The return of fic! Secondhand Destiny, Part 1 of 2
I actually write?!? Holy crap, who knew?
Following is part 1 of 2 of a Neville fic I started some time ago. Bonus points if you can guess the song that inspired it, but I'll put that at the bottom of the next part. I have to split it in two because of size, and also because I can't write a short one-shot to save my life.
Thanks to darling kaerra, who had a look at this fic when I was pouting at it and trying to write even when I didn't feel it. If it's bad, don't blame her-- she can only do so much with what she's given. *g* Your opinions helped me greatly, dear.
Title: Secondhand Destiny
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: Completed piece is 6,500ish
Summary: Neville has loved Ginny Weasley for as long as he can remember, but in his seventh year, his view of her is not the only thing-- or the most important thing-- that will change. Hints of D/G.
He had loved Ginny Weasley for as long as he had known her.
It didn’t matter much to either of them, he supposed, in the way that some things simply had no impact. He loved her, they both knew it, and they went on with their lives.
But all things have to change at some time, and in his seventh year, Neville Longbottom had found his threshold for change. He felt as though he’d walked out of a cage, freed from something unknown, unseen for the first time.
He did not know it had started months before, when two people he both feared and loved, trusted and failed to understand, had made decisions for him. Or, more accurately, had stopped making decisions for him.
“You must stop now, Harriet.” The old wizard’s voice had been gentle but insistent. “We have need of his abililties.”
“He’s helped you already,” his gran had snapped, her grandson blissfully unaware of her actions, past or present.
“We have need of him in his full capacity,” Albus Dumbledore had said. “You have sacrificed much, we know, but it is unfair of you in any case-”
“When you raise children, Albus Dumbledore, you may see fit to tell me what is fair, and when you see your child pass you by the wayside and head toward his own destruction, you may certainly tell me what is unfair.” Her voice was shaking, righteous indignation communicating itself in the stiff shake and bob of the flamingo feather that topped her current hat.
But in the end, she had capitulated, and for the first time in his life, Neville Longbottom had been whole.
His grandmother had stopped giving him the memory potion she’d concocted years before.
~~~
His sleep was interrupted by something that was not a dream.
Neville sat up in his bed with a gasp, visions of a dark-haired woman whose face he knew too well burned into the back of his eyes. A haggard face, a hard face, the face of a woman whose beauty and youth has been torn away by ambition and later madness, he understood her all too well, and how did he understand her? How could he know?
But he knew.
He scrubbed his hands over his face, fingers pressing to his eyes to chase away Bellatrix with the bright dots of pressure.
It was queer, he thought. He never remembered his dreams, neither his dreams nor his nightmares, so why should this one be any different?
The room was quiet, his roommates sleeping so deeply that even the snores had been vanquished.
His hatred for the woman-the monster-in his dream had not lessened since the last time he had seen her. It had grown, and with it, his own self-loathing had grown. He had been completely unable to strike out against her. Years of wishing to come face-to-face with the person who had robbed him of his parents had come to fruition, and he had done nothing but scream at her.
There had been no fear in her eyes as he had once hoped there might be.
He would not be able to go back to sleep, that much he knew. It was as though she were crawling around in his head, and the thought made him more than a bit restless. A hot shower, he thought, and then the rest of his day could begin.
~~~
It had been a good year, Neville thought, watching his friends at the Gryffindor table. He’d hardly forgotten a single class or assignment all year, and he’d only misplaced Trevor once. Yes, a good year. A quiet one, which was more than a bit unusal, but a good one. Although he feared for what might come, he didn’t particularly fear for himself.
No, he thought, looking down the table at Ginny, it wasn’t as though he had a whole lot to fear for his own life. He would die a happy wizard, a more successful wizard than anyone would have thought of him otherwise, if he died in service in a final battle. A battle which looked as though it would never come, if one were to judge such things by the students inside Hogwarts.
She was beautiful, Neville thought, smiling at her before going back to his breakfast. She’d always been beautiful. She was quieter this year, however, more tame, something Ron had expressed his utmost appreciation for countless times, but it made Neville a bit sad. He’d liked how strong she was. He’d envied it, but he had admired it as well. This year, though, she was reserved, her smiles somewhat mysterious, dampened.
