March 1st, 1982: Frank Longbottom
It's official: Frank and Alice's divorce has been finalized.
Part of Frank feels like an idiot for ever having married her in the first place. He's known Alice since they were eleven years old, and he knows her tendency to run from her problems—saw her do it with his friend Dirk when Dirk and Alice were dating at Hogwarts. On the other hand, Frank's relationship with Alice has enormously shaped his life—and it's given him Neville. Without having married Alice, who would Frank be? He wouldn't feel right cutting away such an essential part of his life as if it—as if she—had never happened.
Did they split too quickly? After all, they were only separated for a couple of months before Frank served Alice with divorce papers. Should he have tried harder to fight to keep her? Did he let his pride turn a rough patch into a permanent ending?
Then again, Frank did fight for her, and he couldn't make her come back, no matter how many times he contacted her asking her when she was coming home. Alice was always going to do what she always does, and Frank… all Frank could do was decide how he'd react to it.
Did he decide wrong?
They work together, so the mess they've made of their relationship is on full display for all of their coworkers to see. When Frank shows up at the Auror Office to hear everybody start calling Alice "Abbott" instead of "Longbottom" again, it makes him want to cry. But the worst part, Frank thinks, has got to be the reaction he gets from Mum, who always loved Alice and supported the two of them being together. She's been babysitting Neville during the work day now that Lily and James are dead asleep during British business hours, and pretty much every time Frank sees her, she asks him when Alice is going back home to him.
"She's not coming back," Frank tells Mum for the thousandth time one Monday morning after letting Neville loose in Mum's living room. "She signed the papers, and the lawyers notarized them on Friday. It's final."
"I just can't believe that someone as smart and capable and desirable as my Frank could let a catch like Alice slip away," Mum tuts. "Don't you want your marriage to work? Don't you want your son to grow up in a two-parent home?"
"Of course I did, Mum, but I can't force her to be happy with us. She wasn't happy. She moved out. What was I going to do—stay in limbo with her for the rest of our lives? Neville deserves better than that, and so do I."
He loves his mum, and he knows she loves him, and he's grateful to her for the life she's given him and everything she does for him—but, goddamn, does he sometimes wish that she weren't so bloody stubborn. Even now, at the age of twenty-one, Frank still gets heart palpitations sometimes when he feels like he's disappointing her.
In some ways, it makes a lot of sense that he and Alice connected on such a deep level. His mum is just like Alice's own parents in this regard: they believe the best of their children, but only because Frank and Alice almost never disappoint. On the rare occasion that Frank does disappoint Mum… and, let's be honest, getting divorced is one of the biggest failures anybody can make in life, no matter what Frank's friends say to try to comfort him.
He just wants the nightmare to be over. He just wants to go back.
He clocks out of work a couple hours early to pick up Neville and take him along to his Healer appointment at St. Mungo's. They're about a month late for Neville's eighteen-month check-up, but quite honestly, Frank has been so slammed between Auror work and Order business that it completely slipped his mind to schedule it on time. In the waiting room, Frank tries to keep the stress out of his face and keeps Neville engaged with a repetitive game of peekaboo until Healer Whitlock comes out and calls Neville's name.
In the examination room, Whitlock busies herself measuring Neville's weight, length, and head circumference and scribbling notes on parchment. "How much is he sleeping?" she asks Frank.
"About nine to ten hours a night, plus naps at his gran's house during the day."
"Talking?"
"He can just say 'Mumma' and 'Dada' so far."
"Does he understand the word 'no' or simple commands?"
"He stops when you say 'no,' but not really anything more complex than that yet."
"Any signs of magical ability?"
"No, not yet, but that's not uncommon for kids his age, is it?"
"Every child is different," Whitlock assures him. "Can he wave goodbye or point to things or people?"
"He waves bye-bye when I take him to his gran's or his mum's."
"What about more complicated daily tasks? Can he, say, imitate you when you're doing chores or help a little when you get him dressed?"
"He likes to scribble with crayons next to me whenever I write anything down. Does that count?"
Whitlock smiles. It's warm, but comes across a little placating, too. "The good news is I see no reason to be alarmed by the delays in Neville's development."
Frank frowns. "But you're saying there are delays?"
She hesitates. "He's tracking a few months behind where he should be, but there's no need to panic yet: every child is different," she says slowly. "How are things at home? You mentioned that he's been staying with his gran during the day, but your friend James Potter used to be the one who babysat, am I remembering that correctly?"
"That's right," says Frank vaguely. "He's also, erm… his mum and I finalized our divorce recently. I have custody most of the time."
"I'm sorry to hear that," says Whitlock. "Now, Neville was tracking behind at his last check-up as well, so I'm not saying that his developmental delays are necessarily the result of any disruption in his home life, but—"
"But you're saying you think they contribute," says Frank plainly. "You're saying, if I had been a better husband to my ex-wife—"
"I'm not passing any judgment." Whitlock's eyes are wide. "But his mum moving out and his daily babysitter changing are both significant changes in a young child's life, especially in Neville's age range."
Frank stiffens. "Alice still visits him as much as she can, and we started out by taking him to the Potters' house for a while every evening to ease the transition after they… started working again during the day."
"That's good news. I'm glad to hear you've kept his best needs in mind around the adjustments you've made."
