Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness, page 44
It was over. He had failed.
Dumbledore's Army marched on, but he had been cast aside.
OOO
For the next ten days leading up to the Easter break, Neville barely spoke to anyone. The devastating news that he was relieved of command hung over him like a far darker sentence than his own planned death at the end of the year ever had, and he withdrew almost completely into himself. There were three more D.A. meetings, but he refused to attend, taking no notice of his friends' attempts to catch his attention in the halls and shunning the common room in favor of his own quiet dormitory, where Seamus had long since given up trying to speak to him.
He still went to the Room of Requirement to work out as strenuously as he had before, but it was only late at night, when he was certain to be alone. Even if the D.A. no longer wanted him, he was more determined than ever to fight in the final battle. It would be his only chance to make any of this worth it.
Hannah began to send him letters, passing them through Ginny, Colin, and Seamus, but he left them unopened. He didn't want to hear her reasons, her excuses for turning on him like everyone else that he had once considered friends. Neville had thought they understood. Their eyes had seemed to burn with the same fire, the same passion that he saw in his own when he looked in the mirror, but he had been wrong. So terribly, terribly wrong.
The holiday was something to look forward to still, but not for the reasons it had been before. Now it would be a chance to get away not from the stress of leadership, but from the reminders of his own failure that existed inescapably in nearly eighty faces he could not avoid seeing every day. He would say good-bye to his parents, to his family, to his Gran and Mimsy, but then the rest of the time he had decided to spend in the hothouse, moving as many plants as he could to permanent homes in the garden outside and giving the rest away to neighbors. It would be wrong to leave his grandmother with a building full of dead and overgrown plants when he fell.
On the last day before break, he spent the evening going through his trunk. He had packed and unpacked it over a dozen times in the last seven years, but he had never really taken a strict inventory, and he wanted to make sure that when it was sent back to Gran, she wouldn't find anything there that would upset her or give her the wrong idea about what kind of man she had raised. Neville threw away all the detritus of broken quills, half-finished essays, sweet wrappers, and empty ink bottles that had collected over the years, as well as a shirt that the bloodstains hadn't come fully out of, and the now-clean but ravaged sweater he had worn the night in the Forbidden Forest. She didn't need to see that.
He paused briefly over the magazines Seamus had given him, frowning in contemplation. On the one hand, the thought of Gran finding Wild Witches or Babes with Broomsticks was deeply upsetting, but on the other, what healthy seventeen-year-old wizard didn't have things like this buried in his trunk somewhere? After a long moments thought, he decided that his relationship with Hannah was certainly more than enough to comfort her about his fondness for witches, and the two magazines were consigned to the bottom of the growing discard pile.
The pieces of his father's broken wand he kept, as well as the old Remembrall, still blinking feebly in a vain effort to remind him of something forgotten years ago. That he kept not for his Gran, but for Harry, though he knew his old friend would probably never see it. Forgotten, dried-up cuttings wrapped in handkerchiefs stained beyond hope went into the pile, as did the photograph of himself and Dean with their faces painted in stripes and tentacles coming out their noses - really, she'd have had to have been there - but this....
Neville stopped, his hand hesitating over what seemed to be nothing more than a page of class notes from History of Magic. As he finally touched it, it recognized his hand and transformed itself into what it truly was, and he swallowed hard past the large, heavy lump that had suddenly choked his throat.
It was a picture Colin had taken of the D.A.'s senior officers. They had meant to have it done the night after stealing the Sword of Gryffindor, but after that had gone so disastrously wrong, the young Secret-Keeper had insisted that they still needed to celebrate the victory of the three captured officers' return from the Forest.
They were in the Room of Requirement, all four House banners bright on the walls behind them, and his own face grinned up at him from the center of the photo, leaning awkwardly a little to one side so as to wrap one arm around Ginny's slender shoulders and the other over Ernie's taller and much broader ones. Luna knelt in front of them, her hair twisted up on her head with the spoon Ginny had insisted she sport for the photo, and Seamus was there, and Colin himself and Parvati and Terry and Hannah, back when she still wore her hair in two long pigtails. They were all smiling and laughing and jostling for position, and oh, Merlin, how young they all looked!