Why shouldn’t she be sad, Neville wondered. The realization was upon all of them that this would be the last year for many things. Sadness was natural, not only for her, but for everyone.
But as he glanced at Harry, he couldn’t help but wonder if her sadness was for him.
Even if it were, however, he couldn’t bring himself to be jealous. Harry’s lot was an unpleasant one.
“Y’got the salt over there, Nev?” Harry asked, wrinkling his nose at his plate. “I think the elves have been getting into the butterbeer again.”
“Harry,” Hermione said censoriously, but she hadn’t eaten a lot of her own food, either.
Neville smothered a grin and passed the salt to Harry, his knuckles crashing into the other boy’s for a moment-
One, of course, was you. The other was Neville Longbottom.
Dumbledore’s voice was crystal clear, and Neville sat back, brow furrowed. Harry caught the salt as neatly as though it were a Snitch, never noticing Neville’s expression.
“D’you hear that?” Neville asked.
“If it sounds like snakes, ignore it,” Harry said with a sigh. “Trust me on that.”
“Harry!” This time the exclamation came simultaneously from Ron and Hermione. Harry ran a hand through his hair and shrugged apologetically, but he was grinning. If he couldn’t laugh about it, he’d go stark raving mad.
“No,” Neville said, looking around for the headmaster, who was nowhere to be seen. “Strange.”
“Yes, you are,” Dean said from the other side. “Been trying to tell you for years now.”
“He’s right,” Seamus joined in. “Years.”
Neville rolled his eyes at his friends, chuckling a bit. Just one of the quirks of the castle, he thought.
Just a quirk of the castle.
~~~
Thursday nights were his favorite night of the week.
“If I didn’t need to know these things for Potions and for Mediwitch exams, I’d quit this bloody class,” Ginny said, glaring at her Herbology book. “Honestly, Neville, I’m thick when it comes to these things. I can’t grow a plant to save my life. Mum won’t even let me degnome the garden anymore because she thinks things die when I look at them.”
“Bollocks,” Neville said, pointing at a passage. “Everyone can grow things. You probably need a bit of a better attitude for it, though.”
“Bollocks,” she threw back at him, wrinkling her nose, but she started reading the passage again.
He watched her eyes trace the page, her Quidditch-roughened fingertips underlining the words, and he wanted. Their relationship, their friendship had been the same for so long, though, that he had no way to change it, no ideas on how. But it seemed as though this year, he remembered more about her, more of when they met, more of how she’d been her first year, more of everything.
It nagged at him.
He thought love might very well be a pain in the arse.
No matter how much time he spent deliberating on it, though, it really was the same thing every week. Thursday night, the only night she didn’t practice Quidditch, was spent studying for the one class she’d never mastered, the one class in which Hermione Granger wasn’t the top in marks.
And every week, once she’d exhausted herself trying to argue her way out of understanding it, she thanked her friend with a kiss on the cheek.
She slogged her way through the homework, made minimal progress, and all the while Neville was trying to reason with himself that tonight was not the night, things would not change.
He would not kiss her in any way that wasn’t appropriate to the norms they had set between them.
When she leaned forward-no tiptoes for the tall Miss Weasley-and moved to peck him on the cheek, he put a hand to the side of her face, felt the skin there slightly chapped by the sharp wind of the pitch, and brushed his lips over hers.
“Don’t be such a prude, Weasley, certainly I know better than that.”
“It’s a bad habit.”
“Seems you’ve picked up plenty of those around me.”
Neville jerked back, his brow furrowed. “Sorry,” he said, perplexed at what he’d just heard-what he’d just seen but couldn’t compute. “I’m sorry, Gin, it just seemed-”
She looked at him fondly, a small smile on her lips even as she shook her head. “It’s all right, Neville. It was only a kiss, right?” She placed a hand to his elbow. “Just between friends,” she said, firmly setting their places.
He nodded wordlessly and tried not to think about what had just happened.
~~~
Later, if he had to say when he knew for certain things were shifting, that he and his classmates were moving toward something bigger than just school, he would say it was that night.
As it was, he had so much on his mind that he didn’t notice the formation of things, the tension, the weird sort of separation that comes only from the knowledge that things are going to change, and not in a way anyone would like.
