Chapter Text
It had all begun with the nosebleed. Or atleast, that’s roughly where he estimated it had started. Though unlike in stories with a set beginning and ending, in life it was very hard to say when something really started without retracing one’s steps a million times over, trying to find clues that one had overlooked, omens that had portended the current state of events, and prologues in one’s childhood.
But in any event it had come to the beginning, or maybe from another view the climax, during the winter months of Neville’s second year teaching at Hogwarts.
Neville was one of the few professors who had stayed on the campus during the winter holidays which left not much to do with his time other than experiment with as many hallucinogenic and mood altering herbs and plants as his health would allow.
Neville always kept his experimental and recreational use of magical plants as a hobby and not one that ever interfered with his professional life. If he smoked Dizzycot leaf or took a few extracted drops of Sagatbloom cactus in his spare time it was in the privacy of his own room and he reckoned that made it his own business and no one else’s.
That being said, it didn’t change that the use of mystical herbs for recreation was frowned upon by most of the wizarding community. So Neville had to keep his hobby as private as possible.
He went to great pains to make sure the ‘symptoms’ of his habit were never visible. He’d use charms to remove the smell of smoke or potion from his clothes, a dropper of African crocodile tears always willed away any tell-tale redness or discoloration in his eyes, he even used a mouth rinse of nernroot extract to get rid of the traces of some of the plants he took which made his mouth and lips turn bright colors.
His natural tendency to stumble over his words and to maintain little presence in a room of people lended itself well to blending in even at the highest points of his delusions and stimulations.
Neville had yet to be caught, even from the keen eyes of McGonagall, though he thought she might suspect him.
Another factor in how Neville managed to keep his job was that simply put there weren’t many alternative options for a herbology teacher. If there had been, Neville, who was only 22 and never formally learned to teach, would not have been chosen. There was a war going on. The number of students still enrolled at Hogwarts was greatly diminished. And Professor Sprout herself had left her teaching post to be with family abroad. All things being considered, Neville was generally regarded as being very good at his job. He was well liked among his students- he was young enough that they didn’t fully regard him as an ‘adult’ which worked in his favor in terms of popularity though not always in his ability to keep the chaos of the classroom in check. Furthermore, Neville himself seemed to benefit as much as his students. Whatever awkardness or shyness he’d had when he himself was a student seemed to have in part been cured by mustering his strength to speak in front of a class everyday. On most days he barely stuttered or had to wipe the sweat off his palms on his pants legs at all.
The ‘children’ in his classes (because now they were supposed to be ‘children’ to him though some of them weren’t much younger than him) were frightened by the war. Part of their admiration for Neville came from knowing he was a ‘close personal friend of Harry Potter’ who was off doing something unspeakably mysterious and heroic far away from Hogwarts. Horrifyingly, many of the students came to Neville for advice or emotional support.
He wasn’t sure what to say to them. And even after he’d said something, and they seemed soothed by it, he could barely recall what it was exactly that he’d said. But he knew it was from the heart.
Ultimately Neville was a post-war child. He didn’t remember the last war but he’d grown up amongst the very recent remnants of it. That in itself is a traumatizing experience. And with the new wizarding war upon them, he couldn’t help but feel that in some ways being in the midst of the war was better than being born into the aftershock of it. At least with the war happening, one could direct their energies somewhere. There was a sense of purpose, of rallying, of righteousness; even in the wake of tragedies.
After the war is when the strength is allowed to crumble. People’s shield of anger let down leaving them with only grief. It’s only when things go back to normal that you realize how many blank spaces have been blown into that normal life you’d led before.
When he’d been very young, there were still many houses and shops in the wizarding world that were destroyed or damaged from the war. Broken windows and abandoned buildings, doors with enchanted locks wrapped all the way round them for protection, men on street corners selling ‘used wands’ and trinkets… For a very long time, Neville hadn’t realized that any of these things were abnormal. He’d assumed that was just how the world looked. How it was. How it had always been.
And to grow up in that, without even knowing that those blank spaces hadn’t always been there, had led Neville even at a young age to have a very pervasive sense of uneasiness. He’d barely known his parents as a child. While he knew it wasn’t normal, it had always been normal for him. The ritual of visiting them in the hospital, receiving cryptic words of confused affection which he’d stay up at night trying desperately to make sense of, was just one of many idiosynchronicities between himself and other boys his age.
