Harry Potter & The Hand God

Neville is a boy in love. 

Having Harry Potter as a boyfriend has never been an easy thing. Harry is erratic. His heart is always in the right place, sure, but when you watch someone throw themselves into fights with the odds repeatedly stacked against them -- well. It gets you thinking.

And what Neville thinks is that Harry Potter is a great lover, a great friend. He is a wonderful activist. The idea of someone so radical, so violent, being any type of representative for the dismantlist movement is controversial. 

It is not Harry’s morals that disturb him. It’s not his morals that make him, sometimes, secretly, a challenge to cherish.

Neville is weak and he knows this. He hates this. And he knows that Harry has his special powers and that, most of the time, he runs off pure will. These things have been his shield and sword and they’ve been useful, for sure, absolutely, in protecting his livelihood. 

But he knows, deep down, that Harry is just as weak as him. He is short and unskilled -- knowing only as many spells that he deems necessary, and that’s not all that much -- and though he knows how to throw a punch, he’s not muscular enough to beat anyone who would ever dare to throw one back.

He’s weak and he has a righteous thirst for blood. Neville tries to be supportive. He loves this boy and he wants him to feel loved. Even so, even if he doesn’t say it… a weak fighter is not a fighter for long. 

Neville lives in dull fear that, sooner or later, Harry will start something he can’t finish. He’ll die and it is not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when.’ 

Neville will do what he can to prevent it. Still, he knows that he can’t do much. Blaise is powerful. Blaise is protective and kind and perfectly confrontational, when the situation beckons it. Tom, the newer addition, is strong. He’s a gentleman and a fighter -- not normally, but for Harry. For Harry, he’s whatever he needs him to be.

Neville is… not like that. 

He fades into the background, into the flickering lights of medical room after medical room, swapping out visiting chairs for visiting chairs. Unable to do anything but wait. When in Harry’s third year, he fights three bone-headed seniors because they threatened Hermione, he spends a week in the hospital afterwards. 

Neville thought, at the time, that that would be it. He sat steadfastly at his side, sad in his knowledge that that’s all he could do. Wait, and be there. He is so useless and so in love. It is an ugly combination. 

Harry survived that incident. He started his War on Purebloods and, against Neville’s silently held belief, survived that one, too. Same with his fight with Pansy, and so on and so forth -- if anything, Neville sumrises,Harry is resilient.

But he’s not invincible. Neville takes every moment spent with him as if it’ll be their last, and sends him off lovingly to every fight the way a wife sends her husband off to war.

It’s a surprise -- a prime example of cruel irony -- that the thing coming close to killing Harry now is out of either of their controls. It’s not a result of reckless endangerment, of taking too much to chew. 

Harry might die here, and it isn’t even his fault. Neville takes some solace in that. Mostly, he just doesn’t know what to do with it. His uselessness remains and it’s never hurt more.

Upon Tom revealing that Harry’s problem is more, supposedly, than just his long standing issue of memory loss, Tom has erupted. Though he is no medi-witch, far from qualified, he’s joined the gaggle of healers working fervently on un-doing whatever has been done.

Neville watches. He only watches. The room in which Harry is being held is now officially open to all friends and family, but Neville sees the pink hands encircling his lover, and thinks, for no reason at all, that Harry is not himself right now. Even if Neville were to sit right by his side, to hold his hand… Neville’s not sure Harry would feel it. 

What a terrible fate, for Harry to be dying and Neville being unable to even be there for him.

Hermione and Ron, to their credit, are at least trying. They begged the attending employees to let them use the nearest Floo and have spent the last few hours in Hogwarts. Supposedly, they are researching. Neville wonders if they’ve found anything helpful. He doubts it.

Blaise is shell shocked. Neville watches him pace in a show of relentless restlessness. He eventually sits by the window, as if expecting a letter. It is a sad sight and proves to further Neville’s desperation; if Blaise, who is, for all intents and purposes, the most capable out of all of them, is unable to do anything but wait, what chance does Neville have at doing anything different?

He does not let his desperation swallow him. He props up Harry’s journal -- brought to the hospital by Tom -- on his lap and resumes the thing that was asked of him. Look through his journal and find anything that could help Harry understand his heritage, his power.

