faint indirections (neville/percy, snape/potter - sort of)
rating: pg-13
word count: c.11,500
warnings: dh spoilers; largely canon-compliant, some avoidance of epilogue and interview canon
note 1: written for the snape_after_dh prompt: Professor Longbottom converses with Severus Snape's portrait.
note 2: much gratitude to buckle_berry and secrethappiness for advice, suggestions and beta-ing, and especially to fitofpique for some truly invaluable mutual support.
note 3: posted in two bits. second bit linked below.
Faint Indirections
Outside Greenhouse Four, two figures in auror grey are trudging across the grass towards the castle, between them a large oblong bundle, slung awkwardly under arms. Neville had forgotten it was today. He turns abruptly back to his pots, the weird sensation of disapproving eyes boring into his back, and takes the head off a healthy shoot by mistake. Odd that Harry hasn’t come himself, but perhaps with the baby so close.
“I want to point out that this decision is my own and based on the weight of evidence, and in no way due to any pressure brought to bear by members of the Auror Office.”
The headmaster had looked over his spectacles at a room full of teachers three times his age, his thumbs pressed together - soberly, almost persuasively - above clasped fingers. Flitwick had coughed at that point and earned himself a stare. Neville, too, had some idea of what that pressure might have been, but kept his mouth shut. Benefit of the doubt - that’s always been his way, until he’s proved wrong, changed his mind, and then, unexpectedly, proved wrong again. Which means he was right in the first place, doesn’t it? Either way, he’ll be in no hurry to visit the headmaster’s office again soon. Not now, with its newest occupant.
Concentrate, Longbottom.
He snips another half centimetre. There is a new bud shoot just below where the branch forks, a little fold of palest blue-white below the sheath of green: dense, waxy and strong against the tip of Neville’s thumb. A good scion.
White winter chattering camellias. Camellias for luck, boy, Augusta Longbottom used to say. She grew them in the rose garden. They never brought Neville much luck, but then she didn’t have his patience with compost. Or the grafting knife.
He slides the cut edge carefully into a notch carved in the rose stock, holds it gently between one thumb and forefinger just at the join, and reaches with his other hand for a small vial of cambium potion. He’s always preferred the hands-on approach, smoothing the potion down the stem, feeling the stalk shiver and stretch.
“There. There’s a comfy new home for you.”
The bud seems to sigh into his palm, unfurling a little. He smiles, understanding. Odd to feel so confident - by December the greenhouse will be thick with oyster-white flowers, full of the high hum of brittle chatter.
~
Dear Neville,
We got to Costa Rica on Saturday and it definitely looks like the sort of place you might find a colony of crumple-horned snorkacks. Now that I think about it, it was really very silly of Father and me to think we might find one in Sweden, when their favourite food is dugbogs. I’ve found someone who’s going to take me into the forest in few weeks. He’s called Pablo Despiste, and I think he’s tracked quite a lot of snorkacks in his time; he told me about a very exciting expedition he went on last year where they found two families of snorkacks and some male clabberts. I’ve owled Father about it, and he says they’re very rare.
I hope you aren’t lonely. Are you going to move back into the castle? I don’t know if I’m coming back, so you can keep the yellow armchair. Good luck with the second years. I hope they don’t keep planting your dragonhide gloves this year.
Your friend,
Luna.
PS. I think I always liked being friends better.
~
It’s more than a week later when Headmaster Weasley visits Greenhouse Three, mid-morning.
“Professor Longbottom, that’s my tea.”
“Oh. I thought - I’m sorry, I thought - the fluxweed loves oolong. I assumed -” Neville gestures towards the tall swaying plant with the blue-figure china cup, then sets the cup down on the saucer. Of course not. He looks at Percy’s feet in their brown brogues. Impatient feet - he expects them to start tapping.
“Well? Perhaps a refill?”
Neville looks up to see the headmaster’s expression slide from superciliousness into something like annoyance. His mouth moves a little and he’s frowning, but it’s at the fluxweed and not at Neville.
“Repleo.”
“Yes. Thanks.”
They stand for a second or two. Percy sips his tea, then clears his throat.
“Anyway. I wanted to ask about the new Defence professor. Settling in, is he?”
“As well as can be expected,” Neville says cheerfully. “They’re always a bit rattled when they start, of course, but I think Benjamin stands a real chance.”
“And the circle?”
“No real problems yet. Everyone’s really quite positive, actually.”
“You’ve met?”
“Twice.”
“Good. Good.” Percy claps a hand on Neville’s shoulder, a movement that begins with enthusiasm and ends a little stiffly. He removes the hand and resumes his teacup. “I’m really hoping to see Professor Murtlegrip back next year. It’s becoming a little, well, that’s to say, those Prophet articles last summer about Professor Goldstein’s breakdown could have been really very damaging.”
“Not to worry, Headmaster.” Neville pats his shoulder in return, eliciting a look of the greatest surprise. “The curse is definitely gone. Everyone says so -”
“Apart from the Prophet. And the parents.”
“We just have to convince the Defence teachers of it. The circle of support should do the trick.”
That’s what’s really good about having a young headmaster, Neville’s always maintained. What you lack in twinkle, you definitely make up for in practicality and dynamic thinking, even if Professor Weasley is something of a micromanager. He hasn’t yet managed to get Professor Flitwick to agree. Binns, on the other hand, and somewhat surprisingly, is a huge fan and has begun to make an appearance at the new bi-weekly staff meetings, poring with infatuation over the many-bullet-pointed agendas.
The headmaster is looking a little bolstered.
“Well, very good, Professor Longbottom. Yes, I have every faith. Well.” He levitates his cup and saucer in front of him. “I think that’s probably all. I’ll let you - oh yes! except - we’ll be having a portrait dedication in a week or two. All staff are expected to attend.”
“Oh.” Presumably this three-line whip was not used for Dumbledore’s dedication.
“There will also be some delegates from the Auror Office, my brother-in-law among them, assuming the bootleggers and the baby allow. It should be a - jolly occasion.” Percy’s voice hardens and Neville’s thoughts turn to the possibility of a debilitating Devil’s Snare accident. Aside from Harry, who has turned out a bit of a private zealot on Snape’s behalf, he can’t imagine anyone will actually want to be there. Neville feels a little swell of fellow feeling for Percy who has to sit with him day after day. He really ought to make an effort.
“Professor Snape - he’s getting on okay in the office?” Neville fingers a fluxweed leaf, which shudders contentedly in his hand. “I mean, I hope he’s not being -”
“It’s not customary for former headmasters to insult the present incumbent, you know.” A bit starchy even for Percy. His teacup is bobbing ominously.
“Oh. Of course not. Sorry, I -”
Percy clears his throat, looking out of the greenhouse window. “Well. As I say. It’s not customary.”
For a moment or two there’s a silence between them that is either sympathetic or uncomfortable. Neville tries to swing it by projecting his most benevolent thoughts, not at all sure that they will be welcomed.
“Which reminds me, Professor - I’d be grateful if you could pop up there from time to time. I’ve been sent a couple of potted Wishknot shrubs by - well, er, by my mother as a matter of fact - and they’ve been rather disrupting my workspace. I’m sure a little well-judged pruning will work wonders. Tomorrow, perhaps?”
So soon?
“Certainly, Headmaster. Should I bring my, um -?” He gestures scissors with his fingers, feeling like a prize idiot, but Percy is already on his way out of the greenhouse, “Password’s damage limitation!”, forestalling any further discussion.
Neville sighs. There goes his cherished hope of avoiding the headmaster’s office for at least the next year or two. He is deep in memories laced with humiliation and the fearful stink of the Potions lab, when he feels the brush of a fluxweed frond against his knuckle, an offering of leafy comfort. He strokes it with the pad of his thumb.
“Easy for you to say. Some days I’d give anything to be a plant.”
~
The headmaster is away from his office, of course, when Neville enters the next day, secateurs held to his chest. He has been ordering himself to buck up since breakfast this morning, and yet it’s a relief not to be confronted by those gimlet black eyes on the opposite wall the instant he opens the door.
Longbottom, you feeble excuse -!
He lets out a breath, smiling at himself, and steps into the room. In fact the atmosphere hasn’t changed noticeably since he was here just before the summer holidays. McGonagall, visiting last year from her lively retirement in Auchtermuchty, had sighed over the changes Percy’s made, but Neville rather likes it. It’s full of light - a lovely fresh green colour, not all darkness and wood like Gryffindor Tower or musty stone like the dungeons. There is a world of parchment, labelled and divided into thick stacks, and a framed chart hung on the wall next to the desk, which today is showing the slow rise and fall of house points. All in all, the reliable competence of someone who has things well in hand.
