Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness, page 72
The cold rage that had first begun to hint itself to him when he learned of Snape's supposed 'true loyalties' began to grow anew. His mind spun through the list, thinking of how very, very few had actually been lost in the initial onslaught. If what Ron had said was true, they would still have lost Michael, Ryan, a handful of others...but Parvati, Colin, Lavender, Terry...oh damn him! Damn Dumbledore if even half of them could have been spared! If even one!
"There has to be a reason, Seamus." He fought to keep his voice calm, reasonable, but he could hear the tremble of fury and newly-awakened pain at the edges. "I'm sure he had a reason."
"I'd take kindly if he'da told us what it was, but there ain't none o' that now, is there? He's gone long since, an' he weren't 'zactly the most forthcomin' sort in the first!" The words were choked on the sobs, the pain refusing to be numbed by mere alcohol, and Neville gave the tattooed shoulder a firm squeeze as he stood.
"I've got a few questions of my own, actually, now that it comes down to it," he said coldly.
"Go whistle ta the grave if ya will, but won't do no good."
Neville smiled darkly down at his friend, thinking of the night Ginny had been told about his own supposed role in the prophecy - something that now didn't seem to make any sense at all - and the only time he had ever spoken to the old Headmaster in any way directly. A portrait wasn't as good as a person, not by a long shot, but if there were any answers to be had there, he was bloody well going to get them. "I've got an idea," he said, "and I'd take you with me, except -"
"No," the singed head shook dully, "jus' lemme be, mate. I don't want naught t'do with folk right now."
"All right, but I'll be back to check on you, that's a promise." He reached down to his friend's belt and took the wand before the other wizard could protest, tapping the bottle. The liquid inside shimmered, rippled a moment, and Seamus sniffed it before looking up again, his eyes wide with incredulous indignation.
"Tea?!"
"You're already blitzed, mate. Whatever it's gonna do for the pain, it's done. You don't need to hurt yourself on top of it." He smiled at the other man, allowing some of his own pain to show through the layer of anger that had built solidly atop it. "You're not just my last Lieutenant, Seamus...you're one of the dearest friends I have left. Please...."
There was a moment's more frustrated consternation, then the blue eyes softened, and he put the bottle on the floor at his feet, raising his hand to place it firmly over Neville's own. "Fair 'nuff, Fearless Leader."
"Thanks." He slipped his hand away, then started towards the door, but then he paused and turned back. "Here -" Neville tossed the wand, and both wizards seemed equally stunned when Seamus actually managed to catch it. "--I'll give you the benefit of the doubt...if you're able to transfigure it back, you're still okay to have more."
"Oh, Neville, m'darlin," Seamus rolled his eyes at the ceiling, then cast a mournful look at the bottle. "I couldna ever do that when I were stone sober."
OOO
"You don't need a password anymore, mate."
Neville looked up in surprise from where he had been contemplating the battered gargoyle that guarded the steps to the Headmaster's office. Ron was standing a few feet behind him, looking tired and a bit dusty, but also oddly guilty, and he frowned. "What are you doing here?"
"Came up with Harry," Ron explained, "he's off to take himself a bit of a kip now - Merlin knows the bloke needs it bad enough - and...er...." he began to blush, the color starting in the center of his nose and spreading rapidly as though someone had hit him in the face with an overripe tomato. "...I...decided to...hang around."
Now that he looked more closely, Neville noticed that Ron's shirttails were half pulled-out, the red hair mussed, and there was a spot of darker color on his neck that looked very much like it would be purple within a few hours. His eyebrows raised skeptically. "Just...decided to hang around?"
"Yeah." Ron nodded. "You know, I mean, it's pretty crowded downstairs, and I was thinking I might like a little peace and quiet myself."
"And if I were to look behind that big plinth there," Neville motioned to the tall marble pedestal from which Ron seemed to have emerged. "I wouldn't happen to find that Hermione had also decided to just hang around, now would I?"
To his amazement, the blush actually managed to darken, bordering now on positively maroon at the height of Ron's cheekbones. "No...but that's 'cause I told her to split while I got rid of whoever it was. But you don't need to go running to the Prophet about it. Just because you haven't figured out what witches are all about -"
"Actually, that would fall under things we need to catch up on," Neville grinned.
