Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness, page 43
The muscles of his stomach already burned from the workout with Bagman, but he forced the sit-ups to come at a steady, merciless rhythm, lashing out with his wand at the height of each one to blast another saucer from the air. He knew there were fifty of them, but sometimes he missed because he was working off-handed and shaking so much, and for each of those, he punished himself with five more repetitions before he could strike again.
His head was spinning, he felt nauseous with exertion, but it felt good, and each drop of sweat, each throb of pain, each shuddering gasp of air was doing something. Making him stronger, making him faster, harder, tougher, more able to strike back when they would finally, finally be allowed their revenge.
Once he had hated the speed with which June was approaching, but now it was the months in between that he hated. Each day was no longer one more to live, it was one more where Snape and the Carrows could hurt them, one more chance to lose their own, one more where they had to sit on their wands and wait while those black eyes smirked down at them from the usurped throne. June could not come fast enough, because when it did, that sallow face would no longer be projected by his mind's eye onto harmless pieces of china...it would be real, the fight would be real, and the wand in his hand would be real and damned if it would waver in the face of those he had come to hate so violently.
Whitby's abduction had hit them all hard, but Neville had taken it the hardest. He had become practically inhuman in the five days since it had happened, sleeping less than four hours a night, going over the events a thousand times for ways he might have acted, might have prevented it. Tiny, charmed objects like hairpins and the lids of ink bottles now littered the grounds surrounding the castle, ready to alert them again if the Dementors returned, and he had devised plans to snatch intended victims from any point in the castle at a moment's notice. The other officers had tried to talk him down, tell him that the plans endangered more than they protected, but he was deaf to their protests.
Never, never again would he sit helplessly by while a friend, a comrade was hurt or snatched from under his very nose. Never again would they coldly slice away at his loved ones and then sit back and laugh about it. Every sit-up, every push-up, every lap and spell came with a name, a rhythm of self-retribution that repeated like a prayer for the damned.
Frank. Alice. Lavender. Dennis. Ernie. Colin. Parvati. Seamus. Luna. Renny. Kevin. Luna. Renny. Kevin. Luna. Renny. Kevin. Luna. Renny. Kevin.
Three times they had taken someone now, but not a fourth. Not unless they had to step over his cold, dead body to do it, and he was going to make that a very, very difficult thing to accomplish.
The last of the saucers was lying in shards again, and he unstuck his feet, rising slightly unsteadily and grabbing a drink of water from the bottle that lay on the floor. Then he crouched, bracing himself to begin running windsprints of the length of the room when something stopped him.
"You really have lost your mind along with your waistline, haven't you, Longbottom?" The cold, drawling sneer came with the shock of a slap, and Neville whirled, wand outstretched. He hadn't heard the door open, and his eyes narrowed as he saw Draco Malfoy leaning casually against the wall, arms crossed.
"What...are you...doing here?" he panted angrily.
"If you don't want to hear what I have to say, that's fine." Malfoy shrugged and turned, placing one pale hand on the doorknob. "It'll probably be more fun to see the look on your face tomorrow when you find out anyway."
Neville's eyes narrowed, and he cuffed away the sweat that had begun to drip stinging salt into them. "What do you mean...when I find out what?"
Malfoy turned back, eyebrows raised in mock surprise. "Oh, so you do want to know?"
He jerked the wand, shooting a hex into the wall beside the white-blonde head, and was rewarded with a distinct flinch. "Out with it, Malfoy. I'm in no mood for games."
"All right, all right..." Malfoy raised both hands placatingly, then smiled again. "You don't need to start throwing spells at me." The young Slytherin strode calmly into the room, waving his own wand to conjure a chair out of thin air and settling himself into it as casually as if he were in his own sitting room. "Pansy left her book in the Divination classroom, and I had told her I'd get it for her since I was heading that way for my own reasons - which are none of your business - and I happened to get walked in on by a very unique group of people. They didn't see me, I've got a fairly good Disillusionment Charm, but I should thank you for your little trick earlier, because it let me overhear something very, very interesting."
