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Story: The Private Garden of Neville Longbottom
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
laguera25
Rating: PG-13-R
Summary: Every man tends a secret garden, and Neville Longbottom is no exception. He is a good boy, a diligent boy, and he does his best to tend it well in the moldering house of his grandmother, but every secret garden has a dark place where even the hands that tend it dare not venture.
Disclaimer(s): All recognizable people, places, locales, and spells are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic, Bloomsbury, and Warner Bros. Inc. No copyright infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
"Come, little boy. If I intended...forest," is an excerpt of a poem by Kenneth Pratchen, found in his book But Even So.
"Journeys end in lovers' meeting," and "Whatever walked there, walked alone," are quotes from Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, 1961.
Once upon a time, you were seven years old, and one day, not long before Christmas, your grandmother told you that, at long last, you were going to see your parents, who you had not seen for a very long time. In fact, you had not seen them since the night they were spirited away to the faraway land of St. Mungo's by a Curse from Dark knights. You were so small that you hardly remembered them at all.
And so, when your grandmother told you that you were going to visit them, you were overjoyed. After all, you had so many questions to ask them. Did they miss you? Did they love you? When were they coming home? If he came back, did they want him to bring them one of the gingerbread men you and Gran made on Christmas Eve? You were so excited, and your head was so brimming with a thousand and one queries that you drifted through those heady days until the trip in a joyous daze. You scarcely slept, and when you did, it was to dream that you had tumbled headlong into the world of the photo album you kept under the sofa and over which you pored for hours every chance you could.
And so, on that morning when she called you to fetch your mittens and your muffler and come along, you left the parlor without a backward glance. You forgot two things. Your muffler, which Gran retrieved with thin-lipped irritation, and the photo album. You left it open on the floor, its pictures exposed to whatever predation the shadows desired. You didn't mean to leave it there, so forlorn and unprotected, but it was in your nature to forget. Gran always said you had a head like a sieve.
She put the muffler and your head and tightened her scarf around her throat, and then she held out her hand and said the magic words. Give me your hand, Neville. And like a fool, like a child, you listened. You slipped your small, chubby hand into her narrow, weathered one, and the closing of her fingers around your wrist was as the snapping of the iron shackle. There was no escape from that moment onward, but you did not know that then, were blissfully unaware that not all adventures were grand, and not all of them ended in lovers' meeting.
In your ignorance, you left the safety of hearth and home gladly, dancing and squirming as she shut the door against the wintry bite of the wind and the shrewish howl of Jack Frost's imps in the eaves and cornices. You stomped your rubbers in the snow to hear it crunch beneath your feet, and you sent plumes of steaming breath into the air to watch the faces and shapes it made, and told yourself that they were Patronuses, the secret soul magic all wizards know. You didn't even mind when Gran Disapparated with you in her grip and your eyes felt as though they must surely burst from their sockets.
How strange that when you opened your eyes again, you found yourself not at a great medieval fortress with ramparts and royal banners that snapped and popped in the wind, but in a cramped, dirty alley overflowing with garbage and facing a storefront with whitewashed windows. You thought that she had erred, had gone too far or not far enough, and you opened your mouth to ask her what had gone wrong, but before you could speak, she was striding in the direction of that blind, dirty window, pulling you resolutely in her wake.
What are we doing here, Gran? you asked, sure that she was playing a Christmas joke. Surely your brave Mummy and Daddy could not be here, in a ramshackle shoppe that even the bustling Muggles ignored.
But all she said was, Be quiet, Neville, boy, and mind what I tell you.
She tugged you onto the pavement in front of the shop, her fingers hard and biting against your frozen flesh, and you stared at the sad displays through the grimy glass in mute fascination. Drooping hats and tatty purses arranged haphazardly on a teetering table. Gloves yellow with age. A pair of Muggle shoes from which one heel had broken. The corpses of dead mice and the bric a brac of a world with which you coexisted but did not interact.
But it was the mannequins that fascinated you the most, the frozen people with lidless eyes and unsettling gazes that saw nothing and everything all at once. They were alien and terrifying, monsters masquerading in human skin, dispassionate as the plastic from which they were molded, yet possessed of an avid, leering malevolence. Their mouths were fashioned into polite smiles on their blank faces, and you knew they could not move, but you knew, in the place where all the secret truths lie, that when the sun set, mouths gifted neither tongue nor teeth would whisper into the watches of the night, the breath no sane god ever granted them would fog the window glass, and the hands that stretched forth to showcase their gaudy wares in the light of day would beckon to little boys who ventured too near under the abetting veil of night, and ensnare them forevermore in their strangling embrace, tendrils of diseased wisteria around unwary throats.
Come, little boy. If we meant to harm you, would we be standing here, in the darkest part of the forest? they asked slyly as they returned your stare with their smooth-marble eyes, and though their expressions shifted not at all, you felt them smile.
You whimpered and recoiled, but your grandmother's grip was iron, and her patience was thin. Merlin's beard! They're only mannequins. Now stop behaving like a child and come along.
Here there be monsters, you wanted to tell her. You wanted to tell her that there were worse terrors in the world than the crouching bogey in the wardrobe and his ally beneath the bed, but your tongue had cleaved itself to the roof of your mouth, and the warning lodged in your throat, and it was too late, too late, because she was pulling you through the shimmering, syrupy glass of the shoppe and into a drab, grey corridor that reeked of astringent and starch and sour illness.
This was not the St. Mungo's your bright, child's imagination had envisioned, the regal medieval citadel of majesty and might where heroes lived in sweet repose. There were no damsels with garlands in their hair, no lyres or roaring hearths and sagging banquet tables, only white-smocked matrons trundling down the corridors with carts full of porridge that looked like construction paste. No one spoke as you entered, and there was no laughter. Indeed, there was no sound at all except for the discreet squeak of crepe soles on stone and the scrape of hinges as the matrons delivered their cargo to the unseen occupants of the rooms that lined the corridor. None of them acknowledged Gran as she passed, and when you offered one of the matrons a shy wave, she did not return it.
Down the corridor, past the receptionist, who did not look up from her sheaves of parchment, and up the narrow, stone stairs. You passed the Accidental Magic Ward, the Trauma Ward, and the Maternity ward, and all the while, she squeezed your wrist in a vise grip and pulled you inexorably upward through the concentric circles of human misery.
