Work Text:
1993
The greenhouses were the one place nobody thought to look for her.
Ginny had worked that out over the last fortnight. Everywhere else there were people now. There were people in the common room, where the fire was always ringed three deep and someone always stopped talking when she came in. There were people in the corridors, where the portraits leaned out of their frames to watch her pass. There were people at the Gryffindor table, where her brothers sat on either side of her like a pair of tall red walls and kept pushing food at her that she did not want. Percy had gone stiff and kind, which was strange, and the twins had gone quiet and gentle, which was far stranger and much worse; Ron opened his mouth to say things and then shut it again with the things unsaid. At night, through the wall, she could hear her mother, who thought she was being silent about it, and was not.
She had stopped being able to eat much. Food turned to paste in her mouth and would not go down, and Madam Pomfrey had taken to leaving a beaker of something chalky on her bedside cabinet at night, which Ginny poured down the sink. She had all but stopped sleeping. And her body had got into a state where the least thing set it off — a chair scraped back, a door banged, someone two seats down laughing too suddenly — and her heart would slam and her skin go cold and every muscle in her would lock tight and ready, braced against nothing at all, before her mind could catch it up and tell it there was nothing there to be ready for. It was worst in a crowd. In a crowd everything came at once, too many faces and too much noise and no way to keep an eye on all the doors together, and it ground her down to the bone by the middle of the morning, so that by supper the warm roar of the Great Hall was more than her skin could hold.
But nobody came down to the greenhouses after supper. The path was churned to mud, and the wind came cold off the lake even in June, and by evening the long panes had gone dark and blind, so that from the outside you could not have told whether there was a living soul inside or not.
She let herself in at the door of greenhouse three and stood a moment in the wet green breath of the place, and breathed with it.
Something stirred in the dark at the far end, low down among the staging, and her whole body went off at once — heart lunging up into her throat, breath gone, both hands gripping the edge of the bench hard enough to hurt, her spine flat to the door before she had decided to move. It was a Fanged Geranium. Only that. It swung its heads round toward the sound of the door, snapped once, drowsily, and sagged. She had known that. Even while her body was throwing her back against the door, some cold clear part of her had known it was only the geranium, and had not been able to make the rest of her listen. Her heart took a long time to be sure of things now, far longer than it used to, and no amount of knowing seemed to reach all the way down to it.
"Sorry — I didn't hear anyone come in."
She turned. There was a lamp burning at the near end after all, a small one, and behind it sat a boy she had walked clean past without seeing. Neville Longbottom. She knew him the way you knew everyone in your own House and none of them at all — a round-faced boy from the year above, forever losing his toad, the one the others laughed at, a little, on the rare days they thought of him. She could not have said one true thing about him. He had a streak of soil down one cheek and his sleeves shoved up past the elbows and a trowel in his fist, and he was looking at her the way everyone looked at her now, carefully, as though she were a cauldron that had begun, very quietly, to hiss.
"I'll go," she said, in the very breath that he said, "You can stay, if you want."
Neither of them moved.
"I mean — I'm nearly done," Neville said. "It's only the Mandrakes. The new ones. Professor Sprout said I could, so long as I was careful with the — well." He looked down at the tray across his knees. "You've to be careful."
Ginny did not go. She did not quite come any nearer, either. She stayed where she was, in the strip of floor between the door and the lamp, where the dark and the light met, and she watched him work. He had a way with the small pots that she would never have guessed at. She had seen him at meals; she had seen him drop his goblet twice in one week and send a dish of parsnips into Seamus Finnigan's lap. But down here his hands went slow and certain, settling the black earth in round each seedling, firming it with two fingers, moving on to the next. The seedlings were ugly little things, pale and squashed and screwed up, like small fists, or small furious faces, and they smelled of turned earth with something sharper running under it.
"They don't cry yet," Neville said, not looking up. "Not at this size. You can hold these ones bare-handed. It's when they're grown that the crying can — well. That it can kill you."
He stopped. Colour came climbing up his neck.
"That's a daft thing to say," he said. "To you, I mean."
Ginny said nothing.
He put the trowel down and wiped his palms on his knees, which only moved the soil about, and then he sat and did not try to fill the quiet, which was somehow better than if he had. After a moment he shifted along the crate and made a space, and edged the tray a few inches toward it.
