Chapter Text
Longbottom Manor
Lancashire, England
March 28th, 2117
On the fifth day after nine-year-old Neville Longbottom crossed all of time and space to save his world - the third day after his counterpart's son, Frankie Longbottom, sent out the global all-call that that world was now in probable vital danger as the result of his own world's saviour-complex-slash-half-arsing-of-their-cross-dimensional-details - half of South America, it seemed, descended upon England in indignation and rage: wave upon wave of feather, fin, scale, claw, tooth and nail, all dark and shining and tangle-eyed as the soul of the heated jungles that its children carried with them.
England, of course, met them at the door: politely and hospitably at first, but things started degenerating rapidly as soon as the representatives from all the rest of the other countries and continents involved in the Project started Apparating in. All were armed with a dazzling array of completely uneducated and unhelpful opinions, and not one of them brought so much as a single chocolate frog as a host or hostess gift.
"Rude," Potter observed disapprovingly (and loudly) as he and Longbottom passed through the overflowing kitchens on the night after the North American delegations arrived. "Alright, Stella can provide her own flowers, and Frankie's richer than all of them put together and can afford his own wine and party puds, but still. It's the principle of the thing. Aunt Petunia," he said self-righteously (and even more loudly), "would be appalled."
"I'm appalled," Longbottom of Longbottom said, if not loudly, then in his best imitated projected ringing tones of one Lucius Malfoy, and with his Gran's best disapproving sniff thrown in for good measure. "Honestly, is this what our future holds, Potter, because I can't write about it this way if it is! Imagine the uncivilized literary example it would set for the children, never mind the potential traumatic involved! Why, in terms of even the most basic and essential etiquette, it's positively post-apocalyptic!"
"Unacceptable," Potter agreed as they made their way around the Manor and through the external door to Potter's tower, sniggering madly together (though Longbottom did wait till they were out of sight of the crowds). "And for the record? That last bit was in extremely poor taste. Well done, you!"
"Thank you," Longbottom said modestly. "Though again for the record? I meant it."
"So did I," Potter said. "They even got to the ginger newts behind the Mr. Smiley's enviro-cleaning fluid in the cleaning cupboard! Ap-palling, I say! And the absolute worst bit? They didn't even clean up the crumbs! They left the crumbs, Longbottom! In the cleaning cupboard! They just left them there! For the house-elves! With the broom and pan right there, never mind that Vanishing charms are a mere fourth year spell!"
"What are they teaching in schools these days," Neville agreed as they climbed the spiraled staircase. His own room was still available to him, of course, but as his loo shared a hot water pipe with the main guest bath on the floor, and as he was, as of yet unable to charm his shower hot at will, the two boys were sharing quarters for the interim. It had been Potter's suggestion, put forth as soon as he'd digested the implications of the problem... Potter did not approve of cold baths any more than he approved of crumbs in the cleaning cupboard or guests who arrived without food in hand to replace and bolster the household's (and by extension, his pockets') reserves.
That being said, and no matter the general mayhem, all of the South American hordes, at least. and insofar as the boys were concerned, were polite enough: gentle and reassuring, though whenever they were out of sight, if not earshot, the infuriated roaring aimed at the rest of the contingents promptly returned to the epic. As the roaring translated primarily in Portuguese and Spanish, Neville and Potter weren't privy to the specifics, but it wasn't exactly hard for them to gather the gist either. 'We told you so' was more of a matter of intonation over pronunciation in any language, and the message was coming through loud and clear.
"They were all against the Project from the start," Frankie told them, the fourth night after everyone had begun to arrive. The immediate family was all hiding out together in the smallest sitting room, and the sorrow and fatigue on his face was temporarily on leave, given way to worry, outright exhaustion, and profound irritation. As naturally expansive, genial and hospitable as he was, even he, as Head of Longbottom, had his limits - directly correlative, at this point in time with his lack of ability, given that he was what the locals called a Low-Maj, or a wizard of minimal magical talent, to quickly, easily and magically clean up his Manor. "The whole Hernandez de Silva clan. They were kind with it to the immediate family because we were immediate family; Uncle Harry was as good as Mig Silva's son, even if he was the only one who never realized it, and Mig was de facto head of the family after his adopted father 'Tonio died. As that head, he held their first and primary loyalty. So it got a bit complicated after he died, you see, twelve years before Uncle Harry first presented his ideas on the Project to the ICW, because no one who survived Mig or followed him was quite sure how to tell his adopted son how bad a mistake they thought that he was making, especially after he'd helped avenge Mig's parents from the lethifolds. Everybody else in the world knew exactly what they all thought, in excruciating, exacting detail, but Uncle Harry had saved them, you see? Saved everyone, but with Mig's parents involved.... It was a family issue. A matter of respect. Absolute respect, and they just... Didn't know how to tell him that they thought he'd gone totally off his nut, especially since he wasn't Catholic, or even Christian, formally anyway, so they couldn't pull the You're-Playing-God card as effectively as they might have otherwise."