"You were spying on the D.A.?" The words came in an angry hiss, but even as he said it, he felt a sick betrayal that his officers had been meeting behind his back.
"Spare me." Malfoy rolled his eyes. "And here I am, trying to do something nice for you."
"I'll believe it when that thing's off your arm," Neville said icily.
"All right, so I'm here because the only thing worse than your little Harry Potter Vigilante Fan Club is the idea of Weasley in charge of it." Malfoy sneered, letting the statement dangle a moment before announcing nastily, "They're going to relieve you of command."
The news hit him like a physical blow, and he actually staggered back a step. "They can't."
"Oh, they certainly can! It was unanimous, actually," Malfoy was reveling in every syllable. "Even your little friend Abbott. Apparently, they've finally seen that you're a head case, though I could have told them that years ago. You're being dumped tomorrow at the next one of your little meetings and that ginger-headed Blood-Traitor thinks she's taking over...just because she was snogging the great Chosen One, I suppose."
Neville swore, pushing past Malfoy to the door. The sarcastic drawl followed him. "Don't I get a thank you?"
His reply was short, direct, and not even physically possible with magic.
OOO
"What the HELL is this about you trying to kick me out of the D.A.?!" The shout of furious accusation erupted even before the portrait hole had fully swung shut behind him. Neville stalked across the common room to where Ginny was sitting with her homework by the fire, not caring as he shoved two younger students roughly out of the way.
She looked up, her brown eyes huge with shock as he swatted one of the armchairs away with a crash and then kicked the low table aside, bracing one hand on the arm of her chair to lean over her menacingly. "Neville...." she started nervously.
"Yes, I know," he spat. "Malfoy told me. You were overheard. So I'll ask you again...." he brought himself down until his face was only inches from hers, his wand pointed squarely at her chest, and the look of fear in her eyes did not make him feel guilty in the least. "What do you mean by trying to relieve me of command?!"
Ginny's eyes flicked not to his, but to a point just off his shoulder, and at the same moment, he felt the hard tip of a wand against the side of his head in the soft, vulnerable flesh just behind his ear. Parvati's voice was unwavering. "Because you're not yourself. Case in point: you just came barging through the common room like a rampaging Shortsnout and are threatening Ginny. So why don't you hand over that wand and we'll see if you are still capable of having a conversation."
He started to protest, but the tip pressed in harder, and he released his grip on the handle of the cherry wand, allowing Ginny to take it from him, but his eyes still burned, the sense of betrayal only intensified by the sight of his own wand being used with those of the two girls to back him away and lower him to the couch like a dragon being handled with wrangler's prods. They exchanged a look over his head, then Ginny sighed, brushing back her hair before turning back to him.
"Neville, you've lost sight of why we're doing this. We don't think you have the best interest of the D.A. at heart any more. You're making stupid choices, putting us all at risk needlessly, and we can't let that keep happening just because we like you as a person." She took a deep breath, meeting his eyes with a look of saddened honesty.
"You think I don't care about the D.A." His voice was incredulous, and he reached down, grabbing the hem of his t-shirt and yanking it up over his head and off. He twisted at the waist, showing his back to the girls with deliberate bluntness. They had never actually seen more of the scars than the few bits that showed at the neck and from the short sleeves of an undershirt, and he felt a little surge of satisfaction as they both flinched. "This was for the D.A. And this...." The scar on his forearm from Lupin. "...And these...." The scars on his palms. "And every damned drop of this." Neville twisted the shirt tightly in his hands, wringing the sweat to fall like tears onto the stones at their feet.
"No." Parvati shook her head, then reached out to trace her fingers over the jagged lines that networked his back with such gentleness that it felt almost obscenely wrong at a time like this. "These, yes. And the others. We all know that, and we're grateful, Neville, we'll always be grateful. But that's not for us." She pointed down at the spots on the floor, then smiled faintly as her fingertips outlined the muscles of his shoulder. "And it's not for Hannah either, though I'm jealous of what she gets and I didn't."
