Fic: Into the Sun (R)
Title: Into the Sun
Author: Scela Letifer
Rating: R
Pairings: Neville/Cho, Harry/Remus, Neville/Harry
Disclaimer: JKR wouldn’t be this cruel. At least, I hope not.
Warnings: Character death. General end-of-the-world angst. Implied cross-gen (Harry's 16).
Author Notes: Written for darkones' “Boggarts Beneath the Bed" Challenge. Thanks very much to my darling, darkfic-loving fool of a beta, Jay. Will be cross-posted to darkones and nevillosity.
The animal was still warm as Hagrid took it into his hands, still clinging on to the illusion of life. A smear of white fur in the cracked, earthen valleys and hills of his hands - Neville couldn’t look away from the gleam of sightless eye delineated a with a bloody crust.
“What killed it?” Hermione asked.
“It was scared to death,” Harry said lowly. “Its heart exploded.”
Lupin’s nostrils flared and he held up a hand in a sharp movement. “Drop it, Rubeus. We need to leave now.”
They looked to Harry - they always did. He nodded, and the animal crackled as it crushed the skeletons of leaves beneath it.
* * *
The animal corpses were around the entire perimeter of the school - perhaps they extended deep into the forest, but no one was fool enough to go into there. Fang bounded in one day, barking madly among the silence of dead birds and dying trees. He never came back - there was not even a husk left to provide some jaded reassurance. Hagrid hadn’t spoken much since then.
It seemed to Neville that everyone knew what was happening, and maybe he was really too thick to be here, but there was no where else to be. He couldn’t leave if he wanted to - if they wanted him to. The world had receded beyond the realm of imagination, of hope. All the owls were dead, and without communication, the rest of the world might as well be dead too.
Faith, Hermione had preached in the beginning. Neville had wanted to believe, wanted to hold onto the infinite glory of possibility, but he couldn’t help the doubt. It was like fishing: Great Uncle Algie had told him to wait with precise care for the tug of something, something you couldn’t see but feel - something undoubtedly alive. Only sometimes, you didn't want the fate you reeled up.
Fishing wasn’t much like what Uncle Algie said - he didn’t expect it to be cruel. He didn’t expect to be watching the creature gasping on oxygen that couldn’t enter its bloodstream, didn’t expect to be terrified of touching something so glistening and small. There was life in it, and that night, Neville didn’t touch the flesh, didn’t even want to prod it with his cold and callous fork. It seemed a needlessly scientific endeavor.
The animals around Hogwarts were all dying, and everyone was wondering when the people would follow in suit. For, in essence, an animal and a person were made of the same stuff. Surely they could die just as easily.
Neville hated not knowing what was happening most of the time.
But then, it flew fast here, faster than even Hermione could track. She needed time. But this wasn’t a place of learning anymore than the Professors were thinking of their students first.
In the early days of the war, first years were used as shields and the third years as fodder. The speeches Dumbledore - and all the Heads of House - had delivered had rung with a righteous passion - heroism. The hope shining in their eyes was what Neville chose to remember. There wasn’t much left after that but red - red like his hands, but he’d managed to make it. He learned what Gryffindor strength was all about - it was about winning, or failing that, making sure that the enemy didn’t win either. Building the wards that kept them off of the grounds required sacrifice. Perhaps Dumbledore wanted to atone, wanted to repent - his blood was potent.
But everyone knew and no one spoke of Snape’s dagger in the night, least of all Snape, who disappeared into the forest not long after the wards were complete. Even stricter than the unspoken taboo against Snape’s name was the silence about Lupin - Lupin’s soft voice in Snape’s ear.
It was like when Harry shattered Malfoy’s neck with a swift hex, and none of the other Slytherins said anything after that. No one questioned his abilities, his leadership.
Harry didn’t sleep in the boys’ dorm anymore, and Neville tried not to be too glad. He shrieked unnaturally in his sleep, and Dean and Seamus had already made arrangements to bunk with the fifth years. It seemed wrong for Neville to leave, like another betrayal, another Gryffindor leaving Harry alone. Harry leaving was a relief.