"But why?" Neville said, bewildered. "Why were they against it? Didn't they want our war stopped? Didn't they want our world to be saved?'
"The saved world was a bit of a metaphor in this case," Scorpius Malfoy said. At a hundred eleven, he was yet straight-backed, fine-boned and slim: a bit fragile and delicate in his aged state, but yet the image, structurally speaking, of Auntie Niss. Other than his height and build though, he was all Malfoy: pale hair gone silver rather than white, grey eyes and triangular features. The defining and joyous enthusiasm for life, the boundless and overt puppy-like energy, and the chronically soft and silly expressions on the other hand, were just disconcerting. Charming, but disconcerting, never mind the silly and affected little monocle.... Neville rather suspected that the monocle, at least, was a joke, but as Potter said, with the wealth of three more months' exposure to the man in question, One Could Never Quite Tell With Scorp, and there was the accompanying maxim besides - It's Really, Really Better Not To Ask. "It didn't end literally, after all, did it, after Riddle's war? Their world ended: our grandparents and parents' world I mean, but the world went on." He gestured around. "Broken, changed... Diverted, maybe... Who knows what God intended, really? He didn't instigate or enjoy the evil fallout, I'm sure, any more than He did the lethifolds, but... Free will, right? He works with what we give him. What we offer forth: with what we do to ourselves and each other."
Potter rolled his eyes a bit at that. Potter and God, Neville thought, were more than obviously not on not-speaking terms the way He and Neville were... The other boy just didn't have context for theological musings, not on that bi-weekly ten-to-eleven-thirty basis anyway, never mind all the religious, and religiously delivered, opinions offered up every evening following.
"What about my parents?" he persisted. "Why didn't they want them saved?"
There was a sudden awkward silence at that…
And the entire conversation was abruptly put on hold, courtesy of a rather patently fabricated and trumped-up excuse involving the sudden necessity of helping the Master of the House mind his soup pots. Neville could tell that they all hoped that if they just let it go he'd forget to bring it up again, and his eyes narrowed in his sweet, round face as he watched them all retreat collectively to the kitchen, veritably shoving each other in their haste to get out the door first.
"They're relying on your manners to take note that the subject makes them uncomfortable," Potter observed from where he was sprawled across the squashiest sofa and methodically licking the insides off of an entire packet's worth of chocolate sandwich biscuits. "You're not going to let them get away with it, are you?"
"Hardly," Neville said. "Only I haven't got my answer yet, have I?"
"I could tell you."
"I'm sure you could, Potter, but I don't want to hear it from you. I want to hear it from them. Refusing to answer a perfectly reasonable question because it makes you uncomfortable when the lack of an answer is obviously making your guest uncomfortable is an exercise in complete self-indulgence, never mind self-prioritizing, e.g. selfishness, poor hospitality, and cowardice. I don't believe in encouraging any of those things."
"Did your Graaaaan teach you that one?" The tone, while ostensibly teasing, was not... quite… disparaging, but then again, that nasty little gleam considered, the tone wasn’t necessary. Potter, Neville had noticed, might not much like any of their current hosts, but there was something else there that had become increasingly apparent over the last few days… He really didn’t like sharing them either. He understood it intellectually; Stella had pulled him aside at one point and gently explained that in Potter’s personal context, sharing was a completely foreign concept - either he had something or someone else did; there was no middle ground - but understanding it didn’t make Potter’s version of self-expression there any easier to take.
Or to suppress the urge to slap that gleam, and the accompanying challenging smirk, right off of his smug little face.
"No," Neville said shortly. "She didn't."
"Who, then?'
The nine-year-old Head of House Longbottom turned to Look at him silently. Potter doe-eyed limpidly back at him, that devilish emerald glint dialed up to maximum. "I know it prolly makes you uncomfortable to answer it," he said with patently false sweetness. "But I'm just aching to know. Really. "
And with that... Something inside Neville snapped.
