Author: Morgan
Email: [email protected]
Rating: PG
Summary: Aftermath at the Longbottoms', Moody POV
Feedback: If you can be nice and not point out how inane this is
Disclaimer: I am neither JKR nor Scholastic nor anyone else. They should be grateful for that.
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We thought they were dead, you see.
We picked up their broken bodies, black with bruises caused not by impact but by sheer agony, and the carpet where they had lain was still warm with the heat of their just-boiled blood. The child was screaming in Albus' arms, wet wails that didn't understand.
He spoke for all of us, I think.
We covered them with flower-patterned sheets because Alice didn't have any plain ones, loved her garden so much she liked to have it inside as well as out, and her husband just laughed and said his masculinity was not threatened by sleeping on linens covered with orchids and trailing vines. A few strands of her hair remained uncovered, but none of us were quite ready to tuck them in. Frank's mother arrived then, her ridiculous hat perched on her grey head, and Frank had once whispered to me that the best part of being an Auror was the chase and the worst part the catching. I had never quite understood him- I loved laying my hands on Dark Wizards, I relished the impotent hatred in their eyes. Looking into the eyes of a woman whose dead son was lying beneath a pink and purple sheet on the floor of his sitting room, I finally understood he hadn't meant apprehending the criminals. He meant the aftermath.
She didn't cry, no, but her stiff gait as she walked over to Dumbledore seemed to fill the room with all the tears she refused to shed, the vulture on her hat looking away, ashamed of his pertinence. "Give Neville to me, Professor," she intoned, holding out wrinkled hands too small to hold her other child. The boy was passed into her embrace, and his eyes strayed into the last place he had seen his parents, his hiccoughs louder as we all held our breath. I wondered if he would associate the pile of flesh covered in fabric vines with memory or nightmares, or if he would never remember it at all. Over a year old- old enough to dream. "Mama?" he bleated, cheeks shining, and his grandmother turned away.
"Here, Neville, take your blanket. You're coming to visit my house, won't that be nice?"
He started screaming once she reached the front door, and he was still calling for his parents when his grandmother disapparated, his struggling body held tightly in her grasp. His voice was hoarse, I realized, and wondered how many hours he had spent howling, his wails of terror a mirror for the chant of pain from voices he recognized.
Albus looked at the wet spots on his robes, the boy's tears darkening the light blur of the fabric. "The last child I held under such circumstances was asleep," he murmured, straightening the glasses young Neville had knocked askew. "Though not, perhaps, when Hagrid found him."
This child had lived too- but the casualties after victory is declared are never as lamented, and the heroes never as adored.
A whisper of breath at our feet, and one eye had turned to look before my body could manage it.
"Alive!" someone breathed, and we pulled the sheet off to believe in fertile soil and miracles.
****
Two months later, I visited St. Mungo's with a bouquet of lady-slippers. Frank's eyes rolled in his head, and Alice cowered at the sight of the flowers. "Not in splendidsharp! No, no! Wine and tea. Wine and tea. No..." Her moans followed me as I turned away, white paper crushed in my clutching hands.
I have never been fond of Spring.
****
fin