Alice clutches her baby boy to her chest. His breathing is soft and slow, each exhale a tiny puff of life.
She has never felt more evil for being alive to raise her son, because Lily and James are not. They are buried beside each other, with constant visits from people they never knew, people who only want to see the parents of the Boy Who Lived. They don’t particularly care that they are dead, because Voldemort is.
They are heroes for dying, and Alice is just grateful she isn’t, that her baby, that her Neville, wasn’t the child of the prophecy after all. The feeling of pure relief flows through her with such an awful intensity that her hands are always shaking, and the need to be near him is one so raw and primal, that the thought of even putting him down for a moment is a stupid one. The gnawing guilt is almost as strong.
It’s called survivor's guilt, the mind healers say. Your mind feels subconsciously as if you are to blame for living, when you are not. It is not your fault. It could never be your fault. It was war, it wasn’t fair.
They tell her it wasn’t her fault very often. She isn’t quite sure she believes them yet.
It is the 15th of November, 1981, when Alice’s entire world falls apart. They didn’t expect it to. Voldemort is dead. Death Eaters have been rounded up. The war is over.
They are supposed to be safe.
The knock on the door didn’t seem suspicious. Of course, they were on edge constantly in the war, so the creeping paranoia still bleeds in, but she and Frank just figured it was an order member. It couldn’t be a Death Eater, surely not. They wouldn’t bother knocking, anyway.
They ignored it, at first. Neville had just gone down for a nap, and he was sleeping badly unless he was in his mothers arms, but he needed to learn to sleep alone. It was important for babies to do so, as Augusta was always saying, but it still broke Alice’s heart to hear his cries every time.
Then the knock came again, louder this time. Frank frowned, but Alice pretended she didn’t hear it at all. She didn’t want anything to ruin her quiet evening, and it was fine with her if she had to ignore some irritating summons from Dumbledore.
It was only by the third time that Alice felt the hairs on the back of her neck prick up. It was no longer a knock, but someone hammering on the door. No, not just someone, two pairs of hands, then three.
The all too familiar kick-drum heartbeat starts up from her growing panic, her hand already gripping her wand. Frank is over by the fireplace, green flames licking the soot-blackened brick as he speaks in a hurried tone to several small faces floating in the fire, no doubt alerting them. She sees Augusta's face flash with fear, as Dumbledore's eyebrows furrow, and Remus’ scarred face stiffens with pain, before they all disappear, along with the emerald flames.
Alice feels her stomach drop. Everyone knows Remus is the strongest dueler left in the order now, even though he seems to have developed a poorly hidden hatred for Dumbledore, so if Frank has contacted him, something must be truly wrong.
Her husband turns to face her, face drawn, yet she is hit with a wave of pure fondness. He is everything, all charcoal-etched features, and bronze shadows. Some days she wonders why he ever chose her, but he is crossing the room and cradling her face, tilting it up at him before she can retreat into the depths of her mind.
His brown eyes are searching her face as if he is trying to commit to memory every dimple, every curve of her cheekbones, every golden streak in her eyes. Alice doesn’t think he has ever looked quite so lovely, and she opens her mouth to tell him this, when a high-pitched cackle pierces the quiet of their house, muffled slightly by the wards, but unmistakable.
And then Alice is twenty two again, and standing on a muggle street, staring straight at a manic Bellatrix Lestrange, who is laughing under a glowing skull and snake, because she knows that sound, and she knows it from battlefields. That laugh is the witching hour, and elbows scraping on concrete, nails on walls and the red of the cruciatus curse.
The feeling of Franks hands pulling her towards the stairs snaps her out, and then he is pressing something smooth and metal and round into her hand, and then he is casting spell after spell at the door, but there are three death eaters on the other side, no longer playing nice, and she needs to help him, but she has to get to her baby.
Her baby. Neville.
She scrambles up the stairs, tripping halfway and the carpet burns her knees. The door to his room is slightly ajar, and his quiet sniffles are barely there amongst the chaos downstairs. Her socks slip on the rug, but she barely notices, because suddenly Neville is in her arms, his tiny hands grabbing at her shirt. Holding him gives her just one single glimpse of relief.
Alice whispers her love into his fluffy hair, and Franks too, as she rocks him gently. He fusses, and she shushes him, but then her husband's screams echo up the stairs, and tears are falling from her eyes too, dropping onto his soft baby skin.