Of course, Neville’s not blind to the futility of his work. Harry has already discovered the source of his powers -- he is his father’s son, after all -- and it is not like Neville has any reason to believe his heritage has anything to do with his memory loss, or whatever is happening now, with the hands.

He knows that he is unlikely to find anything useful. He is still resolute to try. He is tired of waiting on the sidelines and he wants -- he needs -- to do something.

He flips through the pages, idly listening to Tom, in the other room, explain a procedure -- not to recommend it for future use, but about past use. Tom says that Harry’s body developed under the assumption that it was to be non-magical -- and that because he was magical anyway, his mind tried to reject it. It’s the source, he explains, of Harry’s memory loss. And there’s this illegal, out lawed procedure to fix it that shoved Lily’s soul -- Lily’s, he explains, like that makes sense -- into Harry’s shrunken one and Madame Pomfrey is involved and this and that.

Tom says that these pink hands surrounding Harry are Lily, and Lily doesn’t want anyone prodding into the health concerns she is making Madame Pomfrey cause. 

Tom is not listened to. Tom is dismissed, for a million reasons, and all of them, to Neville, at least, rather understandable. It sounds like Tom is grasping at straws. Like Tom is just as wretched as he is.

A small part of Neville thinks that Tom is telling the truth, and this revelation is not as comforting as it might’ve seemed.

Neville wonders why he is talking about it now. How long has Tom known this about Harry? How long has he kept it to himself? Neville wonders if his previously held silence will be the death of him. If the fight Harry’s fighting and losing is one that he didn’t even start.

Neville cannot even gather the will to be angry. He’s not like Harry. He’s just… sad. Sad that Harry will die. Confused that Tom might’ve been able to prevent it. Sadder that he didn’t. What excuse does he have? Whatever the reason, Neville hopes it’s worth it. He really does.

He ducks his head into the journal. He keeps reading.

He notes, out of note, in Harry’s early years at Hogwarts, one odd interaction with Madame Pomfrey. It’s after Harry gets into a fight with half-blood Ethan, who had tried and failed to steal his journal.

Pomfrey is disappointed. (Neville is disappointed in her -- but not angry. Her motives are up in the air and Neville wants, so badly, to understand them. To understand her. Why erase the mind of the boy you’ve been raising for a decade? She is heartless… or she’s not. Or she has a reason. And that’s more terrifying than any sort of cruel apathy.)

Would you heal anyone that came in here? Harry had asked her, Harry had written. Neville gets that it’s a question with a right or wrong answer, and Pomfrey chose, in Harry’s eyes, wrong.

Yes, she had answered. Harry has commented that, you know, of course she says this. She is a Healer and it is her code. Neville can feel Harry’s disagreement nearly bleed through the paper regardless; it is not a code that Harry would take. He’s a lover and he’s a fighter and Pomfrey has sacrificed one for the other. 

What if it was the person who killed mom? Neville notes Harry pointedly only mentioned his mother and not his father. He supposes some grudges die hard, and some don’t die at all. Would you heal them, if not doing so could save her?

And Pomfrey says, smally, tiredly, Go to bed, Harry.

(It is not an answer. It doesn’t have to be.)

Harry writes something about pacifism. About weakness, about inaction being an action. He thinks Pomfrey and people like her are complicit in a way that Harry is not. That Harry refuses to be.

And… though that’s fine, that’s expected, Neville can’t help, upon recent events, but wonder.

Would you heal the people who killed Lily and James if you knew that Lily and James would die later because of it, because of your actions?

Go to bed, Harry.

Go to bed. What type of an answer is that? Harry would say it’s a cowardly one. 

Neville? Neville would say that it’s a deflection. It’s a sign that Pomfrey know something about them that Harry doesn’t… and that there is more reason to the fact that she would heal the murderers of Harry’s parents. It is more than a Healer’s code. It is personal. It must be personal.

He thinks of the fact that, if this procedure Tom is talking about was undergone, then, as Harry’s guardian and as a Healer, she must’ve known. He thinks of the fact that, right now, she is Auror custody upon accusations of child abuse.

