Fic: A Good Life (Neville)
Title: A Good Life
Rating: PG
Characters/pairings: Neville Longbottom and a reporter. Allusions to canon pairings; Neville is paired with a woman who shall remain nameless for the sake of the plot.
Summary: A hundred years after Voldemort's defeat, a reporter is sent to interview Neville Longbottom.
Word count: 4,000
Notes: This is dedicated to everyone on my friends list. The last couple of years have been brilliant; thanks to all of you for contributing to that. ♥ Here's to JKR and the last book! Thank you to such_heights for beta-reading. Comments from anyone not on my flist are disabled until I've read DH; I apologise to anyone affected by this.
"I've had a good life." The old man sipped his tea while Anne set up her equipment: one QuickNotes 6.5 to record the interview verbatim, and one ordinary quill which she poised above a piece of parchment. "It hasn't been awfully exciting for the past hundred years or so, but that's the way I wanted it after all the adventures we had when we were young."
Anne willed him to speak faster; she was hoping to catch up with a friend who lived locally before hurrying home to get Florence's dinner started. Honestly, these old men did go on! She caught sight of a clock out of the corner of her eye, but when she looked around she discovered that it had far too many hands and no numbers. How odd! She'd heard of those (in connection with Ron and Ginny Weasley, now she came to think of it) but she'd never actually seen one, and this old man certainly didn't look the type to have a family as large as the number of clock-hands suggested. She made a note under 'questions' with the quill in her hand.
"So, a hundred years ago next week." She smiled encouragingly and the old man nodded. Sitting amid the brown armchair with his wild, silvery birch hair and wiry brown arms that resembled the gnarled roots of an old oak, he seemed poised to become one with the greenery that filled the room.
"You're right, of course," he said after a pause. "Well, I can't tell you too much about that time. At least, not if you want to know what it was like to be Harry Potter." His expression flattened suddenly.
"There are plenty of books and newspaper articles about Harry Potter," Anne said. Checking that her QuickNotes tablet was working properly, she added: "There's nothing written about how it felt to be caught up in the action simply because you knew him. There are no books about you, or the Weasleys, or..." She floundered. The other pair who'd been directly involved in Voldemort's defeat, Hermione Granger and Luna Lovegood, had become famous in their own right after Voldemort had been destroyed. "I want to hear about you," she finished.
The man smiled, the crow's feet around his eyes furrowing.
"Harry was one of my best friends at school," he said. "Oh, I don't mean I was as close to him as Ron and Hermione. I think he forgot I was there half the time, to tell you the truth. But we had things in common, more than most people realised, and I always felt close to him. Besides, I was -" He laughed deprecatingly. "I wasn't exactly Mr Popular, and some of the kids used to pick on me. You know what children are like. Any sign of weakness... Anyway, Harry was never like that. He - my housemates always defended me if they witnessed any of the teasing. Of course, a lot of it went unnoticed, but, well. That's life, isn't it? Or school, at any rate."
"You remained friends with Harry after Voldemort's defeat, didn't you?"
"Oh, yes. You don't go through those kinds of experiences without forming a bond. Excuse me just a second." The man waved his wand towards a lush-leaved climbing vine - some kind of ivy, Anne suspected - and immediately a localised sprinkler system started up among the cluster of plants in corner of the living room. The old man looked back; Anne did not bother to hide her impatience. Her colleague had been assigned to the venerable Hermione Granger; she got Neville Longbottom, about whom nobody seemed to know a thing beyond the basic facts. The article on the Worldwide Wizarding Network hadn't even listed the names of his wife or children. He'd better have a good story for her.
"Sorry," the old man said, although he did not sound contrite. "They're temperamental old ladies, that lot." Despite his gesture towards the plants in the corner, it took Anne a second to understand his meaning. She smiled tightly.
"Really."
"Oh, yes. Leave 'em for longer than a couple of hours, and their sap production slows dramatically. They become almost useless. Anyway, sorry. What were you asking?"
Anne glanced through her notes. "How did you feel when Harry Potter disappeared?"
The old man smiled. "I thought, good luck to him."
"Really?" This time it was truly a question, and the man nodded.
"Oh, yes. He'd had such a hard time, you know. Nobody would ever leave him alone, and that made it worse. All he wanted was a quiet life, and it never happened. Either the Ministry was asking him to help chase down Death Eaters, or there were forged photos of him all over the press. He just got tired."
"Do you have any idea where he went?"
"I've got plenty." He pulled his mug up to his jaw and eyed her over it. "But I wouldn't tell you lot."
"Do you think he's still alive?" asked Anne. Every few years, the rumours resurfaced: Harry Potter was a climbing instructor in the Welsh mountains; he was crofting on Stornoway; he was working in a Muggle bar in Soho. Sometimes the sightings were farther afield. Privately, Anne suspected he had died years ago, perhaps even soon after his disappearance, although the Prophet encouraged the occasional 'Where is Harry Potter?' story, particularly when sales were low.
"I have an idea," said the man. "But again, I wouldn't tell you lot. I'm sorry." This time, he really did look regretful, and she almost smiled. Time to try another tack.
