Chapter 10: Seedlings

"Longbottom, then?"

Silvery light from the cards grew gold in the fading sunlight, and he felt the stiff muscles of her neck relax. "Hope."

They lingered in bed long past dawn. Exhausted, they'd slept deeply until dreams grabbed him around the neck, just as they had all those nights he'd spent in the shadow of an uncertain future long ago. He hadn't meant to wake her, didn't know he had until she wrapped her soft body around his, chasing the darkness away with her touch and a whispered melody of sound.

Grateful she hadn't asked what filled his dreams, he realised he didn't know himself. Though familiar, their texture was different from the usual haunting nightmares. It was enough that the age-old dread still found him on tendrils of mist and shadow and that she possessed the magic that could burn it away. In its place had risen the most astonishing feeling, crowding his chest with warmth and an inexplicable desire to strip himself bare before her...body and soul. So instead, under cover of night, he hid behind the heat of their bodies and the power of his clever fingers and mouth to draw her to the edge of reason. And catapult her...them...over its precipice and beyond.

**

"I'm done hiding," she'd said to the question he didn't ask, as they lay curled together, tucked under the covers long after the sun had begun its journey across the sky. All he could muster was a raised eyebrow; she'd woken him from a second deep sleep with ravenous lips and tongue, and an insistent presence that swept him away until his hoarse cries of desire and completion drowned hers. "For that matter, you've got no good reason to hide, either."

Her arms had snaked around his waist as she rested her head against his bare chest. Possessive and bossy all at once, it was as if the gesture itself eradicated the need for further discussion. It was fortunate, he thought, since the play of her body against his robbed him of the capacity for coherent speech.

It was afternoon before they ventured out.

If he'd been less preoccupied...and occupied...before setting out for Hogwarts, he might not have been surprised at what happened later. But after a decade's avoidance of the wizarding world, the first time he'd been anywhere near Hogsmeade was his trip to the Hog's Head with Hermione. So, it had been years since he'd seen the rickety building that had haunted him since his school days. It never occurred to him to consider how he might feel that overcast afternoon, winding their way through the wizarding town on their way to Hogwarts castle. As it happened, only a transient clenching in his throat and a lurch in his stomach as they passed the Shack marked it as anything more than ordinary.

So when the sight of Hogwarts castle rising like a valkyrie from the craggy rocks sent him reeling...the Darkness slipping under his skin to burn his blood and flooding him with the echoes of traumas neglected for a lifetime...he was not even the slightest bit prepared.

It made a depressing sort of sense, he thought later, after Hermione had slipped her hands beneath his robes, wrapped her arms around him and crooned nonsense into his ear until he'd stopped shaking and the thunderstorm that had appeared along with the flooding pain had abated. The Shrieking Shack might have been witness to act after act of terror and betrayal, but he'd never once entered that building expecting anything better. At least there had never been any artifice there, no effort to pretend that those walls held anything other than horrors.

Even a decade after Dumbledore's death and Voldemort's defeat, the recurring nightmare that still threw him into wakefulness in a cold sweat was of himself wandering, endlessly lost, Hogwarts' corridors transformed into a treacherous maze, its age-darkened stones absorbing his terror and isolation like pools of black ice.

He would gladly watch the Shrieking Shack burn to the ground without lifting wand or hand to help, but the epicentre of both home and hell had been...since the age of 11...Hogwarts castle.

He had never thought he'd pass through its gates again, especially not alongside a woman who had, over the course of a handful of days, led him to peer out from behind the armour he had worn for a lifetime.

For today, at least, he'd need every bit of it.

~~**~~

She might not have recognised him if he hadn't been precisely where Professor McGonagall had said they would find him...working alongside Greenhouse five, just beyond the end of the rocky path she and the boys had clambered down three times a week for six years.

It wasn't that she'd forgotten how he looked; she'd seen him frequently enough over the years that the changes in his physique didn't surprise her. But the Neville she used to know handled his plants with a devotion bordering on slavish. The Neville who had crowed with pleasure at the offer to apprentice with Professor Sprout treated each plant...magical or not...with a tender reverence, as if he were the blessed recipient of its secrets through the rustle of leaves or the aroma of blossoms in the air.

