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Neville stands there – no, he is forced to kneel with defiance burning in his eyes, his comrades in arms on his left and right, biting back tears of frustration and pain, forced onto his knees by the woman who tortured his parents into insanity, the woman who destroyed his life, the woman who is about to walk off scot free.
Neville kneels there and looks up to the person he once thought to be his friend.
Green eyes blaze back at him, back to that frightening lifeless look they’ve had in the beginning, back when Neville had just got to know Harry, that little boy who never talked and never did, but always, always watched. Neville had been surprised by how much Harry saw. He knew about a tiff between lovers and an argument amongst friends before the rumours reached Neville, and could guess the why and when fairly accurately.
Sometimes, Neville wondered about what Harry knew about him. What did he see that convinced him that Neville was worth the helping hand he’d offered? What did he observe that made him reach out to Neville in the way he did? What did he spot that he gave Neville a chance when no-one else did? What sort of weird habits and strange mannerisms did he catch sight of that Neville didn’t even know he had? Which of his secrets had he grasped? When would he inevitably notice something that would drive him away and forget about Neville just like everyone else?
Thoughts such like this used to keep Neville up late at night, turned him into a shivering ball of anxiety at the mere notion of his only friend leaving him. And when he lay there, deadly afraid, he became even more depressed at the thought of a proud Lion of Gryffindor suffering such problems. The House of the Brave…!
It was only later, when Neville had conquered such fears and found acceptance within himself and Gryffindor, that he started to think what that said about him, that a Slytherin had seen some worth in him when no-one else had.
No longer wondering what made him good and exceptional enough for Harry to take notice of him, he instead considered what made him so cowardly and weak that he needed to seek comfort outside the safe confines of Gryffindor Tower.
Well, Neville has to admit, a big part of such thoughts came through Susan’s prompting. Shortly after their bonding, they’d been endlessly curious about each other. Neville had asked all sorts of questions about Susan’s friends and House and Family and her aunt while Susan had wanted to know all there was to know about Gryffindor.
Quite embarrassingly, Neville hadn’t been able to answer a lot of her queries. He’d noticed then, how excluded he’d been within his House that was supposed to be his pillar and support. Instead, every interaction with his year mates had felt like shackles tying him down. He didn’t get the humour in the biting comments Seamus and Dean shot at each other, didn’t see the fun in Quidditch or arguing about it that Ron and Hermione engaged in nor was he particularly interested in make-up, boys or Divination like Lavender and Parvati. He didn’t have any daring feats to brag about – except for that time Harry and he had broken his father’s wand, but that action was too sneaky and cunning to admit to in the presence of the boys who much preferred brash and blunt acts. And instead of contemplating aloud whether to leave his homework for later and go out to watch the newest of Fred and George’s pranks, Neville made notes about herbs and all sorts of plants and went to meet up with Harry.
Without knowing about it, Neville had distanced himself rather thoroughly from Gryffindor. And he’d been happy about it, content with his plants and his friend, until Susan started asking the same innocent questions Neville asked her.
Suddenly, Neville was confronted with his exclusion and horrified by it. How did he not know that Fred had asked Angelina to be his date for the Yule Ball and been heartlessly rejected until he asked properly and seriously like a proper gentleman? How did he miss that George had tried to trick Angelina into going with him instead when he showed up in Fred’s stead, only to hastily dodge the hex she’d thrown at him in retaliation? How did Seamus and Ginny upset everyone by rapidly dating and breaking up and getting together again and breaking up once more ad infinitum without Neville’s knowledge? How did everyone but Neville meet up on Saturday to relax together, only the boys and girls in Neville’s year, occasionally grilling Hermione for tips for the homework or bringing their soulmates?