Then she was stepping primly onto the fourth floor and marching toward a door marked Closed Ward. The ominous finality of the phrase rekindled the swooning dread the mannequins had inspired. Whatever walked there, walked alone, and you had no desire to join it.
Like it or not, that was your destination, and there was no hesitation in your grandmother's stride as she approached. She rapped smartly upon the door, and the echoes reverberated throughout the corridor like the tolling of a bell.
Knock, knock, you thought, and the answer came unbidden. Who's there?
Who was a nurse, as it turned out, square-jawed and stern as she peered suspiciously through a crack in the door and repeated the question. Who's there?
The Longbottoms, came the reply, and your grandmother's chin had jutted in unconscious defiance.
The door swung open then to reveal a gloomy, airless room divided into curtained cubicles, a mausoleum of the not yet dead. Most of the curtains were drawn, but a few stood open to your horrified, fascinated gaze. It was a menagerie of horrors untold, a retinue of oddities and shambling travesties that made you want to scream and laugh at the same time. Some bore obvious signs of their affliction-missing limbs and tumorous growths that contorted them into shapes no human form was ever meant to assume; one woman had become a weeping sore that stank of putrescence, her skin an angry, running red. All that remained of her humanity were here eyes, wide and bright with terrible awareness. She mewled as you passed, and perhaps it was a harmless greeting, but the nurse scowled and yanked the curtain closed.
Others were unmarked. They sat in their beds or wandered the narrow aisle between the beds with nary a blemish. Those who walked hummed as they sauntered and shuffled and strutted about their rounds to nowhere and never, and a tall, thin wizard who might have passed for a business wizard had he not been wearing the dull grey hospital tunic greeted you with a touch of three bony fingers to the brim of a non-existent wizard's hat.
Good day, young sir, he had said with brisk jollity, and you smiled at him until you noticed his eyes, distant and far too bright in his gaunt face. May the Devil take you and eat your considerable innards in a pie.
That will be quite enough from you, Mr. Grenadier, the nurse had said sternly, and steered him back to his bed.
And then, in a moment you will remember until the first shovels of earth patter over your coffin, she marched to the back of the room and pulled aside the curtain.
Mr. and Mrs. Longbottom, she had said cheerfully, you have visitors.
And you began to scream.
They could not be your parents, those unspeakable atrocities propped side by side in a bed with threadbare linens pulled up to their emaciated hips. Your parents were heroes. Your Gran had told you so times uncounted, and heroes did not sit in their beds and stare at nothing with eyes like polished marble. They did not have sunken, jaundiced skin pulled too tightly over pikes of brittle bone or sparse wisps of lank, white hair that sat atop their scalps in scabrous patches. It countermanded the immutable laws of the fairy tale. No, these creatures were not your parents. Your parents were young and vital and merry, and they walked in the gardens at Kew. The pictures said so, and the pictures did not lie.
You screamed and screamed in mindless denial of the truth your eyes and the nurse would have you believe. There was rage in your howl, and confusion and defiance, and you closed your eyes to shut out the sight of the figures on the bed. You would go on screaming until the evil curse was broken and the illusion shattered; you would bellow until the masks fell away and your real parents stood before you, whole and unbowed and anxious to gather you in their arms.
The slap was hard and bruising across your cheek, and it sliced through your hysteria with cruel totality. The scream died as though it had never been, and you blinked at her in owlish incomprehension, one hand coming up to touch the bloom of heat on your otherwise numb face.
Stop this foolishness at once, she hissed through gritted teeth. I brought you here today because I thought you were old enough to behave, and here you are, screaming like a toddler. Your father must be appalled, seeing you like this.
On the bed, the thing that wore your father's name like an ill-fitting costume blinked sedately, a thin runner of saliva glistening on its papery chin. If it had noticed your outburst at all, it gave no sign. In fact, it had not changed at all since the nurse had exposed this sad and secret show to the diseased light of the room. You swallowed the suicidal urge to laugh.
Those aren't my parents, you told her matter-of-factly.
Her eyes narrowed, and her nostrils flared. Of course they are. I'm not in the habit of playing games, Neville, and I've no time for this one. Now say hello to your parents, she commanded, and shoved you forward.
It wasn't the bony goad of her hand that compelled you to obey, nor was it the looming threat of punishment for your outburst. You moved because you were unwilling to concede defeat and let the fairy tale die. The seed that would one day convince the Sorting Hat to place you in the pantheon of heroes when all you had ever shown yourself to be was a coward refused to yield in the face of insurmountable truth. You had to know beyond all doubt, to look into those dusty-marble eyes and see the family resemblance no illness could ravage.
You crept to the edge of the metal bedframe on trembling knees and placed your hand on the cold steel. Sweat beaded on your forehead and prickled on your palms, but you gathered your courage, cleared your throat, and whispered, Happy Christmas, Mummy.
The wizened crone on the bed said nothing. She stared at the far wall, and her fingers plucked ineffectually at the coverlet puddled at her hips. The man beside her gave a reedy grunt. That was all. No flicker of recognition kindled in their eyes, no stirring of memory untainted by the searing claws of Cruciatus. They simply sat, withered and stinking of old sweat and long confinement, and as the silence stretched awkwardly into minutes, your childhood illusions crumbled into dust.
I'm glad to see you.
A lie almost worthy of Salazar Slytherin, and oh, how it hurt to tell it for the hot cramp of grief in your chest. It wasn't right, this truth, wasn't fair, and all you wanted was to retreat to the safety of the parlor and the book of yesterday. You shuffled your feet and fixed your gaze on the smooth stone beneath your shoes.
I love you, you muttered in a small, tremulous voice to a russet stain just beyond the tip of one scuffing shoe, and turned to flee.
And that was when your mother, who had heretofore displayed the sentience of potted clay, sprang to malevolent life. One moment she was sitting on the bed, staring into thoughts only she could see, and the next, she scrabbling from beneath the bedclothes with startling, serpentine grace and the speed of the damned. The sheets fell from her scrawny waist, and just before the clammy, kiln-fire grip of her gnarled fingers coiled around your wrists, you glimpsed her wasted thighs, slat-thin and white as the sheets that had once covered them. You were seven years old and ignorant of the secret vices of the flesh-that knowledge was six years away-but it was indecent all the same for a boy to see such a forbidden place, and you tore your gaze away, your cheeks hot with shame.