The man attacking a vine of Japanese honeysuckle with something that looked awfully like a machete didn't resemble that Neville Longbottom one bit.

"He seems a bit... angrier than the last time I saw him," Snape muttered.

"That's saying something," Hermione said, "considering the resistance he mounted against you as headmaster."

Snape nodded, his eyes fixed on the smooth movement of the blade as it swung in its wide arc, over and over again. "He seemed almost satisfied that year, actually," Snape said. "Grim, but rather pleased with himself, overall." He gestured to the scene below. "That isn't the stance of a wizard fighting the good fight. That is a man with an axe to grind."

Indeed.

So when Neville finally drove his blade into the roots of the vine, whose trailing leaves seemed to grow rather than diminish with each attempt to cut them, and paused long enough to look up at the witch and wizard lingering at the bottom of the rocky staircase as if he'd known they'd been there all along, Hermione thought she'd pass out from the force of her heart pounding in her throat.

When he did nothing more than fix them both with a cold stare before picking up his machete to resume his assault on the honeysuckle vine, she froze, shivering in the indeterminate space between laughter and tears.

~~**~~

"Sit," he said, relieved that she obeyed him without question. The ice in the boy's eyes had shocked him despite the fact that there'd never been any reason for Longbottom to look at him with any sort of warmth. Hermione, though...Longbottom had been her friend. She'd been a good friend to him, as well, he recalled. So much so that she'd regularly risked detention and the Potions master's wrath helping the boy with his lab work.

Severus knew how it felt to have a once-friendly face turn cold. Knew the agonizing loss of camaraderie and trust its absence wrought.

"When was the last time you saw him?" He sat alongside her, letting his hand rest on the small of her back.

"Maybe a year ago. Year and a half," she said. "Not long before..." Her voice caught. "Before Ron. You know." His soft murmur must have been enough to show that he did. "He and Hannah had been having trouble. Afterwards, she told me that his explosions had been getting progressively worse, but he flat out refused to do anything about them."

"I never knew Longbottom to have explosions of any kind. His potions, however..."

"It's not funny, Severus. Hannah said that the outbursts were almost a relief from his withdrawal." They both looked at the wizard who continued to ignore their presence with a force nearly as frightening as the edge of the blade he swung.

"Did you tell him your suspicions?"

"I thought Harry had, but I found out later that he'd never said a word. He'd been shouting at me that night. That was unusual, actually. Usually Ron did the shouting. Said all my theorizing upset people for no good reason, and he wasn't going to do that to Neville, especially not when he and Hannah were having so much trouble."

"So, it's likely he has no idea what has been happening to him these past ten years."

She looked startled.

"I suppose not." She paused to think. "The last time I saw him, he was irritable, getting angry at small things. I was so worn out from arguing with Ron...with all of them, actually. I just assumed Neville was dismissing it just like the others had."

"Maybe not," he said.

"Look at you, assuming the best of Neville Longbottom."

"If you think that's astonishing," he said, moving to stand, "watch."

He didn't look back as he made his way down the last few yards to the bottom of the incline. Didn't turn to glance at her as he stood, arms folded, just outside the arc of the machete. Instead, his eyes bored into Longbottom's back until the next swing of the blade left it embedded in the pliant earth.

"Longbottom." He'd stopped himself...only just...from filling the word with authority long since relinquished. For a long moment, he thought the boy...no, the wizard swinging that knife, the wizard whose rage fuelled its velocity, was a grown man...would continue to ignore him. Only when his breathing slowed and he lifted his hand from where it rested on the hilt of the knife did Severus realise he'd been braced for the younger man to use it as a weapon.

"Snape." He didn't sound like the Neville Longbottom he remembered, either. His voice was deeper, and there wasn't a hint of a waver there. Even in the midst of his deepest defiance, Longbottom had always been just the slightest bit afraid. Now, the weathered look of his skin suggested that he spent a good deal of time outside, but the bags beneath his eyes belied the good health that sunshine and exercise promised.

"You don't seem surprised to see me."

"The headmistress sent her Patronus ahead to warn me."

"Warn you?" Admittedly, McGonagall had been visibly shocked when he'd followed Hermione into the head's office for their appointed meeting...though he couldn't say whether she'd been more stunned to see him alive or to see him in Hermione's obviously welcome company. The meeting had, he thought, gone well, all things considered.