Or it would be, but for the jungle of Wishknots determinedly making their way through the headmaster’s in-tray. Neville rolls up the sleeves of his gardening robes.
“Now, really! What on earth -” he begins, advancing on the miscreant plants.
He’s rounded the corner, and well in his stride, when he catches sight of it. Lank, black hair falling as far as black worsted shoulders, tense, as if he’s flinching from some monumental stupidity. Neville would recognise the back of that head anywhere. For a moment he’s puzzled - did they really paint him from behind? The portrait is set in the most incredible frame: gilt, spandrels, clusters of grape-strung vine, fluting, everything’s been thrown at it. If Neville had any heart in him at all right now, he might even have to smother a laugh.
It’s a full twenty seconds before he thinks to look away, remember his feet planted one in front of the other, his left hand clenched around the secateurs. Job to do, come on, Neville. It’s not like he’s looking at you. Coaxing. Doesn’t even know you’re here.
Even so, it’s barely a tiptoe that takes him to the desk, a ginger thumb and forefinger that reach to disentangle Percy’s governors’ reports from the Wishknot. Five minutes’ work to get the shrubs pruned back to manageability, to flatten out the pulverised parchment, and with his back to that wall, he’s beginning to relax.
“Now, then,” he whispers. “No more of that. I know he puts a lot of effort into those reports, but let’s get you a proper wish, shall we?” No blank parchment anywhere, he tears a tiny piece of blotting paper, and dips a quill. For a second he pauses, at a loss. Babies, Defence professors, well-behaved second years… Luna. He frowns. Camellias? Yes, why not. Neville scribbles the words, and prods the scrap gently, torn edge first, towards a curling shoot, watches as the plant grips at it greedily, rolls it tight to the stem, folding in corners until it’s all but absorbed.
When both shrubs are fed, and rustling and stretching in post-prandial somnolence, Neville tucks them back into a corner of the desk. He is rearranging the piles of parchment, when his eye catches on his name written in precise headmasterly letters on one of the rescued sheets. He forgets - what was he -? It would take a stronger man than he is not to read:
As in previous years, Professor Longbottom’s Herbology classes prove to be -
“Longbottom!”
An almighty nervous spasm sends the secateurs clattering to the floor. Oh god. Neville spins round, backside pressed to the desk, one hand clutching for safety, the other pressed to his chest. Oh god. Boggart.
“Professor,” he wheezes hopelessly, immediately back in first-year Potions. The portrait just stares at him, that same shrivelling black stare, the same shroud of worsted, buttons and greasy hair, the same terrifying beak of a nose. Detention, Neville quavers at himself, before suddenly realising how ridiculous this is. A mustering of character, that’s all it takes. With an effort he lowers his hand to his side and clears his throat. “You, um, gave me a bit of surprise.”
Snape looks at him as if he’s speaking Chinese.
“I? I gave you a bit of a surprise?” Neville’s stout heart flutters uncomfortably under Snape’s emphatics. Just a picture, after all. Just a picture. “What - exactly - are you doing in this office? Is this some wild, ill-conceived attempt at a break-in?”
Neville tries to smile, but it comes out a bit twitchy. There’s a sort of hysterical guffaw trapped in his chest.
“Perc- Headmaster Weasley hasn’t told you?”
The portrait scowls. “It would seem not.”
Suddenly Neville’s afraid to say it. He looks round at Professor Dumbledore snoozing over the fireplace. No help to be had there. “I, er, I work here now. I’m the new Herbology master.”
“No, you are not.” Snape says it so quickly and with such utter conviction, that Neville’s almost convinced. He glances at his empty hands.
“Um.”
“You are not. This is some sort of hallucination.”
Neville’s laugh finally comes out as a choke.
“I promise you - I really am. You’re not halluci-.”
“NOT ME. YOU.”
It’s almost impossible not to cower under that thunderclap of a voice. And how can Professor Dumbledore still be asleep? Neville bends down and picks up the secateurs, holds them out, to prove a point he doesn’t quite dare articulate again. Snape looks at him, mouth sliding into a curl of absolute contempt, then his eyes close, and Neville can just about make out his mutter:
“Not for this. Dear Merlin, it can’t all have been for this.”
Neville looks at the secateurs, then back up at the portrait, which is already turning its back again, hair swishing in a muted version of the old robe trick. He takes a deep steadying breath, and all the way back down the corkscrew staircase, he says to himself: You are the Herbology Master, but it’s not till he’s safely back in Greenhouse Four that he really believes it.
~
Neville’s standing closer this time. Close enough to see the brush-strokes, which are bolder, quicker, less finished than the other portraits. It was probably an unnerving one to paint - he imagines the last dabs to the chin, the eyes blinking to life. He’d’ve been out of the studio in a flash. All the same, barring the ridiculously flamboyant frame, the effect is right. It is a brash portrait, unsoftened by time or diplomacy, the paleness of the skin and blackness of habit seem to beam out across the room, drawing the eye, just the way they did when he used to stride up and down the dungeon corridors with a glare all special, boxed and secret, just for Neville.
Oh, yes. That glare. Brazen it out, Longbottom. Just a picture.
“Well, do you mean merely to gawp at me?”
“N-No. I’m here to help the headmaster with his -” Neville waves a hand towards the desk. “I just thought we should perhaps try to be a little -” god, can he say the word? “- friendlier.”
It sounds ridiculous - Snape’s eyebrows are high and incredulous - and it’s probably a terrible idea to keep talking.
“Harry wants it.” Snape doesn’t move or blink. “He told us all about - I mean - you’re a hero. And we all thought -”
“Don’t presume to know anything of me!” The words rush at him. “That boy. That boy!” Snape looks away, nose pointing to the window, then turns back so quickly that Neville jumps. “And he showed you my memories, of course. Insolent, careless, ungrateful -”
“No! Honestly no. He didn’t.” Neville’s holding his hands up. This is about as painful as he’d anticipated. “I’m - I’m going to sit down now,” he says, moving slowly to draw up Percy’s chair, as if Snape’s an animal to be pacified. Don’t make eye contact.
On the chimney breast next to Snape’s portrait, Albus Dumbledore is blinking himself awake.
“Good afternoon, dear boy, what a pleasant surprise.”
“Hello, Professor.”
“And then to drag me back here to be ogled by a pack of morons.” Snape isn’t looking at either of them. “Who is he to -?”
Snape doesn’t finish the thought, but stares fixedly towards the window, jaw working. Neville turns to Dumbledore for help, but he’s still just smiling that twinkly smile.
“He did it because he thought you deserved it. He did more than anyone, you know, back then. I mean we all - we had Dumbledore’s Army that last year, when they were away -”
“Ah!” Dumbledore sighs.
“Dumbledore’s Army!” Snape snorts. “You think I didn’t know about that? Your coins and your secret meetings -”
“We were tortured for that!” Neville’s heart skips with adrenaline.
Snape smiles grimly. “Oh indeed. A very pale idea of torture. And your famous saviour and all his sacrifices.” A humourless huff. “Well, the Carrows paid for their crimes. As did we all!”
There’s a ringing silence, during which Neville frowns accusingly at the ceiling.
“Now, Severus. I’m sure there’s no need to shout.” Dumbledore doesn’t even look round, but has Neville trapped in that benevolent blue gaze. “He’s just a child.”
Well. No. Neville shifts from foot to foot.
“He is not! He is twenty-six year old man, partially in charge of what passes for an education in this farce of a school.”
A chuckle and a scowl respectively. Perhaps Neville can slip out and leave them to it. Maybe -
“And where is he now? Precious Mr Potter. I know he didn’t die. Where is the Chosen One, because he isn’t here. He isn’t hanging on a fucking wall!”
Neville stands up then.
“No he’s not! He nearly died, though. We thought he was dead. And he’s worked bloody hard to sort things out, and he’s still working bloody hard. He deserves to have a life and be happy. He’s an auror - head of the Auror Office - with a wife now, and a baby - and why shouldn’t he?”
Snape’s mouth snaps shut. His stare lasers out of the portrait, pushing Neville back into his chair with a thump.
“Bravo, dear boy!”
“Well. Anyway. He’s a big fan of yours, whatever you think of him.”
Snape looks away again then, and Neville finds himself exhausted, drooping into the chair, his hands wilting over the arms. A much longer silence follows, during which Snape glares at a pigeon on the windowsill, Dumbledore finds a sherbet lemon in his pocket, and Neville wonders exactly how soon he can politely leave. A smart silver carriage clock ticks on the desk behind his left shoulder. He thinks with subdued nostalgia of his camellias.
“Well, you see,” Dumbledore finally begins, mouth stuffed with sherbet lemon, “in time, even the most overheated of potions must cool. Harry and Severus, they are like -”
“Oh, pipe down, Albus!”