Every face was shining with the innocence they all had still kept so much of then, the thought that the worst was over, that they were still facing something great and glorious, not really understanding yet what death really meant, despite the brushes with it they had already had. His eyes passed over them one at a time, marveling at how much they had changed in the past four months. They seemed softer, rosier, sweeter somehow, cheeks rounder, eyes brighter. Parvati didn't have the scar by her temple yet. Colin still looked like a child, both hands fidgeting and lively. Terry still wore his hair nearly to his shoulders, not buzzed short. Seamus was in his undershirt, but his arm was marked with nothing darker than a thousand freckles, and no tiny lines touched the edges of Ernie's hazel eyes. And Luna...well, she was there.
Part of him wanted to destroy it, to whip out his wand and blast it away into a puff of ash and a scorch mark on the bottom of the cedar-lined trunk, but he couldn't. Instead he just sat there, holding it in one hand, scarcely feeling that his knees had begun to ache from the awkward way he was kneeling over the trunk, staring at it. Had that really been him?
It was easier, somehow, to reconcile the far greater stranger of the older pictures as being himself. The chubby, bumbling, bashful, blushing child was easily recognizable as Before, but this...this was a grown man, with strong arms and hardened eyes, someone who had already been tortured and nearly died twice in two months, someone who already had to lead, already bore the burden of it all, and yet....
And yet there was no gray in his hair. His cheekbones were visible, not jutting. His jawline was firm, not carved. His eyes were tired, but not sunken, and the dark circles beneath them were the pale smudges of a night without sleep, not the deep purple semicircles of weeks. His lips were fuller, redder, and there was a dimple in his cheek when he grinned. He looked like the kind of man you would want to follow, want to be friends with, not a tortured, driven lost soul that you would follow because he had clearly been in and out of hell several times already and was familiar with the terrain.
Dazedly, he got to his feet, still holding the picture as he crossed the room to where his roommate was packing his own trunk by his usual method of piling everything in and then sitting on it until it fit. "Seamus...?"
The other young wizard nearly fell off the lid in shock. "Neville! Cuchulainn's Ghost, but I though you'd lost the power of speech!"
Ignoring his friend's surprise, he held out the picture. "Have I really changed as much as I think I have?"
Seamus studied the picture for a moment, then looked up at him with a wry, lopsided smile. "If you mean that you used to be nearly as handsome as the blonde devil in the corner there, and these days you could pass for Death's cold breakfast, then yes."
"What's happened to me?" His voice seemed strangely childish to his own ears, and he frowned curiously at the picture, as if his former self would offer the answers.
"Well, it's like we've been tryin' to tell you, mate." Seamus stood, wrapping an arm around Neville's shoulders warmly. "You've been drivin' yourself too hard. This is serious business, sure enough, we all know that, but you've taken on the entire wizarding world when the D.A. is more than enough for any man. Even Harry only really has to worry about You-Know-Who himself. You take it to heart every time you hear about a Death Eater attack somewhere down in the south counties on Potterwatch."
"But there's nothing I can do about that," Neville protested. "It's just how I am."
"The thing is, Fearless Leader," Seamus' voice was firm, yet gentle. "You've been ignorin' what nature gave you."
"What's that?" Neville asked bemusedly.
"There's a hole in your face right between your nose and your chin, and another two on either side of that thick head. One's for tellin' folk you're close to what's troublin' you, the other two are for listenin' when folk try to help. You ain't been usin' any of them."
Neville shook his head. "I can't. I can't ask anyone to take on that kind of load."
There was a long pause as his friend looked at him strangely, then frowned. "Has anyone in your entire life taken care of you, Neville?"