"There's loads of these left," he said, to the tray and not to her. "If you fancied it. You don't have to talk, or anything. It's just — it's better than up there. That's what I always think. Better than being up there with everyone."
So Ginny went and sat.
The crate was not built for two, and their elbows knocked, and neither of them remarked on it. Neville showed her how without turning it into a lesson — here was the seedling, here was its pot, here was how much earth, here was how firmly to press so as not to bruise the root. Her first one she pressed too hard, and the little thing let out a thin, cross squeak, no louder than a mouse, and she snatched both hands into her lap.
"It's all right," Neville said quickly. "They squeak. It doesn't mean you've hurt it. They just don't like being messed about with. Nobody would."
They did another, and then another. The rain came on, soft against the glass overhead, running down it in long grey threads, and the lamp made a warm little island of the two of them and their trays. Out past the panes the grounds had gone to shapes — the black bulk of the Forest, the flatter black of the lake, the far-off gleam where a window burned in Hagrid's hut. A tray of something feathery on the next bench kept up a low, irritable rustling every time one of them moved.
"Screechsnaps," said Neville, when she glanced at it. "Don't mind them. They only kick off if you get too close. They settle down if you leave them be."
Ginny's hands grew steadier. The third seedling she got exactly right, and Neville said "There," as though it counted for something, and something in her chest gave by a single notch. She had not known it was pulled tight until it wasn't.
A toad came lumbering out from between two pots, blinking, and settled on Neville's foot.
"That's Trevor," Neville said, without any surprise at all. "He gets out. He always gets out. I've given up working out how." He nudged the toad with the side of his shoe, gently. "He likes it down here. It's warm. I reckon he'd move into the compost heap if I let him."
Ginny looked at the toad. The toad looked back at Ginny.
"He's all right, is Trevor," she said, and found, to her own faint surprise, that she half meant it.
Trevor considered the compost, thought better of it, and went to sleep on the warm flags by the lamp.
"How long do you stay down here?" Ginny asked. "At night."
"Till the lamp wants topping up, mostly. Or till I hear Filch." Neville shrugged. "Nobody's ever caught me. I reckon Professor Sprout would square it if they did. She said once —" He stopped, and could not keep the pleasure off his face. "She said I've got a feel for it. For plants. Nobody's ever told me I've got a feel for anything before. Snape says I've got a feel for melting cauldrons." He pressed a seedling down. "I keep it, though. What she said. I take it out and have a look at it when Potions has been bad."
Ginny found she was almost smiling.
"That's a good thing to keep," she said.
"It is," said Neville, with feeling. "You want to hang on to those. You don't get many."
They potted on. And somewhere in the potting she asked the thing she had come down here, without quite knowing it, half-meaning to ask.
"Did you grow the others?" Her voice came out smaller than she wanted it. "The big ones. The ones they used on — on Hermione. And all the rest of them."
Neville nodded. "Some of them. All the second-years did — we've been at them since October, only nobody told us what they were for. Not really. Not till it — happened." He caught himself sliding toward it again and steered off, gentler this time; he was learning. "Professor Sprout stewed them up herself. She wouldn't let anyone help with that part; she was down here the whole night doing it. And then Madam Pomfrey took it round like squash, out of a great jug, and they all just — sat up. Hermione sat up talking. First thing she did. Wanted to know how much of the term she'd gone and missed."
Ginny had stopped, with a seedling half into its pot. She was looking at it and not at it.
"So they're all right," she said. "The ones it got."
"Yeah." Neville was watching her now. "Nobody died. That's the bit everyone keeps saying, over and over. Nobody actually died."
"But they could have." The words came out flat. "If it had looked at them straight. Instead of round a corner, or in a mirror. Colin only saw it through his camera. If he'd looked at it properly he'd be —"
She did not finish that one either.
Outside the wind shifted, and a draught came in under the door, cold and river-smelling, and curled round her ankles — and the greenhouse thinned, the way breath goes off a glass, and she was not in it any more.