Her fleshless, burning hand shot out and seized your own, and when you looked into her empty, bulging eyes, reason fled. You threw back your head and howled, keened like an animal caught in a killing snare, because they were devoid of all but the unassailable truth. The thing on the bed was not your mother anymore, if it ever had been.
"It was the mannequin people," Neville moaned to the empty parlor, and hugged the photo album to his chest as though it were a talisman against the crushing tide of memories that washed over him with painful acuity. "It was the mannequin people. They came in the night and stole her away and lived inside her face." His nostrils filled with the remembered stench of unwashed flesh and madness-brine and old cottage cheese.
Yes, resumed the voice, soft as a sigh against the shell of his ear. They did. They put on her face like a Halloween mask and leered at the world from behind the comfortable façade of unfortunate lunacy, but their eyes gave them away. Their eyes they could not change. They were as blank and dead as alabaster statuary, bits of isinglass inside her face.
You saw them and knew that your worst suppositions about the mannequins in the deserted shoppe were true. They did move under the abetting cloak of night and whisper to one another in furtive voices full of sand and clandestine malice. They looked out upon the sleeping world with their wide, covetous eyes and plotted to seize that which had been denied them, the Divine animus that would bid them walk beyond the confines of their glass walls, and at least two of them had found a way to walk in the light of day, diseased as it was by the rank breath of the dying.
You saw all of this and howled in terror and stark comprehension. You would have shouted a warning, but the hand wrapped around your wrist, hot and hard and unnatural as plastic against your flesh, had throttled your tongue, and you could only shriek incoherently as you struggled and flailed at the grinning dybbuk that held you fast.
The nurse rushed to prise her fingers from you, and your Gran shouted at you to stop carrying on so, her voice high and shrill with outrage and panic, and impossibly distant. But you did not stop, could not stop. If you stopped, you would not start again. The grinning fetch crouched on the bed would slither down your unguarded throat in a sour mist and take up residence in your lungs and heart and the base of your brain, a parasite that would leach you of all your memories until you were nothing but a shambling husk of wattled flesh and ruined bone, stripped of all but the primordial will to survive. You screamed to beat the devil and save your soul.
Your grandmother slapped you in an effort to bring you to heel, but you barely felt it in the extremity of your terror. You kept on screaming when she picked you up and carried you bodily from the room. You were still trying to scream even after she placed you in a full Body Bind and floated you down the street as she stomped along behind you, promising reprisals beyond reckoning. No sound emerged from between your locked jaws, but your wails tickled your sinuses like the promise of a sneeze, and they did not stop until you drifted over the threshold and the door slammed behind you and shut the monsters out.
There was no porridge for you that night, but that was fine. You were sure you'd never eat again. You cowered beneath the coverlet and moaned, your belly a hot, shriveled ache under your cupping hand. You buried your head beneath the pillow and listened to the tinny strains of the Victrola and the popping creak of the rocker's runners through the wall. They were familiar sounds, comfortable, and on any other night, they would have lulled you to sleep, but on that night, sleep never came. You lay in your bed and strained your ears for the stealthy scrape of approaching feet or the chitinous clitter of nails on the frozen pane of your bedroom window. You went on listening long after the Victrola had closed its petals for the night and your grandmother had grudgingly surrendered to her own bitter dreams. You held your breath, the better to hear the surreptitious snick of a latch being eased from its casement.
But if they crept beneath the window eaves or skulked in the dark corners of the lavatory, they never came for you, and the terrors of childhood are fleeting, and so when the hours passed with no demon's breath on your face, you slipped from your bed and padded down the stairs to the parlor in search of the album. Your grandmother had found her solace, and now you wanted yours. It was only fair, and even after all that you had seen in the dirty halls of St. Mungo's, you still believed in fairness. You still do.
It was on the floor where you had left it in your haste, and you nearly stepped on it with your slippered feet. You picked it up and carried it to the divan, and under the green glow that heralds both death and knowledge, you groped for bedrock amid the madness.
There she was, your fair mother, smiling at a son she had never seen and but scarcely held. Her fingers still twiddled in merry greeting, and though you could not see them, her eyes still twinkled with secret delight, but the darkness had turned her fingers to the scuttling legs of a spider, and her eyes had become inscrutable, black pits that had no end. The skin you so often imagined to be soft as cream was suddenly thin as parchment paper and tinged the sickly green of decay. You smothered a scream with the back of one disbelieving hand and tried to push the album away, but you could not close it. You could only stare at the picture gone horribly amok.
The present had subsumed the past, and the mother-creature gazing out at you from behind the sepia patina of old photographs was not the cherubic, rosy-cheeked young woman of 1980, but the wasted, scrabbling, mad travesty that spent its days sloughing skin and hours in a bed on the Closed Ward. It smiled a vulpine smile, all yellow teeth and cracked, pitted lips, and you recoiled, pressed your buttocks against the far arm of the divan and drew your knees to your chest.
Hello, Neville, the mother creature said, its voice a high, insectile buzz from behind the thin sheet of plastic that held the photographs in place. Don't be afraid, Neville. It's Mummy. Come to Mummy, darling. It's what you've always wanted, isn't it? it crooned.
It reached out a long, skinny arm in invitation, and if a member of the Wizengamot were to ask you under penalty of death, you would swear upon Merlin's grimoire that the plastic bulged outward at the weight of those fleshless fingers. It creaked at the pressure from dirty, ragged nails that protruded from the ends of stiff, eager fingers.
For the third time that night, you screamed, because you knew how its touch would feel, a feverish, simmering grip that festered with disease and lunacy. If it touched you, sanity would be reduced to smoldering cinders and when your Gran found you, your hair would be white as the Christmas Day snow. You seized the album in your hands and slammed it shut, screaming all the while, and in a blind panic, you shoved it beneath the divan.
Your grandmother found you huddled on the stairs, shivering with terror, a puddle of vomit at your feet. Shock had rendered you inarticulate, and when she demanded to know what had prompted this latest round of the screaming memes, you could only shudder and babble about the mannequins in your mother's skin.
You spent the rest of the night curled in a ball beneath your bed, eyes fixed on the baseboard and the balls of lint that nested there in a cheerful colony, and counted the fly specks on the plaster. And that was where I found you. You were so small and so pitiful that I was almost sorry to set down roots in your private garden, but I had no choice, and I still don't. I am not kind, and I am not fair, but I am yours.