"Just answer me something honestly, and if I'm wrong about the answer, I'll call the officers first thing tomorrow and set it all right," Ginny promised, "if you could wave your wand and send You-Know-Who and all his followers somewhere they could never come back and never hurt anyone again without another drop of blood, another moment's suffering for them either, would you do it?"
"Of course!" he answered instantly.
"And if you had the choice between that and sacrificing your own life to see them hurt, to see them suffer terribly before they left...?"
He hesitated at this, and she pressed on. "Or what about if it was sacrificing yourself and one of us as well?"
"But we've all -" Neville began, and she cut him off with a raised hand.
"Would you take me from my family? Parvati from her twin? Ernie from his wife and child?" Neville startled at this, and she chuckled. "She's got that secretive little smile all the time, and she's suddenly started wearing looser workout clothes three months after marrying Ernie. There's not a girl in the D.A. who hasn't guessed." There was a pause, and her voice became serious again. "Would you take Colin from his brother? Who would you throw on the altar of your revenge, Neville?"
"Except there isn't some spell that will just banish them," Neville pointed out fiercely. "We're all going to have to sacrifice ourselves, and if you suddenly have gotten scared about that, fine! You drop out!"
Parvati sighed. "You're missing the point entirely. Of course we're ready to die if we have to do it to stop them, but you're not out to stop them any more. You're not content with that, and you're not focused on that. You're out to hurt them, to make them pay for what they've done to you, and vengeance isn't something we're ready to die for...and we can't trust your choices any more because of it."
"IT'S NOT ABOUT ME!" He jumped to his feet as he shouted, waving his hand around the common room. "It's about everything! What they've done to my parents, what they've done to all of you, what they've done to this school! I'm not going to let them get away with that! I'm going to make them pay for Renny, for Luna, for Kevin, for every time I've had to sit back and watch them Cruciate and terrify and -"
"Make them suffer as much as they've made you suffer. Make them lose as many friends and loved ones as you have." Ginny's words were terribly calm, and he stopped, unable to rebut her honestly.
His shoulders slumped, but there was still defiance in his tone, almost a plea. "And what's so wrong with that?"
"Nothing on its own, Neville," Parvati agreed, "Merlin knows we all have scores to settle. But if you want to command, you can't put your own scores above the lives of others. And that's what you've been doing, not just with stupid plans and crazy, reckless orders, but the way you've been treating yourself. You were in there more than an hour after Bagman let the others go, and you were in there for hours yesterday, and every day since they took Kevin. We've seen you come in at night, you can barely walk."
He laced his arms tightly across his chest, his chin raised. "What I do to myself is my business. And it's for the good of the D.A. I'm not exactly trying to look great with my shirt off for Hannah. I'm trying to be a better soldier."
"Fine, what you do to yourself is your business," Ginny nodded. "But the commander of the D.A. pushing himself until he's always exhausted and just begging for some serious injury is all of our business. And like Parvati said, the kind of orders you've been giving since Thursday are definitely our business. That's why we're relieving you of command...." A sudden softness came over her pretty face, and she stood, reaching out to lay one hand on his arm. "And because we're your friends, not just your soldiers."
"If you were my friends," Neville said bitterly, "you wouldn't do this to me."
"We've seen what the D.A. is doing to you," she retorted stubbornly. "All of us. It's tearing you to pieces, Neville. You look like you've aged ten years since September. You don't sleep. Seamus says you have nightmares all the time when you do. You take everything that happens to all of us so personally, even when it's something like Kevin's Dad that you have less than no control over. You still laugh and joke, but we can all see what's happening in your eyes, and it hurts that you won't let anyone in to it, not even Hannah, and she's tried to help you carry it."