~
The same day as Ginny goes into labour and Harry’s partner goes missing, Neville gets himself a boggart.
“This isn’t going to get me fired, is it?” Professor Murtlegrip had asked, standing in front of the chest and twitching a little.
“No. Definitely not. It’s just for a speech. Someone else was going to give it, but they’re, um, busy.” Neville put a reassuring hand on Benjamin’s shoulder, smiling his most bracing smile, which he has never imagined to be all that bracing. “I need something to practise on, that’s all.”
Whatever small hope Neville had had that his boggart might have evolved into something more grown up - or even something more reasoned, such as a giant snake - had been disappointed when the chest creaked open like a coffin and a thin black-trousered leg had spidered over the side. Instead of advancing on him like a child’s bedtime ghoul, though, this “Snape” had pulled up a cheerful yellow chair in Neville’s living room and looked at him disparagingly.
“My teacher for six years. A loyal and true friend to, um, his colleagues -”
“What absolute nonsense!”
“- one of the finest minds in Hog-” swallow “Hogwarts.”
“As if you would know.”
“And finally, one - one of the bravest men I, we, ever -”
“Ridiculous.”
“No - you can’t say - I’m supposed to -”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
For a spot practice, and aside from the absence of Headmaster Weasley, who had sat in the sunlight and looked at him with kind encouragement - coupled with the natural relief of not having to do it himself - it turned out to be remarkably close to the actual performance.
~
“Put your back into it, Longbottom.”
“Stop saying ‘Longbottom’ like that.” Neville’s fingers are wedged behind the frame and his nose much closer than he’d like to the pale swipe of paint that makes up Snape’s jawline. The collar of his shirt is dampening with sweat.
“Longbottom.”
He tries again, a futile levering. His knuckles are aching from the pressure, and hard corners of gilt vine leaves are pressing into his palms. “No good. It’s not coming,” he wheezes.
“Try harder!”
“I’m trying! Don’t shout in my ear.” Neville lets go and stands back, puffing. “It’s stuck fast. I think it’s the frame. Maybe if I could get inside it and -”
“Out of the question!”
“Then you’ll have to stay put.”
The hinge of Snape’s jaw flexes. His eyebrows are dangerously low, but Neville, boggart-trained now as well as exhausted from trying to pry an enchanted portrait from the wall, faces him down.
“He can’t be that bad.” Neville glances at Dumbledore, remembering his cloying follow-up speech from the dedication. Snape’s lip curls.
“I will not stay here. I will not be stared at by every weepy girl who comes into this office. And do you have any idea how many of them there are now? ‘The best teacher I ever had’! I hold you to blame for this, Longbottom. You and him.” He looks away from the fireplace, but the indulgent chuckle comes anyway.
“Look - I didn’t write that speech. Harry wanted to -”
“No! Shut up!” Snape’s eyes flick shut. His colour is high, a stippling of scarlet paint on the oyster-white contour of his cheekbone. Neville does indeed shut up, and there’s a painful silence for several seconds. Of course it is interrupted.
“Ah Severus.” As tight as his own jaw is clenching, Neville is certain that Snape’s must be clenching tighter. “Love - even a love that comes late - is worth a hundred years of misunderstanding and bitterness.”
“Get me out of here,” Snape hisses, eyes still closed.
Suddenly hollow-chested with sympathy, Neville nods. Not that there’s any point nodding. He clears his throat. “I’ll think of something.”
~
The baby is tiny, black-haired and crumple-faced, and he lies in the crook of Neville’s arm, curled like a shrimp. Every swipe of his little arms seems a terrible effort and produces a storm of stuttered grunts and muted gasps.
“He’s very handsome,” Neville says, peering closely to make out any degree of handsomeness at all. The baby’s head flops against his stomach and attaches itself by a string of saliva issuing from the mouth.
Harry, crouching in front of the sofa, runs a hand along the tuft of fluffy hair, more to feel, it seems, than to flatten. His smile is so wide it pulls the skin white over his chin.
“His name - it’s -” Unusual. Inappropriate. Going to cause a riot in the headmaster’s office. Neville swallows. “What does Ginny think?”
Harry looks up. “Ginny?” The smile drops a fraction. “No, she’s fine.” His gaze drops again as a small fist connects with Neville’s chin, and the baby’s face trembles into a little mask of misery. “We made a deal. Here.” He holds out his arms as Albus Severus begins to bleat in earnest.
A couple of lengths of the Potters’ living room, Harry shushing and jiggling, and the baby quiets down. It’s still a surprise to see Harry gentle like this: Harry, whose life has always been made up of violences - violent convictions, attachments, hatreds. Neville’s own brief and uncomfortable flirtation with violence had ended the same day as Bellatrix Lestrange and Voldemort’s snake, but he could never imagine himself owning the confident tenderness that Harry embodies with a baby held against his chest. He looks at his own hands, imagines them lacing carefully into cool strong leaves, and feels heartened.
“Malfoy turned up again then?”
“He always does.” Harry’s smiling down at the baby as if he’s hardly listening to his own words. “Not Yaxley after all, probably just a firewhisky binge.” He sits down in an armchair at right angles to Neville’s sofa and looks up. “Listen, thanks for doing the dedication speech for me.”
“That’s okay.” Neville’s not even sure it was entirely for Harry’s sake that he did it. Percy had shaken his hand afterwards with both of his own, forehead slightly sweaty with obvious gratitude, and Snape had spent a whole day and a half facing the wall.
“I wanted to ask -” Harry pauses, shifts his hold on Albus. “How is he doing? Is he settling in all right? I’d really like to visit.”
It had to happen sooner or later, Neville tells himself with a heavy, doomy feeling in his gut. The baby gives a sudden spasm of a wriggle like he’s trying to fling himself out of Harry’s arms, then turns an angry face on Neville, and that, at least, rings true.
“He’s not keen on the frame,” Neville says finally, and is surprised to see Harry blush.
~
Neville’s black crayon is worn practically to a stump. The nose has come out a bit smudged, but roughly the right shape, and the eyes are definitely his. They’re even starting to develop a cynical glint, though he can’t be in there yet surely.
Towards the end of the drawing, every stroke of crayon seems portentous. Neville is gingerly adding an ear lobe when the greenhouse door opens, and picture and crayons are shoved under the potting surface in a jerky reflex.
“Good morning, Professor Longbottom.”
The headmaster’s hair is fifty different shades of copper and gold in the brittle November sunshine. A tray with three cups floats gracefully beside him.
“For the fluxweed,” he explains, waving a hand dismissively.
The sun is hot on Neville’s cheek. “Thank you,” he says, startled, then begins to witter. “Of course, you mustn’t over-tea in the fifth week before the solstice or the buds will come out blue and the sepals won’t smolch, so just one is probably -”
“No!” Percy lifts one of the cups off the tray and it rattles against its saucer. “The other one’s for you.”
“Oh.”
Neither of them notices as a crayon rolls from under the table and comes to rest against the toe of the headmaster’s shoe.
~
With all four corners firmly spellotaped down, Neville steps back.
Snape cautiously opens a crayon eye. “Where in Merlin’s name are we?”
Half sure, as he was, that the picture wouldn’t work, and though the lines around Snape’s nose and mouth shift and jerk like a sketchy cartoon as he speaks, Neville almost laughs out loud at his success.
“This is my living room.” He gestures at the sofa, then, looking round, bends swiftly to pick up a dirty plate left on one of the cushions. “Sorry - I should have -”
“How did you get it off -?” Snape begins to ask, then something catches him, and he stops, frowning. He stretches his mouth into silently exaggerated vowels, furrows his brow, raises one eyebrow and then the other. He gives a gigantic shudder which snaps and twists the paper against its fastenings, then his expression falls terribly smooth and his nostrils flare into giant black crayon holes.
“Longbottom.” It’s barely a whisper. “What have you done?”
“I’ve - drawn you.” This is met with blankness, so Neville pushes on. “Like an alternative portrait - somewhere to escape to.” Snape’s eyes close in something that looks like despair. “I’m not even here really during the day. And there aren’t any - weepy girls either.” None of this seems to be helping.
“You’ve drawn me.”
“Well, yes.”
“YOU’VE DRAWN -” He clears his throat. “You’ve drawn me.”
“Look -”
“And since when were you an art teacher, Longbottom?”
“I-”
“I suppose I should be thanking Merlin that I even have eyelids.” He hasn’t opened them.
Count to ten, Neville.
“I’ll - let you settle in then.” Nothing to be gained by an argument; far better a tactical withdrawal.
A minute and a half drumming his fingers on the edge of the sink and staring out into the garden is enough to induce the calm necessary to think about tea, and as Neville steps back into the living room, mug in hand, Snape is peering at him sharply.
“What were you laughing at?”
