tya's whimsies

Viviane Longbottom showed more promise in the magical arts than her brother Neville, who was two years her junior.

Where he often hid away in the greenhouses of Longland Manor to escape his grandmother’s disappointment and his other relatives’ desperation to prove the Heir of their House was not a squib, she was a model student. She grasped concepts quickly, excelled in her etiquette and pre-Hogwarts tutoring, and her magical core showed such rapid growth it was almost worrying.

It got to the point where the five Elders of the main house, Harfang Longbottom — Viviane and Neville’s great-grandfather who took back the Headship after his grandson was incapacitated —, his wife Callidora, Augusta Longbottom — the last Head’s mother and the widow of Baldwin Longbottom —, Algernon — Harfang’s youngest son and Baldwin’s brother whose own son died in the war —, and his wife Enid questioned whether precedent should be changed, and the tradition of male progeniture of their House should be abolished in favour of granting the Heirship to their most promising candidate. It was either this, or risk that the Headship would be transferred to a branch family should Neville prove to be a squib.

They ultimately decided against it; surely Neville’s core would develop before time came for him to receive his Hogwarts letter. Better to keep him away from the public and save face. If he should not receive his letter, they would reconvene.

They did not notice the shadow of an eight-year-old girl at the door, a little girl who grew to wonder why she, as the oldest child, was passed over in the first place. Her timid little brother could barely remember to tie his own shoelaces; magic or not, was this who they wanted the House to be led by? Neville didn’t even want it.

Her resentment grew.

She did not express it towards her elders, knowing it to be pointless. Augusta Longbottom, the woman who raised her, had an iron spine and a thorny tongue, and the others were just as unyielding. She would get nothing from them except a scolding for eavesdropping.

But she eyed the branch members in a new light, seeing for the first time the greed they had hidden behind veneers of concern for Neville. The branch families had three potential heirs, two of whom were older than both her and her little brother.

From then on, the social gatherings of House Longbottom seemed like a battlefield to her, and she learnt to tread lightly. Where she used to hang onto her second cousin — Ambrose, a seventh year at Beauxbatons — ’s arm and beg him to show her new spells, she now watched the way he looked at the painting of her father, Frank Longbottom, which had been commissioned when the man was Ambrose’s age. She saw the way he mimicked the pose he had taken next to the window overlooking the manor grounds, with wistful fingers trailing on the windowsill.

She heard the way her third cousin once removed, Aunt Hilda boasted of her own son’s accomplishments, staring fixedly at Neville as she did so with a barely concealed smirk. Mathias was only twelve and oblivious to his mother’s ambitions, but he puffed up his chest every time, somehow fooled into thinking that coming back home with a row of Acceptables after his first year at Hogwarts made him some kind of genius.

She grew wary of them all, behaving as if the whole House was her enemy. It made her surly and irritable, to the dismay of her grandmother who was quite content with her previously agreeable disposition. And to the brother she always had patience for, she became cold as ice. Before, she would go to the greenhouses at her grandmother’s behest and listen to Neville ramble about the new plants he took care of under the supervision of the garden fairies. Then she would try to convince him to go back to his lessons, refuting his laments that it was all pointless since he couldn’t do magic anyway with assurances that his time would come soon, and that he must not give up.

Now she would wait it out by the riverside and come back when an appropriate time had passed. If her grandmother asked, she would shrug and say her brother had refused to come back.

Her brother was only six, and he was not as precocious as her. He did not understand this sudden coldness. So he knocked on her door and asked shyly if she wanted to come see the new flowers he had planted in the garden and grew confused when she played her enchanted violin louder and louder to drown out his voice, until her irritation triggered her accidental magic and turned the magical lights her instrument produced into blades that shattered the window of her room.

After weeks of this treatment, he learnt his lesson and stopped asking. He simply stared after her with soulful eyes that Viviane did her best to forget.

And if she missed her quiet little brother, she said nothing to anyone about it.

After all, Neville had been her only confident before she pushed him away. They whispered secrets to each other under blanket forts; he listened to her playing music as much as she watched him care for magical plants and never compared her playing to their father’s as he did so. He asked about the books she was reading and helped her complete the magical puzzles she liked so much. They played games by the riverside with the garden fairies and hunted for mushrooms in the forest.

They spent most of their time with only themselves and their grandmother for company.