"Do you think the break-up of Potter's marriage contributed to his decision to disappear?"
The old man shifted slightly, but his expression was bland. "I thought you wanted to talk about me, not Harry."
Anne gave up, at least temporarily. "Can you tell me how you felt during your fifth year, when the Ministry of Magic and the media were trying to discredit Harry Potter and Dumbledore the Wise?"
"It felt very frustrating," said the old man at once. "Voldemort was back, and yet the wizarding establishment was doing nothing."
"You didn't doubt Harry Potter's story, then, about the death of," Anne checked her notes, "Cedric Diggory?"
"Oh, no." The old man reclaimed his mug. "My grandmother and I - you, um, know what happened to my parents?" He paused for her nod. "Then you'll understand that we were very aware of the possibility of Voldemort returning. My grandparents never believed he was gone - in fact, I think my grandmother half-believed he was behind the attack on my..." He drifted into silence.
"So, you believed Harry," Anne prompted.
"Oh, yes," said the old man. "And if I hadn't done earlier, I would have the moment I discovered that my parents' attackers had escaped from jail."
"From Azkaban?"
"Yes."
"How did you feel when you learned about their escape?"
"Well, it made me angry." The old man poured another cup of tea, his arm shaking with what might have been old age. He made to top up her mug before realising that she hadn't yet touched it. "But also, I realised I was going to have to become a better fighter. My parents were Aurors, and in those days, they didn't let just anyone in. They only took the best of the best. If they could - could lose, despite all their talent and training, then I knew I had to get better. So I practised - we all practised."
"You weren't afraid?" asked Anne.
The man stared into his tea, warming his fingers around the mug. "Of course I was afraid," he said eventually. "We all were. After Cedric, being at school didn't mean you were safe. Fear was a state of mind, especially during that last year, after Dumbledore died. So there was no point talking about it."
"I think modern readers might be interested in knowing," put in Anne and the man smiled.
"Well, I'll leave it to you to tell them. Er-" He looked around awkwardly, as if checking his plants. Anne couldn't help wondering exactly how senile he was. "Was there anything else you wanted to know?"
Anne consulted her notes. "How did it feel when you killed Bellatrix Lestrange?"
His head whipped around. "I didn't."
"Sorry, what?"
"I didn't kill her," he said flatly.
"But-" Anne rifled through her notes. Neville Longbottom had killed Bellatrix Lestrange, the woman who had tortured his parents into insanity; she was sure she'd seen that mentioned hundreds of times, in articles and on the WWN. "Then who did?"
"You want to check your sources, love," said the old man. "That's one thing you can tell people - we never killed unless we absolutely had to, even when our lives were in danger. That was what the other side did. Bellatrix Lestrange died in prison. I put her there, if you want to write that in your story."
"So she survived Voldemort?" asked Anne. She wrote, "NL didn't kill BL. Chase up bloody lexicon writers on WWN!"
"Yes." The man stood up and tottered over to a plant on the table by the window. Anne wished she'd paid more attention in Herbology; the name of that plant - or any of them - would be a good detail, but she didn't want to interrupt him and ask about it. Still, she could always invent something later.
"Bellatrix Lestrange died in prison nearly seventeen years ago," said the old man. "That means she spent about ninety-nine years of her life in jail." Anne noticed that he didn't pause to calculate, despite the qualifier. His voice hardened, the Yorkshire accent suddenly outweighing the tinge of Highland Scots. "Still not as long as the combined sentence she and her cronies condemned my parents to, so I think that was fair enough."
Ninety-nine years in jail! "Did that - make you feel better?" she asked faintly.
The man turned faded blue eyes on her. "No, not really."
She felt young and silly for asking the question, and not at all like a hard-nosed reporter and responsible single mother with a daughter awaiting her first Hogwarts letter this summer. That was what being a journalist was about, she reminded herself: asking the questions that others didn't, whether from reticence or a sense of propriety or because they were just too obvious.
The man gazed out of the window; perhaps he was checking those bushes out there (laurels, even Anne knew that) for some kind of infestation, but she suspected not.
"I used to visit her," he said quietly.
"Your mother?" she asked in confusion. His grandmother, who'd brought him up? What had happened to her in the end? She noted the question on her parchment.
He shook his head. "I visited my mother regularly, of course - both my parents. But I meant her. Bellatrix Lestrange."
"You - why?"
He shrugged. "Nobody else was going to. All her friends and family were either dead or in prison with her. I - I felt sorry for her, to tell you the truth."
She fumbled for her next question. "Did you - did you talk to her?"
"Not really." His voice was distant again. "She was mad, you see. I think she was pretty much driven mad by Voldemort's first disappearance, although she hid it well for a long while. By the time the Dementors had finished with her, her sanity was shredded. I don't think she had a clue what was going on during her second bout of prison, even without the Dementors. She just used to scream and scream. I could never decide-" he coughed - "whether that was justice or not."
Anne stared at the old man again, trying to fathom what had driven him to keep company with a madwoman who had tortured his own parents into insanity. Compassion? Revenge? She shook her head to clear it, but it was no good; she still didn't understand.