“Nothing… just - thinking about something.” There’s no point mentioning the reflexive second cup of tea shoved hastily behind a geranium on the kitchen windowsill. It’s not Neville’s fault he was brought up with manners. He sits on the sofa, zigzagging carefully back towards a cushion so as to keep the cup level.
“Thinking.” One eyebrow lifts into a crooked arch, of course, but curiosity has apparently got the better of Snape’s need to demean. Or shout. “Why do you not live at the school?”
Neville shrugs, wondering whether any explanation will bring down a storm of derision. “Same reason as you.”
“Assuredly not.”
“Oh - god - no. That’s not what I meant. I just meant it’s quieter here - no weeping girls. Private.” Snape sucks in his cheeks. Oh, the hell with it. “There’re a lot of memories at the castle - pretty nasty actually, some of them.” Neville looks at his tea. Still too hot to drink, which is a shame, because he’d dearly love to have something to do with his hands.
“Memories in which I doubtless feature quite eminently.” He sounds disgusted. Neville picks at a loose tuft on the arm of the sofa. “Which in turn raises the question what on earth possessed you to bring me here - to your house? To -” he flexes his shoulders, and the papers crackles like it’s trying pry itself loose from the wall, “- pin me up like a shopping list?”
“I asked at the Three Broomsticks, but Rosmerta wouldn’t have you.” Neville takes a gulp of tea, blisteringly hot against his palate. “Needs sugar,” he says, already on his feet.
~
Neville has his dinner in a little parlour at the back of the house. It’s a cosy room, kept at a constant temperature by thermostatic warming charms, a jungle of succulents in earthenware planters. It’s too hot in here to be eating vegetable stew, and he’s getting up a bit of sweat round his middle where it folds thickly together. With every other spoonful, a venomous aloe that has draped itself over his shoulder pats consolingly at his chest. He thinks of Luna in Costa Rica slicing her way through the undergrowth with a machete hex. He eats as slowly as he can, but the heat drives him out inside fifteen minutes.
“You live here alone,” Snape shouts at him as he passes on his way back to the kitchen. Not any more, Neville feels like shouting back. Instead he fetches himself a steadying brandy and a small bundle of first year essays.
“I didn’t always.” Neville sits in his armchair and sips at his brandy.
If Snape was still waiting for that response, he shows no sign of it. He is inspecting the room with eyes that are unnaturally beady and lifeless, even for him. Neville pats an essay flat on his knee, but it takes him three tries to get through the first paragraph. The room is silent, apart from the creak of springs as he shifts his thighs, feeling that comic book stare on the top of his head.
“That chair -”
“She chose it.”
“She?”
Neville looks up. Snape’s tone is more flat disbelief than curiosity. Suddenly his mouth twitches upwards at one corner and a strange humorous sound comes out.
“There’s a reason you work with plants, Longbottom.”
The brandy blushes hotly down Neville’s throat. “It didn’t quite work as we hoped.”
“Naturally not.” This is not a conversation to be had here. And not with this - person. Neville embarks on paragraph two. “And - Mr Potter and his Weasley. Evidently as felicitous and fruitful as all Weasley unions.”
Nor is Neville about to discuss the ambiguous state of his friends’ relationships with Snape, not that they confide a great deal in him. A relief really - secrecy he can manage, it’s the need for maintenance and discussion he’s never quite mastered. He decides on a safer sort of news. “He’s named the baby after you.”
Snape’s face takes on that strange flat look again. It’s a little alarming - perhaps he was drawn in too much of a hurry; there aren’t enough lines to pinch around his mouth. Neville presses on:
“He wants to visit you.”
A little outbreath, then an oddly strained whisper: “Not here.” The picture is all stark darting black eyes and slack mouth, signifying - what? From Snape, it’s so incongruous that it should be funny; it is not.
~
It is two days later when Neville enters the headmaster’s study to find Percy bending over the smaller of the Wishknot shrubs, a small scrap of paper held out like a spoon towards a greedy infant.
He half turns, then abruptly stands, brushing his hands on the legs of his tweed trousers, as the paper is rolled and crumpled jealously into the ether of possibility. There is a wood fire crackling and snapping in the hearth, and Percy’s cheeks are pink from the heat.
“Ah. Professor Longbottom.” He bounces once on the balls of his feet. “Coming -” he clears his throat, “coming along nicely aren’t they?” Neville steps closer and peers at the plants. They are burgeoning. “Once a day - just like you said.”
“Actually, once a w-”
“Once a week, I mean, yes.” The headmaster rubs his hands together, brisk and in command. “Once a week. Right! Lots to do.” He looks at his watch. “I have a meeting in Hufflepuff at ten-thirty, and today is Auror Potter’s visit, of course.”
“He’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”
“Excellent. I’ll - er - leave you to it.” He looks round tentatively at Snape, who is glaring at the wall opposite, all grim mouth and hunched shoulders. “I know you’ll make our visitor welcome.”
Snape is doing his very best impression of one of those awful corpse-like muggle portraits, totally unblinking, and, suddenly desperate to save the headmaster embarrassment, Neville answers instead.
“We’ll do our best.”
Percy smiles, his hairline rising as an anxious frown smoothes out. “Excellent,” he says again. “Oh and - it might be a good idea to give him a bit of a scourgify. Looking a touch grubby.”
Snape turns at that - affronted, maybe even a little panicked. He lowers his chin to his collarbone and examines his chest. There are fingermarks on the frame and the paint where Neville had tried to wrench him off the wall last week.
“Clean me,” he says, in a voice that would freeze an alpine rockery, as soon as the headmaster is gone, and yet will not allow Neville within six feet of him with a wand drawn. A large yellow duster is summoned from the kitchens.
Neville has been rubbing gingerly at the gilt corners of the frame for several minutes, when Snape suddenly shifts in agitation. “Ridiculous frame. Change it.”
“Can’t be done. He’ll be here in five minutes.” Snape breathes out hard through his nose. “Besides you told me to leave my wand on the table.”
There is more shifting. Neville doesn’t look up, but smoothes the cloth gently over a hard lacquered vine leaf. Vitis vinifera.
“Anyway, he chose this frame. You should probably -”
“I am not here to flatter that boy’s taste!” Snape hisses, and turns to face the window.
When every ronde of grape in every cluster is gleaming, he moves in to inspect the surface of the painting. Thick ridges of oil, fifteen different shades of black. Snape keeps his face averted, for which, as he dabs at the starched black collar, Neville is duly grateful.
The whorls of paint rise and fall smoothly and swiftly with Snape’s breathing. There’s nothing to say; his anxiety beams out of every brushstroke, and it’s infectious. Neville finds his own pulse fluttering. Harry hasn’t seen him in ages - “Eight years,” he’d said, choky, like he was trying to tamp down a weird euphoria - but for Snape who was in whatever bitter peace might pass with him for death, it must seem like a matter of weeks. Four weeks, five maybe, since he dug out his heart for the very last time and spread it out for Harry to pick over. And there are big thick secrets in these swipes of black paint even now, secrets clenched tight between yellowing tempera teeth.
Percy’s clock ticks through five minutes, and when they are up, the door pushes open and Harry walks in. The smothered burst of hunger in Snape’s face is enough to drive Neville back out and down the stairs.
~
“- wanted to understand! I wanted -”
“What exactly leads you to believe you could ever comprehend the kind of -”
“I have no fucking idea! None at all! You’re fucking impossible!”
It was a bare ten minutes on the spiral staircase before Neville heard the first rumble of shouting. But now the door is open again and the words smash around the stone walls.
“Yes! I am! I don’t know why you ever thought different!” Snape’s voice is rising hysterically; there’s the clump of boots on the stairs.
“Fine!” Harry shouts, and Neville flinches as if he’s shouting in his ear.
“- and do me the very great service of not returning!”
Neville is considering backing into the shallow nook at the bottom of the staircase, when he is shouldered to one side.
“Harry -”
“Absolutely bloody pointless.” He doesn’t even look round.
“Harry!”
But he clearly has no intention of stopping or listening to any cack-handed attempts at arbitration. This is the Harry that Neville remembers - the great causes always filled him with a frightening sort of righteous fury. And as for Snape, who’s been ready to jump out of his skin for the last two days, well - any idiot Herbology professor could have predicted this, he tells himself. Neville cranes round, peering back up towards the office, and thinks of Percy safely ensconced in Hufflepuff. There’s nothing for it, though. He trudges back up.
Snape has edged to the furthest left corner of his frame when Neville looks in, and is in his habitual mode of glaring at the window, this time apparently in an effort to avoid Albus Dumbledore who has sidled into the frame and is offering the contents of a crumpled white paper bag. Snape glances at Neville without turning his head, then looks back at the window. He puts a hand to his cheek, like he’s holding himself steady.