Augusta Longbottom had better things to do than to coddle them and always put on their shoulders the pressure of living up to the name and glory of Frank Longbottom. Their relatives only came for family events, and Viviane had learnt her lesson about trusting them. She wasn’t anyone’s priority, and they did not have her best interests at heart. The Elders cared about their Heir, and the cousins cared for what they could take from the main family if given an opportunity.

She just forgot that Neville was the only person in the Longbottom family for whom all of this wasn’t true. The only one who understood what it was like to yearn for stories of Alice Longbottom and wonder why they never heard about her and her family. The only one who knew what it was like to sit in silence at their parents’ bedside for hours while their grandmother wept, staring at these strangers and trying to remember something, anything, of what they were like as parents. The only one who slept in her bed afterwards and murmured how much he hated the Lestranges, holding her hand tightly and trying not to cry.

Viviane forgot, and she did not remember until the summer before she got to Hogwarts, where, at Neville’s ninth birthday party, their great-uncle Algie pushed him out of the balcony.

She watched it happen as if in slow motion, until her instincts kicked in. She dropped her glass of gigglewater, letting it shatter after her and ran to the balustrade next to which his brother had been standing, looking longingly over at the manor grounds until their great-uncle had approached him with grim determination. Viviane had not been standing far, though she had kept her back turned to her brother, and she reached it in little time.

“Neville,” she screamed before she raised up her skirts to get them out of the way and threw herself off the balcony, her arms held out towards him.

Time slowed.

Wingless, she flew, she fell, her hands raised not to slow her descent, but to catch Neville before he would reach the end of his.

She managed to grasp his hand, but they both knew she was too late; Neville watched her with terrified eyes as he hit the ground, and rounded ones when he bounced off it, his magic manifesting at the last moment. But Viviane’s worryingly strong magic was always directed outward rather than inward; it would not protect her.

Instead, it lashed out at Algernon. She heard the man cry out; she did not see what her magic did to him. Her eyes were on her little brother who was futilely struggling to hold her so they could bounce back together. She barely had the thought that he should let go of her when her grandmother intoned, “Arresto Momentum.”

Her fall was halted, but Viviane was still close enough for her elbow to smack against the ground. She hissed in pain and closed her eyes by instinct. As she did, she remembered.

***

Dying is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well, said Sylvia Plath in her poem “the Lady Lazarus”.

It is the last thing she read before he killed her. These words resonated into her mind as she took her last breath and as she breathed her first, reincarnated as she was into this merciless world.

She still felt the phantom grip of his hands around her neck as a newborn child, when her new parents tucked her into their arms and hummed songs of magic to soothe her from the nightmares their predecessors had awakened within her.

It was hard on Alice and Frank, who did not understand why their child flinched and her magic lashed out at the sight of them. Other times she was almost catatonic and did not react to stimuli no matter how much they begged. When she was lucid, she was quiet.

She watched them with dead, wary eyes, waiting for the resentment to set in. She expected them to slowly start hating her, the lifeless doll masquerading as their child. But their adoration for her never seemed to falter, no matter how worried they were for the seemingly mute changeling they had brought into the world.

For all that they seemed much better than the last —not a high bar to reach, mind — she was very aware of how quickly a parent’s view of their child could change, until a dreaded home visit from university ended with a young adult strangled under the Christmas tree, screams of all her faults filling the air she no longer had access to.

Out of desperation, they called Edgar Bones and Emmeline Vance, whom they had chosen to be the girl’s godparents.

Edgar Bones, Alice’s best friend in Hufflepuff, was the Head of his House and a talented curse breaker who was knowledgeable about esoteric magic.

Emmeline, Frank’s last remaining friend after the death of Fabian and Gideon Prewett who was in Gryffindor alongside him, was a muggle-born who volunteered as a frontline healer for the Order of the Phoenix, deployed alongside their fighters to save the victims of Death Eaters. Although she gave that kind of service to Dumbledore’s organisation of vigilantes, she was primarily a Mind Healer, extremely skilled in Legilimancy.

When she looked inside of Viviane’s mind, Emmeline was surprised to see it as developed as that of an adult with memories that should not belong to her, though the little girl still had the emotional regulation ability of a child. She did not examine the memories of the stranger and instead simply pulled away to announce to her friends that a tormented deceased spirit must have been absorbed by their daughter’s soul.

As such, she did not see the memories of a world without magic and did not find the foreknowledge that could have saved her friends and won the war, which Viviane could not speak of both due to her apathy and to the mutism trauma had awakened within her. Emmeline only saw the last moments of her life, when she was killed at the hands of a father who always reproached her the fact that she was born a useless girl instead of the boy he wanted.