He climbed into his bed feeling more confused than miserable. He’d kissed Ginny, something he hadn’t planned on doing and yet had wanted to do for ages, but when he’d done so…
“You can ride back without hexing me, can’t you?”
“I’d rather walk back, Malfoy.”
A hand on her arm, hauling her up and pulling her close.
If he closed his eyes, he could see something too clear to be just his imagination-and why in the hell would he be imagining Ginny, his Ginny, with Draco Malfoy?
She takes the fag from him, places it in her mouth, lips pursed prettily. She breathes in, chokes, shakes her head as she hands it back to him.
The grin he gives her is lazy but familiar, and she likes that he knows she’s the good one and he’s the bad one.
Neville pressed his palms to his eyes, wondering what was wrong with him. His memory had improved, and… what? His sanity had gone straight to shite?
His stomach roiled and he put his hands over his ears to no avail. He could still see with his eyes closed and hear with his ears covered.
She steps to him, the stars seeming only inches away from the Astronomy Tower as she places her fingertips to his chest, not looking scared at all.
“I’m sure,” she says, her eyes shining with something he will never understand.
His shine only with triumph as he undoes the catches on her robes.
Neville sat up finally, opening his eyes to fill the blackness that was trying to fill itself.
Ginny. And Draco Malfoy. It couldn’t be, he thought. Simply couldn’t.
He raised a hand and opened his curtain, ready to take a walk-if he had completed the action, he’d have walked up to the Astronomy Tower just to see if he’d been right-but he was stopped by Harry’s voice.
They’d all become so used to it, and in the silenced havens of their beds, they never heard him talking to the mirror Sirius had given him, empty but for the hopes and thoughts Harry poured into it night after night.
“Sometimes I wish it had been him,” Harry said, turning the mirror over in his hands.
Neville pulled his feet back up into the bed, loath to interrupt. He moved to twitch the curtain shut, but-
“I wish it had been Neville he’d marked and not me,” Harry said, his voice bitter. “Some friend I am, right? I’m not pleased with my destiny so I hand it to someone else. But it could have been him, you know. The prophecy said so.”
Neville shrunk back in his bed and closed the curtains, not wanting to hear anymore. The prophecy, the ball that had caused them all so much trouble.
His toes curled in pained cramps as he thought of Bellatrix and the Cruciatus Curse she’d leveled at him.
That was one way to get out of his head the picture of Ginny in an enemy’s arms, he thought, trembling before rolling over to look the burgundy drapery, finding it far preferable to the images his mind was conjuring.
He kept himself awake trying to decipher Harry’s words until he was too exhausted to see anymore.
~~~
His sleep was spotty at best, coming in snatches interspersed between dreams-or were they visions?-of Ginny and Draco, of she who once was Black, of too many things to think of. Some snips of his parents he didn’t remember ever seeing before, and Ginny, Ginny, Ginny.
He hardly felt like dragging himself from his bed, much less going down to breakfast, but he couldn’t sleep in simply because he’d had nightmares all night. It was nothing, just exhaustion from school and worry, he insisted to himself.
At the very worst, it was that he’d finally cracked and lost what precious few mental strongholds he had left.
“Pardon me sayin’ so,” Seamus said, nudging him at the breakfast table, “But you look like bloody hell, mate.”
Neville smiled thinly and drank a bit more of his tea, hoping it would energize him a bit. “We all can’t sleep like the dead and snore like banshees, Seamus. Only you.” As the other Gryffindors at the table laughed, Neville simply smiled into his tea, feeling a bit more normal. They’d only been nightmares, just bad images thrown at him in a few half-dozing moments of vulnerability.
“Ginny said she hasn’t been sleeping well,” Hermione added with a frown. “You ought to go see Madam Pomfrey, the both of you.”
Neville looked at her more sharply than he’d intended. “Ginny?” he asked. When she nodded, he looked up and down the table and saw no sign of the youngest Weasley. “Where is she?”
“She’s having a lie-in, the lazy bird,” Ron spoke up with his mouth full. “Mum would have a fit.”
Neville pushed away his tea, suddenly feeling sick to his stomach as he had the night before. It didn’t mean anything-
“Speak evil, and it appears,” Dean said with a grin, waving across the Great Hall, where Ginny was walking in with a smile on her face, looking nothing like she’d been sleeping poorly.