“Paint over me,” he says.
continued.
word count: c.11,500
warnings: dh spoilers; largely canon-compliant, some avoidance of epilogue and interview canon
note 1: written for the snape_after_dh prompt: Professor Longbottom converses with Severus Snape's portrait.
note 2: much gratitude to buckle_berry and secrethappiness for advice, suggestions and beta-ing, and especially to fitofpique for some truly invaluable mutual support.
note 3: posted in two bits. second bit linked below.
Faint Indirections
Outside Greenhouse Four, two figures in auror grey are trudging across the grass towards the castle, between them a large oblong bundle, slung awkwardly under arms. Neville had forgotten it was today. He turns abruptly back to his pots, the weird sensation of disapproving eyes boring into his back, and takes the head off a healthy shoot by mistake. Odd that Harry hasn’t come himself, but perhaps with the baby so close.
“I want to point out that this decision is my own and based on the weight of evidence, and in no way due to any pressure brought to bear by members of the Auror Office.”
The headmaster had looked over his spectacles at a room full of teachers three times his age, his thumbs pressed together - soberly, almost persuasively - above clasped fingers. Flitwick had coughed at that point and earned himself a stare. Neville, too, had some idea of what that pressure might have been, but kept his mouth shut. Benefit of the doubt - that’s always been his way, until he’s proved wrong, changed his mind, and then, unexpectedly, proved wrong again. Which means he was right in the first place, doesn’t it? Either way, he’ll be in no hurry to visit the headmaster’s office again soon. Not now, with its newest occupant.
Concentrate, Longbottom.
He snips another half centimetre. There is a new bud shoot just below where the branch forks, a little fold of palest blue-white below the sheath of green: dense, waxy and strong against the tip of Neville’s thumb. A good scion.
White winter chattering camellias. Camellias for luck, boy, Augusta Longbottom used to say. She grew them in the rose garden. They never brought Neville much luck, but then she didn’t have his patience with compost. Or the grafting knife.
He slides the cut edge carefully into a notch carved in the rose stock, holds it gently between one thumb and forefinger just at the join, and reaches with his other hand for a small vial of cambium potion. He’s always preferred the hands-on approach, smoothing the potion down the stem, feeling the stalk shiver and stretch.
“There. There’s a comfy new home for you.”
The bud seems to sigh into his palm, unfurling a little. He smiles, understanding. Odd to feel so confident - by December the greenhouse will be thick with oyster-white flowers, full of the high hum of brittle chatter.
~
Dear Neville,
We got to Costa Rica on Saturday and it definitely looks like the sort of place you might find a colony of crumple-horned snorkacks. Now that I think about it, it was really very silly of Father and me to think we might find one in Sweden, when their favourite food is dugbogs. I’ve found someone who’s going to take me into the forest in few weeks. He’s called Pablo Despiste, and I think he’s tracked quite a lot of snorkacks in his time; he told me about a very exciting expedition he went on last year where they found two families of snorkacks and some male clabberts. I’ve owled Father about it, and he says they’re very rare.
I hope you aren’t lonely. Are you going to move back into the castle? I don’t know if I’m coming back, so you can keep the yellow armchair. Good luck with the second years. I hope they don’t keep planting your dragonhide gloves this year.
Your friend,
Luna.
PS. I think I always liked being friends better.
~
It’s more than a week later when Headmaster Weasley visits Greenhouse Three, mid-morning.
“Professor Longbottom, that’s my tea.”
“Oh. I thought - I’m sorry, I thought - the fluxweed loves oolong. I assumed -” Neville gestures towards the tall swaying plant with the blue-figure china cup, then sets the cup down on the saucer. Of course not. He looks at Percy’s feet in their brown brogues. Impatient feet - he expects them to start tapping.
“Well? Perhaps a refill?”
Neville looks up to see the headmaster’s expression slide from superciliousness into something like annoyance. His mouth moves a little and he’s frowning, but it’s at the fluxweed and not at Neville.
“Repleo.”
“Yes. Thanks.”
They stand for a second or two. Percy sips his tea, then clears his throat.
“Anyway. I wanted to ask about the new Defence professor. Settling in, is he?”
“As well as can be expected,” Neville says cheerfully. “They’re always a bit rattled when they start, of course, but I think Benjamin stands a real chance.”
“And the circle?”
“No real problems yet. Everyone’s really quite positive, actually.”
“You’ve met?”
“Twice.”
“Good. Good.” Percy claps a hand on Neville’s shoulder, a movement that begins with enthusiasm and ends a little stiffly. He removes the hand and resumes his teacup. “I’m really hoping to see Professor Murtlegrip back next year. It’s becoming a little, well, that’s to say, those Prophet articles last summer about Professor Goldstein’s breakdown could have been really very damaging.”
“Not to worry, Headmaster.” Neville pats his shoulder in return, eliciting a look of the greatest surprise. “The curse is definitely gone. Everyone says so -”
“Apart from the Prophet. And the parents.”
“We just have to convince the Defence teachers of it. The circle of support should do the trick.”
That’s what’s really good about having a young headmaster, Neville’s always maintained. What you lack in twinkle, you definitely make up for in practicality and dynamic thinking, even if Professor Weasley is something of a micromanager. He hasn’t yet managed to get Professor Flitwick to agree. Binns, on the other hand, and somewhat surprisingly, is a huge fan and has begun to make an appearance at the new bi-weekly staff meetings, poring with infatuation over the many-bullet-pointed agendas.
The headmaster is looking a little bolstered.
“Well, very good, Professor Longbottom. Yes, I have every faith. Well.” He levitates his cup and saucer in front of him. “I think that’s probably all. I’ll let you - oh yes! except - we’ll be having a portrait dedication in a week or two. All staff are expected to attend.”
“Oh.” Presumably this three-line whip was not used for Dumbledore’s dedication.
“There will also be some delegates from the Auror Office, my brother-in-law among them, assuming the bootleggers and the baby allow. It should be a - jolly occasion.” Percy’s voice hardens and Neville’s thoughts turn to the possibility of a debilitating Devil’s Snare accident. Aside from Harry, who has turned out a bit of a private zealot on Snape’s behalf, he can’t imagine anyone will actually want to be there. Neville feels a little swell of fellow feeling for Percy who has to sit with him day after day. He really ought to make an effort.
“Professor Snape - he’s getting on okay in the office?” Neville fingers a fluxweed leaf, which shudders contentedly in his hand. “I mean, I hope he’s not being -”
“It’s not customary for former headmasters to insult the present incumbent, you know.” A bit starchy even for Percy. His teacup is bobbing ominously.
“Oh. Of course not. Sorry, I -”
Percy clears his throat, looking out of the greenhouse window. “Well. As I say. It’s not customary.”
For a moment or two there’s a silence between them that is either sympathetic or uncomfortable. Neville tries to swing it by projecting his most benevolent thoughts, not at all sure that they will be welcomed.
“Which reminds me, Professor - I’d be grateful if you could pop up there from time to time. I’ve been sent a couple of potted Wishknot shrubs by - well, er, by my mother as a matter of fact - and they’ve been rather disrupting my workspace. I’m sure a little well-judged pruning will work wonders. Tomorrow, perhaps?”
So soon?
“Certainly, Headmaster. Should I bring my, um -?” He gestures scissors with his fingers, feeling like a prize idiot, but Percy is already on his way out of the greenhouse, “Password’s damage limitation!”, forestalling any further discussion.
Neville sighs. There goes his cherished hope of avoiding the headmaster’s office for at least the next year or two. He is deep in memories laced with humiliation and the fearful stink of the Potions lab, when he feels the brush of a fluxweed frond against his knuckle, an offering of leafy comfort. He strokes it with the pad of his thumb.
“Easy for you to say. Some days I’d give anything to be a plant.”
~
The headmaster is away from his office, of course, when Neville enters the next day, secateurs held to his chest. He has been ordering himself to buck up since breakfast this morning, and yet it’s a relief not to be confronted by those gimlet black eyes on the opposite wall the instant he opens the door.
Longbottom, you feeble excuse -!
He lets out a breath, smiling at himself, and steps into the room. In fact the atmosphere hasn’t changed noticeably since he was here just before the summer holidays. McGonagall, visiting last year from her lively retirement in Auchtermuchty, had sighed over the changes Percy’s made, but Neville rather likes it. It’s full of light - a lovely fresh green colour, not all darkness and wood like Gryffindor Tower or musty stone like the dungeons. There is a world of parchment, labelled and divided into thick stacks, and a framed chart hung on the wall next to the desk, which today is showing the slow rise and fall of house points. All in all, the reliable competence of someone who has things well in hand.
Or it would be, but for the jungle of Wishknots determinedly making their way through the headmaster’s in-tray. Neville rolls up the sleeves of his gardening robes.