"I stopped the day we brought my parents home," he said softly. "It just didn't seem right to go from visiting her to making their tea and dressing them and putting them to bed." He looked up at her with a wan smile. "I'm sorry, I don't think I'm being an awful lot of help."
"Oh, no, please," Anne said, glancing involuntarily at the clock that wasn't a clock. Perhaps she had time to let him ramble after all. "Just keep talking."
"Well...Harry never wanted to involve other people." The man rubbed his grey moustache. "Even after our sixth year, after Dumbledore died, I think he thought taking on Voldemort was something he had to do himself. In the end, we just followed him. He didn't like it, but he needed us. He was grateful."
"Us," murmured Anne, leaning forward. "That would be..." She glanced at her notes, but the old man forestalled her.
"Ron and Hermione, of course. And me, Luna and Ginny."
"Luna Lovegood! Of course." Anne sat up. So strange to think that the famous Luna Lovegood had been friends with this ordinary man.
"And Ginny," the man repeated.
"Yes, of course." Anne's mind was whirling with new angles for her story. "Ginny Weasley - she married Harry Potter, didn't she?"
The man smiled. "Yes. They'd been going out for ages; Harry had tried to put her off, he thought it was dangerous for her to be associated with him - and I suppose it was. But Ginny never took that sort of thing lying down. She wasn't ostentatious about it, but she was always there in the background - watching Harry's back, in fact."
Something in his tone made Anne look up; his expression was wistful.
"She was very beautiful, wasn't she? I've seen photographs."
"Oh, yes." The man was still smiling, but the look in his eyes was a hundred years away. "She was the prettiest girl in the school, although somehow that wasn't the first thing you noticed about her. What you saw first were these deep brown eyes, and she had this really determined jaw, and - she looked quite intimidating, actually. She had a reputation for hexing boys who - well, she used to attract quite a bit of attention, you see. All the boys tried it on with her."
"Did you?" Anne prompted and he laughed.
"No. Not then, anyway. I did take her to the Yule Ball, though. I had quite a crush on her in those days, although we were both so young."
You still do, thought Anne, and her heart ached suddenly for this gentle old man, still harbouring wistful thoughts of his schoolboy crush. "Do you ever see her these days?" She hadn't looked up Ginny Weasley in the WWN lexicon, a lapse that she now regretted.
He grinned. "Oh, yes. Very often."
Anne wondered at the mischief that lit up his eyes. He looked happy enough. Perhaps she'd misjudged his emotions. "So," she said watching him, "she married Harry Potter." What happened to GW after HP's disappearance? she wrote on her parchment. "And her brother Ron married Hermione Granger. Luna Lovegood went to - Oxford, was it? What did you do after Voldemort was destroyed?"
The old man looked sober, although the naughty twinkle still sparkled in those blue eyes. "I travelled," he said, "mainly to the Amazon region, looking for new plants, or old ones that were believed to be extinct. Then my old Herbology teacher, Professor Sprout, asked me to assist her at Hogwarts. She was getting on and wanted to retire in a few years. It was good training for the post of professor, and she'd always been kind to me, so I took the job. I got married around then, too." He looked closely at her and shook his head. "No, you're too young. I didn't teach you."
Anne found herself wishing that he had taught her; perhaps then she would have had some idea of the names of the plants that filled the room. "You'd left long before I arrived," she said. "We had Professor Stubbs."
"Yes." He nodded. "He was always a good pupil. Did you like him as a teacher?"
Anne laughed self-consciously. "I'm afraid I didn't really pay attention at school, Mr Longbottom. I hated getting my hands dirty, so Herbology really wasn't my thing."
He smiled at her kindly. "No, it isn't everyone's thing," he agreed. "My wife-"
"You're married?" It slipped out despite her notes, despite the clock with its forest of hands. She'd been thinking of her subject as a lonely old man who had been overlooked by life. Yet again, she found herself mentally rearranging the focus of the story.
"Yes." He smiled again. "My wife has never been interested in plants, except for their healing properties, although she indulges my wittering about them. Still, as my grandmother used to say, the world would be a terribly boring place if we all liked the same things, don't you think? Of course," he added, "she still thought anyone who disagreed with her was an idiot, but it was a nice sentiment."
Anne smiled back at him, and remembered her article. She checked her notes. "So you left Hogwarts in... 2032? Is that when you set up your nurseries?"
"Yes." He nodded. "My grandmother had left me some money. I equivocated for a long time - she thought Herbology was a waste of time, you see, even though she was proud of me being a professor, and I felt it might be disrespectful to her memory. I didn't want to use the money in a way she would have disapproved of. But my wife - she's a Healer - finally convinced me that my grandmother would have liked the idea of a nursery for St Mungo's. We couldn't cure my parents, but our plants have been used in several groundbreaking treatments over the past few decades." His eyes shone with tears despite his smile. "I think my grandmother would have been proud of that. I think she would have appreciated it."
Anne stared at him, her mind whirling. She'd come up to Hogsmeade for a routine interview with an old schoolfriend of Harry Potter's, and had expected to be home and working on her story half an hour later. She had not expected to find a man with a hundred years of history behind him in addition to the snippets she'd learned in History of Magic. "How does it feel," she asked abruptly, "to have your life defined by something that happened when you were eighteen?"