"She knows I don't take well to surprises these days."

And that's when he saw it. Seeping from under sweat-slicked skin, Shadow wrapped itself like a veil around the younger man, its muddy sheen an illusory shield.

"I'm not here to harm you, boy," Severus said, and his stomach clenched at the glint of hatred that flashed in Longbottom's eyes. "Though I take it you'd not pass up the opportunity to swing that blade in my direction."

"Why shouldn't I, Snape?" he snarled. "You show up here...risen from the dead...without a by your leave. Then again, I never did have the chance to thank you for your stellar performance as headmaster."

"I'm gratified you realise it was all performance, Longbottom." His voice carried a whisper of its old command, and he winced. "My best wasn't much."

"No, it wasn't."

Snape nodded. It was no more than he deserved, this condemnation. He'd failed the boy and all the others like him whose blood status meant they'd had no cause to run, but whose loyalties made it too dangerous to stay. That razor's edge left cuts that refused to heal.

Silence brimming with malevolence wafted through the air like ash from a fire out of control...choking him and setting his thoughts racing. It had been a mistake to come out here. He had no right, not to speak to this wizard about loyalty and joining with his compatriots to rally against a common enemy...no matter the enemy was eating them all alive from within. How had he let that woman persuade him? It was pure insanity, and if he had a shred of sense, he'd...

"You have it, too?" Longbottom's panicked voice roused him, but it was Hermione's hand stroking his brow that bought him a pocket of air.

"It's not just us, Neville," she said. She sounded far away from him, and weary, he thought. "I thought you knew, that Harry told you. I'm so sorry." Her voice broke, and Snape lifted his head to meet her eyes lest the Dark take her again, too.

"Of course nobody told me. Nobody ever told me anything. I had to wait for you lot to be away before..." He stopped short, taking rapid breaths. "What is it, then?" Longbottom sounded almost like the young man he remembered. "Am I going mad? Hermione... who else...?"

Snape took a long breath and turned to the boy. The boy had dropped to a crouch, hands trembling like butterflies in front of his face.

"None of us is going mad, Longbottom," he said. "We're suffering the effects of Horcrux exposure."

"Exposure? What?" There it was, the face of the child whose cauldrons inevitably exploded, no matter how hard he tried, the boy who long ago had learned that he would be betrayed by the natural magical laws that inexplicably worked for everybody except for him.

"Neville, could we go sit down somewhere? Please?" Hermione asked. "I can't..." Snape wrapped his arm around her just as her knees buckled.

"The office in Greenhouse ten, Longbottom," Snape said. "Now."

It was a testament to the power of old reflexes coupled with desperation, Snape thought, that Longbottom stumbled to his feet and led the way without another word.

~~**~~

How ironic, Hermione thought, that all the time she'd spent battering her friends with her worries didn't prepare her for the heartbreak when one of them actually listened.

She'd imagined it couldn't feel any worse than it had when there'd been nowhere to go, nobody to tell her that the Darkness flowing beneath her skin like poison was real, was not her fault, was not hers to bear alone. Watching Neville's face as she put words to the waking nightmare she knew he'd been living, she knew she'd barely scratched the surface of pain.

"None of them believed you?" he asked.

"No, and they only got angrier when I pushed."

Neville snickered. "Well, Harry and Ron had plenty of practice ignoring you when it was convenient for them. Can't imagine this was much different."

Hermione ignored Severus' smirk.

"It is different this time. It's not just Harry and Ron. Ginny is worse than both of them, actually. Angrier. Meaner."

"And Mr Weasley?" Neville asked.

"He's not angry, exactly," Hermione said. "He's got a short temper, but mostly he's just become so odd." Severus raised an eyebrow. "Okay, more odd. He used to get as wound up as the twins when something excited him." She paused. "By the time I... left, he was spending nearly all his time in that shed filled with Muggle spark plugs and other junk. Molly refused to discuss it, and everyone kept acting like nothing strange was going on. But he's on the verge of getting sacked because he's so preoccupied, and everybody avoids him unless they have no choice. He did notice when I put Ron through their front window, though." She sighed. "Really, they should thank me. It was the first time I'd seen him act normally in months."