"My Gran!" He answered instantly, rather offended by the question. "She's taken care of me since I was a baby!"
"I don't mean put a roof over your head and robes on your back." Seamus hesitated, clearly trying to put something difficult into words. "I mean the way my Ma has done me, bein' someone you can take the troubles to. Because every time I've heard you talk on your Gran, it seems more like you've been livin' together and tryin' not to trouble her too much, though sure enough it seems she loves you plenty."
He wanted to say that it wasn't true, that of course Gran had always taken care of him like any parent, but the memory of another conversation came back to him, of words spoken under the uninhibited safety of a potion in a warm, cozy kitchen a lifetime ago. She's never really been like a parent to me, and I don't think I've ever really been like a kid to her.... Neville looked down at his feet. "I guess not. But I don't see -"
"That's what you need, mate. You take care of us, but no one does you the same turn, and it's backin' up and killin' you. That's why I voted you out." The bluntness of the statement stung, reminding him harshly of the reason he had not spoken to Seamus in so long, and he pulled away, his defenses rising again.
His tone was cold as he turned back towards his own side of the dorm. "Thanks for the advice. I'll go -"
"No you don't!" Seamus grabbed him by the arm, moving quickly around to block his path, toe-to-toe with the taller youth. "I wasn't half done!"
The blue eyes blazed with a passionate intensity that Neville had only rarely seen, and he knew he would have to make a fight of it if he wanted to get away. It wasn't worth it. He sighed, resigning himself to wait it out as Seamus continued. "You're the best damned commander we could hope for. There's not a man on this green earth I'd rather have leadin' me in a fight. But at the rate you're doin' yourself, you'll be burnt flat out long before June. I voted you out because we've tried talkin', we've tried beggin', and we hoped against all bloody hope that this'd be slap in the face enough for you to listen, but all you've done is shut us out all the harder, and I've had it!"
His cheeks flushed scarlet, he reached into the pocket of his robes and pulled out a letter, shoving it practically up Neville's nose. "There's a witch downstairs, you fool, who is fallin' all over herself beggin' to be exactly what you need so desperate bad, and you're lucky as all hell that she's idiot enough to be so in love with you, given the way you've pushed her away!"
Neville crossed his arms stubbornly. "She doesn't know what she's asking."
"Have you ever considered, Fearless Moron, that she may know better than you?"
He gave Seamus a deeply skeptical look. "How so?"
"We're not meant to be loners, humans aren't. Give us half a chance, and we'll form families, tribes, clans, cities, whatever we can, but we're not meant to go it alone, and I fancy there's a reason for that, sure as there's a reason I was driven to try things that shoulda been impossible when I was a child, because some deep part of me knew I was a wizard." Seamus grabbed his hand, forcing the envelope into it. "She just wants to take care of you."
Neville took the letter, but he pushed it deep into the pockets of his own robes and stepped away, kneeling by his trunk again to dig in the few remaining items. "She can't," he said firmly. "So drop it."
Seamus just stood there, neither coming closer nor returning to what he had been doing himself, then the sandy head tilted mildly. "Can you grow leaves?" he asked finally.
"What?"
"I said, can you grow leaves? Or thorns or flowers for that matter?" The question was repeated in the same casual tone as before.
"No." Neville replied simply, refusing to look up. Whatever Seamus was getting at, he was not about to be baited so easily.
"Then how do you do it? You're so good with plants, but you can't do the growin' for them, so what do you do?"
"You make sure they're in the right light. You water them. Weed them sometimes. Prune them when they need it." His voice was flat as he pulled out two socks from the trunk, holding them against each other to see if they matched. They didn't, and he threw them both on the discard pile.
"And if you don't?" Seamus pressed.
"They die, or they run wild if they're strong enough. But usually they just die." An old poster Dean had drawn of the Gryffindor lion stomping on the Slytherin serpent from some long-ago Quidditch match was rumpled almost beyond recognition, and it joined the socks.
