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After the war, Hannah presses little mint sprigs into one of her mum’s old copies of The Hobbit , right on the page where there’s a line that goes so comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their endings. She wraps it in crinkled brown scotch paper, ties it up neatly with some twine, and attaches it to little Iseult’s leg. “Go on now, love, off to Susie you go.”
It’s like this, essentially: Hannah is adrift. Hannah has fallen from grace.
Her grief has built itself to the size of a chapel, one she imagines to be on some dark green hill in Ireland, mired in eternal sleety rain and frothing black seas. Her heart feels much the same. Some days, she can’t owl her own father over the sharp pain of it all. She’ll sit with a cup of earl grey and look through a window kissed with rain and think of her mum. Mum’s memories come easy: burnished gold hair falling out of a hastily-made bun, pale green paint on her fingertips from painting the bedroom walls, that mostly fawny floral armchair that she used to sit in with the The Sun in hand.
She is caught in these moments, sluggish, a fly in amber.
Learning the secrets of the Leaky Cauldron is, perhaps sadly, not distraction enough. It’s warmer and smaller than Hogwarts, and so its secrets carry a gentle intimacy. Room 323’s mirror was made from melted fortune ball, and so spurts out lucky little fortunes if it so desires. The stairs up to the attic have vines that twine around your ankles and bloom into thornless, buttery yellow roses if you don’t walk fast enough. One of the rooms has a moving, magical painting on its ceiling, one of a ballroom dance, with butterbeer and plum dresses and laughing lords. It is kind, barely warm, just good enough magic.
But it is not enough.
She’s not asking for healing, she’s not asking for grace .
She is asking for something that isn’t just breathing.
Life comes.
It comes, it comes, slowly, cautiously, like the pale pink glow of the sun over the hills and houses. She buys a black cat and names it Tristan, pets it and coos at it and puts a little silver bell round its neck. It delivers notes within the Leaky Cauldron, to those who stay ghost-like in the upper rooms (those who can’t bear to go back to the homes in which their families breathed their last), and becomes a symbol of rebirth, at least to her.
Nine lives, after all.
And after Tristan, after she can begin penning letters in her signature lavender ink again instead of sending childhood books, after she can begin smiling in her quiet manner again, after she can look Susie in her eyes (the one pale and cataract-ridden and hexed, the other the same, only with a spelled-amethyst iris), after all of this —
She finally believes she can live again.
And only after this realization does Neville slip in, quietly.
She sees him in the Leaky Cauldron, of course, beige robes and a cheery smile. He seems untouched, from faraway, a pale gold in the morning light, but then she moves towards him and it becomes a sad, oh. There.
It was a hopeful thing, anyways, to think that Neville Longbottom, of all people, would be immaculate through the war. It doesn’t break her heart or anything like that, no. Not like seeing poor shivering Lavender Brown now a cursed thing, not like attending Sakura Akagi’s funeral with her namesake red cherry blossoms falling over her grave, not like sweet Rose Wax who walked tall but wore long-sleeves to hide the blood traitor carved a nasty pink into her forearm. Nothing like that.
But still. The scars were as easy to see on him as they were on anyone else.
She can remember, sort of sadly, what he had been like in their earlier years at Hogwarts: kind, ruddy-faced, always toting his slimy little toad around. Uniform always in a disarray. She remembers him timid . She remembers that sword glinting in the candlelight from the castle, glinting, glinting — pale yellow snakeblood.
More than all of that, more than that colossal, aching moment of heroism, more than those pure memories of a soft-hearted, bumbling student, she remembers the armchairs. Hours spent together, backs hunched over a table, poring over parchment and paper. She remembers his face: hollowed and hallowed in the creamy candlelight. Chamomile steam wreathing his sunken cheeks. A knight in the making.
Here’s a secret: she fell half-in-love with him then.
Here’s another: she never sent him a book, nor a letter.
And, a third: she kissed him, then, before the very end.
“Hallo, Neville.”
“Hannah! How ‘sit?”
By the end of the night, when he’s the last customer in the Leaky Cauldron, lamps all a dimmed gold and snow falling gently, she kisses him. Right at the door. Desperate and hoping and hard. It’s awkward. When are most things with Neville not? Teeth clinking together and noses bumping and when his hand goes to her hair, he pulls at the pins in her bun just a little too rough.
But.
But.
His lips are so soft it’s sinful, netherlandish fairy-tale pink in the light, and she looks at him, really looks at him, and she can see that he’s just the same. He was a knight from the beginning — chivalrous, good-hearted, and always, always, always courageous.
He smiles at her, rubbing his rough knuckles against the curve of her cheek, “What are you thinking of, love?”
She shakes her head, “Nothing at all.”
And kisses him again.