When Harry started sleeping with Lupin, no one said a thing. No one mentioned wrongness, because everyone knew what fucking was - they were all doing it (what else was there to do to pass time that was thin with lacking?) - no one mentioned monsters, because they knew what monsters were - they’d fought them, killed them, become them.
When they moved into the Headmaster’s chambers, almost no one questioned. When Zacharias Smith snapped and finally went insane (and he wasn’t the first) and asked Harry if he had been planning this all along, no one said anything about the green lighting up his face.
Lupin could be cruel when he was in love.
So, alone in the 6th Year boys’ dormitory, he brought Cho Chang. He could be with her somewhere besides Greenhouse 4, earth getting beneath their nails, besides the Quidditch shed, the sharp resin from the brooms distracting him from her own scent.
She smelled like the first day of spring, of the plants shaking off the frost to stretch green arms high into the chilly morning.
Neville wasn’t very good with girls, but he liked Cho. He liked the way she was honest and cried when she wanted to cry and loved fiercely enough to break herself. He liked the way she made the move to kiss him because he would have never gotten the courage up to kiss her himself, even when they were working together to grow the school’s food supply, even when her arm was pressed warmly against his own and her breath was hot on the side of his face, even when she was telling him that she liked him.
She had kissed him slowly and delicately - like a butterfly.
Neville cradled her face with shaking care until she thrust her hips forward, driving him against the edge of the table, hands on his belt - there wasn’t time to think, and Neville thought that was the only reason he had agreed so readily.
Arse in the damp dirt, he had never felt anything quite as amazing as the feel of being inside her. It took all of ten seconds before he was coming - coming in the wet, tight heat, but Cho didn’t say anything, only kissed him slowly and taught him how to move his smudged finger against her, inside of her, making her feel things as immense as the things he had felt.
He knew that he most probably was in love with her, and maybe it was because they were going to die. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter why, only that it was.
* * *
Their magic stopped working on the thirty-ninth day of the siege. Already six had been killed, but they were by their own or Harry’s (usually through Lupin) hands.
Hermione poured over books in the library, because if the wards failed, if their magic failed, they wouldn’t even be able to produce a Patronus in defense. They would be hopeless.
It was a labarum for Hermione - some desire within her that pushed and pushed her to proving herself. Cho once said it was a Muggleborn thing; something about compensation and a fear that they weren’t quite magical enough. There wasn't any sense in it - they were going to die and fighting against it was needless stress.
At least, that’s what Cho said. She often said things that contradicted everything she did, but maybe that was cleverness. Cho was maybe even smarter than Hermione, because she was the kind of smart that made him speak in response; with Hermione, it had been the sort that made him mute, feel stupid. Neville fancied he was in love with Hermione for the longest time, but that was probably because he loved Harry so much.
Harry, who never smiled anymore - Harry, who was supposed to be their hope. Harry, who had killed the Dark Lord, but hadn’t stopped the war.
They expected it to be so easy, but there was something out there. It wasn’t wizards, because the magic used killed all of them. It wasn’t Muggles, because they were dead too. They were sacrificed by the Dark Lord, fueling darkness greater than his own - the Dementors were multiplying and battering themselves along the decaying wards of the school.
It was irony, that. It wasn’t enough - it was never enough.
Hermione had said that God was pushing them for using magic - for daring to think they were better than him. She had done something funny with her hand - touched her forehead, then chest, then each of her shoulders.
Harry had hit her then. Across the face - red handprint blazing like a furious beacon. If he hadn’t loved Hermione as much as he did, Neville believed he would have killed her too.
“God is a lie.”
She regarded him with disbelieving eyes. “Who will save us then? There must be an answer - a reason.”
“Maybe we weren’t meant to be saved.”
Theodore Nott. They were surprised when he hadn’t been part of the congregation that left Hogwarts in the months leading up to first eruption of war. “Maybe we were meant to bear a punishment.”