Neville was distantly aware that there was a slippery warmth on his cheeks. He touched his fingers to his cheeks and was surprised to discover tears beading on his fingertips like dew. He was crying, and that realization undid him completely. He covered his face with his hands and wept.
He could not remember the last time he had cried. The visits to St. Mungo's had long since ceased to inspire anything but the dull resignation of growing up and accepting the irrefutable. Even the once poignant communion of the wrappers now produced only the briefest twinge of grief and longing. He wondered briefly how much of an ungrateful bastard that made him.
"Moody," he said thickly through a hitching sob. "It was Professor Moody. In his office. The last time I cried."
The irony that he had done his last bit of real grieving in front of one of the sadists who had caused it was not lost on him, and he laughed, a gagging, bubbling guffaw that dissolved into more harsh weeping, and he did nothing to stem the tide. Absurd as it seemed, the tears soothed him, loosened the knot in his chest one drop at a time.
Catharsis, he thought nonsensically, and vomited soundlessly over the edge of the divan, a wrenching spasm that made his stomach throb and his eyes water.
He cried for it all there in the parlor, all the dreams that he had lost in the bright, red glare of unbridled rage, and all the dreams that his parents would never see him fulfill. He cried for his mother's wave and her beautiful smile, gone to tartar and rot in St. Mungo's. He cried for his father, who had once faced down four Death Eaters in a standoff in Derbyshire, and who had gone to ignominious retirement from Aurory in his bedroom slippers and his nightcap. He cried for Uncle Algie, who meant well, but who had the sense of driftwood, and who still drank too much on his sister's birthday.
But mostly he cried for his Gran, whose life had come to an end on the night her son forgot his. She lived and breathed, and the merchants in Diagon Alley still sold her their wares, but time had frozen for her and would never start again. She would always look at him and see in his face the son of whom she had been so unceremoniously robbed, and she would wonder why and how the man she had so lovingly and assiduously reared had so suddenly tumbled into childhood again. To her tongue, his name would always have a single syllable, and there would always be the music and the room at the top of the stairs to keep the truth at a comfortable distance.
"Oh, bugger," he managed weakly when he had regained his composure. The strains from the Victrola drifted to his ears. "Oh, bugger."
What are you going to do now? asked the Lunagall voice.
He looked at the album still in his hands and up the stairs at the closed door of his father's room, where his grandmother rocked away the heartbeats of her life, cushioned by the sweetness of the past. He knew what the voice was asking, and he was not sure he could. They were all he had left of his parents, and though he was afraid of them, he was also afraid to let them go.
It does not do to dwell on dreams, Mr. Longbottom, said the Lunagall voice. Particularly those from which you have long been awakened. Do you want to spend the rest of your days clinging to a dead past and mooning over photographs while the walls molder around you and this house becomes a tomb? When your grandmother dies, will you take her place in the rocking chair and hold vigil over a life no one-not even you-can recall? Let it go. Build a life of your own and let your mother and father rest. You have all been tortured enough.
Such sensible advice, but it was traitorous to cast them aside after all these years, to leave them for the flames and pretend they had never been. It was not what a good son did. A good son kept his parents' memories and the useless bits of paper the ghost of his mother thrust into his hand; he tended them as he tended his private garden, with love and care. That was a fact even the Hufflepuffs knew.
Not forgetting, Mr. Longbottom. Never forgetting. Just…love without expectation.
He blinked and looked at the picture in his lap. His mother was smiling at him, but through the blur of tears, it was a monstrous rictus, the leering, rubber face of the storefront mannequin that lived in St. Mungo's in the cubicle marked "Longbottom".
That decided him, and he closed the album with a snap and drew the wand from the inside pocket of his robes.
My wand, he corrected himself. Mine. No strings attached. He pointed it at the empty fire grate and whispered, "Incendio!" It sounded like a prayer in the silence of the room.
For once, his magic did not fail him, and fire kindled in the hearth. He stood for a moment and let the sudden warmth wash over his face, eyes closed and chin upturned, a flower seeking the sun's caress. The photo album was heavy on his lap, and the velvet beneath his palm was an exquisite roughness against his palm. He was seized by a sweet pang of nostalgia, and his grip tightened convulsively.
My Mum and Dad are in here. If I throw it into the fire, there is no going back. The pictures will be reduced to cinders, and all the king's horses and all the king's men will never be able to mend them again. I'll lose them forever.
You never had them.
The warbling from the Victrola reached a crescendo, and with a breathless cry, he threw the photo album into the flames. It landed with a soft, decisive thump, and in the space of seconds, the edges had curled and blackened. The cover fell away in a shower of sparks, and his mother's face greeted him. It wavered and shimmered, miraculously untouched by the voracious fingers of the fire, and in the brief instant before her face ran and dripped in the blast-furnace heat, he saw her brilliant, lovely smile and her twiddling fingers.
Hello, Neville, and goodbye. Mummy loves you.
"I love you, too, Mum," he murmured.
He watched the flames until there was no trace of the album and the ashes had ceased to flutter and skirl in the grate, and then he closed his eyes and inhaled the scent of smoke and benediction. His eyes stung, and there was a lump in his throat, but his shoulders were no longer burdened with the weight of a responsibility he could not name, and the breath came easily to his lungs. When he stepped forward to bank the dying embers with the fire poker, his tread was curiously light.
Gran would be furious if she ever found out what he had done, but that was all right. The deed was done, and he found he was not sorry for it. Whatever charm the pictures had once held for him, it had curdled, soured into poison, and the fire had burned it away. He was alive, and he was free, and he had a chance now to make his own path. His name would never grace the fabled halls of Aurory, and he would never be the smiling face on the Quidditch poster, but he would find his niche, and when he did, he would make sure that when his name was spoken, it was spoken with dignity, not because of who his father had been, but because of who he had become.
The music still wafted from the room at the top of the stairs, and he thought about asking his Gran if she wanted to go for a walk with him to see the perennials in bloom, but he dismissed the idea. She had long since lost her love of bright things, and he suspected that for her, it was already too late. She had made her choice, and he had made his, and he could not save her.
He left the parlor, and with a last look at the narrow mouth of the stairs and the door to the room that time forgot, he wished her well and opened the front door. The sun was bright and hot and welcoming against his cheeks, and when he closed the door, he was humming. It was a beautiful day, and he had a garden to tend.
A/N: There you have it. It was begun before HBP, but finished well after. I'm not entirely certain it works, but it was a bizarre and wild ride. Feedback is appreciated, but personal attacks are not.
