thank you to lise, to whom I give all blame and credit. every time I touch my hat-shaker, I'm in a hotel room in Orlando. it must be a portkey.
Shook
"lots of watery sun. not a lot of pouring rain. Which is what I can't stand."
~ Lise1.
A porcupine walked down the smoking street. Its tiny black feet hobbled carefully around the empty cobblestone sockets and piles of ash, to the end of the street, through the invisibility charm, to an old house with red shutters that glowed warmly. He limped onto the porch and collapsed.
-
Harry was devastating. He never got tall or broad, but he was strong as a reed; he could bend, he could do anything without breaking. He took responsibility for everything. His black hair was long enough to pull back, but he didn’t, just tucked it impatiently behind his ears when he was bent over a map or a correspondence. He only slept for about three and a half hours in the early morning but he ate voraciously. He never lost a fight, but he couldn’t be at every fight. His eyes had shadowed to a smoldering swamp green.
Everyone in the camp loved Harry, was in love with him, in his or her own way. Even Draco, who’d joined their side two years into the fighting, scarred and mute. Even Snape, who had died in November.
-
They put the porcupine on the rug in front of the fireplace. He slept for hours and at sunset his small body stirred, then shimmered, then stretched into human limbs and a torso and Neville Longbottom’s face staring into the flames.
“Are you hungry?” came the low threaded voice of Sirius Black from the couch.
Neville rolled to his side-- “famished”-- then up onto his knees. He grimaced. “I’m going to need some help, though.”
Sirius walked over to him, stooped to wrap an arm around his waist, pull Neville’s arm around his neck, and heaved them to their feet. Sirius was the only one of them to have put on weight since the war broke out, and Neville’s body fell heavily against him, and Sirius carried them forward, into the kitchen. Sirius’s hair-- longer than Harry’s-- fell into Neville’s face in black tangles; Neville coughed into them.
“All right, Neville?” Sirius asked, setting him down at the long wooden table. Neville nodded, still coughing.
Sirius pulled a bowl from a cupboard and took it to the smaller kitchen fireplace, inside of which hung a large cauldron. He dished out three ladlefuls of a lumpy brown stew and set it in front of Neville with a spoon. Neville raised his eyebrows.
“Ron and Fred are away,” Sirius said, by way of explanation. Ron and Fred were the only ones who could cook or conjure any decent sort of food, except for Parvati, and Parvati was-- lost.
Neville ate the stew quickly and Sirius fetched him more, smiling.
“That must have been some trip,” he said.
Neville grinned. His smile hadn’t changed at all, in all the years, through all of the madness; it had only gotten more rare. It was wide and guileless, slightly self-effacing, but with no hardness. He had a bit of gravy on his chin. “No, I just get tired of eating trees and shrubs.” Then the smile slanted off, without disappearing completely. “Actually, I did find out some things. I need to talk to Harry.”
Sirius nodded. “He’s here. He’s with Hermione and Draco.” Neville knew that they were working on an Immunity potion; they’d been talking about it before he left.
“How’s that going?” he asked.
Sirius shrugged, gestured at Neville’s bowl. Neville resumed eating. “Not well, I’m afraid. They’ve made something which blocks the simpler curses, Jelly-Legs and the like, but Imperius and Cruciatus are still getting through.” Neville nodded without looking up from his bowl. There was a time when he couldn’t hear of the Cruciatus Curse without going still, but now he didn’t falter, didn’t shudder. He’d been in front of it a dozen times too many. “Hermione and Remus have been pouring over the books.” They had a small library in one of the upstairs bedrooms of about twenty-five books. “And Draco--“ Sirius shrugged again, a violent jolt of sharp shoulders. “He’s good but he isn’t Snape.”
Snape had been the one to conceive of an Immunity potion in the first place, to write out a theoretical recipe. It had taken them these many months to gather the ingredients, and since then, Draco spent days and nights staring at them and at his favorite teacher’s hand-scrawled instructions, taking breaks only to eat or do whatever mission he was needed for, or to go out to the back yard, where a stone lay-- about the size of a quaffle, grey, amongst other stones, with “Severus Snape, bastard, war hero” etched into it. The Death Eaters had taken Snape’s actual remains. For a rite of some kind, Hermione suggested. Draco spent quite a lot of time with the stone. The only person who visited the stone more often was Sirius.
The day that Snape had died-- it was the middle of the day, bright and cloudless-- Remus and Sirius went outside; Remus had come back in at nightfall, but Sirius had stayed out for days more. When Harry finally went searching for him, he’d found Padfoot lying in the back yard, in front of that freshly engraved stone, which lay between the old stones marked “Albus Dumbledore” and “George Weasley.” He’d coaxed Padfoot into the house and Sirius had emerged some time later. Harry was the only one unsurprised by how hard Sirius took Snape’s death; Harry, who knew how it sometimes was between rivals.
-
Neville and Sirius were back in the living room, on the couch, when the others came down. Hermione took out her wand and conjured two more couches-- she was amazing, almost as powerful as Harry and more knowledgeable, unstoppable in her own right-- and sat with Ginny, Percy, and Cho on one, while Justin, Harry, and Draco took the other. Dean was away with Fred and Ron; Mrs. Figg was in her room upstairs, where she always was, and Remus-- it was near the full moon-- was in his.
“All right, Neville?” Harry said.
Neville smiled and nodded. “Except for that god-awful stew.”