A post war child through and through- essentially orphaned by soldier parents, timid and overly humble, and born with a sense of incompleteness. No, he had all his limbs in tact and it wasn’t something he spent much time agonizing over. But he had often wondered if like the shops with the broken windows that he and everyone else had been too hasty in assuming he was normal when perhaps there was something fundamentally and significantly missing from him. Some essential part deep inside him unseen by doctors or to the naked eye. Maybe in his brain or maybe in his stomach for all he knew. But something, somewhere, that made the sum of him less than the sum of others. He thought this lacking might be what handicapped him so much in magic compared to his peers.
Many different people on many occasions had suggested what qualities or traits Neville seemed to be lacking- “no self esteem” , “no common sense” , “no skills to speak of” etc. These all very well may have been true but strangely, simply identifying them didn’t provide any help.
Now, the post-war child was engulfed in war. And as usual, he felt out of place.
Part of the appeal of staying at Hogwarts was the isolation. He had a hate/love relationship with it. He could go hours, sometimes even days, forgetting completely that not too far away there were Death Eaters killing wizards and muggles alike. Neville wasn’t sure if it was a good thing that he could forget that, or if it was a bad thing. But he did. It was too easy to fall into a routine at Hogwarts and the routine was already so overly familiar. He woke up, he had breakfast, he taught classes, graded papers, tended to the greenhouse, and all the while he wasn’t saving a single person, wasn’t defeating any evil force.
Sometimes things just seemed so still at Hogwarts. And he knew this would only be exacerbated when the castle emptied for the holidays. Maybe that was why he’d been so overcome with a sudden feeling of panic when he’d dismissed his students on their last day of class. His voice had cracked and all at once he was sure he was going to have a heart attack. Especially because they were already leaving- haphazardly shoving quills and books into their bags and jogging for the door. While he stood with his palm flat against his desk, struggling not to collapse onto the floor. He’d experienced that before- the tightness in his chest that seemed to constrict his lungs so urgently that he couldn’t even muster his voice to speak. But he’d realized then how selfish it would have been to speak anyway. He wasn’t sure what he would’ve said, had he found the ability, but what he would’ve wanted to say would be “please just come back. stay here a moment longer.” He was too old to be asking for help, though. And the world was in a state where cries for help went unanswered. Especially ones as insignificant as his own.
Neville told himself he’d devote the winter holidays to working with his plants. He’d convinced himself that something good could come from that. A plant that could kill Lord Voldemort maybe. A plant to make Harry Potter invincible. If he kept thinking that way, overly optimistic and grandiose, if he could manage that state of mind for at least a few hours per day, he thought he could grind up the motivation to do something productive.
But he was deeply concerned about the solitude.
With all the students gone, the castle felt abandoned. And the one person whose living quarters was closest to his own was the one person he wanted to avoid at all costs- professor Snape.
- - -
Neville woke up freezing cold and on the floor, sheets and one blanket still tangled around his curled up body.
It wasn’t unusual for this to happen. Recently, he slept very fitfully. Though he almost never remembered his dreams, he always awoke feeling uneasy- practically nauseous even, with the ghost of some feeling of terror that had visited him in the night. And on his lower back, he could feel goosebumps still raised. Though he wasn’t sure if this was from his dreams or if it was from the temperature.
He longed for the warmth and comfort of the Gryffindor dormitory. The bedroom he occupied in the room adjoining his office was more remote and drafty. This was a problem not only for his own comfort but the comfort of the large number of plants housed in mismatched pots and vases (and one even in a cage, for his own safety) that cluttered the small space, filling every shelf and surface. He had to recast many warming spells around them, wrapping them in a protective bubble of whatever temperature and humidity was most suited for their growth and uptake.
Aside from the plants, the room was messy but a bit impersonal. Unlike some of the boys he’d gone to school with, Neville had never known much about Quidditch and never put up posters of any favored team. He didn’t have any posters of musicians or portraits of family and friends to decorate the walls either. The only semblance of a wall ‘decoration’ was the Iridis Ivy he’d allowed to get out of control and now crept along half the wall, which turned every shade of color in cycles per hour like a pulse running through a vein.
Because the room was on the edge of a tower, it had a rounded shape and one large lancet window that went nearly from floor to ceiling looked out at the school grounds. In spring, the sunshine from it in the mornings was overpowering. In winter, morning and night both seemed to creep up silently in neutral grays that faded into black or white, but rarely blue.