She-who-was-and-was-not-Viviane listened as parents and godparents debated erasing everything that made her who she was, the memories of this old life she both cherished and hated. She felt resigned to her fate, and both unwilling and unable to argue against it.

As such she was surprised when her parents vehemently disagreed.

“It is cruelty to kill part of our daughter because it is foreign to us,” said Alice, running a trembling hand through Viviane’s downy brown hair, her index resting on her sweaty forehead.

“It is not her,” protested Emmeline.

“Is it not? This spirit rests in her soul. Vivi is already two years old. What will erasing it do to her?” pointed out Frank.

Viviane’s godmother was forced to concede the point, but it was Edgar’s intervention that closed the discussion.

“Is her soul separate to Vivi’s?” As Emmeline shook her head, he nodded gravely. “Then they are one. The best you can do is erase the trauma of her death and dampen the emotional attachment the spirit — or imprint, more likely — had to its former life.”

Emmeline hummed. “I can also seal the memories until Vivi is older. Not completely, parts of the spirit’s personality and life experiences will bleed through the seal, but enough for Vivi to develop her own sense of self without being drowned out. Or you’ll have an adult woman in the body of your child.”

They all shuddered at the thought. She-who-was-and-was-not-Viviane breathed out. This would not be a second death, then. Her parents had not agreed to lobotomise her, and instead found a way for her to develop normally without the crushing weight of trauma.

“This sure explains why her core has been developing so rapidly,” mused Frank, biting his lip worriedly. “What will this do to her?”

Edgar hummed. “Her magic has been developing to match her adult mind. She will likely be more powerful than she should, and her core might be strained because of it. She’ll have to avoid high-stress situations and be monitored by a healer until she gets her wand. Accidental magic might have unintended effects.”

***

When she opened her eyes anew, Viviane’s mind was in chaos, but she did not show it.

She remained completely silent.

She breathed out, letting her body recover from the stress of her fall and her mind from that of her revelation. The seal had worked as intended, though her previous life’s memory was patchy and felt distant — likely an unintended consequence of the discrepancy between reincarnation and spirit possession, the construct Emmeline had used to seal her adult memories was intended for the latter.

She did not let go of Neville. Instead, she kept clinging to him, blinking rapidly and mouthing apologies as she processed the new memories she had unlocked, touching her throat with her free hand to try to get the sounds out of her throat.

“I’m fine, Vivi, I’m fine,” murmured her brother, holding her just as tightly.

“I’m sorry,” she tried to say again, but her voice once more abandoned her.

Neville seemed to understand anyway.

“I forgive you,” he said fiercely. “I forgive you.”

She hugged him tighter to her chest, feeling as his wavy blond hair tickled her chin. It was hard to breathe, but feeling her little brother’s heart beat alongside hers helped.

The adults present at the party had finally reached them. They tried to approach, but Viviane’s magic reacted wildly to their presence. The wind picked up and formed a dome around the two siblings.

She narrowed her eyes at them.

“Let us come closer, Viviane. We need to check on Neville,” ordered their grandmother.

Viviane shook her head.

“Don’t come closer,” said Neville, his voice wobbly though his intonation stayed firm.

“We must examine you, child,” argued Algernon, whose wand arm was bent in an odd way. Viviane guessed that was what her magic had done.

“You just tried to kill me,” shrieked Neville.

The wind picked up, and the barrier shone with power. Viviane instinctively was feeding her turmoil into it, heightening the output of her accidental magic.

A few of them raised their wands but did not attempt to breach the dome. Children’s magic was often volatile, and interference from the inexperienced could sometimes create worse consequences than the original outcome.

“I didn’t!” exclaimed their great-uncle. “I was trying to trigger your magic. And it worked, see?”

“And what would you have done if it hadn’t, idiot boy?” scoffed Harfang Longbottom.

“I would have stopped his fall, like Augusta did.”

From the disbelieving glances of their relatives, few trusted the man to have the reflexes necessary to cast such a spell on time.

As she observed them all, she noticed the visible disappointment on the faces of the branch members. Ambrose’s tightly clutched fist. Aunt Hilda’s grimace. Speculative glances on one side, averted eyes on the other.

Viviane felt herself shaking.

The wind dome whistled harder, until it was impossible to hear their relatives outside.

