning of R&S-training though."
Neville had never heard of R&S-training but it was quite clear what it was.
"When they could deal with mine, they were thought able to face the real thing from someone who could actually do it."
That was almost exactly what the Carrows had done with Neville, unwittingly of course. They had asked other students to perform the curse on him but none of them, not even Crabbe and Goyle had been able to do it properly. Neville didn't believe that this had anything to do with Crabbe and Goyle's lack of evil though. Lack of talent more likely. Afterwards, he had been able to resist the Carrows' own curse much better as well. It had never been as bad as the first time anymore.
"I can't deny that I saw it being used though," Alice continued. "I've argued against it but most of the time, this was overruled. I didn't attack my colleagues to protect a Death Eater of course."
"So it was really regularly used at the Ministry?" Neville asked. As far as this issue was concerned he had done Bellatrix wrong by believing that she had lied, obviously.
"Not regularly," Alice said a hint of defiance in her voice. "In some situations, when the lives of innocent people were at stake. We couldn't value the well-being of a Death Eater higher than their lives, could we? A few people who were a bit too quick to use it existed as well but I didn't have too much to do with them. I've only used the third one once and I've never told anyone about it. It doesn't really matter anymore though I think."
Neville looked at her. He was wondering what she was going to tell him next. She hadn't murdered anyone, had she?
"There was this Death Eater called Jeremy Wilkes. Scrimgeour and Proudfoot interrogated him and well, Proudfoot was one of the people I've just mentioned."
The name Proudfoot was very familiar to Neville as well. This Auror had been involved in the torture of two of his three patients.
"He was in a pretty bad state and they asked me to take him to Azkaban. At first, he begged me to let him go but I couldn't do that of course. He was a Death Eater who had killed one of us, probably more. When we reached the shore and I wanted to get him into the boat, he asked me to kill him. He knew he was going to die in there soon and so did I. He told me that he didn't want to die alone in a dark cell while reliving his pain and I just couldn't take him to the Dementors. So I did it. I cast that curse on a human being, for the first and the last time. A flash of green light and he was gone. The Dementors buried him and I said it had been a heart attack when he met them. Marlene was the only one who guessed the truth but she understood."
Neville swallowed hard. One of his patients, the Auror Williamson had asked the same thing of him, again and again. He had wanted Neville to give him poison to end his life. Neville however had sworn an oath that forbad this kind of thing and Williamson's situation hadn't really been hopeless at all. He had eventually recovered and later fled the country with Kingsley's help.
Neville had never thought about Azkaban too much. During his childhood, he had been glad that it was a safe place keeping his parents' torturers away and later, he had mainly been worried about the various break-outs. Nowadays Azkaban wasn't used as a prison anymore and the Death Eaters kept their prisoners in secret places. Neville had preferred not to know about the details so far.
"Wilkes was in my year at Hogwarts, Slytherin of course," Alice continued. "He wasn't really a bad or evil person back then, always quick with a joke. This was one of the few things that made me question what we were fighting for and if it's worth it. I saw him in front of me every time I went to Azkaban afterwards."
"Being involved in this war must have been very, very hard," Neville said.
For the first time, she was actually talking about this, he thought. So far, he had always been under the impression that she thought longingly back to her earlier life, but today, she acknowledged that there had been bad things as well. His Memory Potion seemed to have brought some of her memories to the surface as well. He wasn't sure if this was a good thing or if it would torment her even more.
"Yes, it was hard but that wasn't all there was to it," Alice said. "This kind of thing wasn't happening frequently, I'd hate you to believe it did. What I just told you was one of my worst memories, apart from those where I've lost my best friends. Dorcas, Marlene, Lily, they were all killed. You know about Lily of course, Dorcas has tried to fight Voldemort and died while Marlene and her family have been brutally murdered by an entire group of Death Eater. We never found all the people responsible, the only one who was apprehended was Quentin Travers. Marlene was a teacher as well as a friend to me. Dorcas was another Auror while Lily made potions for the order. We were like sisters; well the entire Order was like a big family. A family which also had a few more difficult members," she laughed slightly. "But which family doesn't?"