The white light of the cloudless morning sky seemed unbearable against his eyes and he pulled his comforter off the bed and wrapped it further around himself so only the top of his head stuck out the top of the cocoon.
He remembered with a sense of dread that he had no place to be, no one to see, and nothing to do.
Neville sighed and reached one arm out to his left, fumbling in the ice cold space beneath his bed until his fingers wrapped around something smooth and glass.
There was still some leftovers from his previous smoke in the bowl of the pipe, glistening a beautiful burnt orange like a sunset and smelling like a sickening mix of brown sugar and paint. It was a hassle to make the extract- it required several charms and a potion which had taken him three tries to brew correctly.
Neville thought it fairly ironic. The wizarding world was full of magic that muggles never in their wildest dreams could’ve imagined. But to use any type of drug or plant to change things, to make them even more magical, more fantastical, was seen as an attempt to escape from reality.
Neville himself felt ambivalent about reality.
Somehow it didn’t feel as interactive as he would like it to be. He had many thoughts, he felt, that in reality he could not express. Things didn’t turn out right. He wanted to be brave, strong, capable, smart, confident- but somehow that will got lost on the way to his mouth, to his body, never fully realizing itself in his behaviors and life. It was like the deeper parts of his mind were controlling a vessel that had not been fully configured to move to his desires.
But the fantastical, hallucinated, world was much different. Neville’s actions there were not passive- he created his surroundings as he went, the space between dream and reality blurring and dissapearing entirely.
He’d smoked things that had made everything both look and feel as if he were underwater, he’d had draughts that let him see ripples come out of his fingertips with everything he touched, he’d even swallowed seeds that supposedly made one able to read others thoughts though all he’d heard were loud jumbles of words and noises and music everytime he’d looked someone in the eye which he couldn’t make out into any type of logical pattern.
He wasn’t escaping. He was enhancing.
He found his wand under the pillow he hadn’t slept on and mumbled a quick accendit under his breath, sparking a tiny flame at the tip. He brought the glass pipe to his lips and the flame over the bowl of burnt orange tar and sucked in. Inhaled until his lungs were tight and burning. When he exhaled, the smoke felt like liquid pouring out his throat, almost making him retch. He smelled sugar. And then the walls began to melt. And as he looked down at his hands the skin on his fingertips began to drip off the bone.
- - -
Neville ate breakfast at 3 PM in his green house. In his years as a student the great hall had continued to operate during the winter holidays but this was the first year where there weren’t regularly scheduled meals as nearly all of the meager remains of the student body who still attended had gone home. It was awkward to have to go to the kitchen and request food to take away and then bring the dishes back later. The house elves made a rather large fuss whenever a wizard came in.
He never needed to water the plants, they were all connected to glass orbs that were enchanted to water them at regular times and the ceiling of the house was enchanted to provide different amounts of sunlight or shade to different areas. It was a peaceful place to be and Neville found that if left to his own devices he could lose hours of time holed up like a recluse in the green house with his plants.
Another altered reality, he thought.
He was poring over a book he’d found in the restricted section of the library- “The Fantasy Seer’s Guide to Spiritual Herbs and Fungi” by Madame Dizzeria Potspeck. The inside cover had a picture of the woman with deeply tanned skin, a wild mane of purple hair, and tattoos covering her arms and collarbones. She smiled serenely though her head seemed to be wobbling unbalanced on her shoulders and she’d occasionally turned to smell the large red flowers in the background of her photo.
There was a list showing the names of people who had previously taken the book out- it seemed once every few years some bold soul had borrowed it and Neville guessed many were underage students from the mostly fake names scribbled inside: in the 1960s was when it seemed to have gotten the most traffic but as recently as 1987 by “Bossman Tybereus”, 1984 it was taken out by an alleged “Hugh G. Dildeaux", 1975 by the “Half Blood Prince”, and in 1969 by “Maryjane Lover”.
Neville turned the pages with marmalade stained fingers leaving a sticky trail in his wake.