Severus snorted, and Neville looked so surprised...at the warmth of a man not known for his humour, and quite possibly at the fact that under cover of the tabletop, he had his fingers laced with hers...that Hermione mustered a smile.

"Go ahead and ask, Neville. You're obviously dying to." Neville blushed a deep red. Was this the same man who had been doing mortal damage to a climbing vine of rare magical Japanese honeysuckle only an hour ago?

"Am I limited to just one question?"

Severus made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a snort of laughter, though his austere expression gave nothing away. "Mr Longbottom," he said, "I would consider it poetic justice if you would ask numerous questions. In fact, as a favour to me, ask as many as you possibly can."

Neville looked from Hermione to Snape and back again, shook his head and leaned back in his chair. "The world has gone mad, hasn't it?"

Hermione looked at Snape and down at their clasped hands. She closed her eyes and felt the edges of the lurking Darkness kept at bay only by the force of a connection she still didn't understand. Memories of the last few days welled up in her, and she smiled in a way both men would certainly recognize, but didn't care. I'm done hiding.

"Completely mad," she agreed.

Neville nodded. "You and Snape?"

"Not as mad as it might first appear, actually." She glanced at Severus and squeezed his hand, pretending not to notice the way his shoulders relaxed at her reassurance. "He found me, Neville. I don't know how, but I was falling apart. Fast."

"You look okay," he said. "I admit, you seem a bit worn and all, but not like...well..."

"Not like the deranged woman you heard about from the Weasleys and Potters?"

"Right." He looked pained. "Not like her."

"Miss Granger has been suffering...each of us who had intimate contact with a Horcrux has been suffering," Severus said.

"You keep using that word... Hor...?"

"Horcrux," Hermione interjected. "An object that was used to house a piece of Voldemort's torn-up soul."

If it were possible to look even more flummoxed whilst simultaneously being horrified, Neville accomplished it. His eyes lost their focus, and the unhealthy flush returned to his cheeks. "An object that did what?"

Before Hermione could do anything about the knot of panic in her stomach, Snape leaned forward.

"When I encouraged you to ask questions, Mr Longbottom," Snape drawled, "I had hoped that time would have honed your intellect sufficiently that they would be comprised of more than incredulous facial expressions and the word, 'What?'" Hermione flinched, but the steady pressure of his hand in hers stilled her. "You are, I believe, capable of incisive thought and discerning questioning." He caught Neville's eyes and held him fast. "Use them."

Before her eyes, she saw what she'd been unable to observe in herself, or even in Severus. It was as if invisible hands choking him had released him, oxygen flowing again. Neville's cheeks lost their shiny, flushed sheen, and his eyes grew clear and focused. He breathed...in and out as if he'd needed reminding how it was done and gazed at his hands lying on the table in front of him. With each breath, they grew less unsteady. With each passing moment and several dumbfounded glances at Severus...whose respectful, expectant expression hadn't wavered...it seemed to her as if Neville's soul began to once again fully inhabit his body.

That man, the wizard who had, as a young man, stood up to a cadre of Death Eaters and who had fearlessly beheaded the familiar of the most evil wizard alive, finally sat before them.

"Good to see you back, Mr Longbottom," Severus said.

"How did you...?"

"Soon," Severus said. "First, the other questions you need to ask."

Hermione held her breath as the two men sat, eye to eye.

"You've told me what happened to you and the others." Neville paused. "And to me." He took a long breath. "You've explained the common element linking all of us." Snape nodded. "What's missing is how. What is the seed? What makes it grow? And what can we use to eradicate it?"

~~***~~

"Excellent, Mr Longbottom," Snape said. "Question the source. Well done." It had been a hunch...meeting the boy head-on like that, reaching for his competence...and it had paid off. "However, in order to discern the source, I believe that we need to approach this in reverse order. Rather like disassembly of a poisonous potion into its component parts." Longbottom blanched. Snape narrowed his eyes. He'd forgotten. "You did not take Advanced Potions with Professor Slughorn, Longbottom, is that correct?"

"That's right," Longbottom answered. "You'll have to depend on Hermione for help with that approach."

"Incorrect, Longbottom," Snape said. "You will merely use the model you are most familiar with to accomplish the same goals." The younger wizard's forehead wrinkled for a moment and then relaxed. Good.

