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On December twelfth, Longbottom Lodge is silent, for a split second, before the screams, at first too quiet to be heard, rise in a crescendo, tearing through the night air.
The screams come in sets of three (a father, a mother, a child) accompanied by peals of laughter, also in threes (a husband, a wife, a traitor). The wind whistles through the trees he has watered and grown from saplings as Frank grits his teeth, bony knuckles straining against the skin of his hands, whispering platitudes to Neville as much as he can.
“S’alright, love.” He calls to Neville, who screams from where Bellatrix has left him lying on the cold kitchen floor, paralyzed by a spell that shouldn’t be used on babies (Neville is a baby and he is fighting this war too and it makes Frank sick to think that his son, his darling baby, is being raised like this).
Neville’s blue eyes are wide beneath his fringe, wildly darting around the room, and Frank is reminded of a much younger Alice at the Sorting, a little over ten years ago, watching the rest of the room in fear. Even now, as she had been after making her way to Gryffindor House’s table all those years ago, Alice is beside him. Her breaths are slow, now, seem weighted down by something, and he moves his hand just slightly to tangle his fingers with hers. Alice seems calmer, when Frank’s fingertips brush hers, and her back arches when Bellatrix turns her wand on her, leaving Alice gasping for breath, eyes wide and head thrown back.
“Daddy’s okay, darling.” Frank whispers, trying to save someone, at least someone, and Neville’s breath hitches for a second, cries softening to tiny whimpers as he sniffles.
Frank coughs wetly, calling it a victory as he spits out a mouthful of blood before grinning up at Rodolphus Lestrange. “Do your worst. They’ll come for us.”
“Come for you?” Bellatrix throws her head back, laughing like Frank remembers Neville doing only a day before, toddling after the little white butterflies that frequented their garden as he tried to grab them with chubby fingers, and Frank sighs in relief as the door is torn down and Sirius rushes in, wand at the ready.
The owl, Frank thinks, his thoughts rising to the surface of his mind as if they have been buried under rocks, floating up through a sea of honey. He had promised to owl Sirius, after coming home from work. He hadn’t been calling Lestrange’s bluff. He chuckles, the sound coming in bursts as broken ribs are jarred by the motion, before slowly, carefully, working his right hand free of the badly knotted length of rope holding them together, behind the rickety wooden chair he has been tied to.
“Order’s on the way!” Sirius yells, eyes trained on Bellatrix, and he looks as if he is filled with fire. Frank is glad, because he is tired and his limbs are heavy and he wants to fall asleep forever, and maybe hide beneath the waves of consciousness in an eternal sort of stillness, but there is work to be done. And he is here to do it.
He scrabbles for his wand, pointing it at the rope keeping his torso tied to the chair’s back as he braces himself for the pain that will surely, surely come, judging by how violently his hand is shaking. He thinks of the frogs that croak in symphonies during the summers, thinks of the shades of yellow and blue and pink and green he has coaxed out of the earth, thinks of an older Neville, maybe eight, nine years old, running among them, bare feet slapping against the blades of grass, before casting the spell to free himself, his hand now sufficiently steadied. “Diffindo.”
The ropes fall away, Frank’s now blood soaked shirt ripping along with them, and he frees Alice as carefully as he can. Her wrists are bruised and bloody and he tentatively presses kisses to them before turning toward the fray. Crouch has disappeared, leaving Sirius to take on Bellatrix and Rodolphus, and Frank knows that it is his duty, his destiny, to win or fall trying. “Take Neville and hide upstairs. The Order’ll be here soon.”
“I’m not leaving you here.” Alice says, resolute, and grabs her wand from the floor by her chair, gripping it tight before jumping into the fray, eyes ablaze. Alice comes alive, in war, head held high as she sends curses flying left and right, and Frank has always been far too enamored with peace. He has never been a warring sort of man, but he will not leave those he loves to suffer. “I won’t ever.”
So Frank, as he always does, follows her lead.
The Ministry arrives shortly after, along with a crowd of Healers, and Frank catches a glimpse of Alice, battered, bruised, brilliant Alice, with Neville safely cradled in her arms, rocking him back and forth as she kisses his forehead, singing softly in his ear about a better world, and then, only then, allows himself to sleep.
He hears Alice screaming, dimly, as though through an ocean, as he collapses to the floor. His head thuds against the hardwood floor and he feels safe, for the first time in years.
He wakes six, no, seven times in the hospital, but remembers none of them.
When he wakes the eighth time, breaking through the sheet of ice that has grown over him, he sits straight up, blinking as if he has shed a layer of plaster and the dust is rising around him in a tornado. He looks to his right to see a tearful Alice, her hand clasped tightly around his, and she smiles, shaky and unsure, before pressing her forehead to his, raising a hand to his cheek.
Her thumb traces his cheekbone and Frank smiles, eyelids feeling heavy as he leans into her touch.
“We’re safe now”, she says, after a pause. “And you look horrible with a beard.”
“I knew I forgot to tell the Healers something.” Frank sighs, shaking his head, and Alice giggles. It is soft, he muses, not at all like her usual laughter, but it is there. It promises a new beginning. “Neville?”
“With your mother.” Alice looks away and Frank grits his teeth. His mother has never quite liked Alice, and Augusta Longbottom is not one to change her mind, but Frank is not the sort of man who gives up. “We’ll get him when you’re better.”
“Yeah.” Frank nods, searching for something he can give her, something he can make it all better with, and settles for raising a hand to cup her cheek. “What should we plant in April?”
