All characters belong to J.K. Rowling. Please see closing credits. Standard disclaimers apply. Please send feedback. The World's Natural Kindness Luna
Daylight wakes Neville up, not pain. Sunbeams make a familiar pattern on the ceiling. Home. His bed, his pillow. His body hurts, but not the way it should. The way it did. The last thing he remembers--
A flash of light so brilliant it's black, beyond color, beyond seeing, singing directly into his brain and he's crumpled bleeding powerless
--no, it's gone.
He must've been in and out for a long time.
"Gran?" he tries to call. There's no sound. He tries again, tongue leaden, heart hammering. Ages pass. Finally his voice squeaks out, rusty and halting as when he was a little boy. "A-anyone?"
When someone does come, it's a stranger, a mediwitch whose eyes brim when she sees him. And he knows, though his pain's diminished, that something's very wrong.
*
They tell Neville he was found in the rubble of Hogwarts, pinned beneath a broken gargoyle. They tell him, gently, how they healed him: herbs, counter-curses, antidotes with names he's never heard. They tell him that Snape's in Azkaban, that Draco Malfoy's vanished, that Hermione's safe at Durmstrang and will write.
It's easier for them to name the living than number the dead.
They tell him he killed Bellatrix Lestrange. He barely remembers trying to, crawling past bodies in the shuddering corridor, firing curses at her shadow--and after that, only light--but he knows in his bones that it's true, and it's right. It's all right.
After several days, they give him Hermione's letter. She explains about the school's destruction, the forces unleashed, the fallout. There are tearstains on the page where she's written that the survivors won't be magical for some time. Or ever again.
I was useless as a wizard anyway, he thinks--and it hits him, like never before, that this isn't true.
They want to know why he's smiling.
*
He's not unhappy that Gran left the house to St. Mungo's. It's not--wasn't--like her to give up family property, but of course she was practical to the last. They must have been certain he was going to die.
"For days, nobody knew what was happening," Ginny says. She's too thin, too pale, and too old for seventeen, no, almost nineteen now. They wander the garden when she visits, always keeping near the house or the hedges. Open spaces still seem dangerous. "But everyone definitely felt that You-Know--Voldemort was gone."
"I didn't feel anything."
"I did." She hugs herself. "I was--close by, when it happened."
He doesn't say he's glad she got out of the castle.
She doesn't say she was too late.
He glances down at the spring grass, pale green and new and as far from blood-red as possible. The breeze lifts Ginny's hair into his vision.
"Did Harry..." He hesitates, unsure what he's asking. Did Harry suffer? Did Harry say goodbye, knowing his sacrifice was worthwhile? Did Harry even win? Ginny turns her back to him, watching the clouds, and Neville winces and mumbles, "I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry I thought you were dead," she says, and walks away into his family's house.
*
Before dawn he stirs, fumbles for his wand, casts Lumos three times--and remembers. Instead he lights a candle. The match burns his fingers.
*
When he can't endure being an invalid anymore, he works. They won't let him do much, nothing strenuous, and house-elves do the fetching and carrying. Mostly he reads to the other patients, the ones who didn't have his luck. He'll have to adjust to thinking of himself as lucky.
For the catatonics--he knows they can hear him--it's old Herbology books, especially ones about healing plants, proof of the world's natural kindness. For four Ravenclaw girls downstairs, he's ransacking the family library at a speed that would've astounded Professor McGonagall. For a second-year boy who's gone blind, it's Quidditch stories, putting on the voices.
Everyone wants to hear the Daily Prophet, so Neville obliges, trying not to hear himself. It's all trial transcripts, soppy one-year-later stories, and Rita Skeeter's column about how Muggles get on. Driving, cooking, everything. Nothing.
The Prophet says one hundred and seven people survived Hogwarts, and the Ministry's vowed to rebuild, and the nightmare's over. And every other week there's an obituary for someone Neville's age. Succumbed to sudden illness--that's their phrase. When one of the Ravenclaws drowns herself in Gran's bath, he understands what the euphemism's for.
*
"Can you," he stammers, as Ginny kneels in the grass, "can you still--"
"No Transfigurations, no top-level hexes, and I can't Apparate--but I never finished the lessons." She leans over a flowerbed, hands in the moist earth.
"You can fly."
"Yes." Her laugh has very little mirth in it. "Want me to take you up?"
"I can't do anything." It's too warm for April, and he's blushing. "I can't even remember anything."
She looks up at him, heavy shadows under flashing eyes. "Why would you want to?"
Neville closes his mouth. There aren't any words.
He stares into the sun. It doesn't hurt, doesn't even touch the light that took Hogwarts to pieces. Hogwarts: if he saw it again, he wouldn't see it. He couldn't tell the wreckage from the illusion Muggles used to see. His friends, the bed where he slept, everything he loved, feared, and failed at--
Tears slip from his eyes, free and unquenchable as blood from a clean wound.
"Sometimes--" His voice breaks. He swipes at the tears with his cuff. "Sometimes--I forget it wasn't always like this."
Ginny waits.
When he can see again, she's holding out a flower in muddy fingers.
"Neville." She isn't crying, but he hears it gathering in her voice. "You were always fantastic at Herbology."
He blinks the last of the blur away, and takes it, an ordinary daffodil, fresh-plucked and golden. Daffodils are used in several love potions. He still remembers that. He doesn't say it. Ginny stands, visibly trembling.