So he’d started sitting in the Common Room when he organised his notes, listening to the laughs and whispers around him the way Harry told him he did, only that Neville sat in a hidden corner and not in the middle of the room, accepted and acknowledged as Neville was. He introduced Susan officially to his year mates when he learned that a sixth year had done so when he’d found his soulmate. He brought her along on one of those meetings on Saturdays, shaking with nerves both because that would be his first appearance there and because he was scared that Susan wouldn’t be accepted.
He shouldn’t have worried.
She got along swimmingly well with Parvati, knowing her sister Patil rather well since her soulmate was an upperclassman in Hufflepuff. About as interested in Quidditch as Neville, she didn’t talk much with the boys, which left this task to Neville.
That was when he noticed that he and Harry talked a lot and agreed about things that the group had never even questioned. For example, everyone was unanimously of the firm opinion that a wizard as evil as You-Know-Who didn’t have a soulmate.
That got Neville thinking.
If all of the Wizarding World said so, could it really be wrong? Harry didn’t know everything, though he often seemed omniscient.
And so Neville started doubting Harry.
Of course, this process took longer than this paraphrase might make it seem. It actually stretched over three years.
Naturally, during this time, Neville still met up with Harry. When he was with his year mates or even with Susan, he sometimes found himself missing Harry’s witty tongue that managed to make sense of the most confusing situation and somehow made the biggest problem seem smaller, the way his eyes lit up with mirth when he began to tell a joke as if to warn Neville that he was about to be brought to laughter, how he seemed to have a superhuman sense for when to push and when to change a topic. He never made Neville uncomfortable, not like Ron who didn’t understand why Neville didn’t want to go to the next Quidditch match even when he’d already rejected his offer ten times. He never made Neville nervous, the way Susan did when she stepped close a bit too quickly or touched him when he wasn’t paying attention. He never made Neville ashamed, the way Hermione did when she droned on about what she knew and what she thought Neville should know, having been raised in the Wizarding World.
No-one managed to make Neville as proud as he felt when he made Harry laugh, an almost impossible feat, or when Harry praised him. Sometimes, he believed himself stupid when Harry showed him to an answer he himself had jumped to immediately, but he preferred this gentle guidance to Hermione’s tendency to give him the answer up straight and berate him for needed help in the first place, or Lavender’s condescending way of patting his cheek and calling him cute when he expressed his confusion.
But as they grew older, Neville increasingly came to reconsider his and Harry’s views on the world. They’d always been somewhat opposed, with Neville’s boundless optimism and Harry’s identically firm belief that all of humanity was actually terrible. Harry tended to pick silver linings in the terrible present instead of focusing on the bright horizon in front of him while Neville marched forwards, eyes on the prize. Neville planned the future while Harry considered what he could have done better in a situation long past and forgotten in Neville’s eyes.
He also noticed that Harry was not as open with Neville as he was with him.
Some of the fault lay with Neville, he realised later on. He’d been too consumed with Susan and the resulting social obligations of meeting her friends and finding out new things to talk about with her to spend much time with Harry. He’d only been reminded of the world outside his soulmate and Gryffindor when Harry had made an attempt on his life. The wake-up call was taken to heart, but it also made Neville aware that he didn’t know as much about Harry’s life as Harry knew about him.
He didn’t even know if Harry had a soul mark.
Neville realised then that Harry had many problems and concerns that he didn’t trust Neville with. When they met up, he instead put on a happy face and tricked Neville into thinking he was fine, keeping his suffering away from his friend who would have sought to soothe it. As such, Harry left Neville a helpless bystander, forever regretting not doing anything and not seeing anything, but also forever unable to ease.
What Harry thought to be a kindness, keeping his unsolvable troubles to himself, Neville saw as a slight against him. If the two of them had talked earlier, not years after the suicide attempt, the other one now powerless to assist, the other behind the secure bars and wards of an Azkaban cell, they might have emerged stronger from this crisis.
But as it happened, Harry believed his actions and, more importantly, his silence to be for the best while Neville began to withdraw from what he was too timid to address, but too involved in to ignore.