"It's alright. Bellatrix Lestrange said it," he said coolly. "After she burnt my father's tongue out of his head That Night - the fourth time - and right before she flayed him alive for not being able to offer her up the information she wanted from him on how you defeated Riddle."
Potter's hand stilled abruptly, his own tongue half out as he prepared to lick the filling off his seventh biscuit. He stared, paralyzed, green eyes enormous and genuinely stricken. Neville stared back coldly. After a long moment, Potter's gaze dropped, and he twisted his scrawny little hands together, seemingly heedless of the crushed biscuit within, and stared at his bony little knees.
"M' sorry," he muttered almost inaudibly. "That was rude of me."
And Neville was suddenly and deeply ashamed, more deeply ashamed than he'd ever been in his entire short life. He hesitated, then came to sit beside him, on the bare edge of the sofa.
"I'm sorry too," he said, equally quietly. "That wasn't fair of me. At all. It wasn't your fault, Potter. At all. It never was. She was evil all on her own, without anyone's help."
They sat in silence.
"You can keep sharing my tower if you want," Potter said finally, not looking at him. "After everyone goes, and you get your hot water back. If you leave your stuff in your room, anyway. I don't like clutter."
"Neither do I," Neville confessed. "Gran thinks I'm naturally tidy, but too much stuff around me just makes the inside of my head feel sweaty. A Mind Healer would probably say I'm projecting there."
"Are you?'
"No. It's because I cultivate a deliberately clumsy demeanor to go with my stutter, so people think I'm stupid and don't ask too many questions. So I have to trip now and again, and tripping hurts, and the less stuff is around, the longer I can reasonably go between. Can I ask you a question now? It's not rude, I promise."
"I s'pose."
"Do you sing like you do on purpose?”
"Huh?"
"You sing. All the time. Or hum, or whatever. All the time. It sounds really nice. You have a really nice voice. As nice as some of the choir boys at St. Paul's. You could join up after we go home, you're quite good enough, you know. Gran would totally support you if your guardians gave you permission to come with us."
He blinked as Potter stared at him uncertainly... Then actually, actually blushed. Violently.
"Don't you know you do it?” Neville asked curiously.
"I did it at the Dursleys," he muttered. "But only in my head. They didn't like it. I reckon maybe it's because when I came through I cracked my skull, and now it all leaks out."
"Well, I like it. Don't stop on my account."
And he watched, fascinated, as Potter blushed again and shoveled himself back into the corner of the sofa.
"That quote you said earlier," Potter said suddenly. "'What do they teach them in schools these days.' That's from the Narnia books, right?'
"Yeah. The first one. Why?'
"Have you read the fourth one?”
"Sure. Dad has the whole set."
"And you remember it? All of it?'
"Yeah."
"Can you tell it to me? I've read all the others but that one. The library at the school didn't have it. Frankie was going to take me to the book shops this weekend to get it, but then..." He waved vaguely.
"You just want me to tell it to you because it has dragons in it."
"It does?" The smaller boy sat up, patently delighted. "Really? You're not just taking the piss?'
"No. I mean, yes it does, and no. I'm not."
"Tell it to me, tell it to me!" Potter begged. "Please-please-pleeeeease?"
"Not here, Potter! There are too many people coming in and out."
"C'mon then." He slid down, gathering up his biscuits and stuffing them in his pockets. "We'll go get the rest of your things and go to my tower."
"I thought I wasn't allowed to bring my stuff."
"You can have one of my pockets," he allowed magnanimously. "I'll empty one for you. You can keep things in there."
"It's alright. I don't mind keeping it all separate."
"I won't touch any of it, I promise."
"It's not that," Neville said, after a moment.
"Then what?"
"If I move all my stuff in with you, they'll give my room to somebody else. And I like having my room. It's good to have a place to go, to sort things out. I have a lot of stuff to sort out, every day."
"They're not going to take it away, Longbottom! It's yours! I'll tell them not to though, for you, if you don't want to and want to be sure."
Neville rubbed his eyes. Changing one's bad habits, he reflected, was all very well, but the problem there was that once you got properly started with it... Once people were aware that you'd started it...
You weren't allowed to stop.
"I have bad dreams sometimes, Potter," he said bluntly. "About That Night. I know when they're going to happen; it's alway when I have a bad day, with too much stuff to sort. At home, I tell the house-elves to put silence spells up on those nights so I don't wake up Gran, or Uncle Algie, and I just tell them they're not allowed to tell anybody, every time, so they don't know. I don't want to wake you up."
"Oh," Potter said. "Alright. Well, that's alright. Are you going to have bad dreams tonight?'