She did not go anywhere. She did not see anything, exactly, or hear it. It was only that the cold came up through the soles of her feet the way cold comes up off stone that has never once in a thousand years been warm, and there was wet at her back, soaking through, and a smell of standing water and old iron, and, somewhere a long way down, a sound that might have been water moving and might have been something breathing. And she was small. And the dark went up and up on every side. And there was something in it the size of the world that knew her name.
"— Ginny."
She came back.
Neville was saying her name. He had said it more than once; she could see that in his face. The seedling she'd been holding was crushed to green pulp in her fist, her knuckles gone white round it, and she had no memory at all of the time between the draught and now. A few seconds. A minute. She could not have said. That was the part that turned her right over — never knowing how long a gap had lasted. Never being able to find out afterward.
"You're in the greenhouse." Neville had put his trowel down and turned toward her, and he said it plainly, the way you'd tell somebody the time. "Greenhouse three. That's the rain on the glass. That's the Screechsnaps on the bench there, and Trevor asleep by the lamp. You're all right. You're only down in the greenhouse with me."
Ginny got a breath in. It went down wrong and juddered.
"Here." He took the ruined seedling out of her hand, prising her fingers off it one at a time, and put an empty pot into her palm instead, cold and rough. "Hold that. Feel how cold it's gone. There's a chip out of the rim, that side — feel it, there." He waited while she turned it over and over, her thumb going across and across the broken place, until her breathing had come down nearer to the sound of the rain. "There. It's only the greenhouse. It comes on you out of nowhere, doesn't it. I know it does."
He knew it did. He did not say how.
She was shaking in long slow waves now, and gone very cold, coldest at her hands and her mouth; and as she sat there the wind outside dropped away, and across the nearest pane a fine feathering of frost came out all at once, where no frost had any business being in the middle of June, and held for a breath, and melted to nothing. Neville looked at it. He did not remark on it. He seemed to decide that a bit of frost, all things considered, was neither here nor there.
He waited until her breathing had gone quiet. Then he picked the trowel up and went back to it, unhurried, and left her a space to be in that nobody was watching.
Ginny turned the empty pot over in her hands.
"That's the worst of it," she said. "Not the being taken. Everyone thinks it must be that. It isn't. It's that I don't always know what I've done. There are gaps. Whole bits gone, like just now, when the cold came in — I go somewhere, and I don't know how long I've gone for, and while it's happening I can't tell whether it's only that I'm tired, or whether it's the thing, starting up again." She pressed her thumb into the chip on the rim. "I can't trust my own head. That's it, really. I used to be able to. Now I can't, and I don't know how you get that back. Or if you ever do."
Neville was quiet a moment. When he spoke he did not look at her; he turned a seedling in his fingers, round and round.
"I forget things," he said.
Ginny said nothing.
"All the time. It's a joke, mostly. Neville's forgotten his book, Neville's lost his toad again. Gran sends me Howlers about it in front of the whole Hall. And I laugh, because it's easier if you laugh first." He firmed the earth down. "But it isn't a joke to me. Because I don't know what else has gone. That's the thing nobody gets. You only find out you've forgotten something when you go to look for it and it's not there — the rest of the time you haven't the faintest idea it's missing. So how many are there? Things I've had and lost and never even noticed losing." He set the seedling in its pot. "My Gran got me a Remembrall. It goes red when you've forgotten something. And it goes red, and I stand there holding it, and I cannot for the life of me think what. So then I know for a fact there's a thing gone. And I still can't get it back. That's worse, somehow, than not knowing at all."
He stopped himself, and went a bit red.
"It's not the same as yours," he said. "I know it's not. Nobody made me forget. It's only me being useless. But — I don't trust my own head either. So." He turned his hands up, soil in every crease of them. "There's that."
He had given it to her plainly, and laid it down on the bench between them, next to hers, and made no more of it than that. Half an hour ago she had not known one true thing about Neville Longbottom. Now she knew this: that he lay awake too, not trusting what his own mind might do without asking him first. It was not the same as hers. It was near enough that something in her chest let go of a whole fistful of what it had been holding.
"It is worse," she said. "Knowing it's gone. You're right about that. It's worse than not knowing."
"Yeah," said Neville. He sounded almost pleased — not that it was worse, but that somebody had said so. "It is."