Author:
laguera25Rating: PG-13-R
Summary: Every man tends a secret garden, and Neville Longbottom is no exception. He is a good boy, a diligent boy, and he does his best to tend it well in the moldering house of his grandmother, but every secret garden has a dark place where even the hands that tend it dare not venture.
Disclaimer(s): All recognizable people, places, locales, and spells are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic, Bloomsbury, and Warner Bros. Inc. No copyright infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
"Come, little boy. If I intended...forest," is an excerpt of a poem by Kenneth Pratchen, found in his book But Even So.
"Journeys end in lovers' meeting," and "Whatever walked there, walked alone," are quotes from Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, 1961.
Once upon a time, you were seven years old, and one day, not long before Christmas, your grandmother told you that, at long last, you were going to see your parents, who you had not seen for a very long time. In fact, you had not seen them since the night they were spirited away to the faraway land of St. Mungo's by a Curse from Dark knights. You were so small that you hardly remembered them at all.
And so, when your grandmother told you that you were going to visit them, you were overjoyed. After all, you had so many questions to ask them. Did they miss you? Did they love you? When were they coming home? If he came back, did they want him to bring them one of the gingerbread men you and Gran made on Christmas Eve? You were so excited, and your head was so brimming with a thousand and one queries that you drifted through those heady days until the trip in a joyous daze. You scarcely slept, and when you did, it was to dream that you had tumbled headlong into the world of the photo album you kept under the sofa and over which you pored for hours every chance you could.
And so, on that morning when she called you to fetch your mittens and your muffler and come along, you left the parlor without a backward glance. You forgot two things. Your muffler, which Gran retrieved with thin-lipped irritation, and the photo album. You left it open on the floor, its pictures exposed to whatever predation the shadows desired. You didn't mean to leave it there, so forlorn and unprotected, but it was in your nature to forget. Gran always said you had a head like a sieve.
She put the muffler and your head and tightened her scarf around her throat, and then she held out her hand and said the magic words. Give me your hand, Neville. And like a fool, like a child, you listened. You slipped your small, chubby hand into her narrow, weathered one, and the closing of her fingers around your wrist was as the snapping of the iron shackle. There was no escape from that moment onward, but you did not know that then, were blissfully unaware that not all adventures were grand, and not all of them ended in lovers' meeting.
In your ignorance, you left the safety of hearth and home gladly, dancing and squirming as she shut the door against the wintry bite of the wind and the shrewish howl of Jack Frost's imps in the eaves and cornices. You stomped your rubbers in the snow to hear it crunch beneath your feet, and you sent plumes of steaming breath into the air to watch the faces and shapes it made, and told yourself that they were Patronuses, the secret soul magic all wizards know. You didn't even mind when Gran Disapparated with you in her grip and your eyes felt as though they must surely burst from their sockets.
How strange that when you opened your eyes again, you found yourself not at a great medieval fortress with ramparts and royal banners that snapped and popped in the wind, but in a cramped, dirty alley overflowing with garbage and facing a storefront with whitewashed windows. You thought that she had erred, had gone too far or not far enough, and you opened your mouth to ask her what had gone wrong, but before you could speak, she was striding in the direction of that blind, dirty window, pulling you resolutely in her wake.
What are we doing here, Gran? you asked, sure that she was playing a Christmas joke. Surely your brave Mummy and Daddy could not be here, in a ramshackle shoppe that even the bustling Muggles ignored.
But all she said was, Be quiet, Neville, boy, and mind what I tell you.
She tugged you onto the pavement in front of the shop, her fingers hard and biting against your frozen flesh, and you stared at the sad displays through the grimy glass in mute fascination. Drooping hats and tatty purses arranged haphazardly on a teetering table. Gloves yellow with age. A pair of Muggle shoes from which one heel had broken. The corpses of dead mice and the bric a brac of a world with which you coexisted but did not interact.
But it was the mannequins that fascinated you the most, the frozen people with lidless eyes and unsettling gazes that saw nothing and everything all at once. They were alien and terrifying, monsters masquerading in human skin, dispassionate as the plastic from which they were molded, yet possessed of an avid, leering malevolence. Their mouths were fashioned into polite smiles on their blank faces, and you knew they could not move, but you knew, in the place where all the secret truths lie, that when the sun set, mouths gifted neither tongue nor teeth would whisper into the watches of the night, the breath no sane god ever granted them would fog the window glass, and the hands that stretched forth to showcase their gaudy wares in the light of day would beckon to little boys who ventured too near under the abetting veil of night, and ensnare them forevermore in their strangling embrace, tendrils of diseased wisteria around unwary throats.
Come, little boy. If we meant to harm you, would we be standing here, in the darkest part of the forest? they asked slyly as they returned your stare with their smooth-marble eyes, and though their expressions shifted not at all, you felt them smile.
You whimpered and recoiled, but your grandmother's grip was iron, and her patience was thin. Merlin's beard! They're only mannequins. Now stop behaving like a child and come along.
Here there be monsters, you wanted to tell her. You wanted to tell her that there were worse terrors in the world than the crouching bogey in the wardrobe and his ally beneath the bed, but your tongue had cleaved itself to the roof of your mouth, and the warning lodged in your throat, and it was too late, too late, because she was pulling you through the shimmering, syrupy glass of the shoppe and into a drab, grey corridor that reeked of astringent and starch and sour illness.
This was not the St. Mungo's your bright, child's imagination had envisioned, the regal medieval citadel of majesty and might where heroes lived in sweet repose. There were no damsels with garlands in their hair, no lyres or roaring hearths and sagging banquet tables, only white-smocked matrons trundling down the corridors with carts full of porridge that looked like construction paste. No one spoke as you entered, and there was no laughter. Indeed, there was no sound at all except for the discreet squeak of crepe soles on stone and the scrape of hinges as the matrons delivered their cargo to the unseen occupants of the rooms that lined the corridor. None of them acknowledged Gran as she passed, and when you offered one of the matrons a shy wave, she did not return it.
Down the corridor, past the receptionist, who did not look up from her sheaves of parchment, and up the narrow, stone stairs. You passed the Accidental Magic Ward, the Trauma Ward, and the Maternity ward, and all the while, she squeezed your wrist in a vise grip and pulled you inexorably upward through the concentric circles of human misery.