The blue eyes widened in astonishment, and he felt rather annoyed to see that after everything that had happened to the two of them, the thought of him getting a girl could come as such a shock. "Blimey, Neville, you've -"
"Snogged? Changed? Grown up? All of the above, yeah. But I'm not gonna tell anyone, Ron, that's your business. Well, yours and Hermione's, I guess." He paused, and a sudden memory struck him with such force that he had to squeeze his eyes shut against the tears that abruptly threatened, and he heard himself gasp.
Almost instantly, he felt Ron's hand on his arm, and all the jovial embarrassment had vanished from the other young man's voice. "You all right? You're not trying to go for extra hero points and hiding injuries, are you?"
"I'm fine..." He took a deep breath, shaking his head as he forced back the unexpected surge of grief and made his mouth turn up into something like a sheepish smile. "...just...keeps hitting me out of the bloody weirdest places how many we've lost." Ron seemed sympathetic, yet a bit confused, and he went on. "There was a betting pool about you and Hermione, actually. Everyone knew you two were mad for each other, and most of Gryffindor put in...I had some silver on Easter, to be honest. But Lavender would have won. She had it on being the same day You-Kno...Voldemort went down. Except...she's not going to be collecting, I suppose."
"It won't work." Ron's voice was quiet, gentle, and Neville looked up bemusedly.
"Won't work?"
"That's why you wanted to see Dumbledore, I'm guessing." Ron shook his head sadly. "I already asked him after Harry left...I thought maybe, if we used all the Hallows together...and after Harry had given himself for all of us, I thought it might work like Harry's mother, or like what Ernie did for his wife. But Dumbledore said that there's no way, not any way that's real or decent, at least. That kind of sacrifice only works to prevent someone from dying. Once they're gone, Neville, they're just gone."
Neville didn't know what Ron meant by 'the Hallows', and in fact, the thought of asking Dumbledore for a way to bring back their lost comrades hadn't even occurred to him, but the news hurt nonetheless. He shook his head, and his voice was rougher than he had expected as he pushed the words past the grief that was getting harder and harder to keep at bay as the day wore on. "No, I wasn't going to ask him about that. I know they're not coming back."
He took a deep breath, then nodded, accepting Ron's wordless invitation to sit down. The two wizards found a spot on the empty pedestal of the second gargoyle, and Neville gestured towards the door that led to the spiral staircase. "I want to ask about this whole mess - what was it, you know? Wands? Horcruxes? Prophecies? Was I ever anything, or was it all Harry all along? What kind of sick idea was it letting Snape have this school? Why didn't he tell Harry what was going on so we could have spared some lives? Why couldn't he ever just tell anyone what was going on? Why did it always have to be secrets and hidden meanings?"
A long silence hung after the questions, then Ron let out a low whistle. "That's a lot of stuff."
"I know." Neville admitted, "But I think I deserve some answers after everything that's happened. I think we all do. Seamus - " he jerked his head down the hall towards where a staircase had once stood, now nothing more than a pile of demolished stones and shattered railings. "--he's in the Room of Requirement right now, monged out of his mind, not just because he lost his best friend last night, but because he thinks it didn't have to happen."
Ron laughed blackly. "You should tell him to go to what's left of the Gryffindor common room. He could share his stash with George and Lee. They're up there not coping with Fred the same way. Mom just hasn't stopped crying."
"What about you?" Neville asked cautiously.
"Don't feel much of anything, really." Ron shrugged. "Was starting to for a while, so I snogged Hermione until I was this close to passing out from lack of oxygen. Probably do that again later, then...don't know. Guess we're all going to have to figure something out. Don't reckon I've got much right to judge how other people go about it, though, even if getting drunk seems pretty stupid to me. Makes me maudlin when I don't have a reason."
Now it was Neville's turn to be surprised. "When have you...?"
