October 31st
There is a drawn-out creak coming from the doorway, the moon is bright and shining through the curtains, and Alice has been brutally ripped from her sleep.
The creak was a warning, a handy little spell that promised company. Her heart thumps, loud in her ears. Alice is alive, and well, but company means bad news.
Through her fear, Alice is irritated. She’d been having a good dream, of bright lights reflected in deep waters, and a little boy beside her, splashing through the cool water and reaching through the ripples for the long, lightning bright trajectories. Alice knows her boy anywhere, everywhere. She would recognise her son inside and out in each of the planes, in her slumber, on every continent and in any disguise. She’s taken such care in learning him, all of Neville’s careful, sleepy smiles and brilliant, freeing ones, all of his tantrums and watery eyes and screeches. He took his first, toddling steps away from her, and towards Frank, her Frank, and her Frank had cried, delighted, but Alice wouldn’t miss a single second, she wouldn’t. She had refused to.
And in this dream, Alice had been free with the wind, unworried and calm, and Neville had been there, a handful of years older. Every witch and wizard worth their wand knows the intense power of dreams, and she had been prepared to treasure this one, to ride it out until the joy had faded. But here she is, heart beating too fast, gripping her wand, wondering how she will ever cope with any more loss, and knowing she will simply because she must.
“Alice!” Frank calls, and it’s too loud, it’s going to wake the baby. “Alice!” He shouts again, even though their London flat is too small for it to be needed at all, and he sounds so urgent that Alice scrambles from their bed and sets her jaw, wondering what news Frank will bring this time.
Like an owl, she’d joked to Emmeline, always coming and going. Always knows what’s going on, our Frank. Oh, the gossip circles just love him.
But that was before the war, before the darkness, before the missing and the bodies and the wounded. Frank’s news strikes fear into Alice’s bones, now. She loves him for being strong enough to deliver it anyway.
“Frank,” she hisses, hurrying to the hall, and Frank scrubs at his eyes, bone tired. She runs her hands over his strong, smooth shoulders and manages not to give him a shake. Her voice goes solid, goes firm. “You’re alright, Frank, look at me. You’re alright, yeah? You’ve gotta be, right this second, because you’re freaking me the fuck out, and we both know you have something to tell me.”
Her husband doesn’t waste time with apologies. He takes a deep breath, raises his eyes to meet hers, and says, “Voldemort’s dead.”
Of all horrible things that Alice had been expecting Frank to say, this was not it. “What?” She says, whispered on her exhale.
“Voldemort’s dead,” he says hoarsely, “and they’re saying he took Lily and James with him.”
Alice stares at Frank for a very long moment. She recoils, her hands dropping to her sides, still gripping her wand. “Oh,” she says, voice soft with sympathy. “Muggles? No, foreigners, right? Those Americans Moody’s been expecting?”
“Our Lily and James, Alice,” Frank replies very gently, but the tone of his voice does not matter, not one bit, because the words are jagged and cruel and they are splitting Alice open.
Don’t say that to me, she wants to say. Solid, firm, words to stop the shaking of the ground below her feet. Don’t say that to me, I don’t have any room left inside of me. I can’t hold it. Take it back.
But this is Frank, who Alice is madly, wildly, hopelessly in love with. This is Frank. He does not say your Lily and James, because those silly, earnest kids have always been Frank and Alice’s both. And this is Frank, who has had to be the bearer of too much destructive, devastating news.
His hands shakes as he trails them mindlessly down Alice’s thick arms, from her shoulder, down her forearms, to hook his fingers through hers. They are sweat slicked. Alice curls her pinkie finger around Frank’s and doesn’t cry.
Neville does, though. He’s heard the commotion, or maybe smelt the grief, thick and bitter in the air. He cries, and Alice thinks of Harry, having to grow up without remembering his lovely, ridiculous, brave parents, and she can feel the lump rising in her throat.
She turns from Frank abruptly, moves swiftly for her son’s bedroom. But she leaves their fingers intertwined, pulls Frank after her. Alice picks up her son, so small, so loved, so wonderful, and holds him close to her.
“I know, baby,” she whispers. And then she looks up at Frank and says, more fiercely, “Voldemort didn’t take them with him, Lily and James took Voldemort with them.”
Frank crumples, making a horrible whining noise, like a dog that’s just been kicked. Tears are streaming down his face and he’s sobbing loudly, collapsing to the floor. “They were just kids,” he howls, and Alice sinks down next to him, more carefully, pillowing Neville in her lap, and she breaks down right there beside him.
She cries for Lily, who is so generous and so fair and so fierce. She cries for James, who is so excitable, who is so caring, who is so just.
She cries for Marlene, who is so bold, who is so honest, who has integrity in the marrow of her bones.
She cries for Dorcas, who is so attentive, who is so dedicated, who is so wicked in all the right ways.
She cries for Gideon, who is so charming, who is so optimistic, who is so committed.
She cries for Fabian, who is so passionate, who is so open-minded, who is so perceptive.
She cries for Edgar, who is so efficient, who is so reliable, who is so understanding.
She cries for Benjy, who is so resilient, who is so innovative, who is so humble.
She cries for everyone who turned from being something, to someone that had been something. Alice cries, selfishly, for herself, who survived, and must live with all this heaviness now.
It’s a long time before the sobs quiet. And even then, wrung out as they are, the slightest prompting may set them off again.
Frank wipes the tears from Neville’s face with large, gentle fingers, and then turns and does the same for Alice’s red cheeks. She kisses him, every conceivable inch of his face, and then rests her forehead on his. Frank’s wet eyelashes brush against her skin, and she licks his salty tears from her cracked lips. Here they are. Survivors. War veterans.
Neville grabs her hair tightly, and Alice eases the clump from his fist and kisses his cheeks, too. He giggles when she blows a raspberry on his tummy, and she makes sure to smile at him.
“Frank,” says Alice, careful to keep her voice light for Neville, “I don’t know what to do now. Where to go. How to live without fearing for our lives.”
And Frank, the boy with all the answers, replies “I don’t know, either.”
For a moment, the silence is thick and heavy. Frank makes a face at Neville, who crawls across her lap to his, and then looks at Alice, his eyes deep and brown and intense. “But we’ll do it together.”
“And we will get there,” Alice finishes, and promises, like she can will it into existence. It doesn’t matter who she’s trying to convince. Neither of them voice their thoughts, after that. But Alice knows Frank, and she knows he’s thinking what she’s thinking.
We will get there, but Lily and James will never get the chance. Marlene and Dorcas will never get the chance. All of the dead will stay dead, and Harry will stay parentless, and the circles with keep turning and the clocks will keep ticking on and on and on.
Later, in the months of peace that will follow, Alice knows that she’ll take the chances she has and grip them in her hands until they expel blood. She’ll make the best of everything those people, those corpses, no longer have. But for now, Alice just feels the awfulness of it all, deep in her vital organs where her love and pain lives.
On the night of the 31st of October 1981, as November dawns, the Longbottoms do not attend any celebrations. They don’t raise their glasses. They simply relocate to the couch, and stare into the flames where they’ve disconnected the Floo, thigh to thigh and shoulder to shoulder, a restless child juggled between them, and think about luck.