They potted on for a while, and the quiet had changed; it had gone easy, the way it had not been when she first came in out of the rain. Then Ginny said, low, not lifting her eyes from the tray:
"Do you think. If a person did something. Something bad. But they didn't want to — they didn't even know they were doing it, not while it was happening. Only after." She was speaking to the soil. "Do you think it still counts. As them doing it."
Neville did not answer straight away.
He did not rush to fill the quiet, the way her brothers would have, patting a thing on the head until it went still. He sat with it. He looked along the rows of pale, screwed-up seedlings, and the rain ran down the glass, and when at last he spoke he spoke slowly, hunting for each word as he came to it.
"No," he said. "I don't reckon it does. Not the same way."
He turned the trowel handle over in his fingers.
"There's a plant," he said, and Ginny nearly laughed. Nothing was funny; she nearly laughed all the same. He caught the almost of it and went pink and pressed on regardless, because plants were the only language he had ever been sure of. "Devil's Snare. It'll strangle you — if you fall into it in the dark and struggle, it only grips the tighter. It'll kill you and never know it did. But that's only what it turns into where there's no light. It isn't being cruel. It doesn't choose it." He frowned at his hands. "And it isn't the plant's fault. Where it ended up growing. Somebody had to have put it there in the first place."
He did not look at her for the last of it.
"I don't reckon you can blame a person for what got done to them. For what something else turned them into, while they couldn't get free of it. That's not them. That's just the dark they were shut up in."
Ginny looked at him then. She looked at him properly — at round-faced Neville Longbottom, who lost his toad and dropped his goblet and got laughed at, and who had just said the truest thing anyone had said to her in a fortnight while looking hard at the soil so as not to make her hold his eye while he said it. And it came to her, quite quietly, that he had not fished those words out of a book. That there was a reason it was him, of all the people in the whole enormous castle, who had known what to say. She did not know the reason. She only knew, the way you know a thing before you have any right to, that there was one.
She did not ask. She looked back down at her hands, and gave him something back instead, since that seemed to be how it went between them now, one thing laid down for another.
"I had somewhere I used to put things," she said, lower than before. "Things I couldn't tell anyone. I thought it was mine. I thought it was safe, because it was only mine, and nobody else in the whole world knew about it. And then it — it started putting things back. Kind things, at first. It was kind to me. That's the part I can't say to anyone, because it sounds — it was the only thing all year that felt like it was on my side. I told it everything. I was glad to. And the whole time it was —"
She did not have a word for what it had been. There wasn't one. She let the sentence lie there, unfinished, on the black soil.
Neville had gone very still beside her.
She waited for him to lean away, the smallest bit, the way people did — to sit back, to find some reason to look toward the door. He didn't. He set his trowel down in the tray, slowly, and stayed exactly where he was. He did not tell her it was all right, because it wasn't. He did not tell her not to think about it, because she couldn't help thinking about it. What he said, in the end, was:
"That sounds really horrible."
And somehow that was the right thing.
Nobody had said it. Everybody had said the other things — that she was safe now, that it was all over, that she must try her best not to dwell on it — and nobody had simply told her that it was horrible; that a horrible thing had been done to her, and that it was allowed to have been horrible.
"It was," Ginny said. Her eyes had gone hot and blurred. "It was really horrible."
And then she was crying, which she had not done — not once, not in front of her mother, or Madam Pomfrey, or the headmaster with his kind, terrible eyes; not since the night it happened. It did not come gently. It came the way it comes when a thing has been held down by main force for a fortnight and gets loose all at once — her whole body going with it, her breath dragging in and out, both hands pressed hard over her mouth as though even now, even here, she must not be heard. Her teeth had started to chatter. She had gone cold all through. She cried until it hurt her ribs, and could not have stopped to save her life, and did not try.
Neville did not put his arm round her. She could not have borne being held just then, and somehow he knew it, or guessed it, or was only too shy to try. He did a better thing than holding her. He picked his trowel back up and tucked another Mandrake down into the earth, and then another, steady and unbothered, as though a girl crying in a greenhouse were nothing much to remark on — as though she might take as long over it as she liked, and there was nothing that wanted doing about it, and nothing that had to be said. He gave her somewhere to cry that was not the middle of everyone's watching. It was, she thought afterward, the kindest thing anyone had managed for her in a fortnight.
