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Elkins sloshes her way through the surf and stomps up onto the sand: dirty, dishevelled, soaking wet from the knees down, and with a nervous tic fluttering madly under her left eye. Once above the high-tide line, she collapses onto the beach and fervently kisses dry land, then rolls onto her back to stare blankly up at the sky.
After a moment, she notices Cindy and Eileen both looking down at her.
"Oh," she mutters. "Don't ask. Just do not ask."
Sitting up, Elkins notices a pink candy heart still clinging stickily to one elbow. She peels it off and tosses it to one side, shuddering. It is immediately snapped up by a passing seagull.
"Really," Elkins repeats. "I mean it. You do not want to know. It was...it was horrible. Just horrible. There were SHIPs involved. And pink things."
She wraps herself tightly in her featherboas, then looks around the beach, frowning.
"Say," she says. "Has either of you by any chance seen my Snitch controls lying around here anywhere?"
-----------------
Cindy:
I thought we decided we could still be friends. Besides, I see that you have rebounded to George, and deep down I'm very happy for you. Really, I am. I'll just have to remember what we had. Or at least, what I thought we had.
We'll...
<Elkins' voice breaks. She turns quickly away>
We'll always have Avery in the DMC.
I sense a serious misunderstanding about exactly how Big the Reverse Memory Charm can be. Neville as a small toddler who later gets a Reverse Memory Charm is Big. Heck, it's Huge.
Ah! Well, if Neville can be a toddler at the time, then that's different!
The aspect of Neville-with-Reverse-Memory-Charm that I was really objecting to, you see, was your "it has to be 1981, because Neville has to have been but an infant at the time, he just has to have been" stance.
You seemed to be taking a rather firm stand against the entire idea of Traumatized Neville, and frankly, that just offended my featherboas.
So you can certainly have the drama of toddler Neville cowering in the corner, flinching, sucking his thumb, whatever you want. . . .Reverse Memory Charm Neville suffers, you see. I'm giving Neville a tremendous amount of pain. I'm enhancing his memory so that he hears the shrieks of his parents every darn day.
Well!
<Elkins tosses her bloody featherboa over one shoulder with a satisfied air>
Okay, then! So long as he can be a toddler. It was that infant thing that was really the sticking point for me, you see. So can we call it 1983, then, and forget all about that canonically-suggested-but-nowhere-actually-stated "it happened in 1981" nonsense?
Not only has the Reverse Memory Charm wrecked his memory for things like where he left his toad, it has caused him to repeatedly experience his parents' torture in Dolby and Technocolor. Reverse Memory Charm Neville has to be Tough to avoid losing his mind completely, if you ask me.
Sounds good to me. I have never wanted Neville to join the ranks of SYCOPHANTS. I want Neville to be Tough. Tough...but weird. Weird Tough. In fact, what I want most for Neville is for him to develop—yes, you guessed it—Edge.
So if Reverse-Memory-Charm Neville can be a toddler, then I'm cool with it. But earlier, you seemed to be all hung up on this 1981 thing, and that just wasn't flying for me.
(I objected to Reverse-Memory-Charm-Neville on the grounds that it was—snicker—unsupported by canon.)
OK, now, that really hurt. Aside from the fact that you've come right out and said I'm squeamish and therefore not Tough, you're saying the Reverse Memory Charm doesn't exist in canon. Ouch!
Forgive me. People sometimes say hard things when under pressure. And besides, you know how Edgy I can get sometimes. Especially on the subject of timelines. Timelines put everyone a bit on edge, don't they?
It was that insistence on 1981 that did it. 1981, 1981...I just hate that year 1981! As if 1981 doesn't hog up enough of the timeline already. Some people just seem to want to wrap up the entire aftermath of the whole darned Voldemort's Reign of Terror backstory in only two short months. Bah to that, I say. Bah!