Her mind whirled. Her brother was unsafe. Their family was unsafe, the wizarding world would be unsafe in a few years. But they weren’t safe anywhere else. The muggle world would be just as bad soon enough, and they had no safety net there. More than that, they needed to learn magic. But she would leave for Hogwarts in a month and leave him alone in this den of narcissists.

Her silly feelings of resentment regarding the inheritance of the Headship were beyond her now that she had perspective. Being Heir was the only thing that would protect Neville from them. She still thought she would make a better Head than him, but it did not matter. If it kept him in the spotlight, it kept him protected. Especially now that his core had bloomed into awareness.

She swallowed.

She needed to speak, but she could feel her throat close further at the very thought of it.

Viviane turned to her little brother.

“Did this happen before?” she mouthed.

His brows furrowed.

“I don’t —don’t understand.”

She tried again, sounding it out carefully.

He tilted his head, still uncomprehending, before his eyes widened the way they used to when he had an idea. He rummaged through his pocket and pulled out a piece of chalk, which he tapped against his pant leg before holding it out to her.

DID THIS HAPPEN BEFORE, she wrote out shakily.

He grimaced and looked away.

Viviane closed her eyes, resigned.

This was her fault.

She had ignored her little brother for three years, and this happened. She was so focused on herself she hadn’t noticed the increasingly more desperate attempts of her family to prove Neville was a viable Heir. Viviane had felt so inconsequential after listening her elders discuss the future of their House, and she had not had the memories of the girl she was in her old life, who knew very well that being ignored was often better than being seen by those who cared more about what you should be than who you were.

“It’s not your fault, Vivi,” said Neville fiercely, reading her thoughts on her face.

Both of them had always been too expressive. According to her shaky memories, they inherited it from their mother. The girl she was before could hide her thoughts expertly and often used it to avoid her father’s aggression. But Viviane was and was not her; in the time this old version of her took to heal, she became Vivi Longbottom, but Viviane did not become her.

Aspects of her personality bled through the seal, like her love for the violin and for puzzles, her tendency to hold grudges, her trust issues. This fear of being dismissed and despised for her girlhood that had created a ridge between her and her little brother came from her other life, reawakened by her elders. But she stayed Vivi, who loved her brother deeply despite all of this.

She shook her head. “It is,” she mouthed, before holding her brother tighter.

Neville kept quiet despite his obvious disagreement, simply basking in his older sister’s embrace. They stayed like this for minutes or hours, until the trembling in both of their hands subsided and the wind slowed to a stop.

When Viviane was finally calm and her magic had settled, they both raised their heads, prepared to face the storm.

But of all the Longbottoms present, only their grandmother faced them, her face severe and her eyes impossibly sad.

*** 

Augusta apologised and assured them Great-Uncle Algie would not be welcome in Longland Manor for as long as Neville desired it. Despite the reassurance, both siblings heard loud and clear that he was still expected to at some point “get over it”.

Augusta then briskly informed Viviane that they would be shopping for her wand and school supplies at the end of the week.

She then watched her expectantly, waiting for an acknowledgement.

But Viviane was still silent.

After a beat, Neville spoke up timidly. “Vivi’s not speaking. Lutine said it used to happen when she was younger?”

The young girl’s head whipped towards her brother. Neville rubbed the back of his neck, blushing at her bewilderment.

“Lutine!” called Augusta.

A popping sound broke the quiet of the hall, and the Longbottom family elf materialised in front of them.

Viviane observed the creature with the new eyes of someone who remembered a life beyond that of a sheltered pureblood child.

Unlike the house elves she knew of from reading a story a lifetime ago, Lutine was neither dirty nor wearing a pillowcase. Her skin was golden, and her arms adorned with copper bangles. She wore a practical brown dress that looked handsewn. She bore huge green eyes and even bigger floppy ears.

She did not seem mistreated, but a well-cared for slave was still a slave.

Luckily for the muggle part of her, Viviane had been taught about this before. House elves' bonds were different from slavery; the creatures fed on the magical dust that accumulated in old magical houses and as such willingly signed contracts to care for the homes of wixen to obtain this form of sustenance which was more readily available there than in the wild.

Contracts were sometimes worded in disadvantageous ways, which explained what happened to elves like Dobby or Kreacher, and house elves benefited from little protection from the Ministry in case of abuse, but it was not as grim as Hermione Granger made it sound. Their culture had formed around this need to provide for wixen, which explained why they found it so shameful to be dismissed. Dobby was a special case in that he dared to demand more than basic food and lodging from those he would attend to, when other elves seemed to find it more than enough.