She stopped, in the end. She scrubbed her face on her sleeve, and got soil across it, and did not care. The greenhouse swam and then came clear again. There were only a few seedlings left in the tray, and she did the last of them herself, and Neville let her, watching sideways to be sure she pressed them in soft enough, and not letting on that he was watching at all.
"Nobody knows it was me," she said. It came out very quiet. "That's the thing I can't — everyone's being so kind, and it's only because they don't know. They think I got taken, that's all. That I'm the girl it happened to. Dumbledore said it's better that way. Better nobody knows. And he's right, I know he's right, only —" She pressed a seedling in too hard, and it squeaked, and she gentled her hands without being told. "Only it means I have to sit there. At the table. With everybody being so nice to me. And I did it. I opened it. I let the thing out. Colin's up in the hospital wing because of me — Colin, who never did a single thing to anyone, who only ever wanted his photographs — and he'll come round, and he'll be pleased to see me, because he doesn't know either. And I've got to smile at him. And eat my dinner. And never tell one single person, ever, for the whole rest of my life."
She looked down at her hands.
"It's like there's two of me now," she said. "The one they can all see, that everybody's so sorry for. And the other one. The one nobody's ever going to know about, because if they did, they'd —"
She stopped.
Neville did not tell her that they wouldn't. He was not a good enough liar for it, and he knew he wasn't, and he did not try. He knew about carrying a thing you were never going to be able to set down in front of anyone; she could see that he knew, in the way he did not rush to make it any smaller than it was.
"You told me," he said, at last.
Ginny looked up.
"You just did," Neville said. "Told someone. So it's not never, is it. It's only — not them." He turned a pot round in his hands. "It helps. A bit. Just knowing it's not never. I know it does."
For a while neither of them said anything, and she did the last of the seedlings, and this time she got every one of them right. And she found, when the tray was empty, that she did not want to get up and go back to the castle. She wanted to stay in the warm green dark with the rain on the glass, where a person had just been given the worst thing she had and had gone on tucking Mandrakes into pots as though she were still an ordinary person who could be sat next to. She looked sideways at him.
"Your turn," she said.
Neville blinked. "What?"
"That's how it goes, isn't it." She had not planned to say it; it came out with the ghost of something in it that might, in a girl less scraped-out, have been the start of a joke. "I tell you a horrible one, you tell me a horrible one. It's only fair. I've had about four off you and you've had about nine off me. You're behind."
And Neville, to her great surprise, huffed out a short breath that was very nearly a laugh.
"Go on, then," he said, and set another empty tray between them, and reached for the next flat of seedlings. "I've got loads. Where d'you want to start."
"The dark," Neville said. "That's one. When I was small I wouldn't sleep without the landing lamp on. Drove my Gran spare. She kept saying there was nothing in the dark that wasn't there in the daylight, only you couldn't see it, so what was the difference." He set a pot straight. "I never could get her to understand that that was the whole trouble. That it was there and you couldn't see it. That's worse, isn't it. Not less."
"That's worse," Ginny agreed.
She turned a seedling round in its pot, and it was easier to say the next thing with her hands full and the rain going and Neville not looking at her.
"I can't sleep with the curtains shut round the bed. It's the dark of it. I keep thinking I can hear it — not really, I know it's not really, but I lie there and I listen and I can't stop listening, and then it's morning and I've hardly slept. And when I do drop off it's worse, because then I'm back there, and it's so real I can smell it, and I wake up not knowing where I am. Not for a moment or two. I lie there and I honestly could not tell you the year, or that I'm at school, or that it's over. I have to work it out again. Every single time." She pressed the earth down. "And some mornings I wake up and my hands ache and I can't think why, and I'm frightened to let myself think why, in case. So I check the mirror. Every morning, before anything else. To see if it's still me looking out of it. The other girls think I've gone mad." She said it very low. "It always is me. So far it's always been only me. But I have to look first. I can't start the day until I've looked."
Neville nodded slowly, as though this were a sensible arrangement and not a mad one.