Lunaessera Viscum: a lovely flower that only blooms under a full moon. It has luminous white petals that are soft to the touch. When the petals are brewed in a tea and the tea is stirred counterclockwise twelve times with a wand, it produces a heady substance that imbues the drinker with special powers. Their skin will glow like moonlight even in a dark room for several hours and their body will feel very light. My wife and I tried this tea for the first time last summer and the effects of it can only be described as total rapture. The body becomes weightless, the mind unimpended. We danced for ten hours in the nude on our lawn when both of us could’ve sworn it had only been ten minutes. I was sure we connected with the spirit of the moon and gained deep harmony with nature that night…
Neville scratched the nape of his neck absently (sticky- his fingers were still sticky. he felt it clinging to the back of his neck..) and turned the page. The next full moon wouldn’t be for weeks. It seemed that many of the most powerful potions and herbs had to be imbued or harvested at specific times and dates. There was something important, he felt, about the ritual of it. Charms and transfiguration were straightforward, precise, almost procedural. But he’d found that in herbology and potions, there was an ettiquette to it that seemed arbitrary but that was where the revelation was invoked. In the precise minutes, the turns of the wrist, in the conviction that it mattered- a handful of bone dust taken from a doe killed in spring and not winter, rolling the buds of a plant between your fingertips when they’re cold and not warm, picking the flower with the left hand and not the right… these things were of the utmost importance.
Neville had never been able to master the finesse of this type of detail work when he’d done it for a grade in a classroom. He hated being timed, he hated being watched as he worked, and most of all hated the looming presence of Snape standing behind him ready to criticize his every move. But alone, and in his own pace, with the right motivation, he sometimes successfully pulled off even very difficult potions to go on one of his fantasy journeys.
So take that, proffessor Snape…
Neville took a sip of tea and continued scanning the pages of Dizzeria’s book.
Csinpine. There were several pages on Csinpine. Dizzeria tended to ramble and what started as an instructive guide to how to properly crush the needles into a powder had quickly devolved into a long winded tale about her experiences using it, how she’d first discovered its properties when living with a colony of Welsh pixies in a woodland hollow for four months. Neville, though he had to admit he was quite fond of Dizzeria’s stories, had become quite adept at skimming her work for relevant information. He had two small Csinpine trees in the greenhouse though he’d never thought they could have any type of opiate properties- the sap could be used in a potion that made skin invulnerable to heat and flames.
Neville had to use gloves and a small knife to cut off a sprig off the plant. The needles had a scaly quality to them but they were sharp- very sharp. It made a terrible noise when he ground it with his pestle. The process was slow going. His arms were aching by the time it had been crushed into a fine, bright green, powder.
Removing his gloves, he ran the tips of his fingers against the top of the small mound. He gave one final look at Dizzeria’s instructions. Dumped the mortar into the palm of his hand, then took a breath and blew out, scattering the powder to the air. It hung suspended, every fiber lit up with sunlight for just a moment as Neville leaned forth, sticking his face into the small cloud and inhaled deeply through his mouth and nose until the powder dissipated through the air.
The effects were not immediate. He sat for several minutes wondering if he’d done something wrong- made the powder too fine or not breathed in deeply enough.
Then he began to feel it. It was subtle at first. His face tingled and he had to keep rubbing his nose with the back of his hand. Why not with his fingers? He couldn’t feel them at all. He looked down and they were there. But somehow they felt detatched from the rest of him. And he wasn’t quite sure what the rest of him was anyway. His skin felt strange and rippling.
He arched his back. It really did feel as though something was going to grow out of him at any minute- his ribs maybe. They felt like they were bending, just ready to pierce out the skin of his back and reform like a series of prehensile spider legs.
He knew at once that he had to find a mirror.
He stumbled out of the greenhouse, one hand clawing at the wall for support as he attempted to make his way back to his bedroom. His legs barely worked underneath him, curving and arching like the hindquarters of a beast. His skin felt hot, irritable, like fur was bristling just beneath the flesh and rising steadily to the surface.
But he was arrested down the hall when he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the window. In the dark winter afternoon, he could make his appearance out clearly in the glass and he stopped, stunned, pressing his fingertips against the cold surface.
He looked exactly the same.
There was nothing unusual about his features, his eyes weren’t even red or watering. He warily felt his own face with his hand, dragging his fingernails lightly across his jawline to test if he could feel the claw-like appendetures he imagined were growing there. There was nothing. It made him break out in a cold sweat.
He raked both hands through his hair, scratching feverishly at his skull. No horns! But he could’ve sworn-
His clothes were too tight, too warm. They felt like a nest of snakes constricting against him. He tugged at his collar, ran his hands through his hair once more. It was a nightmare.
Then somebody screamed, and to Neville’s surprise, it wasn’t him.