Cho’s eyes flashed. “Don’t tell me you’re buying into this Muggle rubbish. Any history book will show you the damage this ‘religion’ has wrought upon the world.”
“Why is it so effective then? Why do people perish in its wake? Chang, we’re trapped, we’re going to die - there must be a reason.”
“Must there? Is death significant? I’m sorry, I must be remembering the wrong things - those can’t have been bodies we walked over. Those can’t have been lives we took. We breathe death, Theodore.”
“There is always hope,” Hermione argued, and Cho laughed long and loud.
“Shut her up, Neville,” Colin Creevey said with eyes that bespoke too much - conflicts like this tended to end in death.
Colin was the youngest person left.
“There’s nothing I can say,” Neville explained. “Love doesn’t give you power over anything.”
Harry snapped something cold that shut both girls up - Neville didn’t care to listen. He was their leader, and loved or hated, they listened.
Neville knew that Harry had been listening to what Colin was saying, and it had made him nervous. When those who love you begin to doubt, things start to unravel.
* * *
It was swift.
The fortieth day of the siege, Neville had been in the library, running his hands along the smooth branches of Cho’s arms, coming up around her neck to play with the jut of her collar bones when sound exploded through out the school - a wail softer than a Banshee’s but foretelling more doom than a crystal ball.
The wards had been broken, and they started running - they met Harry in the Great Hall. His face was white - as white as it had been on the first day of battle, as white as it had been when flecked with Ron’s blood. Lupin wasn’t there, and Hagrid went into the Room of Requirement to die two days before.
“They took Remus,” he panted bitterly, and the fastest followed him to where they had kept the emergency brooms.
There were nineteen brooms and thirty-seven people.
Cho moved her hands in a series of movement that blurred Neville’s eyes and lashed out a leg, tossing him a broom, face cocooned in a mask he had come to know well. Three students were down so Neville could go up.
They kicked off without waiting for an order, Neville’s feet crying as they left the comfort of the ground. No one looked back as the screams of hatred and jealousy were flung at them with impotent virulence.
It didn’t last long, and Neville assumed the Dementors were there or that his brain had gotten even better at shutting out unpleasantness than he remembered.
It was then, over two hundred feet in the air, that the cold began its slow ensnarement over his heart. The Dementors were in the air.
Colin Creevey screamed high and long as a rotting hand clasped upon his ankle and dragged him down. Neville could hear laughter, but maybe it was only Bellatrix. In his head and out of it were the same now.
Fear was fear was fear, and there was no escape.
They tried to head where Hogsmeade was - where it once was - and a cloud of black was rising like a flock of birds, flying towards them, coming for them.
There were thousands of them.
“Up!” Harry shouted, and Neville could barely make out the words as the air stripped them of everything but urgency. “We need to get through the clouds - they don’t like the sun!”
The slowest fliers were already being hit as they titled their brooms up - Tracey Davis and Ernie Macmillan were engulfed in the storm of black, and no one heard anything - there was no time for sound.
Hitting the clouds wasn’t like sinking into a bowl of cotton as Neville had often imagined, but wet, and crackling slightly with malevolent charge. He couldn’t see anything but the smear of red that was Harry’s cloak.
There were whispers in the clouds, and Neville wondered if the fear came from himself or if the Dementors were right next to them, playing with them - the Dementors were afforded a play because there was no where for them to go.
Hermione cried out once - Neville knew it was her; she was right next to him, only then she wasn’t.
Eaten by the clouds, and Neville didn’t look back, just went on. It became a matter of the fact that Neville loved Harry more, loved Cho more, loved himself more that he loved Hermione, and that was how it went - that was desperation - when you forsake your friends and principals for a few more breaths.
They might have been flying for days or seconds, they might have been flying in circles, or straight into a mountain - they might have followed Harry anywhere, and when they burst out of the clouds, Neville could barely breathe, and his hands were wet and nearly frozen to the broom.