The man laughed. "But it isn't!" he exclaimed. Catching sight of her expression, he added, "Well, perhaps by you lot. Perhaps by history. But what does that matter, when I've lived for a hundred mostly happy years since then? We've got three children, seven grandchildren and our first great-grandchild on the way. Look." He pulled a large photograph from between two pot plants. "This was taken a few years ago, on our seventy-fifth wedding anniversary."
Anne had barely taken in the group of people in the photo, had barely registered that the well-preserved woman beside him must be his wife, when she heard the front door open; looking up, she watched a large clock-hand move to join its partner under 'Home'.
"That'll be the wife," said the old man, and sure enough, a birdlike woman, her long white hair coroneted around her head with an elegance that spoke of decades of practice, appeared in the doorway. She smiled enquiringly at Anne, then turned a genuine smile on her husband.
Loneliness overwhelmed Anne as she watched the old couple move towards one another. They had been married for nearly eighty years, according to what she'd just been told. It was clear that they were still in love, had been in love all that time. How must it feel, she wondered, to be with one person for so long? To love someone for all that time?
But Mr Longbottom was turning towards her after seizing his wife's hand. "This young lady," he said, giving Anne a gratified thrill, "has been interviewing me about everything that happened a hundred years ago."
The old lady's smile sharpened; Anne could almost hear daggers being sharpened, too.
"It's been a pleasure chatting to your husband, Mrs Longbottom," she said hurriedly. "He's got some wonderful stories to tell."
"Speaking of stories, you'll be wanting to talk to the wife, too." The old man smiled proudly at them both. "Ginny, my love, this is Anne Montague. Anne, my wife, Ginny."
Her smile frozen in place, Anne nodded slowly. In the back of her mind, the headlines rose and fell, the columns of newsprint flipping once more. "I'd love to talk to you," she managed eventually, "if you'll let me."
"That depends on what you want to ask." The woman's voice was quavery with age, but she pulled off her cloak with the vigour of someone fifty years her junior.
"I'm doing a profile on Mr Longbottom for the Daily Prophet, what with the anniversary celebrations coming up," Anne said. "My colleague is interviewing Hermione Granger. I don't think they knew - I mean, is it well-known..." She took a deep breath. "I don't think my paper realises that you're still alive. And they certainly don't know about your marriage."
"Yes, well." Again, that razor-sharp smile. "We kept it very private, and we've always been careful to live quietly. I've seen one life ruined by fame first-hand; I didn't intend to see it again."
"She changed her name, you know," the old man put in. "I only introduced her as Ginny because, well, you seemed to like it when I talked about her earlier, and I could tell you didn't know. I'm sorry for misleading you like that." He looked anxious, and Anne mustered a wry grin.
"Well," she said honestly, "I am very glad you got the girl, even if I do feel idiotic."
"I told you you wanted to check your facts," the man said. He seemed energised by his wife's appearance. "Why don't I make us another pot of tea and some biscuits, and you can have a chat to Ginny."
"On one condition," the old lady said as her husband gathered the teaset and shuffled from the room. "You can interview me, but I don't promise to give any answers, and I want a separate profile or whatever you call it, with no reference to the fact that we're married."
"But-" Romantic headlines filled Anne's mind. "But it's such a lovely story. Such a good story, the two of you in love after all these years."
"Yes, and can you imagine the reporters swarming around if you printed it?" she demanded. "No, thank you. If you print anything implying that we're together, I'll hex you into the next century."
Anne sighed. Well. She still had a good story on Mr Longbottom, and Ginny Weasley - or whatever her name was now - appeared to have enough personality to fill several articles. All wasn't lost. And perhaps she could slip in a few hints for enterprising readers to follow up.
"Besides," said the old lady, "I think you'll find that if you actually try to get anything along those lines printed, it will be quietly edited out." She smiled again, revealing two rows of well-preserved teeth. "You don't think we've kept this quiet through luck, do you? Who owns the Prophet Group?"
"Black Family Holdings," replied Anne promptly.
"Yes, and who owns that?"
"I - don't know."
"Let's just say the owner is a very old friend, a very dear friend, of Neville's and mine." The old lady seated herself carefully in an upright chair, hands demurely in her lap. "I'm appealing to your better nature," she said. "We're not doing any harm; we just want to be left in peace. Do you really want to ruin that for us?"
Anne thought of the old man, quietly tending his houseplants, perhaps wandering through the greenhouses a few times a day with a watering can, or whatever herbologists did. The odd bit of repotting, perhaps? No, she did not want to ruin the tranquil nature of his life. She nodded in defeat. "No, I don't. I'd hate to do that."
The woman nodded in satisfaction. "Then we can begin."
Mr Longbottom trudged into the room carrying a tray which he laid down on the table by the window. Anne looked over to her QuickNotes quill, which was hovering over the tablet waiting for someone to speak, and then down at her notes, which contained even less information about Ginny Weasley than they had about Neville Longbottom. "So..." she said, and fumbled for her first question.