Cho laughed and pointed at Percy. Percy pursed his lips and said, “I told you I couldn’t cook. Didn’t I tell you.”
“Ron and Fred should be back sometime tomorrow or the next day,” Harry said, knee bouncing absently. “We’ll get them to make casserole for you.” He leaned forward. “What did you find out?”
Everyone else leaned forward, except for Draco, who sat back on the couch, watching Harry. Neville cleared his throat. “They’re not moving south, like we thought, but they are bringing in wizards from other places, and stationing them below us. On the southern border, I mean. Wizards from Egypt and Italy, and from the Americas, too, I’d reckon.”
Justin cursed softly. Harry asked, “Where?”
“Surrey, Berkshire. As far as Devon.”
“Alright.” Harry clasped his hands on his knees. He glanced at Draco. “We’ll be ready to move in a week. Fred and Ron and Dean will be back, the moon’ll be waning, and we should have all the potions done by then.”
“They’ve also started using Muggle-borns,” Neville added grimly.
The Death Eaters had begun recruiting in earnest the last three years, when the tactics used by Harry and his camp finally began to smack of the guerilla warfare strategies that they certainly actually were; their recruitment consisted of threats, bribery, and the Imperius Curse. Parvati and Seamus had been lost to the latter in the middle of a battle-- their eyes had glazed over, their wands dropped. By now, whole Imperius armies were emerging; and it apparently no longer mattered what stock their soldiers were, for they were only cannon fodder anyway.
Harry nodded. “Alright.”
-
After dinner-- which everyone joked about, to Percy’s consternation, but ate of heartily-- Hermione, Harry, and Draco went back upstairs to work on the Immunity potion while everyone else went to bed, except for Neville, who offered to clear off dinner, and Sirius, who offered to help, even though Neville cast the Cleaning Charm with practiced ease and there was no help to be done.
Neville hopped up to sit on the table while bowls were lifting themselves up from around him and flying into the cupboard. “I heard a joke while I was out, too.”
Sirius leaned against the counter. “Let’s hear it.”
Neville grinned and cleared his throat. “Okay. Mr. Trent was sitting in his living room one day and he heard the back door slam shut. He thought it was his wife, back from the market, so he called out, ‘I’m in here, darling. I’ve been waiting for you!’ There was no answer for a moment, then a strange voice called back, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but I ain’t your usual milkman.’”
Sirius shook his head. “That’s awful.”
Neville laughed. “Well, you know, people don’t waste their best jokes on strange porcupines.”
“I don’t see why not. Porcupines need hospitality just like the rest of us.”
“You’re telling me.” Neville looked around at the kitchen and his smile softened. “It’s so good to be home.” Sirius’s own smile faded into solemnity as Neville said, “Harry said that we’re leaving next week,” and then sighed. “I hope we’ll be back.” He said it just as though he were saying, “I hope the Cannons win their match,” or “I hope Gran brings back a ham,” and one would never know from his tone that he was saying, “I hope we don’t all die, I hope our people aren’t enslaved, I hope our home doesn’t burn.”
“How do you do that?” asked Sirius.
“Hm?” said Neville.
“I spent most of your lifetime in Azkaban,” Sirius said quietly, crossing his arms over his chest. “It made me crazy. Crazy with all the darkness and hopelessness. But I’m starting to think that you could spend ten lifetimes there and not feel a thing.”
Neville tipped his head to the side, smiled a little bemusedly. “This isn’t hopeless, Sirius.”
Sirius’s eyebrows drew together. “Isn’t it?” He’d reached that place of supposed wizard age standstill, where the features freeze for decades, just as Professor McGonogall’s had, wherever she was, whatever secret place Hogwarts had relocated to; but his face still shone fatigue more easily than the others’ faces, except for maybe Remus. It shone now. “Even if we beat them and all that’s left of us comes out alive-- none of you will ever be what you were. You’re all changed and-- trodden. You’re never going to--”
Neville slid off the table with a thump. “Sirius, stop it.” He came to stand in front of Sirius and put his hands on Sirius’s arms, and look into his face. He was as tall as Sirius, and a little taller now for Sirius leaning back against the counter.
“We do all this because it’s what we can do, alright? Not because we’re owed anything for it, or because we didn’t get what we were owed in the first place. It’s just what we have to keep doing. Because if we do, there’ll be something to keep moving on with in the end. I promise. There’s always something.”
Neville squeezed Sirius’s arms. Sirius stared into the chestnut-colored eyes that stared back, and he saw a resolve there that was every bit as strong and unshakeable as Harry’s, but with a stillness, a peace, that Harry could never afford to harbor.
Sirius would be forty-two in the summer and he had lived the first half of his life with everything he wanted, had known no loss until he was twenty-one, when he’d lost everything. Neville, on the other hand, was twenty-one and he’d lost it all-- most of it-- at the very beginning, and then built something with that. He was still building now.
Neville smiled and reached up to touch-- tweak?-- the bone of Sirius’s jaw. “Like my Gran used to say,” he said, “it’ll all come out in the wash.”
Sirius exhaled a laugh and his arms loosened within Neville’s, fell down to his waist. Sirius pulled Neville to him and folded himself around the younger man, who wrapped his own arms around Sirius’s shoulders and breathed into the dark tangle of hair,
“All right, Sirius?”
Sirius nodded, moving his cheek softly against the warm, still cheek alongside it.
“Alright.”
stoli and sprite