They squinted their eyes in the flood of color - the clouds were red as the sun sunk, whipped into motionless waves of deep apricot and blood.
It had almost set, and darkness was sweeping in from the East, cold and purple and rich with Dementors.
Harry’s eyes darted quickly - “Chase the light! Into the sun!” Harry cried. “Faster, faster!”
It became a morbid chant in their heads, and they flew, and they flew faster. It grew too bright to look at so they closed their eyes enough to only alow the slightest slice of light in.
Harry was the fastest, but Cho wasn’t far behind hair whipping with a cold joy in the murderous wind, and Neville knew this was madness, but where Harry would go, where Cho would go, he would follow.
It was cold, and Neville couldn’t tell if it was because of the Dementors or if it was because they were up so high. He didn’t look down for fear of losing Harry or Cho.
And yet.
In the way you can see things without meaning to - out the corner of your eye - he saw an endless field of black below them. The Dementors were teaming just under the whipped tips of fiery clouds - there were millions - no. Numbers lost meaning. There was only one, and it was fear.
There would be no going back.
Theodore Nott and a seventh year Hufflepuff were the only ones left now besides Harry and Cho. And Nott was weakening - Neville could tell that he was no more a natural flyer than Neville, but that he had only lasted that long through sheer fear and determination.
And then it made sense - it made sense. He could barely breathe the air had gotten so thin, but he was beginning to understand. Or at least he thought he was beginning to understand.
“Harry!” Neville called out. “Cho!”
The two of them slowed marginally. If it had been any one but Neville, they would have sped up.
He pulled up in between them.
“It’s over,” he yelled, and ice crystals fell with his words.
He imagined them falling back down to earth and shattering to provide knowledge to someone on the ground.
They stopped, and the Hufflepuff and Nott were still a good three minutes behind.
He took Cho’s hand, and after the slightest hesitation, Harry’s. Neville had very little balance in the air, and he trusted the two of them to steady him.
The blackness beneath them drew closer.
“You can never unsee, you can only stop looking. And we haven't been looking. We’ve been running, and we’ve let every part of us to be proud of - every bit worth remembering - fall to the ground. Our friends are dead and we didn’t do a thing to remember them or avenge them. Being the last one left living - you’re all alone then. And. And I don’t want my last moments to be of running and of being a coward.”
“Neville, I -”
Neville leaned to kiss Cho, a warm brush in the coldness - a brief respite from the screams that had been resonating in his head - the screams of those long dead that had been haunting all of them for forty days.
Her face was wet, and as he pulled back, he looked at Harry.
Harry’s eyes were still too fiercely green to be real, his scar too lividly red, his life too heroic - Harry was the stuff of legend, but Neville could still remember the way he told Neville he was worth twelve of Malfoy, and the way he could smile in a way that made you feel good and important and world-changing, and the way he loved Ron - loved the people who took the time to know him and understand him - so much that it tore him apart when they disappeared one by one, and the way his face had been lit as Voldemort, an immortal, was killed.
Harry was impossible, and Neville loved him.
He kissed Harry slowly, once on each cheek, and once one on the lips, lingering because there was nothing to be afraid of when you’re afraid of everything.
Harry’s eyes were wide - Cho’s were wide, and she was a good deal cleverer that Harry, because her mouth was issuing a hopeless little, “Oh,” of despair as Neville let go of each of their hands, relaxed his legs and fell.
The two of them might have dived down to stop Neville before he plummeted into the fear in silent peace.
The two of them might have waited for the other two, might have decided to go down together if they went down at all.
But this was how it really went: Cho let go of her broom and fell face up towards the heavens, turned away from the end, from inevitability. She wasn’t like Neville - she didn’t want to see it when it came. And Harry, unable to cease the pursuit of the impossible, unable to accept all that he had done and seen, unable to believe that there was something waiting beyond, something that was determined by how your life was lived, unable to let go of what life had made him into, a hero incapable of rest, of relief -
Harry flew into the sun.