"At Bill's. I...." Ron paused, looking down at his hands as he twisted the long fingers awkwardly on the hem of his shirt. "Oh, hell. I had a lot of the same problems you did, mate. Why hadn't he told us more, how did he expect us to do whatever it was he expected us to do, how many people were going to die while we solved his little puzzle? All that. And I decided to stuff it. Just quit the whole thing."
"You what?"
"Not proud of it. Ran out on both of them right around the middle of November. We'd just found out about you guys trying to steal the Sword and getting caught, and I kind of snapped. Up and left. Tried to go back, but I ran into some trouble, and we'd put up a lot of protective charms, so I couldn't find them again for about a month. Stayed with Bill in the mean time, and his wife's French, so there was plenty of wine around for me to give it a go a couple times." He shook his head with a self-deprecating smile. "Not my thing. Makes me turn on sappy music and cry like a witch. Have you ever--?"
Neville smiled back. "Properly drunk? Just once...with the guys the first week we were hiding out in the Room of Requirement. We all did. I get really stupid and lose all sense of self-preservation. Thank goodness Ernie, Derek, and Wayne combined to outweigh me like five-to-one is all I'll say. Although if Terry were still around, I'd get him loaded just so you'd believe me. He parses."
"He what?"
"Spells. You know. The advanced stuff. Sits down and starts picking them apart really intently. Incendio, Incendius, Incendior, Incendiate, Incendiavis..."
"That. Is. Bizarre." Ron chuckled. "Between that and Luna, I think they need to re-build Ravenclaw tower with padded walls."
"I think we've all wound up a little mental," Neville pointed out. "It's been that kind of a - well, that kind of a several years, really." He paused, then his tone became serious again. "But what brought you back? Did you get your answers?"
"Some of them, and some just sort of figured themselves out as we went along." He hesitated, frowning. "You don't really know Harry all that well, do you, Neville?"
He spread his hands, shrugging slightly. "As well as anybody other than you and Hermione and maybe Professor Dumbledore. He's always kept to himself a lot. Never really blamed him, being a celebrity since he was a baby and all."
"He really, really got thrown into the deep end of this. You and I, we can't properly imagine. Not only did he find out from nowhere that he was a wizard and about the whole world that came with that, but that he was The Boy Who Lived, about Voldemort, his parents - did you know he actually grew up believing that scar came from a piece of jagged glass in a Muggle car accident?"
"But that's a textbook Curse scar!"
"Gotta come from a world that's got those textbooks," Ron pointed out. "Thing is, he really held on to Dumbledore a lot more than I think anyone except the old wizard himself understood. When he died, Harry just came apart...and did you see that book that came out last summer?"
Neville made a face. "Skeeter's piece of dung? The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore?"
"That's the one."
"Didn't read it. Don't think anyone at the school did, actually. None of us got past the by-line...especially the Hufflepuffs. I remember when the article came out in the Prophet about it hitting its tenth week on Flourish and Blot's Best-Seller List. Sally-Anne made quite the show of tossing the paper across the table and saying that she wasn't going to spend two Knuts on the woman who had listed 'Cedric Diggerly' as 'the secondary Hogwarts Champion.' But what of it?"
"It messed with his head bad. It was already so much of a shock to him that Dumbledore had actually died, he was ready to believe anything. And I think Dumbledore knew that. He knew there'd be stupid trash books and people jumping up to blab to the papers, because there always are when someone famous dies, whether they deserve it or not. I think he knew how bad it would muck with Harry and gave us a good long run-around to give him a chance to get his head together. He needed it, too." Ron shuddered a little, there was a haunted look in his eyes, and Neville remembered his own near-breakdown that spring. He certainly had no right to hold it against Harry if he'd taken the strain badly himself. "On my wand, Neville, I think if it had been even a couple weeks less - hell, even a couple of minutes - he wouldn't have been able to do what he needed to in the end, because there would have been a part of him that wanted to die."
Neville thought about this a moment, then cocked his head curiously as another question came to him. "Why not warn Harry ahead of time if he knew he was going to die and knew it would hurt him?"
The blue eyes fixed him with a frank, open stare. "Do you think he'd have been able to concentrate on what Dumbledore was telling him all year, or do you think he'd have just started giving up and coming to pieces earlier?"