Guilt pools in her chest as she wipes them away, murmuring apologies and more words of calm reassurance. Behind it all, Bellatrix’s screams of delight, and her husband's screams of agony are a twisted backing track that she wishes would just stop.
She wonders if this is how Lily Potter felt, if she heard her husband's body drop, rather than convulse, if she too had promised her son a life full of everything she wanted to give him, even when she knew she wouldn’t be there to do so?
She puts Neville down, into his crib, and when he cries louder, she feels as if she can’t move. She has to go help Frank, she has to, but leaving Neville? She never thought she’d be ready to do that, especially not this soon.
It is then that she registers the ring still pressed into her hand, and she knows without looking that it is Frank’s. It has left a harsh dent in her palm, but she just unclasps the chain around her neck, yanking the lily charm off. It skids across the floor and disappears underneath the chest of drawers in the corner.
She pulls off her own engagement and wedding rings, before tipping all three onto the delicate chain. Fastening it around her sons neck, she presses a kiss onto each of his rounded cheeks, and then another onto his forehead.
She turns away, and he cries out for her. Alice doesn’t look back at him until just before she shuts the door, and when she does, her heart cracks inside her chest so loudly that she is sure the whole world must be able to hear it.
Neville is standing in his crib, small hands gripping the edge to pull himself up, his face pink and streaked with tears as he sobs, his nose running and his large brown eyes bubbling with tears.
She shuts the door with her own loud sobs filling the hallway, casting every locking charm and silencing spell she knows, putting up wards that only Augusta can access, spelling protection after protection to keep her baby boy safe.
Then she turns away and runs down the stairs.
She doesn’t think she’ll ever see him again.
Frank is on the ground, body curved in agony, his mouth open in a silent scream. Bellatrix has her wand trained on him, glee dancing across her features. Rodolphus Lestrange and Barty Crouch’s son, the Ravenclaw, flank her, each watching with a mixture of admiration and curiosity.
When she steps into the hallway, Bellatrix’s gaze immediately snaps to her, and her maniacal grin widens even further.
Her voice is strangely childlike as she speaks. “Ooh, another little plaything! Now, are you going to tell me where my lord is, or are you going to behave like a traitorous mudblood, just like your husband.”
Alice doesn’t say a word. Bellatrix’s smile drops. Her mouth twists into an ugly sneer, eyes narrowing.
“Well, then.” Her voice is cold, cold, cold. “Crucio.”
The crimson red spell hits Alice before she can even think of casting a shield. Frank yells in defiance and anger for a split second, but then one of the others must recast the spell, because it quickly cuts off.
She feels as if she is floating just out of reach of her body, watching. Waiting.
Someone is screaming. It is the kind of sound that would vibrate through the depths of hell. She wants to wrap her arms around whoever is making such a guttural, primal sound. Her heart aches and aches knowing that someone is in that much pain, and she wants to peel her skin off just to wrap it around the wounds that they surely have, in case it helps ease their pain.
It takes her a few moments to realise that she is the one screaming.
That is when the feeling returns to her body, and the sensation of a thousand white hot knives boring into her skin returns. Her heart is a hummingbird and her lungs are quicksilver and everything just hurts hurts hurts hurts hurts.
And then someone is cradling her, and it stops for a second, and Frank is holding her, and the three Death Eaters are laughing, laughing so loudly, and could they please stop laughing because this isn’t funny, and her head feels as though it is splitting in two, and then the spell is hitting them over and over again.
CrucioCrucioCrucioCrucioCrucioCrucioCrucioCrucioCrucioCrucioCrucioCrucioCrucioCrucio.
Alice feels something is slipping away from her, something important, and she tries to chase after it, but it’s like she is moving through sticky honey. All she really knows is Frank and Neville and Hurts.
The sound of boots pounding against wood trickles in through the kind of lavender-tinted haze in her mind, and the laughing gets louder, but the pain is quieter now, so she doesn’t mind as much.
Then there is dark blue fabric in her face and it is crawling into her eyes and slipping through her open mouth and she thinks she is drowning because why else would she feel quite so suffocated? Then a grey thing of - is that hair? - replaces the blue, and she can breathe again. At least, she can until there is red, and red is bad, red hurts, so she screams and screams and screams until the red moves away too, and then it is brown and patched and scarred instead, and Alice recognises this. This is safe.