"No. I'm not used to having lots of people around, and it's tiring. Whatever I've got to sort out right now is just going to have to wait."
"Yeah," he agreed, and when they'd done collecting Neville's things for the next day and had made their way up to the tower, they'd taken turns washing up and changing in the loo... Potter climbed into the big bed, shoving the bedclothes back. Round the other side, Neville climbed in as well, lying a bit gingerly yet beside him. It was, he had to admit, a very comfortable bed, with plenty of room, and had more than the one redeeming feature... Even as they arranged the blankets, the glass shifted, the room darkened suddenly, and as the ceiling glassed over as well, they were flooded in swathes of starlight.
"That's brilliant," he said, as he'd said every night since the first night he'd seen it. "Just... Brilliant."
"Yeah," Potter agreed, as he had in response on every one of those same nights, and rolled on his side, thunking at his pillows. "It is. Story?"
Neville settled back, and sorted through his mental bookshelves. Potter squirmed in anticipation.
"The Voyage of the Dawn Treader," he began. "By C.S. Lewis. Book Four of the Chronicles of Narnia. Chapter One: The Picture in the Bedroom. 'There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. His parents called him Eustace Clarence and masters called him Scrubb. I can't tell you how his friends spoke to him, for he had none. He didn't call his Father and Mother "Father" and "Mother", but Harold and Alberta. They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotallers and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on the beds and the windows were always open.'"
“They’d never survive a day on Privet Drive,” Potter said disparagingly. “Though it’s still better than Dudley Durrrr- sley. And he does deserve it. For the record.”
"Eustace Clarence liked animals," Neville continued, ignoring that. "'Especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card.'"
“Isn't that lovely!”
"'He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.'
“In. For. May. Shun,” Potter repeated. “Nope. Not on Privet Drive. Fat children, yes. Exercise? Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.”
“In. Ter. Up. Shuns,” Longbottom repeated back. “Im. Po. Lite. Haven’t we had this conversation already?”
“It’s not interruptions. I’m expressing myself." Potter smirked at him in the cascading, rippling starlight.
“Mm. 'Eustace Clarence disliked his cousins the four Pevensies, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy -'”
“Bet they disliked him right back.”
"'But he was quite glad when he heard that Edmund and Lucy were coming to stay. For deep down inside him he liked bossing and bullying; and, though he was a puny little person who couldn't have stood up even to Lucy, let alone Edmund, in a fight, he knew that there are dozens of ways to give people a bad time if you are in your own home and they are only visitors.”
“Or if they’re not.”
“Looberries,” Longbottom agreed. “Or powdered glass-nettle, soaked three times and dried between.”
“Ooooh! What does that do?”
"‘Loads and loads of sound and fury signifying nothing. You dust it over the powdered sugar on the shortbread biscuits at tea: the ones that Gran never eats because the sugar gets all over her dress, and you never eat because they’re rubbish, and Uncle Algie stuffs down like they’re the cure for stupidity, and when he starts feeling unsettled you brew the tea with the looberries. The combined effect delays the effect of the looberries and gives him just about an hour between the time to hit the pub with his blokes, and the time it takes him to humiliate himself in front of the Leaky Cauldron, and again in front of the goblins when he goes down to take out enough money to bribe emergency Obliviators. Nobody obliviates goblins.”
It took a moment for that to process fully.
“What the bleeding hell did he do to deserve that?” Potter said in awe.
“Dropped me out a third story window to jump my magic. I bounced, but still. Gran cried. And it wasn’t because she was happy either. Gran doesn’t cry when she’s happy; she just gives me second desserts.”
"Ah. What kind of desserts?" Potter asked, diverted.
"Everything but rice pud. She tried to make me eat it once, but only once. I sicked up all over the house-elf."
Potter guffawed. Loudly.
"You're alright, Ace," he said. "Alright. Go on. I won't interrupt again, I promise. Wait, before you go on, one question. What kind of dragons are we talking here?"
"I would say... Hebridean Blacks? The description's right, and there was an island involved too."
"Brilliant." He settled down again. Neville startled a little as he moved in a bit so that he was snuggled up next to him. "Go on. You were at the bit that talks on the dozens of ways to annoy visitors in your own home?"
"It doesn't actually give examples, you know?"
"That's alright. I could write my own book there. Number One, if the visitor's Aunt Marge: Exist. Number Two: Breathe. Number Three: Twitch violently at random intervals. Number Four: Don't ever blink when looking at her...."