Author: Scela Letifer
Rating: R
Pairings: Neville/Cho, Harry/Remus, Neville/Harry
Disclaimer: JKR wouldn’t be this cruel. At least, I hope not.
Warnings: Character death. General end-of-the-world angst. Implied cross-gen (Harry's 16).
Author Notes: Written for darkones' “Boggarts Beneath the Bed" Challenge. Thanks very much to my darling, darkfic-loving fool of a beta, Jay. Will be cross-posted to darkones and nevillosity.
The animal was still warm as Hagrid took it into his hands, still clinging on to the illusion of life. A smear of white fur in the cracked, earthen valleys and hills of his hands - Neville couldn’t look away from the gleam of sightless eye delineated a with a bloody crust.
“What killed it?” Hermione asked.
“It was scared to death,” Harry said lowly. “Its heart exploded.”
Lupin’s nostrils flared and he held up a hand in a sharp movement. “Drop it, Rubeus. We need to leave now.”
They looked to Harry - they always did. He nodded, and the animal crackled as it crushed the skeletons of leaves beneath it.
* * *
The animal corpses were around the entire perimeter of the school - perhaps they extended deep into the forest, but no one was fool enough to go into there. Fang bounded in one day, barking madly among the silence of dead birds and dying trees. He never came back - there was not even a husk left to provide some jaded reassurance. Hagrid hadn’t spoken much since then.
It seemed to Neville that everyone knew what was happening, and maybe he was really too thick to be here, but there was no where else to be. He couldn’t leave if he wanted to - if they wanted him to. The world had receded beyond the realm of imagination, of hope. All the owls were dead, and without communication, the rest of the world might as well be dead too.
Faith, Hermione had preached in the beginning. Neville had wanted to believe, wanted to hold onto the infinite glory of possibility, but he couldn’t help the doubt. It was like fishing: Great Uncle Algie had told him to wait with precise care for the tug of something, something you couldn’t see but feel - something undoubtedly alive. Only sometimes, you didn't want the fate you reeled up.
Fishing wasn’t much like what Uncle Algie said - he didn’t expect it to be cruel. He didn’t expect to be watching the creature gasping on oxygen that couldn’t enter its bloodstream, didn’t expect to be terrified of touching something so glistening and small. There was life in it, and that night, Neville didn’t touch the flesh, didn’t even want to prod it with his cold and callous fork. It seemed a needlessly scientific endeavor.
The animals around Hogwarts were all dying, and everyone was wondering when the people would follow in suit. For, in essence, an animal and a person were made of the same stuff. Surely they could die just as easily.
Neville hated not knowing what was happening most of the time.
But then, it flew fast here, faster than even Hermione could track. She needed time. But this wasn’t a place of learning anymore than the Professors were thinking of their students first.
In the early days of the war, first years were used as shields and the third years as fodder. The speeches Dumbledore - and all the Heads of House - had delivered had rung with a righteous passion - heroism. The hope shining in their eyes was what Neville chose to remember. There wasn’t much left after that but red - red like his hands, but he’d managed to make it. He learned what Gryffindor strength was all about - it was about winning, or failing that, making sure that the enemy didn’t win either. Building the wards that kept them off of the grounds required sacrifice. Perhaps Dumbledore wanted to atone, wanted to repent - his blood was potent.
But everyone knew and no one spoke of Snape’s dagger in the night, least of all Snape, who disappeared into the forest not long after the wards were complete. Even stricter than the unspoken taboo against Snape’s name was the silence about Lupin - Lupin’s soft voice in Snape’s ear.
It was like when Harry shattered Malfoy’s neck with a swift hex, and none of the other Slytherins said anything after that. No one questioned his abilities, his leadership.
Harry didn’t sleep in the boys’ dorm anymore, and Neville tried not to be too glad. He shrieked unnaturally in his sleep, and Dean and Seamus had already made arrangements to bunk with the fifth years. It seemed wrong for Neville to leave, like another betrayal, another Gryffindor leaving Harry alone. Harry leaving was a relief.