♥ you all.
Rating: PG
Characters/pairings: Neville Longbottom and a reporter. Allusions to canon pairings; Neville is paired with a woman who shall remain nameless for the sake of the plot.
Summary: A hundred years after Voldemort's defeat, a reporter is sent to interview Neville Longbottom.
Word count: 4,000
Notes: This is dedicated to everyone on my friends list. The last couple of years have been brilliant; thanks to all of you for contributing to that. ♥ Here's to JKR and the last book! Thank you to such_heights for beta-reading. Comments from anyone not on my flist are disabled until I've read DH; I apologise to anyone affected by this.
"I've had a good life." The old man sipped his tea while Anne set up her equipment: one QuickNotes 6.5 to record the interview verbatim, and one ordinary quill which she poised above a piece of parchment. "It hasn't been awfully exciting for the past hundred years or so, but that's the way I wanted it after all the adventures we had when we were young."
Anne willed him to speak faster; she was hoping to catch up with a friend who lived locally before hurrying home to get Florence's dinner started. Honestly, these old men did go on! She caught sight of a clock out of the corner of her eye, but when she looked around she discovered that it had far too many hands and no numbers. How odd! She'd heard of those (in connection with Ron and Ginny Weasley, now she came to think of it) but she'd never actually seen one, and this old man certainly didn't look the type to have a family as large as the number of clock-hands suggested. She made a note under 'questions' with the quill in her hand.
"So, a hundred years ago next week." She smiled encouragingly and the old man nodded. Sitting amid the brown armchair with his wild, silvery birch hair and wiry brown arms that resembled the gnarled roots of an old oak, he seemed poised to become one with the greenery that filled the room.
"You're right, of course," he said after a pause. "Well, I can't tell you too much about that time. At least, not if you want to know what it was like to be Harry Potter." His expression flattened suddenly.
"There are plenty of books and newspaper articles about Harry Potter," Anne said. Checking that her QuickNotes tablet was working properly, she added: "There's nothing written about how it felt to be caught up in the action simply because you knew him. There are no books about you, or the Weasleys, or..." She floundered. The other pair who'd been directly involved in Voldemort's defeat, Hermione Granger and Luna Lovegood, had become famous in their own right after Voldemort had been destroyed. "I want to hear about you," she finished.
The man smiled, the crow's feet around his eyes furrowing.
"Harry was one of my best friends at school," he said. "Oh, I don't mean I was as close to him as Ron and Hermione. I think he forgot I was there half the time, to tell you the truth. But we had things in common, more than most people realised, and I always felt close to him. Besides, I was -" He laughed deprecatingly. "I wasn't exactly Mr Popular, and some of the kids used to pick on me. You know what children are like. Any sign of weakness... Anyway, Harry was never like that. He - my housemates always defended me if they witnessed any of the teasing. Of course, a lot of it went unnoticed, but, well. That's life, isn't it? Or school, at any rate."
"You remained friends with Harry after Voldemort's defeat, didn't you?"
"Oh, yes. You don't go through those kinds of experiences without forming a bond. Excuse me just a second." The man waved his wand towards a lush-leaved climbing vine - some kind of ivy, Anne suspected - and immediately a localised sprinkler system started up among the cluster of plants in corner of the living room. The old man looked back; Anne did not bother to hide her impatience. Her colleague had been assigned to the venerable Hermione Granger; she got Neville Longbottom, about whom nobody seemed to know a thing beyond the basic facts. The article on the Worldwide Wizarding Network hadn't even listed the names of his wife or children. He'd better have a good story for her.
"Sorry," the old man said, although he did not sound contrite. "They're temperamental old ladies, that lot." Despite his gesture towards the plants in the corner, it took Anne a second to understand his meaning. She smiled tightly.
"Really."
"Oh, yes. Leave 'em for longer than a couple of hours, and their sap production slows dramatically. They become almost useless. Anyway, sorry. What were you asking?"
Anne glanced through her notes. "How did you feel when Harry Potter disappeared?"
The old man smiled. "I thought, good luck to him."
"Really?" This time it was truly a question, and the man nodded.
"Oh, yes. He'd had such a hard time, you know. Nobody would ever leave him alone, and that made it worse. All he wanted was a quiet life, and it never happened. Either the Ministry was asking him to help chase down Death Eaters, or there were forged photos of him all over the press. He just got tired."
"Do you have any idea where he went?"
"I've got plenty." He pulled his mug up to his jaw and eyed her over it. "But I wouldn't tell you lot."
"Do you think he's still alive?" asked Anne. Every few years, the rumours resurfaced: Harry Potter was a climbing instructor in the Welsh mountains; he was crofting on Stornoway; he was working in a Muggle bar in Soho. Sometimes the sightings were farther afield. Privately, Anne suspected he had died years ago, perhaps even soon after his disappearance, although the Prophet encouraged the occasional 'Where is Harry Potter?' story, particularly when sales were low.
"I have an idea," said the man. "But again, I wouldn't tell you lot. I'm sorry." This time, he really did look regretful, and she almost smiled. Time to try another tack.