“Now, really! What on earth -” he begins, advancing on the miscreant plants.
He’s rounded the corner, and well in his stride, when he catches sight of it. Lank, black hair falling as far as black worsted shoulders, tense, as if he’s flinching from some monumental stupidity. Neville would recognise the back of that head anywhere. For a moment he’s puzzled - did they really paint him from behind? The portrait is set in the most incredible frame: gilt, spandrels, clusters of grape-strung vine, fluting, everything’s been thrown at it. If Neville had any heart in him at all right now, he might even have to smother a laugh.
It’s a full twenty seconds before he thinks to look away, remember his feet planted one in front of the other, his left hand clenched around the secateurs. Job to do, come on, Neville. It’s not like he’s looking at you. Coaxing. Doesn’t even know you’re here.
Even so, it’s barely a tiptoe that takes him to the desk, a ginger thumb and forefinger that reach to disentangle Percy’s governors’ reports from the Wishknot. Five minutes’ work to get the shrubs pruned back to manageability, to flatten out the pulverised parchment, and with his back to that wall, he’s beginning to relax.
“Now, then,” he whispers. “No more of that. I know he puts a lot of effort into those reports, but let’s get you a proper wish, shall we?” No blank parchment anywhere, he tears a tiny piece of blotting paper, and dips a quill. For a second he pauses, at a loss. Babies, Defence professors, well-behaved second years… Luna. He frowns. Camellias? Yes, why not. Neville scribbles the words, and prods the scrap gently, torn edge first, towards a curling shoot, watches as the plant grips at it greedily, rolls it tight to the stem, folding in corners until it’s all but absorbed.
When both shrubs are fed, and rustling and stretching in post-prandial somnolence, Neville tucks them back into a corner of the desk. He is rearranging the piles of parchment, when his eye catches on his name written in precise headmasterly letters on one of the rescued sheets. He forgets - what was he -? It would take a stronger man than he is not to read:
As in previous years, Professor Longbottom’s Herbology classes prove to be -
“Longbottom!”
An almighty nervous spasm sends the secateurs clattering to the floor. Oh god. Neville spins round, backside pressed to the desk, one hand clutching for safety, the other pressed to his chest. Oh god. Boggart.
“Professor,” he wheezes hopelessly, immediately back in first-year Potions. The portrait just stares at him, that same shrivelling black stare, the same shroud of worsted, buttons and greasy hair, the same terrifying beak of a nose. Detention, Neville quavers at himself, before suddenly realising how ridiculous this is. A mustering of character, that’s all it takes. With an effort he lowers his hand to his side and clears his throat. “You, um, gave me a bit of surprise.”
Snape looks at him as if he’s speaking Chinese.
“I? I gave you a bit of a surprise?” Neville’s stout heart flutters uncomfortably under Snape’s emphatics. Just a picture, after all. Just a picture. “What - exactly - are you doing in this office? Is this some wild, ill-conceived attempt at a break-in?”
Neville tries to smile, but it comes out a bit twitchy. There’s a sort of hysterical guffaw trapped in his chest.
“Perc- Headmaster Weasley hasn’t told you?”
The portrait scowls. “It would seem not.”
Suddenly Neville’s afraid to say it. He looks round at Professor Dumbledore snoozing over the fireplace. No help to be had there. “I, er, I work here now. I’m the new Herbology master.”
“No, you are not.” Snape says it so quickly and with such utter conviction, that Neville’s almost convinced. He glances at his empty hands.
“Um.”
“You are not. This is some sort of hallucination.”
Neville’s laugh finally comes out as a choke.
“I promise you - I really am. You’re not halluci-.”
“NOT ME. YOU.”
It’s almost impossible not to cower under that thunderclap of a voice. And how can Professor Dumbledore still be asleep? Neville bends down and picks up the secateurs, holds them out, to prove a point he doesn’t quite dare articulate again. Snape looks at him, mouth sliding into a curl of absolute contempt, then his eyes close, and Neville can just about make out his mutter:
“Not for this. Dear Merlin, it can’t all have been for this.”
Neville looks at the secateurs, then back up at the portrait, which is already turning its back again, hair swishing in a muted version of the old robe trick. He takes a deep steadying breath, and all the way back down the corkscrew staircase, he says to himself: You are the Herbology Master, but it’s not till he’s safely back in Greenhouse Four that he really believes it.
~
Neville’s standing closer this time. Close enough to see the brush-strokes, which are bolder, quicker, less finished than the other portraits. It was probably an unnerving one to paint - he imagines the last dabs to the chin, the eyes blinking to life. He’d’ve been out of the studio in a flash. All the same, barring the ridiculously flamboyant frame, the effect is right. It is a brash portrait, unsoftened by time or diplomacy, the paleness of the skin and blackness of habit seem to beam out across the room, drawing the eye, just the way they did when he used to stride up and down the dungeon corridors with a glare all special, boxed and secret, just for Neville.
Oh, yes. That glare. Brazen it out, Longbottom. Just a picture.
“Well, do you mean merely to gawp at me?”
“N-No. I’m here to help the headmaster with his -” Neville waves a hand towards the desk. “I just thought we should perhaps try to be a little -” god, can he say the word? “- friendlier.”
It sounds ridiculous - Snape’s eyebrows are high and incredulous - and it’s probably a terrible idea to keep talking.
“Harry wants it.” Snape doesn’t move or blink. “He told us all about - I mean - you’re a hero. And we all thought -”
“Don’t presume to know anything of me!” The words rush at him. “That boy. That boy!” Snape looks away, nose pointing to the window, then turns back so quickly that Neville jumps. “And he showed you my memories, of course. Insolent, careless, ungrateful -”
“No! Honestly no. He didn’t.” Neville’s holding his hands up. This is about as painful as he’d anticipated. “I’m - I’m going to sit down now,” he says, moving slowly to draw up Percy’s chair, as if Snape’s an animal to be pacified. Don’t make eye contact.
On the chimney breast next to Snape’s portrait, Albus Dumbledore is blinking himself awake.
“Good afternoon, dear boy, what a pleasant surprise.”
“Hello, Professor.”
“And then to drag me back here to be ogled by a pack of morons.” Snape isn’t looking at either of them. “Who is he to -?”
Snape doesn’t finish the thought, but stares fixedly towards the window, jaw working. Neville turns to Dumbledore for help, but he’s still just smiling that twinkly smile.
“He did it because he thought you deserved it. He did more than anyone, you know, back then. I mean we all - we had Dumbledore’s Army that last year, when they were away -”
“Ah!” Dumbledore sighs.
“Dumbledore’s Army!” Snape snorts. “You think I didn’t know about that? Your coins and your secret meetings -”
“We were tortured for that!” Neville’s heart skips with adrenaline.
Snape smiles grimly. “Oh indeed. A very pale idea of torture. And your famous saviour and all his sacrifices.” A humourless huff. “Well, the Carrows paid for their crimes. As did we all!”
There’s a ringing silence, during which Neville frowns accusingly at the ceiling.
“Now, Severus. I’m sure there’s no need to shout.” Dumbledore doesn’t even look round, but has Neville trapped in that benevolent blue gaze. “He’s just a child.”
Well. No. Neville shifts from foot to foot.
“He is not! He is twenty-six year old man, partially in charge of what passes for an education in this farce of a school.”
A chuckle and a scowl respectively. Perhaps Neville can slip out and leave them to it. Maybe -
“And where is he now? Precious Mr Potter. I know he didn’t die. Where is the Chosen One, because he isn’t here. He isn’t hanging on a fucking wall!”
Neville stands up then.
“No he’s not! He nearly died, though. We thought he was dead. And he’s worked bloody hard to sort things out, and he’s still working bloody hard. He deserves to have a life and be happy. He’s an auror - head of the Auror Office - with a wife now, and a baby - and why shouldn’t he?”
Snape’s mouth snaps shut. His stare lasers out of the portrait, pushing Neville back into his chair with a thump.
“Bravo, dear boy!”
“Well. Anyway. He’s a big fan of yours, whatever you think of him.”
Snape looks away again then, and Neville finds himself exhausted, drooping into the chair, his hands wilting over the arms. A much longer silence follows, during which Snape glares at a pigeon on the windowsill, Dumbledore finds a sherbet lemon in his pocket, and Neville wonders exactly how soon he can politely leave. A smart silver carriage clock ticks on the desk behind his left shoulder. He thinks with subdued nostalgia of his camellias.
“Well, you see,” Dumbledore finally begins, mouth stuffed with sherbet lemon, “in time, even the most overheated of potions must cool. Harry and Severus, they are like -”
“Oh, pipe down, Albus!”
~
The same day as Ginny goes into labour and Harry’s partner goes missing, Neville gets himself a boggart.