"Hannah's not half bad with plants either. Maybe you should let yourself be watered if you don't think she can grow the leaves for you." His voice was quiet, with a deep sadness that Neville had never heard before, and it made him pause, though he still did not look up. When Seamus spoke again, it was barely a whisper. "Because, mate, you're dyin.'"
When Neville did look up, his friend had already turned away again, but his words lingered long after him.
OOO
It was after two in the morning, but Neville had been unable to sleep. After five hours of lying awake in his bed, he had finally made up his mind, but he had to take a deep breath to prevent himself from turning back and running up to Gryffindor tower again as the door to the Room of Requirement appeared in front of him.
Reaching out one invisible, Disillusioned hand, he took hold of the knob and opened it. It was oddly blank inside, a featureless space no larger than a broom closet with another door immediately opposite, because it knew that was all he needed. Just a way through, whether or not he was sure if he really wanted what would be on the other side.
As if prodding him forward, the door behind him disappeared, and he knew instinctively that the only way out again until he returned was the one that lay in front of him now. Shaking, he opened it and stepped through, hearing the faint whispering sound like a passing breeze as the door ceased to exist in the wall behind him.
The Hufflepuff common room had a cozy look to it even in the near total darkness. The yellow tapestries and cheerful paintings on the walls had a brightness that made up for the lack of windows, puffy, overstuffed couches and armchairs were everywhere, and there was something charming about the dozen or so round doors that opened into the dormitories. A few books lay here and there on the tables, but for the most part, like the one in Gryffindor tower above, the room had the slightly stripped-down feel that always came just before a break or the end of a term, all the little stray personal belongings picked up and packed away.
He closed his eyes, trying to remember which of the identical doors Hannah had come out of on Valentine's Day. They had been sitting on the couch there, but his back had been to the door and....
"Drop your wand." Ernie's voice was a cold command, and he was suddenly caught in the bright blue glare of wandlight. Instinctively, his hand tightened on the weapon instead as the other came up to shield his face, but before he could say anything, the light had dropped from his eyes. "Neville? What in heaven's name are you doing here?"
"I need to talk to Hannah," he replied, "How did you -"
"Basic Screening Charm," Ernie said bemusedly, "Lets me know if anyone but one of ours comes in or out after the door's locked for the night. Not that I expected you breaking in. Or talking to me, quite frankly." His voice was cold on the last.
Neville took a step forward, putting his wand away and spreading his hands imploringly. "Please, Ernie, I know I've been an ass about things, but I really need to talk to Hannah...can you just show me which door is hers?"
The Lieutenant was silent for a while, then the curly head nodded curtly. "I'll get her." He crossed to one of the round doors, then stopped, looking back over his shoulder to fix Neville with a warning glare. "But if you do anything to hurt her...."
"I won't," he promised, then added in confusion, "but I didn't think guys could go into the witch's rooms."
"Only that one," Ernie replied. "Sprout's made an exception for me because my wife lives in there."
"How, uh...are you two doing okay?" Neville asked awkwardly.
"We're fine. We'll be going to her parents first, then up to my family to break the news to them over the holiday." The almost-normal conversation seemed as strange to the other man as it did to Neville after almost two week's silence between them.
"I hope they take it okay," he offered.
Ernie shrugged. "Like it or not, they'll have to adjust to it. And we are married, so they can't get too angry." There was a pause, then his face softened, and the hazel eyes held almost the familiar warmth he remembered. "Thanks for asking, though." He nodded again to Neville, then opened the door and vanished into the darkened room.
It was several minutes before the light of his wand appeared at the door again, and he emerged back into the common room, Susan at his side. She was still blinking with sleep, and she yawned, one hand rubbing at her eyes while the other rested unconsciously on her stomach, the slight swelling there just noticable where her hand brought the loose fabric of her nightgown close against her body. When she saw Neville, however, she snapped fully awake, her dark eyes blazing angrily as her hand dropped. "It is you!"