Still, laws should be implemented, mused Viviane, before focusing back on the matter at hand. Especially to stop this culture of self-inflicted punishment that seemed so prevalent in them.

“Viviane has had issues with mutism before?” she asked sharply.

“Yes, Madame,” said the elf, shaking her head vigorously. Her ears flapped as she did so, producing a nose that brought a half-smile to Viviane’s face. “Miss Vivi not be speaking until a few months before her third birthday, and very little at the beginning. She be having periods of complete silence until her sixth birthday. Sometimes hours. Sometimes days. Lutine cannot help her with it, she cannot,” she lamented, folding her ears to hide her face.

Their grandmother looked uncomfortable for a moment, but she soon straightened. “And you did not inform me?”

“Lutine is being informing you, Madame, but you is being more preoccupied with Master Nevie’s sleeping problems, Madame.”

Viviane bit her lip. It was true. Neville had been in the manor when their parents were tortured; she had been on an outing with her godmother — coincidentally, it was also the last time she had seen Emmeline Vance. After the events of that night, her little brother had terrible night terrors.

Augusta turned red at the reminder. “I see.” She cleared her throat. “And it stopped by itself?”

Lutine bobbed her head. “Yes, Madame.”

“Very well. You’re dismissed, Lutine.”

Lutine nodded and disappeared with a pop.

“Hm. Hopefully you will be able to speak by the time you are at Hogwarts. How else will you cast spells otherwise?” Their grandmother looked lost for a moment. “Today was a trying day. Lutine will bring your supper in your rooms in a few hours, and classes will be dismissed tomorrow. Take the time you need.”

Viviane didn’t take much time after being dismissed. She dragged Neville to her room and sat him down on her bed. She then went to rummage in her desk for a parchment and self-inking quill before following him there.

She grasped his hand, placing two fingers on his pulse to make sure it was still there. Her little brother watched her do so, tears welling up in his hazel eyes.

“I missed you, Vivi,” he sobbed.

She wrote.

I missed you too. I’m sorry, Nev.

“Why — why did you — I don’t — understand —”

He was only six, she thought, and she left him to fend for himself for three years. She left her little brother to live through the loneliness he had felt in the original story when he shouldn’t have to. She didn’t know why she was here, and what it meant for the story she had read. It couldn’t be exactly the same, if details such as the number of children Frank and Alice Longbottom had were not the same.

But it was close enough for her to know what she had to protect Neville from, she thought with a heavy heart. Death Eaters were a threat to her brother and she would have to do something about it.

She rubbed her brother’s back with one hand until the tears subsided. With the other, she tried to put to paper an explanation. Neville deserved one, even if it was one she was ashamed of.

“I was angry. You’re the Heir and everyone treated me like... it felt like nothing I did was important. It didn’t matter if I was good at school or at music, because I’m not a boy. I took it out on you because I couldn’t be angry at Gran or the others.”

She held out the parchment to her little brother. Neville hiccupped as he read.

“But I — I don’t want it.”

She lowered her head until her forehead rested against his shoulder.

“You know that,” he realised quietly, “but you were still angry.” He paused. Swallowed. Then seemed to make a decision. “When I’m the Head, I’ll change the rules and give the Headship to you.”

Viviane shook her head softly, so as not to jar his shoulder with the movement.

“No. I will. I don’t want this. I don’t want to sit at the Wizengamot, I don’t want to do politics. I don’t want to fight with the branch families and be in the spotlight all the time. I want people to leave me alone. It’s our Dad’s legacy so we can’t give it away to Ambrose or Mathias or Jasper. And since I don’t want it, I’ll give it to you.”

She leaned away and wrote frantically.

I don’t deserve it.

Neville shrugged.

“Tough luck. You’re getting it anyway.”

Viviane looked down at her hands.

Maybe he was right. She didn’t have to deserve it. Maybe it was enough that Neville didn’t want it for himself, and she could take the responsibility from him. Not for her own selfish desires, but because he was her little brother, and she ought to protect him. She had always known he was merely resigned to it, after all. She could have talked to him instead of treating him like an enemy.

She would just have to be better, to quiet the voice that called her an imposter when she thought of taking her brother’s seat. And if Neville changed his mind, she would step aside and assist him.

But that would only come when Neville took the Headship at fourteen. Viviane had years ahead of her.

And she would use those years to protect her little brother from the threats within and from those that lurked outside of the Manor grounds.