The laughter was gone from her face again. "There's been a traitor as well of course. I've never really trusted Pettigrew but I thought it was unfair to accuse the most fearful one because he's fearful. It never occurred to me that the Potters would choose him for their Secret Keeper though. Even if he had been well-meaning, he would never have had a chance to resist if the Death Eaters had caught him. If I had known, I would have told them not to choose him of course. Lily and I actually planned to be each other's Secret Keepers but James didn't want it and Dumbledore disagreed as well. He thought it would be too obvious." She sighed. "You know how it ended."
"Yes, I do," Neville said. The Potters had been killed and so had their son Harry by now.
"I know, these times must sound horrible to you," Alice said now. "But they weren't really. Not while we were in the middle of it. We were living much more intensely, you know. Knowing that every day could be our last made us cherish every peaceful moment we had. Many of us became really close during that time. And we always believed that we were doing the right thing. With the Order, I never doubted this for a second." She spoke in an impassioned manner that Neville couldn't remember having heard from her before.
"We got killed one after another but during the war, we barely had any time to grieve. I knew that I might die really soon and I was okay with that in a way. The idea of sacrificing my life for the cause didn't scare me. As strange as it sounds, I felt almost invulnerable at the same time. I had been in so many tight situations, faced Voldemort himself three times and each time, there had been a way to escape, some sort of miraculous rescue. Part of me believed that it would go on and on like that, that Frank and I would always escape. Probably, making myself believe this was the only way to deal with it. When the Potters died, everything changed. For the first time I realised how many people I had lost, how many friends I would never see again in this world. I started having nightmares. My dead comrades were there, I revisited many of the crime scenes I had been to but I also heard the screams of the prisoners in Azkaban. Many of them claimed they were innocent. We sent more than fifty people there but Voldemort only broke out ten. The rest must have been innocent, dead or so ill they're no use to him anymore."
Neville had realised one thing by now. His mother had suffered many terrible things he had never imagined. Neville had never had much to do with the Order of the Phoenix during the war. This way he hadn't known what life had been like for them.
"If you hadn't been there, I probably would have had trouble living in this new, seemingly more peaceful world," Alice said. "But you've always reminded me of the good things, of the fact that life goes on." She smiled slightly. "You've been a bit difficult sometimes too and distracted us."
Neville took the last, cold pancake and ate it. He didn't want it to be left over.
"That's why I was so nervous about Frank's task," she said. "I haven't been like this in the past. I hated to sit at home waiting for him and unable to do anything. The Death Eaters had been arrested or released; Auror department had become a lot less busy. When he returned, we only had two days together. You know the rest of the story."
Neville swallowed. She still didn't wish to talk about it and he couldn't claim that he really minded. He didn't know how he was supposed to deal with it because he couldn't treat his mother like one of his patients. The necessary distance in this kind of professional relationship just didn't exist between them and he didn't want it to.
The other things she had told him about were disturbing enough. He had had no idea what the war against Voldemort had really been like the first time and hadn't known about the terrible things she had been forced to witness and endure even before the final attack. Murdered friends, traitors among people you considered your extended family, and, most shockingly, the image of his mother in the role of the enforcer for a rather cruel government. He had never really thought about this, the cases of people tortured by the Ministry had been isolated cases, caused by the black sheep of the institution, by people like Umbridge. He wasn't so sure about that anymore.
"Let's wash the dishes now," Alice said. Neville knew that this discussion was over. At least for now.
"Susan has sent an owl by the way. The children are doing really well."
Neville was glad to hear that. He had been worried about leaving Deborah with another family but obviously, she got on better than he had thought. So at least his daughter hadn't suffered from his Memory Potion-induced illness.