When Harry started sleeping with Lupin, no one said a thing. No one mentioned wrongness, because everyone knew what fucking was - they were all doing it (what else was there to do to pass time that was thin with lacking?) - no one mentioned monsters, because they knew what monsters were - they’d fought them, killed them, become them.
When they moved into the Headmaster’s chambers, almost no one questioned. When Zacharias Smith snapped and finally went insane (and he wasn’t the first) and asked Harry if he had been planning this all along, no one said anything about the green lighting up his face.
Lupin could be cruel when he was in love.
So, alone in the 6th Year boys’ dormitory, he brought Cho Chang. He could be with her somewhere besides Greenhouse 4, earth getting beneath their nails, besides the Quidditch shed, the sharp resin from the brooms distracting him from her own scent.
She smelled like the first day of spring, of the plants shaking off the frost to stretch green arms high into the chilly morning.
Neville wasn’t very good with girls, but he liked Cho. He liked the way she was honest and cried when she wanted to cry and loved fiercely enough to break herself. He liked the way she made the move to kiss him because he would have never gotten the courage up to kiss her himself, even when they were working together to grow the school’s food supply, even when her arm was pressed warmly against his own and her breath was hot on the side of his face, even when she was telling him that she liked him.
She had kissed him slowly and delicately - like a butterfly.
Neville cradled her face with shaking care until she thrust her hips forward, driving him against the edge of the table, hands on his belt - there wasn’t time to think, and Neville thought that was the only reason he had agreed so readily.
Arse in the damp dirt, he had never felt anything quite as amazing as the feel of being inside her. It took all of ten seconds before he was coming - coming in the wet, tight heat, but Cho didn’t say anything, only kissed him slowly and taught him how to move his smudged finger against her, inside of her, making her feel things as immense as the things he had felt.
He knew that he most probably was in love with her, and maybe it was because they were going to die. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter why, only that it was.
* * *
Their magic stopped working on the thirty-ninth day of the siege. Already six had been killed, but they were by their own or Harry’s (usually through Lupin) hands.
Hermione poured over books in the library, because if the wards failed, if their magic failed, they wouldn’t even be able to produce a Patronus in defense. They would be hopeless.
It was a labarum for Hermione - some desire within her that pushed and pushed her to proving herself. Cho once said it was a Muggleborn thing; something about compensation and a fear that they weren’t quite magical enough. There wasn't any sense in it - they were going to die and fighting against it was needless stress.
At least, that’s what Cho said. She often said things that contradicted everything she did, but maybe that was cleverness. Cho was maybe even smarter than Hermione, because she was the kind of smart that made him speak in response; with Hermione, it had been the sort that made him mute, feel stupid. Neville fancied he was in love with Hermione for the longest time, but that was probably because he loved Harry so much.
Harry, who never smiled anymore - Harry, who was supposed to be their hope. Harry, who had killed the Dark Lord, but hadn’t stopped the war.
They expected it to be so easy, but there was something out there. It wasn’t wizards, because the magic used killed all of them. It wasn’t Muggles, because they were dead too. They were sacrificed by the Dark Lord, fueling darkness greater than his own - the Dementors were multiplying and battering themselves along the decaying wards of the school.
It was irony, that. It wasn’t enough - it was never enough.
Hermione had said that God was pushing them for using magic - for daring to think they were better than him. She had done something funny with her hand - touched her forehead, then chest, then each of her shoulders.
Harry had hit her then. Across the face - red handprint blazing like a furious beacon. If he hadn’t loved Hermione as much as he did, Neville believed he would have killed her too.
“God is a lie.”
She regarded him with disbelieving eyes. “Who will save us then? There must be an answer - a reason.”
“Maybe we weren’t meant to be saved.”
Theodore Nott. They were surprised when he hadn’t been part of the congregation that left Hogwarts in the months leading up to first eruption of war. “Maybe we were meant to bear a punishment.”
