Aphotic: Lightless; dark.
April 30, 1998
They could see nothing. The Room of Requirement felt huge even in the pitch darkness, whispers sometimes echoed up to the raftered ceiling, the occasional dim movement in the passage as people came or went from the nightly watch came from the corner, but there was no light at all with which to see.
Neville didn't need it though. He lay in his hammock beneath the haphazard pile of sheets, staring sightlessly at the wooden planks above his head and he could see the whole room.
It had started as one small, cozy hole-in-the-wall sort of place, a haven he had thought of only as he had hurtled around a seventh floor corridor, one of the Carrows roaring about blood traitors at the base of a stairwell, hindered by the heavy white bust of Gregory the Smarmy across his chest. It had, he had reflected later, lying on a sleeping bag with his eyes fixed intently on the locked door just in case, been a stroke of genius he would not have expected of himself before that term.
And in the ensuing weeks, it had rapidly filled as more and more people, with the knowledge that there was an escape, grew bold enough to need it. How the room was cavernous compared to that tiny modest bunking space Neville had first found. There were easily twenty students – boys and girls, most upperclassmen, but not all – sharing the high-ceilinged, paneled room. Hammocks of every color, were strung from the ceiling and from a wooden platform running along the outer edge with ladders, ropes, and even a slide courtesy of Sally-Anne Perks (who turned out to be quite a riot once you got her going) as means of moving from one level to the other. Tapestries depicting three of the four Hogwarts Houses decorated the wooden walls, a few card tables and a Muggle game called foosball (thanks to half-bloods Terry Boot and Seamus Finnigan) had materialized in the middle of the room, and a lavender-scented bathroom sprouted from the back wall.
All of this Neville could see despite the complete lack of any illumination whatsoever. He knew this room so well, he thought it was about time he bought a ring and popped the question. Look at that. He was even being facetious now.
But the point was there was no need for light. In fact, there was a very good reason for the rule banning wandlight past eleven o'clock. The thing about living in one room with twenty other people every hour of every day was that they literally were required to do next to everything together, whether they wanted to or not. If one person fancied reading late into the hours of the morning, the rest of the room would be forced to stay awake by that one spot of blinding light. Thus the lights-out rule.
But there were other ways to see in the dark, Neville thought. The soft creaking came from Micheal Corner's hammock across the way. The consequences he'd suffered for freeing that first year kept him up late into the night still, whatever healing spells Susan Bones tried to cast for him. The hitching breath from a few hammocks down was Parvati. She cried a lot these days, but by morning all evidence of tears (or even the ability for her to produce tears) had vanished. The snoring from the Hammock directly above Neville was Seamus. After the past seven years, he only noticed when he didn't hear it. Seamus was technically supposed to be on guard tonight, but he'd taken over for Natalie McDonald, a fourth year who had only recently found out her brother had been disappeared in London.
Neville could smell Padma Patil's watercolor painting hung out to dry in the Hammock beside his own, the lingering scent of vanilla from the candle Hannah Abbott lit for her mother before she went to sleep each night. He felt his hammock sway as Stephen Cornfoot silently paced the planks above him, probably worrying about his sister in Ravenclaw who had refused to drop out of classes to join him here.
Neville didn't need the light to see. There were other ways of knowing you were not alone in the darkness.
A/N: As we approach the infamous May 2nd, I thought I'd get one last good shot of the DA's side of things. It will be September before I can really write them again. Except when I go back to fill in my holes… I really need to do that. But on the plus side, I finally have a whole entire month completed without a single missing day! Yay April! :) And we even got some under-developed characters mentioned here. How about that.
I meant to do this last chapter, but THANK YOU SO MUCH to everyone who has reviewed! You are amazing people! I can't believe we've already broken 400 reviews for this story! Highest on my profile :) Of course with 91 chapters that averages around 4 a chapter, but that in itself is impressive considering the frequency of updates. Thank you all!