Then she was stepping primly onto the fourth floor and marching toward a door marked Closed Ward. The ominous finality of the phrase rekindled the swooning dread the mannequins had inspired. Whatever walked there, walked alone, and you had no desire to join it.
Like it or not, that was your destination, and there was no hesitation in your grandmother's stride as she approached. She rapped smartly upon the door, and the echoes reverberated throughout the corridor like the tolling of a bell.
Knock, knock, you thought, and the answer came unbidden. Who's there?
Who was a nurse, as it turned out, square-jawed and stern as she peered suspiciously through a crack in the door and repeated the question. Who's there?
The Longbottoms, came the reply, and your grandmother's chin had jutted in unconscious defiance.
The door swung open then to reveal a gloomy, airless room divided into curtained cubicles, a mausoleum of the not yet dead. Most of the curtains were drawn, but a few stood open to your horrified, fascinated gaze. It was a menagerie of horrors untold, a retinue of oddities and shambling travesties that made you want to scream and laugh at the same time. Some bore obvious signs of their affliction-missing limbs and tumorous growths that contorted them into shapes no human form was ever meant to assume; one woman had become a weeping sore that stank of putrescence, her skin an angry, running red. All that remained of her humanity were here eyes, wide and bright with terrible awareness. She mewled as you passed, and perhaps it was a harmless greeting, but the nurse scowled and yanked the curtain closed.
Others were unmarked. They sat in their beds or wandered the narrow aisle between the beds with nary a blemish. Those who walked hummed as they sauntered and shuffled and strutted about their rounds to nowhere and never, and a tall, thin wizard who might have passed for a business wizard had he not been wearing the dull grey hospital tunic greeted you with a touch of three bony fingers to the brim of a non-existent wizard's hat.
Good day, young sir, he had said with brisk jollity, and you smiled at him until you noticed his eyes, distant and far too bright in his gaunt face. May the Devil take you and eat your considerable innards in a pie.
That will be quite enough from you, Mr. Grenadier, the nurse had said sternly, and steered him back to his bed.
And then, in a moment you will remember until the first shovels of earth patter over your coffin, she marched to the back of the room and pulled aside the curtain.
Mr. and Mrs. Longbottom, she had said cheerfully, you have visitors.
And you began to scream.
They could not be your parents, those unspeakable atrocities propped side by side in a bed with threadbare linens pulled up to their emaciated hips. Your parents were heroes. Your Gran had told you so times uncounted, and heroes did not sit in their beds and stare at nothing with eyes like polished marble. They did not have sunken, jaundiced skin pulled too tightly over pikes of brittle bone or sparse wisps of lank, white hair that sat atop their scalps in scabrous patches. It countermanded the immutable laws of the fairy tale. No, these creatures were not your parents. Your parents were young and vital and merry, and they walked in the gardens at Kew. The pictures said so, and the pictures did not lie.
You screamed and screamed in mindless denial of the truth your eyes and the nurse would have you believe. There was rage in your howl, and confusion and defiance, and you closed your eyes to shut out the sight of the figures on the bed. You would go on screaming until the evil curse was broken and the illusion shattered; you would bellow until the masks fell away and your real parents stood before you, whole and unbowed and anxious to gather you in their arms.
The slap was hard and bruising across your cheek, and it sliced through your hysteria with cruel totality. The scream died as though it had never been, and you blinked at her in owlish incomprehension, one hand coming up to touch the bloom of heat on your otherwise numb face.
Stop this foolishness at once, she hissed through gritted teeth. I brought you here today because I thought you were old enough to behave, and here you are, screaming like a toddler. Your father must be appalled, seeing you like this.
On the bed, the thing that wore your father's name like an ill-fitting costume blinked sedately, a thin runner of saliva glistening on its papery chin. If it had noticed your outburst at all, it gave no sign. In fact, it had not changed at all since the nurse had exposed this sad and secret show to the diseased light of the room. You swallowed the suicidal urge to laugh.
Those aren't my parents, you told her matter-of-factly.
Her eyes narrowed, and her nostrils flared. Of course they are. I'm not in the habit of playing games, Neville, and I've no time for this one. Now say hello to your parents, she commanded, and shoved you forward.
It wasn't the bony goad of her hand that compelled you to obey, nor was it the looming threat of punishment for your outburst. You moved because you were unwilling to concede defeat and let the fairy tale die. The seed that would one day convince the Sorting Hat to place you in the pantheon of heroes when all you had ever shown yourself to be was a coward refused to yield in the face of insurmountable truth. You had to know beyond all doubt, to look into those dusty-marble eyes and see the family resemblance no illness could ravage.
You crept to the edge of the metal bedframe on trembling knees and placed your hand on the cold steel. Sweat beaded on your forehead and prickled on your palms, but you gathered your courage, cleared your throat, and whispered, Happy Christmas, Mummy.
The wizened crone on the bed said nothing. She stared at the far wall, and her fingers plucked ineffectually at the coverlet puddled at her hips. The man beside her gave a reedy grunt. That was all. No flicker of recognition kindled in their eyes, no stirring of memory untainted by the searing claws of Cruciatus. They simply sat, withered and stinking of old sweat and long confinement, and as the silence stretched awkwardly into minutes, your childhood illusions crumbled into dust.
I'm glad to see you.
A lie almost worthy of Salazar Slytherin, and oh, how it hurt to tell it for the hot cramp of grief in your chest. It wasn't right, this truth, wasn't fair, and all you wanted was to retreat to the safety of the parlor and the book of yesterday. You shuffled your feet and fixed your gaze on the smooth stone beneath your shoes.
I love you, you muttered in a small, tremulous voice to a russet stain just beyond the tip of one scuffing shoe, and turned to flee.
And that was when your mother, who had heretofore displayed the sentience of potted clay, sprang to malevolent life. One moment she was sitting on the bed, staring into thoughts only she could see, and the next, she scrabbling from beneath the bedclothes with startling, serpentine grace and the speed of the damned. The sheets fell from her scrawny waist, and just before the clammy, kiln-fire grip of her gnarled fingers coiled around your wrists, you glimpsed her wasted thighs, slat-thin and white as the sheets that had once covered them. You were seven years old and ignorant of the secret vices of the flesh-that knowledge was six years away-but it was indecent all the same for a boy to see such a forbidden place, and you tore your gaze away, your cheeks hot with shame.