Cho’s eyes flashed. “Don’t tell me you’re buying into this Muggle rubbish. Any history book will show you the damage this ‘religion’ has wrought upon the world.”
“Why is it so effective then? Why do people perish in its wake? Chang, we’re trapped, we’re going to die - there must be a reason.”
“Must there? Is death significant? I’m sorry, I must be remembering the wrong things - those can’t have been bodies we walked over. Those can’t have been lives we took. We breathe death, Theodore.”
“There is always hope,” Hermione argued, and Cho laughed long and loud.
“Shut her up, Neville,” Colin Creevey said with eyes that bespoke too much - conflicts like this tended to end in death.
Colin was the youngest person left.
“There’s nothing I can say,” Neville explained. “Love doesn’t give you power over anything.”
Harry snapped something cold that shut both girls up - Neville didn’t care to listen. He was their leader, and loved or hated, they listened.
Neville knew that Harry had been listening to what Colin was saying, and it had made him nervous. When those who love you begin to doubt, things start to unravel.
* * *
It was swift.
The fortieth day of the siege, Neville had been in the library, running his hands along the smooth branches of Cho’s arms, coming up around her neck to play with the jut of her collar bones when sound exploded through out the school - a wail softer than a Banshee’s but foretelling more doom than a crystal ball.
The wards had been broken, and they started running - they met Harry in the Great Hall. His face was white - as white as it had been on the first day of battle, as white as it had been when flecked with Ron’s blood. Lupin wasn’t there, and Hagrid went into the Room of Requirement to die two days before.
“They took Remus,” he panted bitterly, and the fastest followed him to where they had kept the emergency brooms.
There were nineteen brooms and thirty-seven people.
Cho moved her hands in a series of movement that blurred Neville’s eyes and lashed out a leg, tossing him a broom, face cocooned in a mask he had come to know well. Three students were down so Neville could go up.
They kicked off without waiting for an order, Neville’s feet crying as they left the comfort of the ground. No one looked back as the screams of hatred and jealousy were flung at them with impotent virulence.
It didn’t last long, and Neville assumed the Dementors were there or that his brain had gotten even better at shutting out unpleasantness than he remembered.
It was then, over two hundred feet in the air, that the cold began its slow ensnarement over his heart. The Dementors were in the air.
Colin Creevey screamed high and long as a rotting hand clasped upon his ankle and dragged him down. Neville could hear laughter, but maybe it was only Bellatrix. In his head and out of it were the same now.
Fear was fear was fear, and there was no escape.
They tried to head where Hogsmeade was - where it once was - and a cloud of black was rising like a flock of birds, flying towards them, coming for them.
There were thousands of them.
“Up!” Harry shouted, and Neville could barely make out the words as the air stripped them of everything but urgency. “We need to get through the clouds - they don’t like the sun!”
The slowest fliers were already being hit as they titled their brooms up - Tracey Davis and Ernie Macmillan were engulfed in the storm of black, and no one heard anything - there was no time for sound.
Hitting the clouds wasn’t like sinking into a bowl of cotton as Neville had often imagined, but wet, and crackling slightly with malevolent charge. He couldn’t see anything but the smear of red that was Harry’s cloak.
There were whispers in the clouds, and Neville wondered if the fear came from himself or if the Dementors were right next to them, playing with them - the Dementors were afforded a play because there was no where for them to go.
Hermione cried out once - Neville knew it was her; she was right next to him, only then she wasn’t.
Eaten by the clouds, and Neville didn’t look back, just went on. It became a matter of the fact that Neville loved Harry more, loved Cho more, loved himself more that he loved Hermione, and that was how it went - that was desperation - when you forsake your friends and principals for a few more breaths.
They might have been flying for days or seconds, they might have been flying in circles, or straight into a mountain - they might have followed Harry anywhere, and when they burst out of the clouds, Neville could barely breathe, and his hands were wet and nearly frozen to the broom.