Her laugh is stronger this time, feels solid and strong, and Frank relaxes, finally, because all this time, it has felt like there has been something dangerous coiled in his chest, and now it has gone, leaving him feeling gloriously empty.
Perhaps he will fill that space with more love, he thinks, as he watches the corners of Alice’s lips curve further and further upward, grow it like the saplings he planted when he was five and wanted to reach heaven to hug his father one last time. Perhaps his chest will fill with little red flowers, each petal made of the names of those he has loved, if given time.
His heart has always looked best in red.
When people ask for stories about the victors of wars, they want stories where the winners triumph and move on in the same breath, effecting change and confronting memories with ease.
None of them are that kind of story, Frank muses, as he sees the other five tired looking, barely legal adults clustered around the broken kitchen table, once classmates and now former soldiers.
It is New Year’s Eve, something they would have celebrated by getting smashed and vandalizing something only two years before, but now four of the six of them are parents to children under two, and one of the remaining two is good enough about propriety to restrain the other. So they conjure chairs, each more ridiculous looking than the last, and drag them up to the kitchen table, watching each other with someone occasionally piping up to recount a story or a joke that they’d heard on the job.
They revel in the silence broken only by the whooshing of the wind through the trees outside and Harry and Neville’s soft giggles as they toss their toys at each other, after years of war, because silence now means that there is nothing coming that they have to listen for.
James stares at Frank, from across the table, eyes still bloodshot and tired despite the fact that he has had months to relearn how to live, and Frank is glad, glad that someone understands what it means to be a father and know you could die for what you have created. Frank smiles, soft and unsure, and James mirrors the action, nodding just barely as proof that he’d seen the glimmer of hope. James looks half a decade older than he had, the last time Frank had seen him, and Frank wonders how old he looks, having already been closer to thirty than twenty to start with.
Frank remembers late night talks with James, while Alice and Lily were off healing injuries or on missions of their own, when they’d crack open cans of pop and listen to the radio for hours while waiting for the doorbell to ring, remembers stakeouts spent wondering what their sons would look like or smell like or smile like.
He remembers James, hoarse from yelling orders during a fight one night in September, asking, in a voice too soft to have been anyone near the gregarious prankster Frank remembered from school, if it was normal to fall in love with someone so quickly.
He remembers a younger James running ahead of him, the handle of a bucket clutched in a small hand, as he beckoned Frank forward, toward the waves of the ocean before them, swelling and falling like the wind.
He remembers James running too far, yelling too loudly, and nearly getting sucked under the water for it.
And he knows, when James meets his eyes again, that James remembers too.
He knows that James remembers Frank tugging him back by the edge of his soaked shirt and telling him that maybe, staying by the shore could be fun too. He knows that James remembers afternoons spent playing tag in the tall grass with all the other pureblood children, finally allowed to be free and loud and children instead of the little facsimiles of their parents they were all expected to be when company came.
Frank knows that James remembers that hardly a quarter of that group remains, now.
“Y’know, Frankie”, James says, a ghost of a grin settling over his lips, “Nev’s eating a frog. Isn’t that cannibalism?”
“You shut your mouth, Potter.” Frank rolls his eyes, scrunching up his nose, and Sirius nearly squeaks as he tries to stifle a laugh. Sirius, like always, ends up failing miserably at keeping it in, slamming his fist on the table as he nearly roars with laughter. And it is contagious, as all things are with Sirius, so everyone is laughing in seconds, holding each other and nearly crying over a nearly decade old joke. “I’m not a frog. I swear. Alice.”
“I don’t speak ribbit, love.” Alice chuckles, draping her arm around Frank’s shoulders. Her eyes look a little brighter now that the dark circles beneath them have faded just slightly, and she seems happier, now, a little lighter on her feet. Frank has loved Alice for many things, over the years, but first and foremost has been her incredible gift for resilience. “You’ll have to say that again.”
Thing feel okay again, Frank thinks, as he looks to James, whose shoulders are shaking, but with something akin to mirth rather than the sadness they have all carried like a weight upon their shoulders ever since they rode the boats back across the Great Lake. Things feel lighter now, a little more hopeful, and talk turns to the future, as it usually does.
“You going back to the force, Frankie?” Sirius asks eagerly, and Frank shakes his head. They have become incredible partners, the two of them, but Frank has never been wanting for those. He has more friends than he can count, and a family to come home to, and he knows Sirius understands.
Frank has never been the warring sort of man, only the sort that protects those he loves. And now, the danger is gone.
It is an easy thing to understand, that Frank’s law enforcement days would be done when the war drew to a close, and Frank feels no loss in saying it. It’s what will come after that puzzles him, after devoting nearly five years to the Auror Department, and something strikes him.
“I think I’ll grow things.” Frank says, looking around the room, and several people nod. He longs for the feeling of dirt between his fingers and under his finger nails and caking his boots, has for years now, and he’s gleeful at the idea of getting that back. “Sell them, maybe. To Potioneers and things. I did always like the idea of that, in school.”
“That’s our Frankie”, James says solemnly, raising his glass. “Always looking for any excuse to muck about in the dirt.”
Frank laughs uproariously, shaking his head, and smiles even wider four months later when James, Sirius and Remus turn up at his door one afternoon with packets of seeds, a packet of Acid Pops (which Frank, for some reason, actually enjoys) and four small shovels.
“Well?” Sirius says, grinning wide. “You wanted a garden, Frog, so you’ll get one.”
Frank takes one of the shovels, smiling as the soft, green grip adjusts itself to fit his hand, and nods. “Let’s do this.”