I say, it's about time we let 1982 and 1983 see some action. They were good years, they deserve a bit of excitement too. Why should 1981 get all the glory?
Cindy:
Reverse Memory Charms are not directly mentioned in canon, true. You know, kind of the way Avery's backstory isn't directly mentioned in canon. *g* But the Reverse Memory Charm clues are there.
At this point, Eileen chimes in:
Take that, Elkins!
<Elkins stares at her in wounded disbelief>
Boy. You really do just go with the biggest bully on the playground, don't you?
::suddenly remembers that she herself gave Eileen her very own SYCOPHANTS badge and slaps herself on forehead as comprehension dawns—along with a vast quantity of reader sympathy::
Oh! Riiiiiiight! I'd forgotten all about that. Well...yeah, okay. Okay. Fair enough. That's quite all right, Eileen. I really do understand. I guess I'd probably do the same to you, given half the chance.
Cindy, Toughly ignoring this minor SYCOPHANTIC spat, continues:
And you said you were agnostic on the subject of Memory Charms and were willing to work with me if I'd go along on Avery. I feel soiled somehow.
Well, that was before you showed any willingness to bend on the whole timeline issue, wasn't it. But now that you've offered me a traumatized toddler Neville, as well as a gut-wrenched Moody and a remorseless Crouch and a Great Big Bloody Dramatic Battle between Moody and the DEs—it's every bit as good as a Bloody Ambush!—I'm in again.
Just don't try to make Neville an infant when it all happens, and I'll follow you wherever you lead. Really. I'm all yours.
Well...so long as you don't step on George's toes.
And...well...except for maybe when it comes to that Toadkeeper thing. I just don't know about that whole Toadkeeper idea.
<brightly>
But aside from that, I'm your willing slave, Cindy. Honest, I am. Just keep the Big Bangs coming when it comes to Neville, Aurors and DEs, and I'm, er, almost all yours!
Eileen expresses her own SweetGeorgian concerns:
But we can still be Georgians and believe in bloody ambushes, can't we? Otherwise, you and Elkins are pulling me apart.
::patting Eileen reassuringly on the shoulder::
But of course we can! George himself may not like it very much, but we don't need him anymore. We have an acronym now! So long as we don't start ascribing any Bangy motivations to Snape's big decisions, then we can have as many tortured toddlers and anguished Aurors and Great Bloody Ambushes as we like, and still wear our SWEETGEORGIANISM badges with pride! But...um...
::nervous glance out to sea, lowered voice::
But we should probably watch out for that Captain Tabouli. She can be just vicious. And sneaky, too. I don't know how you sleep nights on that ship, Eileen. I really don't.
Eileen expresses her preference for a Tortured!Neville scenario:
Why would the Lestranges leave Neville out of the picture, Cindy? They tortured Mrs. Longbottom to make Frank talk, why would they leave his little toddler out of the business? Because Florence Lestrange was a kind maternal woman in whom Neville awakened the thought of a lost life as Mrs. Sirius Black barefootedly baking cookies for the hordes of little Blacks? No, I don't think so.
"You won't talk? Well, do you want to see your child tortured?"
Cindy squirms squeamishly:
OK, you're going to force me to think about little babies being tortured, aren't you?
Eeeeeee-yup! We sure are. (And he's not a baby, dammit. He's a toddler.)
Here, Cindy. Have a featherboa. Have two: they're warm, and made from murdered owls.
Cindy:
I have to address this, or I will be heckled as "squeamish" and I will lose all credibility (or what smidgen of credibility I have left). So here we go.
You see, the reason Mrs. Lestrange leaves Neville alone during the attacks is that she doesn't see him as a risk. He is too young to identify her, she thinks.
Nah. I think she just didn't know he was there. He was hidden in the closet. I make the case for the closet for two reasons: (a) every cheesy issue-of-the-week made-for-TV-movie ever written that deals with early childhood trauma always has the kid hidden in the closet, and (b) it, uh, provides a literary parallel with Harry's own early childhood experience.