Her fleshless, burning hand shot out and seized your own, and when you looked into her empty, bulging eyes, reason fled. You threw back your head and howled, keened like an animal caught in a killing snare, because they were devoid of all but the unassailable truth. The thing on the bed was not your mother anymore, if it ever had been.
"It was the mannequin people," Neville moaned to the empty parlor, and hugged the photo album to his chest as though it were a talisman against the crushing tide of memories that washed over him with painful acuity. "It was the mannequin people. They came in the night and stole her away and lived inside her face." His nostrils filled with the remembered stench of unwashed flesh and madness-brine and old cottage cheese.
Yes, resumed the voice, soft as a sigh against the shell of his ear. They did. They put on her face like a Halloween mask and leered at the world from behind the comfortable façade of unfortunate lunacy, but their eyes gave them away. Their eyes they could not change. They were as blank and dead as alabaster statuary, bits of isinglass inside her face.
You saw them and knew that your worst suppositions about the mannequins in the deserted shoppe were true. They did move under the abetting cloak of night and whisper to one another in furtive voices full of sand and clandestine malice. They looked out upon the sleeping world with their wide, covetous eyes and plotted to seize that which had been denied them, the Divine animus that would bid them walk beyond the confines of their glass walls, and at least two of them had found a way to walk in the light of day, diseased as it was by the rank breath of the dying.
You saw all of this and howled in terror and stark comprehension. You would have shouted a warning, but the hand wrapped around your wrist, hot and hard and unnatural as plastic against your flesh, had throttled your tongue, and you could only shriek incoherently as you struggled and flailed at the grinning dybbuk that held you fast.
The nurse rushed to prise her fingers from you, and your Gran shouted at you to stop carrying on so, her voice high and shrill with outrage and panic, and impossibly distant. But you did not stop, could not stop. If you stopped, you would not start again. The grinning fetch crouched on the bed would slither down your unguarded throat in a sour mist and take up residence in your lungs and heart and the base of your brain, a parasite that would leach you of all your memories until you were nothing but a shambling husk of wattled flesh and ruined bone, stripped of all but the primordial will to survive. You screamed to beat the devil and save your soul.
Your grandmother slapped you in an effort to bring you to heel, but you barely felt it in the extremity of your terror. You kept on screaming when she picked you up and carried you bodily from the room. You were still trying to scream even after she placed you in a full Body Bind and floated you down the street as she stomped along behind you, promising reprisals beyond reckoning. No sound emerged from between your locked jaws, but your wails tickled your sinuses like the promise of a sneeze, and they did not stop until you drifted over the threshold and the door slammed behind you and shut the monsters out.
There was no porridge for you that night, but that was fine. You were sure you'd never eat again. You cowered beneath the coverlet and moaned, your belly a hot, shriveled ache under your cupping hand. You buried your head beneath the pillow and listened to the tinny strains of the Victrola and the popping creak of the rocker's runners through the wall. They were familiar sounds, comfortable, and on any other night, they would have lulled you to sleep, but on that night, sleep never came. You lay in your bed and strained your ears for the stealthy scrape of approaching feet or the chitinous clitter of nails on the frozen pane of your bedroom window. You went on listening long after the Victrola had closed its petals for the night and your grandmother had grudgingly surrendered to her own bitter dreams. You held your breath, the better to hear the surreptitious snick of a latch being eased from its casement.
But if they crept beneath the window eaves or skulked in the dark corners of the lavatory, they never came for you, and the terrors of childhood are fleeting, and so when the hours passed with no demon's breath on your face, you slipped from your bed and padded down the stairs to the parlor in search of the album. Your grandmother had found her solace, and now you wanted yours. It was only fair, and even after all that you had seen in the dirty halls of St. Mungo's, you still believed in fairness. You still do.
It was on the floor where you had left it in your haste, and you nearly stepped on it with your slippered feet. You picked it up and carried it to the divan, and under the green glow that heralds both death and knowledge, you groped for bedrock amid the madness.
There she was, your fair mother, smiling at a son she had never seen and but scarcely held. Her fingers still twiddled in merry greeting, and though you could not see them, her eyes still twinkled with secret delight, but the darkness had turned her fingers to the scuttling legs of a spider, and her eyes had become inscrutable, black pits that had no end. The skin you so often imagined to be soft as cream was suddenly thin as parchment paper and tinged the sickly green of decay. You smothered a scream with the back of one disbelieving hand and tried to push the album away, but you could not close it. You could only stare at the picture gone horribly amok.
The present had subsumed the past, and the mother-creature gazing out at you from behind the sepia patina of old photographs was not the cherubic, rosy-cheeked young woman of 1980, but the wasted, scrabbling, mad travesty that spent its days sloughing skin and hours in a bed on the Closed Ward. It smiled a vulpine smile, all yellow teeth and cracked, pitted lips, and you recoiled, pressed your buttocks against the far arm of the divan and drew your knees to your chest.
Hello, Neville, the mother creature said, its voice a high, insectile buzz from behind the thin sheet of plastic that held the photographs in place. Don't be afraid, Neville. It's Mummy. Come to Mummy, darling. It's what you've always wanted, isn't it? it crooned.
It reached out a long, skinny arm in invitation, and if a member of the Wizengamot were to ask you under penalty of death, you would swear upon Merlin's grimoire that the plastic bulged outward at the weight of those fleshless fingers. It creaked at the pressure from dirty, ragged nails that protruded from the ends of stiff, eager fingers.
For the third time that night, you screamed, because you knew how its touch would feel, a feverish, simmering grip that festered with disease and lunacy. If it touched you, sanity would be reduced to smoldering cinders and when your Gran found you, your hair would be white as the Christmas Day snow. You seized the album in your hands and slammed it shut, screaming all the while, and in a blind panic, you shoved it beneath the divan.
Your grandmother found you huddled on the stairs, shivering with terror, a puddle of vomit at your feet. Shock had rendered you inarticulate, and when she demanded to know what had prompted this latest round of the screaming memes, you could only shudder and babble about the mannequins in your mother's skin.
You spent the rest of the night curled in a ball beneath your bed, eyes fixed on the baseboard and the balls of lint that nested there in a cheerful colony, and counted the fly specks on the plaster. And that was where I found you. You were so small and so pitiful that I was almost sorry to set down roots in your private garden, but I had no choice, and I still don't. I am not kind, and I am not fair, but I am yours.
Neville was distantly aware that there was a slippery warmth on his cheeks. He touched his fingers to his cheeks and was surprised to discover tears beading on his fingertips like dew. He was crying, and that realization undid him completely. He covered his face with his hands and wept.