The scream came again, louder and drawn out. It was a girl’s voice. A student.
Neville whirled around from the (disturbing) sight of his reflection and began striding down the hall in earnest. If he shut his eyes tightly he could feel leathery wings weighing down his back, parting and catching the air behind him in his pace. His legs still felt disconnected and it was dificult to move but he slapped his own face several times, blinking and willing himself to just be normal. He had to be.
Whatever effects the drug had had, certainly one of them seemed to be dulling his ability to worry. Not panic, but worry which was very different. He felt panic surely enough. His heart was hammering in his chest and he could feel a clammy sweat collecting behind his ears. His mind, however, was still. It wasn’t racing with the possibilities of what the scream meant- it had only one goal in mind and his body in turn, doggedly pursued it despite his impediment.
Through reality or by his imagination, he felt his hearing was sharper. His ears- larger. Expanding like an elephants’ and then curling into themselves like cones turned upward, sensitive to even the rustling of dust on the hallway floors.
He turned, pacing then going back, scratching the back of his neck then turning again, following his instinct. There hadn’t been another scream after the first two and his brain was pounding with attempts to recollect as vividly as possible where the noise may have originated from.
Keep it together, some faint still lucid voice told the beast that had taken over. One leg in front of the other, just don’t stop moving no matter what. The pit of his stomach burned with a fear that he wouldn’t consciously identify.
He wasn’t paying any heed as to where he was going. He was following the sound, senses focused so acutely to his mission that his surroundings were of no consequence or notice to his drug addled brain.
But at a certain point he began to take heed of the change in temperature and atmosphere. He was going lower, he realized. And a cold dampness hung in the air. It only made him break out in a sweat worse than before, feeling fevered in contrast to his surroundings. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand even though the contact of his skin to his senses felt like the sickeningly soft flowing fin of a fish.
She was there, standing still.
It was Prithella Berdock. First year. Slytherin. She had long, blonde, hair and wore spectacles. She loved flowers but hated getting dirt under her nails. She was standing straight as a board, eyes wide open and round saucers staring directly ahead as if entranced- pale with horror.
The dark stone wall had a large, thick, streak of wine red blood defacing it. The blood was thick with the ooze of viscera in it that caused it to stick sickeningly to the wall like a gelatinous mold. In harsh paint strokes of more blood down from the initial mark, the trajectory of the descent was evident.
And on the ground in front of it lay the victim.
It was a truly terrible slight- body akimbo and foot still twitching even with the innards all drawn out in a pulpy mess beside him. The beady eyes staring straight ahead, and the beak still partly open. It was a crow.
Hogwarts was nothing if not drafty and full of secret entrances- it wasn’t irregular for animals to come in and out. In his fourth year, one side of his dormitory room had smelled rotten for days because of a dead mouse stuck in the wall by his bed, before McGonagall had charmed it away with a flick of her wand.
He could imagine what had happened- from the battered look of the poor creature on the floor in front of him, it seemed as if it had panicked at finding itself entrapped and thrown itself fitfully against the walls until finally smashing too hard. It would account for the messy slur of blood stains and scratch marks that speckled the hallway now. Stuck to the blood, between the cracks of the stone were tufts of dark feathers.
Prithella made a noise beside him and he remembered her prescence once more, sitting on his haunches to be at her eye level.
It’s okay, he thought to tell her.
“I didn’t do it, professor, I swear.” Prithella whimpered, lip trembling.
Of course not, its not your fault. He found he couldn’t speak. His tongue was forked, thin, it slipped uselessly around his overly large, cavernous mouth, flicking against his incisors behind his lips.
“Mmn.” he managed to intone, nodding his head once though it wobbled a little too hard to be normal.
His eyes couldn’t keep focus on Prithella’s face. Everything went through filters of colors and heat with every blink and he couldn’t stop blinking with his eyelids so dry and heavy.
It was so cold. He’d been noticing for some time but it really was. How was she not freezing? How was their breath not coming out in puffs of smoke before their faces? How was the fresh corpse of the bird next to them not steaming? All that warm blood. Neville felt quite nauseous.
“Rnngh… mm…” he clamped down his jaw, dreadfully afraid of what type of creatures might spill out if he dared open his lips.
“Professor? Professor, are you sick?” her hand touched his shoulder. “You’re shaking.”
And indeed he was. It was just so cold to him.