"Well," he said slowly. "A diseased plant presents the same challenges, I suppose. If a plant isn't thriving, my job is to discover the pathogen and then the environmental factors that will support recovery."

Snape nodded. "Indeed. Now then, as information is far preferable to ignorance, let us compare notes, shall we?"

"Compare what notes, though? I have no information for you."

"Of course you do, Neville," Hermione interrupted. "Your symptoms, and how they developed...when they started, when they are worst...all of that might tell us something we don't know yet." She paused as if unsure how to continue. "And we have our own histories to share as well. Plus..." She hesitated again, her glance at Snape the cue he needed.

"What Miss Granger is trying to articulate, Mr Longbottom, is that we...she and I...have made some progress regarding the mechanisms of symptom relief."

"What?"

"He means that we've stumbled on some things that make both of us feel better, Neville," Hermione said. "I don't think the same things will be effective for each one of us...what works between me and Severus didn't work with Ron..." She stopped short, waiting as her former classmate swallowed hard at the image that she imagined must have come to mind. Then she soldiered on, ignoring the wide-eyed look Longbottom was giving her. "It also seems as if something Severus did earlier helped you. Severus, do you know what it was you did?"

"I do," he said, watching for Longbottom's breathing to steady again, but the boy's eyes were slightly glased. "Mr Longbottom, you are not required to imagine what, precisely, Miss Granger is alluding to." He tilted his head for emphasis. "Suffice it to say that between us, the simplest touch..." He brought his hand to stroke the skin of Hermione's cheek. "...pushes back the encroaching Darkness that I, myself, refer to as the Shadow. You may call it what you will."

"Shadow," he whispered, his eyes flickering back and forth between Snape's hand, which now rested on Hermione's arm, and his face. "Feels like it, yes. I never gave it a name. It's just familiar, you know? It felt just like this in school, just not as big."

"It did?" Hermione asked, leaning towards him. "I didn't know. Neville, I'm sor..."

"Quit apologising, Hermione," Neville snapped. "It's not about you. I dealt with plenty all on my own, remember? Got teased. Pushed aside. Judged. And not just in school. I'm not looking for pity, but I have plenty of experience dealing with hurt. And fear. It did go away for a short while. The year you were headmaster." He gestured towards Snape. "My purpose was clear, then, and I didn't have time to be lonely. After a while, I was dying for some peace and quiet, actually." He smirked, but it was clear he enjoyed that particular memory. "It was after. After the war and the cleanup. After I started my apprenticeship. The old feelings would come back, but worse. Much worse."

"Which old feelings, precisely, Mr Longbottom?"

"The indecision. The conflict. Wanting to be liked, but hating feeling so desperate. I thought I'd got past all that my seventh year, thought I'd come into my own. I was a hero, you know...felt like one, at least. But then it all came back bigger than before, and I don't know why." He shook his head, remembering. "At first, I thought I could control it well enough. Enough that Hannah didn't notice, at least, and then enough that she thought she understood me."

"Hannah told me that you became withdrawn and then a few years ago started to get... you know... explosive," Hermione said.

"At the time, it didn't seem like anything serious, some post-war bumps in the road. She sometimes got upset about it, but if she pushed too hard, I'd just get angry..." He drew in a sharp breath as if realising what he'd just described. "Oh. I guess I have more in common with Harry and Ron than I thought." He looked apologetic.

"It's just, I couldn't think. Mostly, if I'm working with the plants and the soil, it stays away. But lately, even when I'm working myself to exhaustion, it seeps back in. It feels like... I don't know. It's like oil. Dark and slick. Impossible to grab a hold of." He looked at them both, pleading.

"An apt description, Mr Longbottom. That's precisely how I experience it, as well." Snape looked at Hermione. Her eyes were closed. He shifted his hand so it enveloped hers, and she took a long breath.

"For me, too, Neville. It feels like I can't ever get clean. Felt. It felt like that, until a few days ago." Her eyes flew open and she met Snape's eyes. Gratitude and fear shone there, and in that instant he knew. He knew despite the way his stomach clenched that he wouldn't rest until her fear and gratitude had been replaced with nothing more agonising than love.

~~**~~

Beta kudos to Annie Talbot. :)