He could not remember the last time he had cried. The visits to St. Mungo's had long since ceased to inspire anything but the dull resignation of growing up and accepting the irrefutable. Even the once poignant communion of the wrappers now produced only the briefest twinge of grief and longing. He wondered briefly how much of an ungrateful bastard that made him.
"Moody," he said thickly through a hitching sob. "It was Professor Moody. In his office. The last time I cried."
The irony that he had done his last bit of real grieving in front of one of the sadists who had caused it was not lost on him, and he laughed, a gagging, bubbling guffaw that dissolved into more harsh weeping, and he did nothing to stem the tide. Absurd as it seemed, the tears soothed him, loosened the knot in his chest one drop at a time.
Catharsis, he thought nonsensically, and vomited soundlessly over the edge of the divan, a wrenching spasm that made his stomach throb and his eyes water.
He cried for it all there in the parlor, all the dreams that he had lost in the bright, red glare of unbridled rage, and all the dreams that his parents would never see him fulfill. He cried for his mother's wave and her beautiful smile, gone to tartar and rot in St. Mungo's. He cried for his father, who had once faced down four Death Eaters in a standoff in Derbyshire, and who had gone to ignominious retirement from Aurory in his bedroom slippers and his nightcap. He cried for Uncle Algie, who meant well, but who had the sense of driftwood, and who still drank too much on his sister's birthday.
But mostly he cried for his Gran, whose life had come to an end on the night her son forgot his. She lived and breathed, and the merchants in Diagon Alley still sold her their wares, but time had frozen for her and would never start again. She would always look at him and see in his face the son of whom she had been so unceremoniously robbed, and she would wonder why and how the man she had so lovingly and assiduously reared had so suddenly tumbled into childhood again. To her tongue, his name would always have a single syllable, and there would always be the music and the room at the top of the stairs to keep the truth at a comfortable distance.
"Oh, bugger," he managed weakly when he had regained his composure. The strains from the Victrola drifted to his ears. "Oh, bugger."
What are you going to do now? asked the Lunagall voice.
He looked at the album still in his hands and up the stairs at the closed door of his father's room, where his grandmother rocked away the heartbeats of her life, cushioned by the sweetness of the past. He knew what the voice was asking, and he was not sure he could. They were all he had left of his parents, and though he was afraid of them, he was also afraid to let them go.
It does not do to dwell on dreams, Mr. Longbottom, said the Lunagall voice. Particularly those from which you have long been awakened. Do you want to spend the rest of your days clinging to a dead past and mooning over photographs while the walls molder around you and this house becomes a tomb? When your grandmother dies, will you take her place in the rocking chair and hold vigil over a life no one-not even you-can recall? Let it go. Build a life of your own and let your mother and father rest. You have all been tortured enough.
Such sensible advice, but it was traitorous to cast them aside after all these years, to leave them for the flames and pretend they had never been. It was not what a good son did. A good son kept his parents' memories and the useless bits of paper the ghost of his mother thrust into his hand; he tended them as he tended his private garden, with love and care. That was a fact even the Hufflepuffs knew.
Not forgetting, Mr. Longbottom. Never forgetting. Just…love without expectation.
He blinked and looked at the picture in his lap. His mother was smiling at him, but through the blur of tears, it was a monstrous rictus, the leering, rubber face of the storefront mannequin that lived in St. Mungo's in the cubicle marked "Longbottom".
That decided him, and he closed the album with a snap and drew the wand from the inside pocket of his robes.
My wand, he corrected himself. Mine. No strings attached. He pointed it at the empty fire grate and whispered, "Incendio!" It sounded like a prayer in the silence of the room.
For once, his magic did not fail him, and fire kindled in the hearth. He stood for a moment and let the sudden warmth wash over his face, eyes closed and chin upturned, a flower seeking the sun's caress. The photo album was heavy on his lap, and the velvet beneath his palm was an exquisite roughness against his palm. He was seized by a sweet pang of nostalgia, and his grip tightened convulsively.
My Mum and Dad are in here. If I throw it into the fire, there is no going back. The pictures will be reduced to cinders, and all the king's horses and all the king's men will never be able to mend them again. I'll lose them forever.
You never had them.
The warbling from the Victrola reached a crescendo, and with a breathless cry, he threw the photo album into the flames. It landed with a soft, decisive thump, and in the space of seconds, the edges had curled and blackened. The cover fell away in a shower of sparks, and his mother's face greeted him. It wavered and shimmered, miraculously untouched by the voracious fingers of the fire, and in the brief instant before her face ran and dripped in the blast-furnace heat, he saw her brilliant, lovely smile and her twiddling fingers.
Hello, Neville, and goodbye. Mummy loves you.
"I love you, too, Mum," he murmured.
He watched the flames until there was no trace of the album and the ashes had ceased to flutter and skirl in the grate, and then he closed his eyes and inhaled the scent of smoke and benediction. His eyes stung, and there was a lump in his throat, but his shoulders were no longer burdened with the weight of a responsibility he could not name, and the breath came easily to his lungs. When he stepped forward to bank the dying embers with the fire poker, his tread was curiously light.
Gran would be furious if she ever found out what he had done, but that was all right. The deed was done, and he found he was not sorry for it. Whatever charm the pictures had once held for him, it had curdled, soured into poison, and the fire had burned it away. He was alive, and he was free, and he had a chance now to make his own path. His name would never grace the fabled halls of Aurory, and he would never be the smiling face on the Quidditch poster, but he would find his niche, and when he did, he would make sure that when his name was spoken, it was spoken with dignity, not because of who his father had been, but because of who he had become.
The music still wafted from the room at the top of the stairs, and he thought about asking his Gran if she wanted to go for a walk with him to see the perennials in bloom, but he dismissed the idea. She had long since lost her love of bright things, and he suspected that for her, it was already too late. She had made her choice, and he had made his, and he could not save her.
He left the parlor, and with a last look at the narrow mouth of the stairs and the door to the room that time forgot, he wished her well and opened the front door. The sun was bright and hot and welcoming against his cheeks, and when he closed the door, he was humming. It was a beautiful day, and he had a garden to tend.
A/N: There you have it. It was begun before HBP, but finished well after. I'm not entirely certain it works, but it was a bizarre and wild ride. Feedback is appreciated, but personal attacks are not.