They squinted their eyes in the flood of color - the clouds were red as the sun sunk, whipped into motionless waves of deep apricot and blood.
It had almost set, and darkness was sweeping in from the East, cold and purple and rich with Dementors.
Harry’s eyes darted quickly - “Chase the light! Into the sun!” Harry cried. “Faster, faster!”
It became a morbid chant in their heads, and they flew, and they flew faster. It grew too bright to look at so they closed their eyes enough to only alow the slightest slice of light in.
Harry was the fastest, but Cho wasn’t far behind hair whipping with a cold joy in the murderous wind, and Neville knew this was madness, but where Harry would go, where Cho would go, he would follow.
It was cold, and Neville couldn’t tell if it was because of the Dementors or if it was because they were up so high. He didn’t look down for fear of losing Harry or Cho.
And yet.
In the way you can see things without meaning to - out the corner of your eye - he saw an endless field of black below them. The Dementors were teaming just under the whipped tips of fiery clouds - there were millions - no. Numbers lost meaning. There was only one, and it was fear.
There would be no going back.
Theodore Nott and a seventh year Hufflepuff were the only ones left now besides Harry and Cho. And Nott was weakening - Neville could tell that he was no more a natural flyer than Neville, but that he had only lasted that long through sheer fear and determination.
And then it made sense - it made sense. He could barely breathe the air had gotten so thin, but he was beginning to understand. Or at least he thought he was beginning to understand.
“Harry!” Neville called out. “Cho!”
The two of them slowed marginally. If it had been any one but Neville, they would have sped up.
He pulled up in between them.
“It’s over,” he yelled, and ice crystals fell with his words.
He imagined them falling back down to earth and shattering to provide knowledge to someone on the ground.
They stopped, and the Hufflepuff and Nott were still a good three minutes behind.
He took Cho’s hand, and after the slightest hesitation, Harry’s. Neville had very little balance in the air, and he trusted the two of them to steady him.
The blackness beneath them drew closer.
“You can never unsee, you can only stop looking. And we haven't been looking. We’ve been running, and we’ve let every part of us to be proud of - every bit worth remembering - fall to the ground. Our friends are dead and we didn’t do a thing to remember them or avenge them. Being the last one left living - you’re all alone then. And. And I don’t want my last moments to be of running and of being a coward.”
“Neville, I -”
Neville leaned to kiss Cho, a warm brush in the coldness - a brief respite from the screams that had been resonating in his head - the screams of those long dead that had been haunting all of them for forty days.
Her face was wet, and as he pulled back, he looked at Harry.
Harry’s eyes were still too fiercely green to be real, his scar too lividly red, his life too heroic - Harry was the stuff of legend, but Neville could still remember the way he told Neville he was worth twelve of Malfoy, and the way he could smile in a way that made you feel good and important and world-changing, and the way he loved Ron - loved the people who took the time to know him and understand him - so much that it tore him apart when they disappeared one by one, and the way his face had been lit as Voldemort, an immortal, was killed.
Harry was impossible, and Neville loved him.
He kissed Harry slowly, once on each cheek, and once one on the lips, lingering because there was nothing to be afraid of when you’re afraid of everything.
Harry’s eyes were wide - Cho’s were wide, and she was a good deal cleverer that Harry, because her mouth was issuing a hopeless little, “Oh,” of despair as Neville let go of each of their hands, relaxed his legs and fell.
The two of them might have dived down to stop Neville before he plummeted into the fear in silent peace.
The two of them might have waited for the other two, might have decided to go down together if they went down at all.
But this was how it really went: Cho let go of her broom and fell face up towards the heavens, turned away from the end, from inevitability. She wasn’t like Neville - she didn’t want to see it when it came. And Harry, unable to cease the pursuit of the impossible, unable to accept all that he had done and seen, unable to believe that there was something waiting beyond, something that was determined by how your life was lived, unable to let go of what life had made him into, a hero incapable of rest, of relief -
Harry flew into the sun.