It was a gradual change. Neville spent more time with his fellow Gryffindors, finding more and more points of common interest with them. Their friendship would never be as close as he and Harry were – or had been? –, but with so much time spent together and enough will to befriend each other, they all soon grew to be good friends.
Neville and Susan were the perfect additions to the group, as Lavender would reveal to them. Susan enjoyed talking about gossip with Lavender and Parvati while still being able to keep up when the boys started talking about the defensive spells needed to enter the Auror training program. Neville was soft-spoken and kind, if a bit shy, in a way that interested the girls. Each one wanted to boast of being the one to have made him into a confident young man, a goal Susan supported and which drew in even Hermione, who had not found anything to connect her to Lavender and Parvati until then. Ron appreciated Neville for his solid knowledge in Herbology and, acquired through Harry, Potions. Seamus and Neville found a common interest in plants and what could be done to and with them, even if one of them was only fascinated by the processes which led to the emergence of alcohol. During one of Hermione and Ron’s frequent fights, Dean and Susan appreciated the dry and sarcastic comments Neville had about them, the humour and inclination for which he’d learned from Harry.
When all this time spent with his new friends and Susan and Susan’s friends was added up with the time spent doing homework and studying for increasingly difficult and progressively more important tests and exams, Neville barely managed to spend a minute alone, not to speak of with Harry.
Harry, who had begun to find his own social circle away from Neville, even if his consisted of much younger and more distant friends than Neville’s, and so limited the already little time they could’ve spent together even more.
So, over the course of the years, the two went from meeting up almost every day to once or maybe twice a month.
Such a thing is not unusual for childhood friends as they grow up and apart, but with distancing himself from Harry and unintentionally making him hold his tongue for fear of frightening off his friend, Neville stopped listening to another point of view that was not centred around the Light.
When Neville told Susan about his parents, she didn’t smile a bit and confess to feeling a similar disconnect to her own dead parents. Instead, she broke down in tears. She cried when she spoke of her parents although she hadn’t got to know them any better than Neville knew his.
Unintentionally, Susan gave Neville the feeling that his reaction was wrong. He confessed his parents’ fate to his Gryffindor group of friends, and they all responded similarly. Ron gave an angry tirade about Death Eaters and Dark wizards. Hermione promised to look up if the damage could somehow be reversed. Seamus and Dean offered their condolences. Lavender fainted. Parvati paled drastically and slowly began talking about her cousin who’d also perished in a war she hadn’t lived. Soon, they all sat in a circle, comparing the harm Death Eaters and Dark Magic had done to their Families, Hermione supplying them with hard facts and statistics.
Neville began to lift his parents on the pedestal all the others seemed to hold their own deceased relatives, feeling scorn for the callous way he’d spoken about and to them before.
Neville didn’t address the topic with Harry. Otherwise, he might have got to know about all the deaths and injuries the Light side was responsible for in the war. As it was, he knew theoretically that war was a terrible thing where both sides got hurt, but slowly grew convinced that the other side had been much worse and more dangerous.
And as Neville was introduced to such propaganda, he consciously began to reject everything to do with Dark Magic much more fiercely than before. He didn’t pause to consider or question his friends and his beliefs. It wasn’t in his character to stop for such irrelevant things. If he was wrong, he’d see it at the end of the path and reconsider and be on his way again, and if he was right, he would have only wasted his time. His optimistic nature didn’t allow him to face that, even if he was incorrect, he might would not be able to correct his wrong.
And Harry, as rarely as he met Neville, only saw his friend slip further away without being able to do anything about it, as he told Neville later on, one in freedom and one shouldering the consequences of not thinking deeply.
So, of course, when Neville was faced with the murderers in all but deed of his beloved parents running amok and no-one stopping them, he began to seethe. As he saw how the Slytherins rose their dainty Pureblood noses into the air with self-importance and pride in their Death Eater relatives, Neville was convinced that the belief so many held so close to their heart – that Slytherins were Dark and, therefore, evil – was true.