He felt harsh goosebumps rising on his skin, peaking until they were sharp and he felt like a cactus.
The effects of the drug were wearing off, he could feel that. But it wasn’t leaving his system without a fight.
He was more in control of his body but at the price of being too acutely aware of it. Before, he’d been fine tuned to the unreality of it imagined into being by the effects of the drug, but what was left as the drug wore off was an acute awareness of his body in reality and an exaggerated consciousness of the cold, the sweat on the back of his neck and beading on his forehead, of the dull ache in the front of his skull.
He curled his arms around himself, rubbing his hands up and down his back and forearms to try and spark some warmth.
Prithella’s hand rested on his knee. It was so small and white.
“Professor? Professor?”
The words seemed to echo back and forth across the hallway several times before they reached Neville’s awareness. His vision was fading, blurring everything into mosaic shapes.
“Please say something” Prithella was shaking him, gently, tugging with small fingers on the sleeve of his sweater. And all Neville could do was curl further into the fetal position. He was sure his chest would burst and all the spiders he could feel crawling around inside it would come out like a hurricane of tiny feet.
“Mmgg’ohkay” he managed between tightly pursed lips. GO! he wanted to scream. He was terrified that he would endanger her. Not but a few minutes ago, he had been sure he was a beast. A dangerous one at that. He’d never wanted to be seen in the fits of one of his fantasy trips. It was too much to mix the world of things he controlled and things he couldn’t together in such a way. The effects, as he was feeling, were devastating.
He was tipping to the side, the weight of his shoulders dragging him down like a gravitational pull. He had to struggle just to keep from laying down.
and then “Professor!” this time it was said in a different tone of voice. Surprise? Relief?
Neville craned his neck with great effort to shakily look up though the action made his eyes water.
The face was rippling like a disturbed pond behind the vision of his waterlogged eyes but the essential features remained the same- the gaunt, sallow face, haloed in hair as dark and slippery as seaweed, his black robes billowing like curtains.
Whatever beastly thing had been possessing his body before, stretching its limbs nearly to the point of rupturing out of his flesh, whatever lingering of it was left in him, retreated all at once with sudden force to the muscles of his chest and writhed and shook like an animal caged.
Prithella ran to the older man’s side- small, snow white hands clutching at his dark robes.
“Sir, there was a bird but it was flying around all mad like and then it just went headlong into the wall! I didn’t do anything to it! It was just mad like that!”
Snape’s eyes turned slowly across the scene without moving another muscle, but his eyes never lighted on Neville, still crouched on the floor curled nearly in the fetal position.
“And then- and then Professor Longbottom’s gone all mad now too!”
I’m not going mad, Neville thought uselessly.
Snape strode over to the wall and waved his wand in a graceful arc. “Scourgify.” The blood stains and clumps of feathers faded from the walls.
He cocked his head slightly, to stare down at Neville, his brows knit together, but his lips- undeniably there was a curl in them. The corner of his mouth was curled up in disgust. His black eyes were searching over him with a curiosity that was uncharacteristic. But the moment passed and he returned to levelling him a gaze of complete indifference.
He spoke slowly and purposefully, as always, to effectively make sure each word was sufficiently saturated with venom.
“I’ve attended to the dead bird now, Mr.Longbottom, so unless you would like to continue amusing us with this repugnant display you can get up off the floor now.”
He turned on his heel, gently nudging Prithella’s shoulder with his fingertips to urge her to follow him, and the two of them left Neville behind, sitting quite still until he heard a door slam distantly.
It took Neville a few minutes to rouse himself to his feet as his body seemed numb from shock, made of lead. But when he regained his energy he broke into a sprint, taking steps two at a time, nearly stumbling over his own feet in his haste until he’d reached his bedroom and slammed the door shut behind him.
His breath came in great heaves that nearly made him wretch and he shut his eyes tightly, pressing the back of his head against the door and his palms flat against it for support.
He had been discovered for the first time, and at a point of great vulnerability. It was quite a blow. The experience had put in him a feeling of terror of the likes he hadn’t experienced since he was a child. It was the kind that combined fear and shame- the sense of knowing you’ve done something taboo and anxiously awaiting the impending punishment.
Neville inhaled deeply, in an attempt to calm himself, and tasted salt bitter on his tongue. He touched his fingertips to his face and they came back wet and bright red. There was blood streaming down his nose, catching between his lips and dripping from his chin.