Neville watched her, the words and chatters of those around him lost, and as his attention focused behind her thirty or so paces, he felt his world tilt.
Draco Malfoy was walking in behind her, situating his robes with an insouciant smirk plastered over his face.
“I’m going to be sick,” he announced to no one in particular, getting up from his seat to walk out of the hall. Ginny turned to look at him, and as he passed Malfoy, he shrunk away to avoid touching the other wizard, more out of instinct than design.
Later, he would be glad he hadn’t.
~~~
“I’ll not tell him.” Poppy’s whisper carried harshly through the nearly empty infirmary, and Neville put his head in his hands. He oughtn’t have gone to the infirmary, but he’d had no other idea of where to go, where to flee, and once he’d shown up there, he’d grabbed her hand, meaning to ask for help-
“Let them be, Poppy. They know less this way, I think, than they were if they were… aware.”
“I can’t stand to see them like this, Albus. Their boy’s so young, and Alice-”
“Leave them,” he repeated, more sternly this time, and she nodded, thin-lipped.
“My parents,” Neville had whispered, recoiling from her. “You treated my parents?”
She had looked at him with fear in her eyes, but she had treated him, anyway, given him something to calm him down, and then had immediately called Dumbledore.
“I’m losing my mind, aren’t I?” Neville asked calmly, his voice bouncing over rows of empty beds, clean floors, pristine walls, to reach the ears of his headmaster. “
Just like my parents.” His mouth firmed and he raised his head to meet the old wizard’s eyes. “Would I be best off, too, if I’m not… aware?”
The words set Dumbledore in motion and he crossed the space in what seemed like impossibly few and impossibly long strides. “You are not mad,” he said, his voice gentle though his demeanor was fierce. “Nor do you really believe you are.” Neville bristled and Dumbledore put up a hand. “If you did, you would not have repeated those words back to me.”
“I don’t know what I believe.” He wanted to believe he was mad. He didn’t want those pictures of Bellatrix to be real, didn’t want those recollections of his parents.
He didn’t want to betray the Ginny he knew by believing the things he had seen.
“You have a gift,” Albus Dumbledore said, sitting on the edge of the Gryffindor’s bed.
As he spoke of empathy and Ligilimency, of seeing things that had happened in the past, or perhaps only in the mind of someone else, of years of being fed memory potions against his knowledge to dampen both his memories and the memories of others, Neville doubted very much that his headmaster had told him the truth.
It did not sound like a gift at all, but a curse.
~~~
He stayed in the infirmary as long as he could, then made his way to Dumbledore’s office, the questions he felt he should ask stuck on his tongue. He’d gotten as many answers as he’d needed, he supposed, and certainly more than he’d wanted.
“Your grandmother meant well,” Albus said, offering Neville a chocolate frog only to have it refused.
“I wish you’d let her keep doing it,” Neville said, surprising them both. “I didn’t want to see my parents well.” It sounded selfish, but he had no words to explain it. He didn’t want to even try.
But the headmaster seemed to understand, nodding and setting his ever-present candy aside. “Neville, you understand things are likely to come to a head very soon-”
“I’ll do whatever you want,” Neville said, thinking of Ginny, thinking of his grandmother who had bound him with lies for his entire life. What reason had he to hesitate, to protect himself? He’d not really needed to before, but now the decision didn’t even merit hesitation. “Whatever it is you want done, I’ll help.” I’ve no reason not to.
His need for revenge had sharpened, as well, become keener, more insistent as his chemical complacence faded. Bellatrix Lestrange would be there when things came to a head, as Dumbledore had put it, and Neville wanted to be there, as well. He knew what she’d done, and he felt before he saw her again, he’d know even more about how and why she’d done it. She had touched him with her magic and left him with pictures, voices, sounds.
Dumbledore frowned, his beard seeming to droop with the expression. “Mr. Longbottom, there are things you don’t know-”
One, of course, was you. The other was Neville Longbottom.
“I don’t want to know,” Neville said in a rush, feeling panicked. There was more there, and he felt he knew far more than he wanted to already. “Just… I’ll help, and that’s all. I don’t need to know why you want me to, and you don’t need to know why I want to.”
Albus inclined his head. He knew when he had gotten all he could, and for now, that moment had come.
Part Two in next journal entry!!!