He didn’t have Harry to tell him about the Muggleborn students in Slytherin who now feared for their lives, or about the many Death Eaters who didn’t participate in battles any more than many Order members who’d only contributed to the war efforts with their money and promises of someday, or about how many Death Eaters and Slytherins were disgusted by the Lestranges’ overly violent tendencies. He didn’t have Harry to remind him that the one-dimensional caricatures of the evil Death Eater enemies that the Light side would love to paint their opponents as were as multi-facetted and diverse as every human is.
But Neville didn’t have Harry, so he was convinced that the Death Eaters were pure evil and his parents and the Order were pure good.
Neville wanted revenge, and he wanted justice. Neither would be given to him by the new “government”, so he joined the Order. His parents once had been part of it, had died for it, and his grandmother was one of the fiercest fighters. The Order fought against Bellatrix and the Lestranges. It seemed like the logical conclusion.
Suddenly, Harry’s refusal to take part in the war was unbearable. Didn’t he want revenge for his parents? Didn’t he want to avenge his Godfather, who’d spent a decade falsely imprisoned? Didn’t he want to end the blight that is You-Know-Who forever?
At the same time, Neville was scared out of his mind. Actually going out and risking death or, worse, ending up like his parents is different from the theoretical desire to take part in the war. But Harry was so much braver and cleverer and better than Neville, and yet, he didn’t even express an ounce of longing. Sure, he hoped for the war to end, but sometimes, it seemed to Neville as if he didn’t care which side walked away victorious. He sat unbothered as the Order was beaten and Death Eaters took control of Hogwarts, not even intervening when blood and extremities started flying.
Neville had been in the thick of it, trying to protect the younger students and assist the professors. He’d almost been killed when a careless spell sent a staircase crashing down and had to watch as a Death Eater and a thirteen-year-old student weren’t so lucky as to escape the falling stones.
Afterwards, he learned that Harry had holed himself and his students up in safety while Hogwarts burned around them. But surely, surely, Harry would now see what a threat the Death Eaters were and stop being so difficult!
And then, Harry went outside the safety that Hogwarts offered and risked himself and probably the last hope the general populace had for the Light to win. All all of that just to become a Godfather! Neville understood the draw, he’d read about Godparent Bonds, and he knew that Harry longed for connection, but he couldn’t imagine why this desire outweighed the benefit of the Wizarding World for Harry. He couldn’t reconcile the image of the cautious boy who looked thrice before even considering to do anything with the brash figure who dashed through metaphorical spell-fire for something he could have also had without danger by waiting for a few months or years until the war was over.
Then, the situation blew up.
Neville knew it immediately. As soon as he looked into those eyes – the green eyes of his friend, so familiar, but also so devoid of feeling.
He knew he’d messed up.
He only didn’t know how thoroughly he’d messed up.
Still naïve in his belief of how close he and Harry were, though they had grown apart, and convinced that Harry would rise against You-Know-Who in the end as was his destiny, he let the wound fester and heal over instead of trying to explain himself to Harry and ask for forgiveness for those words spoken in the heat of the moment, though they were firmly believed. They might have started a serious conversation and maybe Neville would have been led to question some of those new ideas he now believed in. Maybe Harry would have convinced him to return to his earlier world view that was in shades of grey as opposed to the Light-vs.-Dark that his friends had unknowingly indoctrinated him with.
As it happened, however, Neville left Harry to cool down while Harry actually mourned the boy who had once been his friend.
And then, it got busy and Neville didn’t manage to get to talk to Harry. Instead, he prepared himself for a war he would surely be part of soon – either through his own devices, or by the will of his grandmother and the expectations of his friends.
As such, he was lost for words when he heard that Harry might be You-Know-Who’s soulmate. And when Harry didn’t laugh about the mere idea, Neville considered, “What if?”
With that, he cut the last thread connecting him to Harry.