"Do you think the break-up of Potter's marriage contributed to his decision to disappear?"
The old man shifted slightly, but his expression was bland. "I thought you wanted to talk about me, not Harry."
Anne gave up, at least temporarily. "Can you tell me how you felt during your fifth year, when the Ministry of Magic and the media were trying to discredit Harry Potter and Dumbledore the Wise?"
"It felt very frustrating," said the old man at once. "Voldemort was back, and yet the wizarding establishment was doing nothing."
"You didn't doubt Harry Potter's story, then, about the death of," Anne checked her notes, "Cedric Diggory?"
"Oh, no." The old man reclaimed his mug. "My grandmother and I - you, um, know what happened to my parents?" He paused for her nod. "Then you'll understand that we were very aware of the possibility of Voldemort returning. My grandparents never believed he was gone - in fact, I think my grandmother half-believed he was behind the attack on my..." He drifted into silence.
"So, you believed Harry," Anne prompted.
"Oh, yes," said the old man. "And if I hadn't done earlier, I would have the moment I discovered that my parents' attackers had escaped from jail."
"From Azkaban?"
"Yes."
"How did you feel when you learned about their escape?"
"Well, it made me angry." The old man poured another cup of tea, his arm shaking with what might have been old age. He made to top up her mug before realising that she hadn't yet touched it. "But also, I realised I was going to have to become a better fighter. My parents were Aurors, and in those days, they didn't let just anyone in. They only took the best of the best. If they could - could lose, despite all their talent and training, then I knew I had to get better. So I practised - we all practised."
"You weren't afraid?" asked Anne.
The man stared into his tea, warming his fingers around the mug. "Of course I was afraid," he said eventually. "We all were. After Cedric, being at school didn't mean you were safe. Fear was a state of mind, especially during that last year, after Dumbledore died. So there was no point talking about it."
"I think modern readers might be interested in knowing," put in Anne and the man smiled.
"Well, I'll leave it to you to tell them. Er-" He looked around awkwardly, as if checking his plants. Anne couldn't help wondering exactly how senile he was. "Was there anything else you wanted to know?"
Anne consulted her notes. "How did it feel when you killed Bellatrix Lestrange?"
His head whipped around. "I didn't."
"Sorry, what?"
"I didn't kill her," he said flatly.
"But-" Anne rifled through her notes. Neville Longbottom had killed Bellatrix Lestrange, the woman who had tortured his parents into insanity; she was sure she'd seen that mentioned hundreds of times, in articles and on the WWN. "Then who did?"
"You want to check your sources, love," said the old man. "That's one thing you can tell people - we never killed unless we absolutely had to, even when our lives were in danger. That was what the other side did. Bellatrix Lestrange died in prison. I put her there, if you want to write that in your story."
"So she survived Voldemort?" asked Anne. She wrote, "NL didn't kill BL. Chase up bloody lexicon writers on WWN!"
"Yes." The man stood up and tottered over to a plant on the table by the window. Anne wished she'd paid more attention in Herbology; the name of that plant - or any of them - would be a good detail, but she didn't want to interrupt him and ask about it. Still, she could always invent something later.
"Bellatrix Lestrange died in prison nearly seventeen years ago," said the old man. "That means she spent about ninety-nine years of her life in jail." Anne noticed that he didn't pause to calculate, despite the qualifier. His voice hardened, the Yorkshire accent suddenly outweighing the tinge of Highland Scots. "Still not as long as the combined sentence she and her cronies condemned my parents to, so I think that was fair enough."
Ninety-nine years in jail! "Did that - make you feel better?" she asked faintly.
The man turned faded blue eyes on her. "No, not really."
She felt young and silly for asking the question, and not at all like a hard-nosed reporter and responsible single mother with a daughter awaiting her first Hogwarts letter this summer. That was what being a journalist was about, she reminded herself: asking the questions that others didn't, whether from reticence or a sense of propriety or because they were just too obvious.
The man gazed out of the window; perhaps he was checking those bushes out there (laurels, even Anne knew that) for some kind of infestation, but she suspected not.
"I used to visit her," he said quietly.
"Your mother?" she asked in confusion. His grandmother, who'd brought him up? What had happened to her in the end? She noted the question on her parchment.
He shook his head. "I visited my mother regularly, of course - both my parents. But I meant her. Bellatrix Lestrange."
"You - why?"
He shrugged. "Nobody else was going to. All her friends and family were either dead or in prison with her. I - I felt sorry for her, to tell you the truth."
She fumbled for her next question. "Did you - did you talk to her?"
"Not really." His voice was distant again. "She was mad, you see. I think she was pretty much driven mad by Voldemort's first disappearance, although she hid it well for a long while. By the time the Dementors had finished with her, her sanity was shredded. I don't think she had a clue what was going on during her second bout of prison, even without the Dementors. She just used to scream and scream. I could never decide-" he coughed - "whether that was justice or not."
Anne stared at the old man again, trying to fathom what had driven him to keep company with a madwoman who had tortured his own parents into insanity. Compassion? Revenge? She shook her head to clear it, but it was no good; she still didn't understand.