“This isn’t going to get me fired, is it?” Professor Murtlegrip had asked, standing in front of the chest and twitching a little.
“No. Definitely not. It’s just for a speech. Someone else was going to give it, but they’re, um, busy.” Neville put a reassuring hand on Benjamin’s shoulder, smiling his most bracing smile, which he has never imagined to be all that bracing. “I need something to practise on, that’s all.”
Whatever small hope Neville had had that his boggart might have evolved into something more grown up - or even something more reasoned, such as a giant snake - had been disappointed when the chest creaked open like a coffin and a thin black-trousered leg had spidered over the side. Instead of advancing on him like a child’s bedtime ghoul, though, this “Snape” had pulled up a cheerful yellow chair in Neville’s living room and looked at him disparagingly.
“My teacher for six years. A loyal and true friend to, um, his colleagues -”
“What absolute nonsense!”
“- one of the finest minds in Hog-” swallow “Hogwarts.”
“As if you would know.”
“And finally, one - one of the bravest men I, we, ever -”
“Ridiculous.”
“No - you can’t say - I’m supposed to -”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
For a spot practice, and aside from the absence of Headmaster Weasley, who had sat in the sunlight and looked at him with kind encouragement - coupled with the natural relief of not having to do it himself - it turned out to be remarkably close to the actual performance.
~
“Put your back into it, Longbottom.”
“Stop saying ‘Longbottom’ like that.” Neville’s fingers are wedged behind the frame and his nose much closer than he’d like to the pale swipe of paint that makes up Snape’s jawline. The collar of his shirt is dampening with sweat.
“Longbottom.”
He tries again, a futile levering. His knuckles are aching from the pressure, and hard corners of gilt vine leaves are pressing into his palms. “No good. It’s not coming,” he wheezes.
“Try harder!”
“I’m trying! Don’t shout in my ear.” Neville lets go and stands back, puffing. “It’s stuck fast. I think it’s the frame. Maybe if I could get inside it and -”
“Out of the question!”
“Then you’ll have to stay put.”
The hinge of Snape’s jaw flexes. His eyebrows are dangerously low, but Neville, boggart-trained now as well as exhausted from trying to pry an enchanted portrait from the wall, faces him down.
“He can’t be that bad.” Neville glances at Dumbledore, remembering his cloying follow-up speech from the dedication. Snape’s lip curls.
“I will not stay here. I will not be stared at by every weepy girl who comes into this office. And do you have any idea how many of them there are now? ‘The best teacher I ever had’! I hold you to blame for this, Longbottom. You and him.” He looks away from the fireplace, but the indulgent chuckle comes anyway.
“Look - I didn’t write that speech. Harry wanted to -”
“No! Shut up!” Snape’s eyes flick shut. His colour is high, a stippling of scarlet paint on the oyster-white contour of his cheekbone. Neville does indeed shut up, and there’s a painful silence for several seconds. Of course it is interrupted.
“Ah Severus.” As tight as his own jaw is clenching, Neville is certain that Snape’s must be clenching tighter. “Love - even a love that comes late - is worth a hundred years of misunderstanding and bitterness.”
“Get me out of here,” Snape hisses, eyes still closed.
Suddenly hollow-chested with sympathy, Neville nods. Not that there’s any point nodding. He clears his throat. “I’ll think of something.”
~
The baby is tiny, black-haired and crumple-faced, and he lies in the crook of Neville’s arm, curled like a shrimp. Every swipe of his little arms seems a terrible effort and produces a storm of stuttered grunts and muted gasps.
“He’s very handsome,” Neville says, peering closely to make out any degree of handsomeness at all. The baby’s head flops against his stomach and attaches itself by a string of saliva issuing from the mouth.
Harry, crouching in front of the sofa, runs a hand along the tuft of fluffy hair, more to feel, it seems, than to flatten. His smile is so wide it pulls the skin white over his chin.
“His name - it’s -” Unusual. Inappropriate. Going to cause a riot in the headmaster’s office. Neville swallows. “What does Ginny think?”
Harry looks up. “Ginny?” The smile drops a fraction. “No, she’s fine.” His gaze drops again as a small fist connects with Neville’s chin, and the baby’s face trembles into a little mask of misery. “We made a deal. Here.” He holds out his arms as Albus Severus begins to bleat in earnest.
A couple of lengths of the Potters’ living room, Harry shushing and jiggling, and the baby quiets down. It’s still a surprise to see Harry gentle like this: Harry, whose life has always been made up of violences - violent convictions, attachments, hatreds. Neville’s own brief and uncomfortable flirtation with violence had ended the same day as Bellatrix Lestrange and Voldemort’s snake, but he could never imagine himself owning the confident tenderness that Harry embodies with a baby held against his chest. He looks at his own hands, imagines them lacing carefully into cool strong leaves, and feels heartened.
“Malfoy turned up again then?”
“He always does.” Harry’s smiling down at the baby as if he’s hardly listening to his own words. “Not Yaxley after all, probably just a firewhisky binge.” He sits down in an armchair at right angles to Neville’s sofa and looks up. “Listen, thanks for doing the dedication speech for me.”
“That’s okay.” Neville’s not even sure it was entirely for Harry’s sake that he did it. Percy had shaken his hand afterwards with both of his own, forehead slightly sweaty with obvious gratitude, and Snape had spent a whole day and a half facing the wall.
“I wanted to ask -” Harry pauses, shifts his hold on Albus. “How is he doing? Is he settling in all right? I’d really like to visit.”
It had to happen sooner or later, Neville tells himself with a heavy, doomy feeling in his gut. The baby gives a sudden spasm of a wriggle like he’s trying to fling himself out of Harry’s arms, then turns an angry face on Neville, and that, at least, rings true.
“He’s not keen on the frame,” Neville says finally, and is surprised to see Harry blush.
~
Neville’s black crayon is worn practically to a stump. The nose has come out a bit smudged, but roughly the right shape, and the eyes are definitely his. They’re even starting to develop a cynical glint, though he can’t be in there yet surely.
Towards the end of the drawing, every stroke of crayon seems portentous. Neville is gingerly adding an ear lobe when the greenhouse door opens, and picture and crayons are shoved under the potting surface in a jerky reflex.
“Good morning, Professor Longbottom.”
The headmaster’s hair is fifty different shades of copper and gold in the brittle November sunshine. A tray with three cups floats gracefully beside him.
“For the fluxweed,” he explains, waving a hand dismissively.
The sun is hot on Neville’s cheek. “Thank you,” he says, startled, then begins to witter. “Of course, you mustn’t over-tea in the fifth week before the solstice or the buds will come out blue and the sepals won’t smolch, so just one is probably -”
“No!” Percy lifts one of the cups off the tray and it rattles against its saucer. “The other one’s for you.”
“Oh.”
Neither of them notices as a crayon rolls from under the table and comes to rest against the toe of the headmaster’s shoe.
~
With all four corners firmly spellotaped down, Neville steps back.
Snape cautiously opens a crayon eye. “Where in Merlin’s name are we?”
Half sure, as he was, that the picture wouldn’t work, and though the lines around Snape’s nose and mouth shift and jerk like a sketchy cartoon as he speaks, Neville almost laughs out loud at his success.
“This is my living room.” He gestures at the sofa, then, looking round, bends swiftly to pick up a dirty plate left on one of the cushions. “Sorry - I should have -”
“How did you get it off -?” Snape begins to ask, then something catches him, and he stops, frowning. He stretches his mouth into silently exaggerated vowels, furrows his brow, raises one eyebrow and then the other. He gives a gigantic shudder which snaps and twists the paper against its fastenings, then his expression falls terribly smooth and his nostrils flare into giant black crayon holes.
“Longbottom.” It’s barely a whisper. “What have you done?”
“I’ve - drawn you.” This is met with blankness, so Neville pushes on. “Like an alternative portrait - somewhere to escape to.” Snape’s eyes close in something that looks like despair. “I’m not even here really during the day. And there aren’t any - weepy girls either.” None of this seems to be helping.
“You’ve drawn me.”
“Well, yes.”
“YOU’VE DRAWN -” He clears his throat. “You’ve drawn me.”
“Look -”
“And since when were you an art teacher, Longbottom?”
“I-”
“I suppose I should be thanking Merlin that I even have eyelids.” He hasn’t opened them.
Count to ten, Neville.
“I’ll - let you settle in then.” Nothing to be gained by an argument; far better a tactical withdrawal.
A minute and a half drumming his fingers on the edge of the sink and staring out into the garden is enough to induce the calm necessary to think about tea, and as Neville steps back into the living room, mug in hand, Snape is peering at him sharply.
“What were you laughing at?”