What once was his closest friend has now become a possible enemy. Further strengthened in this belief by his friends, Neville walked away and stopped looking closer and left Harry behind. Sure, he mourned the friendship he’d once had, before Harry had become as dark and evil as the rest of them, but he couldn’t find it within himself to reconcile the laughing boy and the stoic young man.
And that’s all Harry becomes.
A fallen idol, a blemished god, the Lucifer of the Wizarding World.
Occasionally, like right now, Neville would look at his ex-friend and see glimpses of the boy he’d been and wonder where it all went wrong, just as Harry did. But as opposed to each other as they now were, it was impossible for them to be the first to offer an opportunity to discuss, argue and make up, each believing that the other wouldn’t even consider – a belief that likely was true.
As time passed, other things occupied Neville’s mind, like worry for his grandmother and Hermione and the youngest Weasley siblings. He did his best to forget about Harry and the complicated mixture of feelings the mere mention of his name stirred up within Neville.
And so Neville said nothing when he saw Harry in Grimmauld Place, instead doing his best to avoid him. And when he met Hermione, Ron and Ginny and they revealed to him the secret of what they had been doing all year long, he didn’t even have to stop to consider.
When the battle for Grimmauld Place began, they left to do their duty: eradicating all that binds You-Know-Who to life. Or they tried to do so, until Ginny petulantly and in a fit of ravenous rage uttered You-Know-Who’s name and the Snatchers snatched them all up.
Which leads to now: Neville, Hermione and the Weasleys on their knees, surrounded by Order members, surrounded by even more Death Eaters, awaiting judgement from their sadistic lord.
The others are shivering in fear and trembling in rage, and so is Neville – until all his thoughts and feelings suddenly seem so cold and so very, very far away.
Until Harry steps up to speak to him, resting his old and cold eyes on him and him alone, or so it feels, and actually dares to talk while everything waits for You-Know-Who.
Neville listens as Harry asks for mercy. Listens as Harry tries to change You-Know-Who’s mind. Listens as Harry stands up for his once-friend. For Neville doesn’t have to think; he knows that Harry is doing all of this for him and him only. He couldn’t care less for the Order nor did he ever like Hermione or Ron.
And Neville sees the loyalty of the one he once called a friend and how the embers of it flicker for him, even now, just as he sees that this is all that is left of Harry’s goodwill.
Harry will ask the unmentionable, but if he is rejected, he will avert his eyes and let the new law exercise its terrible and deadly power.
Maybe, once upon a time, when Neville and Harry still were close, or in an alternative universe where Neville and Harry never grew apart, Harry would have given his all to spare his friend, fighting for him with heart and passion and wand blazing. But then, if they were still as close, this situation would never have come to be. Either Neville would never have joined the Order or Harry would be forced to kneel right beside him.
As it is, Harry stands tall on a dais, next to the throne on which the most powerful man in the country is seated, and he whispers to him a plea hidden in an offer of a logical alternative, and Neville kneels alone.
Their sentence is announced, but Neville only has eyes for Harry, the one who should not have this power of the enemy, the one who should not have joined the enemy, the one who should not be the soulmate of the enemy, who does not even look surprised or disgusted or dismayed as You-Know-Who reveals this fact for all to hear and despair about.
Maybe, Neville thinks, feeling betrayal fill his whole body, this is how Harry felt when Neville said to him that he should be thrown into prison simply for being the way he is.
Years later, sitting in the very same cell that once held Bellatrix Lestrange, Neville listens to Ron and Hermione bicker, holds hands through the bars with Susan, who resides where once Rodolphus Lestrange was incarnated, thanks every god known to man that the Dementors were removed from Azkaban and wonders and thinks and remembers old and not-so-old conversations with Harry, and is reminded of the childish ideas he held, the foolish actions he took, the timeless friendship he threw away for beliefs he now knows he never really believed in, and all he feels is regret.