"I stopped the day we brought my parents home," he said softly. "It just didn't seem right to go from visiting her to making their tea and dressing them and putting them to bed." He looked up at her with a wan smile. "I'm sorry, I don't think I'm being an awful lot of help."
"Oh, no, please," Anne said, glancing involuntarily at the clock that wasn't a clock. Perhaps she had time to let him ramble after all. "Just keep talking."
"Well...Harry never wanted to involve other people." The man rubbed his grey moustache. "Even after our sixth year, after Dumbledore died, I think he thought taking on Voldemort was something he had to do himself. In the end, we just followed him. He didn't like it, but he needed us. He was grateful."
"Us," murmured Anne, leaning forward. "That would be..." She glanced at her notes, but the old man forestalled her.
"Ron and Hermione, of course. And me, Luna and Ginny."
"Luna Lovegood! Of course." Anne sat up. So strange to think that the famous Luna Lovegood had been friends with this ordinary man.
"And Ginny," the man repeated.
"Yes, of course." Anne's mind was whirling with new angles for her story. "Ginny Weasley - she married Harry Potter, didn't she?"
The man smiled. "Yes. They'd been going out for ages; Harry had tried to put her off, he thought it was dangerous for her to be associated with him - and I suppose it was. But Ginny never took that sort of thing lying down. She wasn't ostentatious about it, but she was always there in the background - watching Harry's back, in fact."
Something in his tone made Anne look up; his expression was wistful.
"She was very beautiful, wasn't she? I've seen photographs."
"Oh, yes." The man was still smiling, but the look in his eyes was a hundred years away. "She was the prettiest girl in the school, although somehow that wasn't the first thing you noticed about her. What you saw first were these deep brown eyes, and she had this really determined jaw, and - she looked quite intimidating, actually. She had a reputation for hexing boys who - well, she used to attract quite a bit of attention, you see. All the boys tried it on with her."
"Did you?" Anne prompted and he laughed.
"No. Not then, anyway. I did take her to the Yule Ball, though. I had quite a crush on her in those days, although we were both so young."
You still do, thought Anne, and her heart ached suddenly for this gentle old man, still harbouring wistful thoughts of his schoolboy crush. "Do you ever see her these days?" She hadn't looked up Ginny Weasley in the WWN lexicon, a lapse that she now regretted.
He grinned. "Oh, yes. Very often."
Anne wondered at the mischief that lit up his eyes. He looked happy enough. Perhaps she'd misjudged his emotions. "So," she said watching him, "she married Harry Potter." What happened to GW after HP's disappearance? she wrote on her parchment. "And her brother Ron married Hermione Granger. Luna Lovegood went to - Oxford, was it? What did you do after Voldemort was destroyed?"
The old man looked sober, although the naughty twinkle still sparkled in those blue eyes. "I travelled," he said, "mainly to the Amazon region, looking for new plants, or old ones that were believed to be extinct. Then my old Herbology teacher, Professor Sprout, asked me to assist her at Hogwarts. She was getting on and wanted to retire in a few years. It was good training for the post of professor, and she'd always been kind to me, so I took the job. I got married around then, too." He looked closely at her and shook his head. "No, you're too young. I didn't teach you."
Anne found herself wishing that he had taught her; perhaps then she would have had some idea of the names of the plants that filled the room. "You'd left long before I arrived," she said. "We had Professor Stubbs."
"Yes." He nodded. "He was always a good pupil. Did you like him as a teacher?"
Anne laughed self-consciously. "I'm afraid I didn't really pay attention at school, Mr Longbottom. I hated getting my hands dirty, so Herbology really wasn't my thing."
He smiled at her kindly. "No, it isn't everyone's thing," he agreed. "My wife-"
"You're married?" It slipped out despite her notes, despite the clock with its forest of hands. She'd been thinking of her subject as a lonely old man who had been overlooked by life. Yet again, she found herself mentally rearranging the focus of the story.
"Yes." He smiled again. "My wife has never been interested in plants, except for their healing properties, although she indulges my wittering about them. Still, as my grandmother used to say, the world would be a terribly boring place if we all liked the same things, don't you think? Of course," he added, "she still thought anyone who disagreed with her was an idiot, but it was a nice sentiment."
Anne smiled back at him, and remembered her article. She checked her notes. "So you left Hogwarts in... 2032? Is that when you set up your nurseries?"
"Yes." He nodded. "My grandmother had left me some money. I equivocated for a long time - she thought Herbology was a waste of time, you see, even though she was proud of me being a professor, and I felt it might be disrespectful to her memory. I didn't want to use the money in a way she would have disapproved of. But my wife - she's a Healer - finally convinced me that my grandmother would have liked the idea of a nursery for St Mungo's. We couldn't cure my parents, but our plants have been used in several groundbreaking treatments over the past few decades." His eyes shone with tears despite his smile. "I think my grandmother would have been proud of that. I think she would have appreciated it."
Anne stared at him, her mind whirling. She'd come up to Hogsmeade for a routine interview with an old schoolfriend of Harry Potter's, and had expected to be home and working on her story half an hour later. She had not expected to find a man with a hundred years of history behind him in addition to the snippets she'd learned in History of Magic. "How does it feel," she asked abruptly, "to have your life defined by something that happened when you were eighteen?"