"Leave the gap," he said. "In the curtains. For the light. There's nothing daft in it. If the light helps, have the light. Anyone tells you different's never once lain awake listening for something." He reached quickly across her for the last of the seedlings —
— and she flinched, her whole arm jerking back, the pot going over — before she could stop it, before her mind could catch her body and hold it still.
Neville went carefully still. He did not say sorry, or ask what the matter was, or make a single thing of it. He only drew his hand back, slow, and after that she noticed he brought his movements up where she could see them coming — reached where she could watch the reach, set things down where she could hear them land, the way you would move around a horse that had been badly handled. He did it without a word, and did not stop doing it, and did not once let on that he was doing it at all.
"Right," he said, righting the pot. "My turn. A big one, I think, to catch up." He was quiet a moment, choosing. "My Great-Uncle Algie. He's got a garden that's more shed than garden — pots and jars and things that bite. When I was small, everybody thought I might not have any magic in me at all. A Squib." He said it lightly, and it did not stay light. "So they kept trying things. To force it out of me. Uncle Algie hung me out of an upstairs window by the ankles once, to see if I'd bounce, or float, or do — anything. I was seven. He wasn't being cruel, he says, and he was pleased as anything when I finally did something. But I remember hanging there. Looking at the flowerbed a long way down. And thinking — quite calmly, that's the part — if I'm nothing, they'll all know it now."
He turned the trowel over.
"Not that I might die," he said. "That wasn't the thought. The thought was that everyone was finally going to find out I was nothing. Or —" he stopped, and steered off, the way she had steered off a dozen times that evening — "or that I'd turn out to be something. Something I never asked to be. I don't know which of those was worse." He pressed a seedling home. "So I know a bit about it. Waiting to find out what you are. Being frightened of the answer."
He almost smiled.
"Uncle Algie took me round the greenhouses after, mind. That bit was kind. He never once cared if I was rubbish at it. He just showed me things and let me grow them, and if a plant did all right it didn't matter whose fault it was, or whether I was ever going to amount to anything. It just grew." He looked along the little pale rows. "That's the plants, isn't it. They don't care what you are. They only care whether you looked after them. It's about the only thing I've ever met that's like that."
Ginny thought of Harry, then, without meaning to. She always thought of Harry without meaning to; her face went hot the instant his name came into her head, and it had been going hot a hundred times worse since he had been the one to come down into the dark after her — who had seen her lying white and half-dead on the cold wet stone, with the whole horrible truth of it written plainly all over her. She could not so much as look at him now, the length of the Hall away. She could not think how she was ever going to look at him again.
"He came down there," she said, before she had decided to say it. "Harry. To get me. Everyone thinks he's — and he is. He's brave, and he's — he's Harry." She picked at the rim of a pot. "It makes you feel about an inch tall, doesn't it. Being next to someone like that. Especially when you're the one that had to be got."
"Yeah," said Neville, at once, before she'd even finished. "It does. A bit."
He said it so promptly, and so plainly, and with such fellow-feeling, that Ginny very nearly laughed a second time, and this time it got most of the way out — a short, wet huff of a thing — before she caught it.
"He's all right, though," Neville added, loyally. "Harry. He never once makes you feel it. That's the thing about him. It's just there, and he never rubs your nose in it, and somehow that's almost worse than if he did."
"Almost worse," Ginny agreed, and this time they both smiled, briefly, in the lamplight, at the shared and hopeless business of being ordinary in the near neighbourhood of Harry Potter.
When the last pot was done, Neville did not get up straight away. He looked along the rows of them, all the small pale screwed-up faces, and then he chose one — she could not have said what set it apart from the rest, if anything did — and worked it loose, and settled it into a little clay pot of its own, and pushed it across the bench to her.
"Here," he said. "You have this one."
Ginny looked at it. "I'll only kill it. I'm rubbish at —"
"You won't." Neville said it as though it were a plain fact he happened to have to hand, like the boiling point of a standard cauldron, or the date of a goblin rebellion. "You've got the hands for it. You have. Most people press too hard because they aren't paying it any attention. You press too hard because you're frightened of hurting it. That's a different thing altogether. That one, you can teach." He nudged the pot another inch toward her. "Water it when the top of the soil's gone dry, mind, not before — that's how most people finish them off, too much water. You can talk to it, if you want. They do better for it, though don't you go telling anyone I said so. And when it starts to cry, you'll want the earmuffs. But that's ages off yet. That's not till next year, that is."