So she lets the brown pick her up and carry her to a bed that isn’t a bed, but that's okay, because Frank is there and he’s seen her, and she knows Frank understands why blue is drowning and red is hurts and brown is safe .
Then faces are crowding and she doesn’t like these faces, because they are blocking her from Frank, and the faces are saying ‘lucky’, but she doesn’t understand that; that makes her confused, because she doesn’t feel lucky, she just feels used. And she wants Frank, she needs Frank, and he’s right there and why won’t they let him near her?
There is a film of some kind around her body and she hates it, she hates it so much. It feels like plastic. And where has Frank gone again? She wants to hold his hand, even if it is only through the plastic. Where is he? Where is he?
So she screams again, and then Frank screams too. Someone points a stick at her and she kicks out, because that stick is hurts just as much as red is, but then her arms have gone slack and so has her mind and then she is drifting, drifting, drifting.
The walls of the room she is in have always been white, and Alice likes it. Most colours are bad, but green and brown and purple and yellow are okay. She doesn’t really know how to explain it.
She never really leaves the room, but that’s okay. Outside of the room are all of the wrong things, and there is a lot of red. She had left one time, and there had been so many people wearing red, and carrying those sticks, and it had hurt, so she had screamed until she couldn’t scream anymore, and then she drifted away.
She isn’t very good with time, but she thinks it has been a few weeks since she first came here, and her hair has turned a very nice shade of white.
White is safe.
Her son is standing a few metres away from the foot of her and Frank’s bed. He has grown a lot in those few weeks, he is taller than her already, and his hair is curly and dark. He is very lovely, and the faces that come in - the ones in the green cotton - tell her how he looks just like her, and that makes her smile.
She loves Neville more than anything.
He is talking to a few people, and she thinks they must be his friends. She recognises one of the boys, the one with round glasses, but it isn’t possible that it is him, because that boy is dead. Anyway, she hasn’t given him his visit-ly present yet, so she reaches into her bedside drawer, and picks out a yellow wrapper.
The walk to where Neville and his friends seems very long, but Alice supposes it isn’t. She isn’t very good with distance, just like with time, but she reaches him eventually. He turns and smiles at her, and she clasps his hands and places the wrapper inside them.
The bird-hat-lady face says something, but Alice's legs are starting to hurt, and do that boy and that girl both have red hair? Because red is bad, very bad, and that other girl has a stick. Are they going to hurt her Neville? She can’t let them hurt her Neville.
She is just opening her mouth to scream, because it is starting to hurt again, because these people have the bad things, when one of the green cotton faces whisks her away, and closes the curtains around their part of the ward while another tucks her into the bed. She struggles for a moment, until her head starts to ache, violently.
Her last thought before she is drifting is that she hopes Neville liked her gift.
Her baby has a black eye, and a long, scabbing gash down the side of his face. Alice wants to cry, so she does. The tears flow very freely, and Neville’s face crumples.
“Please don’t cry, mum.” His voice cracks, and she immediately sits up straighter, wiping her tears away. He looks shocked that she seems to have heard him, but she just reaches for his face, and he lets her.
His jaw has a light stubble, but his skin is smooth and soft, the same as it was when he was still small. The his crows feet crinkle as she smooths the worry lines away, cradling the side of his face as if it is the most precious thing in the world. He leans into her touch, his dark brown eyes fluttering shut.
“Proud.” Her voice is soft, and it even surprises her that it still works, but Neville’s eyes fly open in shock.
His eyes fill with tears, and then they are both crying, and even though he is taller than her, she holds him like he is a baby, because he is still hers, cupping the back of his head as he sobs quietly into her shoulder.
When his eyes have dried up, she reaches for her drawer, and pulls out a green wrapper. She doesn’t use them a lot because they are for special occasions only, but this seems like a very special one. Reaching for his hands, she folds the crinkled plastic into them, and he smiles when he notices the colour.
And then he is crying again, and she is holding him again, and everything is right in the world, because this is her baby boy, and he is safe in her arms.
He falls asleep eventually, but only for twenty short minutes.
Alice clutches her baby boy to her chest. His breathing is soft and slow, each exhale a tiny puff of life.
She hopes he dreams of some epiphany.