The man laughed. "But it isn't!" he exclaimed. Catching sight of her expression, he added, "Well, perhaps by you lot. Perhaps by history. But what does that matter, when I've lived for a hundred mostly happy years since then? We've got three children, seven grandchildren and our first great-grandchild on the way. Look." He pulled a large photograph from between two pot plants. "This was taken a few years ago, on our seventy-fifth wedding anniversary."
Anne had barely taken in the group of people in the photo, had barely registered that the well-preserved woman beside him must be his wife, when she heard the front door open; looking up, she watched a large clock-hand move to join its partner under 'Home'.
"That'll be the wife," said the old man, and sure enough, a birdlike woman, her long white hair coroneted around her head with an elegance that spoke of decades of practice, appeared in the doorway. She smiled enquiringly at Anne, then turned a genuine smile on her husband.
Loneliness overwhelmed Anne as she watched the old couple move towards one another. They had been married for nearly eighty years, according to what she'd just been told. It was clear that they were still in love, had been in love all that time. How must it feel, she wondered, to be with one person for so long? To love someone for all that time?
But Mr Longbottom was turning towards her after seizing his wife's hand. "This young lady," he said, giving Anne a gratified thrill, "has been interviewing me about everything that happened a hundred years ago."
The old lady's smile sharpened; Anne could almost hear daggers being sharpened, too.
"It's been a pleasure chatting to your husband, Mrs Longbottom," she said hurriedly. "He's got some wonderful stories to tell."
"Speaking of stories, you'll be wanting to talk to the wife, too." The old man smiled proudly at them both. "Ginny, my love, this is Anne Montague. Anne, my wife, Ginny."
Her smile frozen in place, Anne nodded slowly. In the back of her mind, the headlines rose and fell, the columns of newsprint flipping once more. "I'd love to talk to you," she managed eventually, "if you'll let me."
"That depends on what you want to ask." The woman's voice was quavery with age, but she pulled off her cloak with the vigour of someone fifty years her junior.
"I'm doing a profile on Mr Longbottom for the Daily Prophet, what with the anniversary celebrations coming up," Anne said. "My colleague is interviewing Hermione Granger. I don't think they knew - I mean, is it well-known..." She took a deep breath. "I don't think my paper realises that you're still alive. And they certainly don't know about your marriage."
"Yes, well." Again, that razor-sharp smile. "We kept it very private, and we've always been careful to live quietly. I've seen one life ruined by fame first-hand; I didn't intend to see it again."
"She changed her name, you know," the old man put in. "I only introduced her as Ginny because, well, you seemed to like it when I talked about her earlier, and I could tell you didn't know. I'm sorry for misleading you like that." He looked anxious, and Anne mustered a wry grin.
"Well," she said honestly, "I am very glad you got the girl, even if I do feel idiotic."
"I told you you wanted to check your facts," the man said. He seemed energised by his wife's appearance. "Why don't I make us another pot of tea and some biscuits, and you can have a chat to Ginny."
"On one condition," the old lady said as her husband gathered the teaset and shuffled from the room. "You can interview me, but I don't promise to give any answers, and I want a separate profile or whatever you call it, with no reference to the fact that we're married."
"But-" Romantic headlines filled Anne's mind. "But it's such a lovely story. Such a good story, the two of you in love after all these years."
"Yes, and can you imagine the reporters swarming around if you printed it?" she demanded. "No, thank you. If you print anything implying that we're together, I'll hex you into the next century."
Anne sighed. Well. She still had a good story on Mr Longbottom, and Ginny Weasley - or whatever her name was now - appeared to have enough personality to fill several articles. All wasn't lost. And perhaps she could slip in a few hints for enterprising readers to follow up.
"Besides," said the old lady, "I think you'll find that if you actually try to get anything along those lines printed, it will be quietly edited out." She smiled again, revealing two rows of well-preserved teeth. "You don't think we've kept this quiet through luck, do you? Who owns the Prophet Group?"
"Black Family Holdings," replied Anne promptly.
"Yes, and who owns that?"
"I - don't know."
"Let's just say the owner is a very old friend, a very dear friend, of Neville's and mine." The old lady seated herself carefully in an upright chair, hands demurely in her lap. "I'm appealing to your better nature," she said. "We're not doing any harm; we just want to be left in peace. Do you really want to ruin that for us?"
Anne thought of the old man, quietly tending his houseplants, perhaps wandering through the greenhouses a few times a day with a watering can, or whatever herbologists did. The odd bit of repotting, perhaps? No, she did not want to ruin the tranquil nature of his life. She nodded in defeat. "No, I don't. I'd hate to do that."
The woman nodded in satisfaction. "Then we can begin."
Mr Longbottom trudged into the room carrying a tray which he laid down on the table by the window. Anne looked over to her QuickNotes quill, which was hovering over the tablet waiting for someone to speak, and then down at her notes, which contained even less information about Ginny Weasley than they had about Neville Longbottom. "So..." she said, and fumbled for her first question.
♥ you all.