He heard it after it was out — next year — and they both went quiet, because next year had not been at all a settled thing, these last weeks.
"They wanted to send me to St Mungo's," Ginny said. "Did you know that? Instead of me coming back. A nice quiet ward, and a cure, and a fresh start well away from here." She turned the little pot in her hands. "Mum cried when they said it. She thought I was asleep."
Neville had gone very still.
"It's not a bad place," he said. He said it too quickly, and too surely, the way a person speaks up for somewhere he knows from the inside. "St Mungo's. It's — it's clean. The people there are kind. There's a tea trolley comes round, and the long-stay wards have got great big windows. It's not what people think it is. It's not a place to be frightened of."
He heard himself, and stopped.
Ginny looked at him. She thought of the long-stay wards, and of a boy who knew about the windows in them, and the tea trolley, and how kind the people were — who had not read that anywhere, but had sat inside it, more than once, on visiting days, next to somebody. And she thought of the things her mother said sometimes, low, at the kitchen table, when she believed the children were all asleep — about people who had been ordinary once, and then had a terrible thing done to their minds, by the same kind of magic that had come so near to being done to hers. And it went quietly together in her, the plain unhurried way he had known what to say to her all evening, and the too-quick certainty in his voice now, and where the two of them fit.
She did not ask. She would never ask him. It was his, exactly the way the diary was hers — a thing standing just behind the words, that he had come as close to as he was ever going to come, and stopped at. She only nodded, once, the way he had nodded at her, and did not make him say the rest.
"I'm not frightened of it," she said, which was not quite true, and was the kindest thing she had to give him. "It sounds all right. The way you tell it."
"It is all right," said Neville, low. Then, steadier: "But you don't need it. You're coming back here. You've got a Mandrake to see to now, haven't you. Can't very well leave that to me. I've got enough on."
Somewhere far up in the castle a bell rang, thin and small through the rain, and Ginny knew it meant the feast was breaking up, and that her mother would already be starting to look for her — that soft, searching look that made Ginny feel like something that might be mislaid, rather than a person who had only wandered off. She would have to go up. She did not want to go up. But she got to her feet, with the pot held safe against her, and Neville got up too, and knocked the crate clean over, and set it right, and caught the edge of the tray as it went, and steadied that as well; and Ginny found that the corner of her mouth had done a thing it had not done in a fortnight. It was not a smile, quite. It was the place a smile comes from.
"Neville," she said, at the door, with the warm green dark of the greenhouse at her back, and the cold reaching in for her.
She wanted to thank him, and could not find any way of doing it that would not be too big — that would not go and turn the whole evening into a Thing, and frighten it clean off. So in the end she only said:
"Are you down here most nights?"
Neville went pink again, but this time he was smiling before he could stop himself.
"Most nights," he said. "After supper. Professor Sprout doesn't mind. She leaves the lamp lit for me."
"All right," said Ginny.
And she went out into the rain with the little Mandrake tucked up under her jumper to keep it warm, and started up the churned path toward the great lit windows of the castle, where they were all of them still waiting to be careful with her. And she thought that tomorrow, after supper, when the being careful got to be more than she could stand, there was somewhere now that she could go — and, in it, one person in the whole castle who would not handle her like something that had a crack running through it, because she had shown him the crack, and he had shown her his, and they had sat and potted seedlings over the pair of them all the same.
The rain had thinned to almost nothing. Halfway up the path she stopped, and shifted the pot round under her jumper until it sat over her heart, where it was warmest, and where the small crushed leaves would take no more knocking about. It was only a Mandrake. It would scream the house down in a year and have to be shut away in a cupboard. But it was hers, and it was alive, and she had not killed it yet.
She thought that when she got up to the dormitory she would set it on the sill by her bed, in the gap she left in the curtains, where the light came in. And she thought that later, when the others were asleep, she might tell it a few things — out loud, the way you were meant to, the way Neville said they liked. Only small things, to start with. Only the true ones.
She went on up toward the castle.
Behind her, in greenhouse three, the lamp stayed lit.