Frank is furious—but not at Whitlock, not really. She doesn't even know the biggest reason of all that he's worried he's ruining Neville's life: both Neville's parents are Aurors and members of the Order of the Phoenix, which means they're pretty much constantly in danger of dying at the hands of Death Eaters. How much of that danger has Neville subconsciously picked up on? Can Neville read Frank's constant anxiety, and is it making him, too, feel unmoored? By trying to make the world a safer place for Neville, are Frank and Alice only hurting his development?
He's got to tell Alice at least what Whitlock said about the milestones Neville should be hitting by now, but he's so, so tempted not to report back to her about Neville's appointment at all. He wants to pull out his hair and scream. He wants never to see Alice again. He wants his wife to come home—but Alice isn't his wife, not anymore.
It would be so easy to direct all of his anger at Alice for walking away, leaving Frank as a single father to have to sort out all of Neville's problems on his own without any support—but Alice isn't the one Frank is really mad at, either. He knows this, even if it's easier to pretend to himself like he doesn't.
He was wrong before about the worst part of all this being Mum's reaction. The very worst part of all is having to live with the knowledge that everything wrong with Neville is entirely Frank's fault.
Honestly, Frank has been expecting that it'll all come to a head before long, but he's not expecting to fall apart quite the way he does. He would have preferred to have a breakdown in the privacy of his own bedroom or maybe, if doing it in front of others were absolutely unavoidable, with Dirk or Kingsley or Sturgis. As it happens, however, he's not alone, and he's not with any of his best mates, either: he's at Lily and James's house in Canada, holed up in the master bedroom with Neville, Emmeline, and Remus.
He should be sleeping, obviously, catching what little rest he can before the orb inevitably goes off and wakes them all up (sans Neville) for a raid. Instead, he's lying awake staring at the room-darkening shades covering the windows and wondering how the hell he got here, twenty-one years old and already divorced, a single parent with a kid who's falling further behind with every check-up. For all Frank knows, he could die on the very next raid he goes on tonight, and so could Alice soon enough, and where would that leave Neville? Frank loves his mum, he does, but the thought of her raising Neville the way she raised Frank—
Stuffing a fist in his mouth, he realizes he has to get out of here before he wakes up everybody else in the room, Neville included. The last thing Frank wants to do is let Neville see him cry. No way, not when Frank is supposed to be strong for him.
So he darts into the loo as quickly as he can and locks himself in there, casting a Silencing Charm on the door. He lights the torch lamp: with the lights on, it's a little harder to drown in his own miserable thoughts.
He stays in there for at least a quarter of an hour before he hears a knock on the door—a quiet one, so as not to wake anybody else in the bedroom, Frank assumes. "Everything okay?" he hears Remus ask softly.
But Remus is the last person in this house that Frank wants to show his vulnerabilities to, not when Remus is one of them—one of the Gryffindors who have always been so thick with the woman Frank just divorced, and out of them all, Remus was probably the thickest of them all. Frank swipes at his face and clears his throat. "Everything's fine, thanks."
"Frank?"
That's when Frank remembers the Silencing Charm. "Finite," he mutters, and then he quashes the light and opens the door. "Sorry," he says a tiny bit louder. "All yours."
He can barely make Remus out in the darkness of the bedroom, but Remus, apparently, can see or otherwise sense enough. "Frank, are you sure you're—"
"I said it's fine," snaps Frank. He doesn't remember until after that Remus wouldn't have been able to hear him the first time, but does it matter? "I'm going for a walk. Patronus me if the orb goes off."
But Remus, to Frank's horror, follows Frank right out of the bedroom and into the street. "I won't say a word if you don't want me to," Remus promises. "I'll just keep you company. That okay?"
And it's not okay. None of this is okay, least of all the fact that Frank fell apart and then got himself caught like they're eleven years old again and can't control their emotions. But Remus is here, and Frank thinks he might wreck himself if he bottles it all up any longer, and they are in the Order together, aren't they? Remus may be one of Alice's best friends, but he and Frank have a stupid bond through shared trauma and service to Dumbledore, whether they want to or not.
"I took Neville for a check-up at St. Mungo's yesterday," he says, "and he's tracking a little behind in his development, and apparently, it's my fault for taking him away from his mum and his babysitter." Frank is careful to keep his eyes trained to the ground so that he can't see Remus's face.
"Alice mentioned that you said something about that," murmurs Remus. "I'm sorry. The Healer said not to worry, though, didn't she? I'm sure everything will be—"
"Everything is not fine," Frank snaps. He's completely contradicting himself in the space of the past two minutes, but he doesn't care. "What if he grows up without a mother or father? What will become of him then? My wife is gone, Remus. She's gone running back to—to you and all the other people she's been hiding behind. What if—what if—"
And Remus stops walking and reaches over and—hugs him. Frank can't remember the last time anybody besides Neville, anybody adult that Frank could actually confide in, really held him; he doesn't think it's happened since before Alice walked out on him. It's stupid. He and Remus have saved each other's lives numerous times by now, but they don't know each other, not really, and Remus's arms feel foreign around him.
But it's kind of nice, slowing down and feeling like he can spread around the weight of his entire world a little. Frank doesn't know how long they stand there, and it's not enough, never enough, but—everything feels like it's fallen back a little by the time they let go.