“Nothing… just - thinking about something.” There’s no point mentioning the reflexive second cup of tea shoved hastily behind a geranium on the kitchen windowsill. It’s not Neville’s fault he was brought up with manners. He sits on the sofa, zigzagging carefully back towards a cushion so as to keep the cup level.
“Thinking.” One eyebrow lifts into a crooked arch, of course, but curiosity has apparently got the better of Snape’s need to demean. Or shout. “Why do you not live at the school?”
Neville shrugs, wondering whether any explanation will bring down a storm of derision. “Same reason as you.”
“Assuredly not.”
“Oh - god - no. That’s not what I meant. I just meant it’s quieter here - no weeping girls. Private.” Snape sucks in his cheeks. Oh, the hell with it. “There’re a lot of memories at the castle - pretty nasty actually, some of them.” Neville looks at his tea. Still too hot to drink, which is a shame, because he’d dearly love to have something to do with his hands.
“Memories in which I doubtless feature quite eminently.” He sounds disgusted. Neville picks at a loose tuft on the arm of the sofa. “Which in turn raises the question what on earth possessed you to bring me here - to your house? To -” he flexes his shoulders, and the papers crackles like it’s trying pry itself loose from the wall, “- pin me up like a shopping list?”
“I asked at the Three Broomsticks, but Rosmerta wouldn’t have you.” Neville takes a gulp of tea, blisteringly hot against his palate. “Needs sugar,” he says, already on his feet.
~
Neville has his dinner in a little parlour at the back of the house. It’s a cosy room, kept at a constant temperature by thermostatic warming charms, a jungle of succulents in earthenware planters. It’s too hot in here to be eating vegetable stew, and he’s getting up a bit of sweat round his middle where it folds thickly together. With every other spoonful, a venomous aloe that has draped itself over his shoulder pats consolingly at his chest. He thinks of Luna in Costa Rica slicing her way through the undergrowth with a machete hex. He eats as slowly as he can, but the heat drives him out inside fifteen minutes.
“You live here alone,” Snape shouts at him as he passes on his way back to the kitchen. Not any more, Neville feels like shouting back. Instead he fetches himself a steadying brandy and a small bundle of first year essays.
“I didn’t always.” Neville sits in his armchair and sips at his brandy.
If Snape was still waiting for that response, he shows no sign of it. He is inspecting the room with eyes that are unnaturally beady and lifeless, even for him. Neville pats an essay flat on his knee, but it takes him three tries to get through the first paragraph. The room is silent, apart from the creak of springs as he shifts his thighs, feeling that comic book stare on the top of his head.
“That chair -”
“She chose it.”
“She?”
Neville looks up. Snape’s tone is more flat disbelief than curiosity. Suddenly his mouth twitches upwards at one corner and a strange humorous sound comes out.
“There’s a reason you work with plants, Longbottom.”
The brandy blushes hotly down Neville’s throat. “It didn’t quite work as we hoped.”
“Naturally not.” This is not a conversation to be had here. And not with this - person. Neville embarks on paragraph two. “And - Mr Potter and his Weasley. Evidently as felicitous and fruitful as all Weasley unions.”
Nor is Neville about to discuss the ambiguous state of his friends’ relationships with Snape, not that they confide a great deal in him. A relief really - secrecy he can manage, it’s the need for maintenance and discussion he’s never quite mastered. He decides on a safer sort of news. “He’s named the baby after you.”
Snape’s face takes on that strange flat look again. It’s a little alarming - perhaps he was drawn in too much of a hurry; there aren’t enough lines to pinch around his mouth. Neville presses on:
“He wants to visit you.”
A little outbreath, then an oddly strained whisper: “Not here.” The picture is all stark darting black eyes and slack mouth, signifying - what? From Snape, it’s so incongruous that it should be funny; it is not.
~
It is two days later when Neville enters the headmaster’s study to find Percy bending over the smaller of the Wishknot shrubs, a small scrap of paper held out like a spoon towards a greedy infant.
He half turns, then abruptly stands, brushing his hands on the legs of his tweed trousers, as the paper is rolled and crumpled jealously into the ether of possibility. There is a wood fire crackling and snapping in the hearth, and Percy’s cheeks are pink from the heat.
“Ah. Professor Longbottom.” He bounces once on the balls of his feet. “Coming -” he clears his throat, “coming along nicely aren’t they?” Neville steps closer and peers at the plants. They are burgeoning. “Once a day - just like you said.”
“Actually, once a w-”
“Once a week, I mean, yes.” The headmaster rubs his hands together, brisk and in command. “Once a week. Right! Lots to do.” He looks at his watch. “I have a meeting in Hufflepuff at ten-thirty, and today is Auror Potter’s visit, of course.”
“He’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”
“Excellent. I’ll - er - leave you to it.” He looks round tentatively at Snape, who is glaring at the wall opposite, all grim mouth and hunched shoulders. “I know you’ll make our visitor welcome.”
Snape is doing his very best impression of one of those awful corpse-like muggle portraits, totally unblinking, and, suddenly desperate to save the headmaster embarrassment, Neville answers instead.
“We’ll do our best.”
Percy smiles, his hairline rising as an anxious frown smoothes out. “Excellent,” he says again. “Oh and - it might be a good idea to give him a bit of a scourgify. Looking a touch grubby.”
Snape turns at that - affronted, maybe even a little panicked. He lowers his chin to his collarbone and examines his chest. There are fingermarks on the frame and the paint where Neville had tried to wrench him off the wall last week.
“Clean me,” he says, in a voice that would freeze an alpine rockery, as soon as the headmaster is gone, and yet will not allow Neville within six feet of him with a wand drawn. A large yellow duster is summoned from the kitchens.
Neville has been rubbing gingerly at the gilt corners of the frame for several minutes, when Snape suddenly shifts in agitation. “Ridiculous frame. Change it.”
“Can’t be done. He’ll be here in five minutes.” Snape breathes out hard through his nose. “Besides you told me to leave my wand on the table.”
There is more shifting. Neville doesn’t look up, but smoothes the cloth gently over a hard lacquered vine leaf. Vitis vinifera.
“Anyway, he chose this frame. You should probably -”
“I am not here to flatter that boy’s taste!” Snape hisses, and turns to face the window.
When every ronde of grape in every cluster is gleaming, he moves in to inspect the surface of the painting. Thick ridges of oil, fifteen different shades of black. Snape keeps his face averted, for which, as he dabs at the starched black collar, Neville is duly grateful.
The whorls of paint rise and fall smoothly and swiftly with Snape’s breathing. There’s nothing to say; his anxiety beams out of every brushstroke, and it’s infectious. Neville finds his own pulse fluttering. Harry hasn’t seen him in ages - “Eight years,” he’d said, choky, like he was trying to tamp down a weird euphoria - but for Snape who was in whatever bitter peace might pass with him for death, it must seem like a matter of weeks. Four weeks, five maybe, since he dug out his heart for the very last time and spread it out for Harry to pick over. And there are big thick secrets in these swipes of black paint even now, secrets clenched tight between yellowing tempera teeth.
Percy’s clock ticks through five minutes, and when they are up, the door pushes open and Harry walks in. The smothered burst of hunger in Snape’s face is enough to drive Neville back out and down the stairs.
~
“- wanted to understand! I wanted -”
“What exactly leads you to believe you could ever comprehend the kind of -”
“I have no fucking idea! None at all! You’re fucking impossible!”
It was a bare ten minutes on the spiral staircase before Neville heard the first rumble of shouting. But now the door is open again and the words smash around the stone walls.
“Yes! I am! I don’t know why you ever thought different!” Snape’s voice is rising hysterically; there’s the clump of boots on the stairs.
“Fine!” Harry shouts, and Neville flinches as if he’s shouting in his ear.
“- and do me the very great service of not returning!”
Neville is considering backing into the shallow nook at the bottom of the staircase, when he is shouldered to one side.
“Harry -”
“Absolutely bloody pointless.” He doesn’t even look round.
“Harry!”
But he clearly has no intention of stopping or listening to any cack-handed attempts at arbitration. This is the Harry that Neville remembers - the great causes always filled him with a frightening sort of righteous fury. And as for Snape, who’s been ready to jump out of his skin for the last two days, well - any idiot Herbology professor could have predicted this, he tells himself. Neville cranes round, peering back up towards the office, and thinks of Percy safely ensconced in Hufflepuff. There’s nothing for it, though. He trudges back up.
Snape has edged to the furthest left corner of his frame when Neville looks in, and is in his habitual mode of glaring at the window, this time apparently in an effort to avoid Albus Dumbledore who has sidled into the frame and is offering the contents of a crumpled white paper bag. Snape glances at Neville without turning his head, then looks back at the window. He puts a hand to his cheek, like he’s holding himself steady.
“Paint over me,” he says.
continued.