He wonders if the two things are connected.

Neville doesn’t know. It is an idea that stews solely in his head. If he tried to voice it, he would be just like Tom; he would appear a love sick fool who does not know who he is talking about.

This is the burden of proof, and the weight of it is unsightly. 

Neville keeps reading. It is useless, and he is more aware of this than ever. The most relevant part of this journal was just handed to him and he can’t do anything about it.

He blends into the background, always. He prays that Tom will pull through. That Blaise will use his magic and do something -- do whatever it is that Neville just can’t.

But -- unbeknownst to him -- it won’t be Tom who solves this problem. It’ll be Blaise. To Neville’s utmost surprise, it won’t be Blaise alone.

•─────⋅☾ ☽⋅─────•

The burden of proof. Blaise knows a thing or two about the burden of proof. 

Tom has run into the same problem Blaise had -- without proof, no one buys that Harry shares a body with Lily. It is impossible. It’s ridiculous. The word of mouth is next to worthless. Tom’s frustration grows palpably -- a swell of angry red surrounding him -- and Blaise can practically see the situation he himself was in, trying to explain this very same fact to Harry.

The burden of proof. It is the key here. Knowing what is wrong is the gateway to fixing it, and since they already know what’s wrong, they just need to prove it. It is that easy, on paper. 

On paper. But this is real life, and in real life, children in love are treated like it. They are patronized and disregarded and sometimes it’s justly done and sometimes -- now -- it’s not.

He has been searching for something viable for a while now. Ever since the incident in the girl’s bathroom, the one that had Harry fighting for his own body and pawing at his skin, like he was hoping to be let in, he’s been following the same trail that Tom’s likely already found the end of.

And Tom -- Tom, who is miles ahead of him in the finding out something is wrong arena, Tom, who is being denied use of truth serum -- ... is getting nowhere. 

Blaise sees pink blare from Harry’s suspended body. He tries to speak to Lily and gets no response, and he doesn’t think he ever will. Lily -- if she wants to speak to anyone at all -- does not want to speak with him. 

He sees the black shadow of damnation creep in the room, and forces himself to return to the waiting room. He squeezes his eyes shut because he doesn’t want to see it, does not want to believe it -- and yet is faced with no other choice.

It is over. Harry will die here. If he doesn't, he will remain without his memories, and he will wish he was.

Shadows swarms him, and Blaise knows that it is over. There’s nothing secondary about this apocalypse. It is personal. It is all his fault. He had promised to protect Harry and has failed him -- he thinks of Petunia and Tom and Lily, and knows that everyone has.

The world goes dark.

And then the world is given light again.

In the corner -- impossibly; likewise to glass plates being uncovered in the aftermath of a particularly gruesome earthquake -- there is the small illumination of hope. 

Blaise blinks and notes that he can finally see clearly. The fog has cleared from his brain. Sense has found its way back to him.

From the window shines a warm, golden green. It is symbolic of a lot of things -- it is symbolic, sometimes, of the sign of new beginnings.

New beginnings. Not endings.

Blaise swallows. His feet pull him toward the window and he sees, in his peripheral, that the room in which Harry is in echos the same color. 

(It’s over, he thinks. This time, it carries an entirely different meaning.)

He is not surprised when an owl pecks at the glass, begging for entry. 

Blaise creeks open the window, and steals the overstuffed letter from its leg, all in one, swift motion. He does not look at the label -- titled from: Petunia Evans and to: Blaise and Harry Potter -- before he is on his feet. He walks quickly and smoothly and stops in front of Neville.

He clears his throat once. Neville stares up at him, blankly.

“It’s for you,” Blaise says, voice hoarse. He corrects himself, because he knows this isn’t, “I think this could help you.”

Neville wraps his hand around it, hesitantly. He brings it to his lap and by the time he is unwrapping it, Blaise has already scurried away, too overwhelmed with anticipation.

He doesn’t know what that letter was. He doesn’t know how it’s going to help Harry -- he just knows that it will. It’s worth the world.

Blaise keeps his eyes locked out the window, sitting himself on the ledge. He stops his arms from shaking and breathes.

The world has never looked more radiant.