"Okay...." Neville had never considered Ron to be particularly philosophical before, and he was beginning to regard the other wizard with a new respect. "You've really thought this all out, haven't you?"
Ron laughed. "I know you guys were busy all year, but ours was basically I'm-Going-To-Die-Of-Boredom spiced up here and there with just plain I'm-Going-To-Die. Hide. Camp. Argue. Fight for our lives. Hide. Camp. Argue. Fight for our lives. Hide again, camp some more, argue just for a change of pace. Fight for our lives again. I've done more thinking in the past ten months than in the seventeen years before it, I swear."
"Still," Neville pressed, "maybe it's just the way Harry made it sound, but it all seems really...seat of your pants, you know? Like it worked out as much as from luck as anything else. You'd think with all those years to work out that Voldemort was coming back, Dumbledore would have had a tighter plan."
"That's what I thought too, but Bill straightened me out on that one. He was privy to a lot more from the Order," Ron retorted. "No one expected Voldemort to come back as fast as he did. Dumbledore and everyone else thought they'd have a few more years at least, and no one thought Fudge would just shove his wand up his arse and ignore the whole thing. That's what really let him get hold. Once that happened, everyone - Dumbledore too - was scrambling by the seat of their pants to catch up and do something. If you're gonna blame someone for the body count downstairs, mate, I'd suggest you point your wand at Fudge."
"I don't think I know enough hexes," Neville said bitterly. "And half of them didn't need to die."
"According to Seamus, half of you shouldn't have lived," Ron snapped with surprising harshness. "He said you were planning a last-man-standing business at the end of the year without Harry or Dumbledore or anyone else."
"We didn't have a choice!" he shot back fiercely. "We thought we'd been abandoned! No one told us anything! How were we supposed to trust in any kind of greater plan with someone like Snape running the school! It's all the worse that he was Dumbledore's man in the end! To let that bastard have control of his -" Neville cut off, his face twisting in hate as he struggled to find words for what the ex-Potion Master's reign had been like, but Ron either had heard enough from others already, or he could guess.
"If he'd known you like you are now, Neville, I'm sure he would have told you something, but when he was alive to make the decisions, you weren't a leader, there wasn't a reason to tell the rest of Hogwarts anything." Ron couldn't keep an edge of sarcasm back as he continued. "And how was he supposed to have let Snape have the school when Snape took over after he'd died? No one ever said he liked Snape, just that he used him, and he'd have been an idiot not to."
"Fair enough," Neville conceded grudgingly, then sighed deeply, rubbing his temples with the tips of his fingers. "I hate you, Ron."
The other wizard blinked, stunned. "What?"
"This whole year," he said slowly, "it's been a living hell. And now we've lost just enough of our friends that it hurts almost too bad to go on, but there are still enough of us left that it's a victory, and Voldemort's dead, Snape's dead - and he helped win it in the end, even though he was a horrible person - and everything's still a mess, and Dumbledore screwed up, but thanks to you I guess I know he didn't screw up badly enough that I can hate him for it, and Fudge is too pathetic to hate...and it's just...Colin once said that he liked the wizarding world because it was straightforward. Good. Evil. End of story. But it's not."
Ron nodded, and there was absolute understanding and equal pain in his eyes. "Do you suppose this is what it means to be adults?"
A humorless smile came to Neville's mouth. "If it is, want to snap our wands and go be Muggles? I hear they don't have to do it until they're eighteen."
"Nah, I don't see why," Ron said dryly. "Too late for me, and you'd only get what, three more months?"
"I suppose. And I spent two days in their world over Christmas anyway." He shook his head. "You're right. More trouble than it's worth."
"So what're you gonna do now?" Ron asked after a long pause.
Neville took a deep breath, considering it carefully before he answered. "I still want to know if I ever was really fated for anything, or if it was just Dumbledore's way of trying to make sure that someone would be willing to make a go of it if Harry had died in a way that wasn't planned. It doesn't really matter now, I know, but I think I'll sleep better at night just having an answer. But otherwise...I guess...try to move on. Try to help my friends, put together the victory party I promised the survivors, see where things go with Hannah...basically do the best I can. How about you?"