"It's not hers to carry." He shook off the small, white hand, turning away from both of them to stare into the fire. His voice was hollow, haunted. "It's mine. I'm the one who did this to all of you with my stupid little 'let's play soldier' speech at the start of the year. Everything that's happened to all of you is because of me. I've tried as hard as I can, oh god, Ginny, I've tried...." His voice broke, and he buried his face in his hands.
"You're right to kick me out. I'm not a soldier, I'm not a General, I'm not a leader. I've tried so hard to be what I'm not, but I keep effing up this whole thing. I've nearly gotten people killed a dozen times. I know people are going to die because I'm going to make some stupid decision, some stupid order, you don't have to tell me that! Don't you understand...." He looked up, and his eyes were naked. "...wanting to hurt them isn't about making what I've been through worth it, it's making what I've put you through worth it! I don't care what they've done to me!" Neville knew that tears had begun to flow down his cheeks, but they were tears of sheer agonized desperation, and he didn't care if they knew it or not.
"You're so much a leader that we're all afraid because we know we'd follow you into hell whether we needed to or not." Ginny crossed to him, stepping over the upended table to take both of his hands in hers. For a long time, she just looked up into his eyes, then a terribly sad smile touched her mouth. "You're worse than Harry, you know?"
"About what?"
"Blaming yourself for things. Torturing yourself for things. Maybe it's Gryffindor men. Maybe it's what makes you such heroes. But you've taken it to a level that's going to destroy you before the Death Eaters ever can, and you're going to take us all with you just because we won't let you go." She lowered her mouth to kiss his hands gently. "Take some time, Neville. Get your head on straight. The D.A. will be there for you after the break."
"Please," he whispered. "Don't take this from me. It's all I have. I will...there are ways I can stop - "
"I know about that, my father warned me to keep an eye on you about it." Ginny cut him off, and Parvati looked confused, but to his relief she did not explain further about Percy's Settling Solution. The refusal to give him an out from the awful fate of being shut out of what he himself had started was bad enough without adding humiliation atop it. "That wouldn't solve anything, it would just bury it and create more problems on its own. Like I said, Neville, you need to take some time...and the D.A. is not all you have."
"You have Hannah. You have your Gran. You have friends, not just officers." Parvati's face was kind, but her words hit him like hexes. "We're relieving you of command through the end of the break, then we'll see. And I for one want to see you back to lead the fight." She nodded her head towards the other girl. "All due respect to Ginny, but she's not half the soldier you've become."
"No offense taken...I'm the first to say I want you back too, Neville." Ginny nodded, but the infamous stubbornness had come into her eyes now, and he knew he had lost. "But not like this."
She stepped back from him, drawing herself to her full height, her shoulders pulled back at attention as she lifted her wand. "Commander Longbottom, as First Lieutenant of Dumbledore's Army and by the authority of the combined officers of the same, I hereby relieve you of command until such time as the officer corps feels you are fit to resume. It is the hope of all of us that our commander will be with us again shortly."
Her stiff posture relaxed, and she smiled gently, pressing his wand back into his hand with a comforting squeeze. "And that our friend will take care of himself."
It had happened. She had actually done it. He had felt the Galleon in his pocket give a little jerk, and he knew that it was real. The wand clattered from the limp fingers of his hand to the stone floor, and he made no move to pick it up. He couldn't breathe.
Unable to speak, he shook off Parvati's comforting hand and shoved past both girls to the entrance to the tower dormitory. Neville took the steps three at a time, not even feeling the exhaustion, not feeling anything but a horrible emptiness and pain, as if his two friends had gutted him with a knife and left him to bleed to death.
Seamus attempted to say something to him as the door flew open and Neville threw himself down on his bed, but he heard nothing. His arms were folded beneath his face, the taste of salt sweat mingling with salt tears as he wept more deeply, more bitterly than he ever had before. They were the sobs of everything that had ever been taken from him in the past and every pain he had ever endured, and the agony of knowing that they would never be eased because he hadn't been good enough, he hadn't been strong enough, he hadn't been able to do it in the end.