So it's canonical to have Neville in the closet. Really it is.
Cindy:
We want our DEs to be grey, right?
We sure do! Or at least, I do. And that's why, as sweet as I found Eileen's suggestion that it might have been Avery who saved him, I'm nonetheless going to plump here yet again for my favorite Sympathy For the Devil Theory: Neville Owed a Life Debt to Barty Crouch.
No, it wasn't Avery who saved poor Neville. Avery was too busy keeping a look-out for the Aurors and trying not to be sick. Or perhaps participating while under the Imperius Curse, depending on which variety of Fourth Man you favor. And it wasn't Mrs. Lestrange who spared him either, are you kidding? As we all know, Florence is Ever So Evil now, thanks to Sirius toying with her affections like that back in her school days. And it sure wasn't Mr. Lestrange. He doesn't even have a first name, so why would he spare Toddler Neville from torment?
Nope. No, it had to be young Crouch. I mean, think about it. Given the vast quantities of information that we have now accumulated, through our irreproachable extrapolations from canon, about these four characters, which of them do you think would have had the most invested in the entire "don't judge children by their parents" concept? Which of them would had been the most likely to balk at the notion of a child being forced to suffer for his parents' sins? Which of them, throughout all of GoF, stands in as the thematic representative of the Apple-Fallen-Far-From-The-Tree? Which of them is practically a personification of the principle of parricide itself?
It had to have been Crouch. It just had to have been. This was pre-Azkaban, pre-Imperius Crouch, remember. He wasn't quite so damaged back then. Bouncing Ferret Crouch was still years in his future. Back then, he still had some qualms about the whole punish-child-for-parents'-sins thing.
Yeah, I say that Crouch spared Neville. He came across him huddling in the closet where he had been hidden, took one look into those big pure-blooded eyes, and then closed the door, went back to the others, stared meaningfully at the Longbottoms, and said: "No, sorry, couldn't find the brat anywhwere. Guess they were telling the truth after all. The boy just isn't here."
Which explains, of course, why it is that the Longbottoms don't recognize Neville. They were forced to spend so much mental energy during their ordeal trying to keep it in mind that the kid wasn't there that it's just about the only thing that they now do remember about him. They remember that "the child is not here." So whenever Neville goes to visit them in the hospital, they look right at him and repeat dully: "My son isn't here. He's not here."
There. I don't know if that's Big enough for the Bangers, but I think it's probably at least horrid enough to satisfy everybody's featherboas.
And it meshes fairly well with Reverse-Memory-Charm Neville, too. Under the influence of the Reverse Memory Charm, Neville fingered all four of them, right? And yet both Dumbledore and Sirius seem highly dubious about Crouch's guilt. Clearly there was something about Neville's testimony under the Reverse Memory Charm that didn't seem very convincing, at least when it came to the question of Crouch's guilt. (And, er, Avery's, of course. We can't forget Avery.) Must have been the life-debt. The poor kid was all torn, what with the trauma, and the Reverse Memory Charm, and then the life-debt to Crouch on top of all of that -- it just muddled his testimony all to pieces.
After all, life-debt to Crouch would explain so much! It would explain why despite his usual timidity, Neville was willing to volunteer information about such a traumatic subject as the Cruciatus curse in Fake Moody's class. It would explain why, in spite of being absolutely terrified of the man, and in spite of showing obvious signs of having been weeping when he returns from his little tea party with him, he nonetheless strikes Harry as looking "cheered" — and yet then spends that entire night lying awake in his bed. Would a simple word of praise about Herbology and the loan of a book have had quite that dramatic an effect, do you think? Would it have the power to inspire such obvious and deep-seated ambivalence?
No, the poor kid's seriously conflicted when it comes to Moody. He just doesn't know what to make of their relationship.
I'm tellin' ya, it's gotta be one of them life-debt thingies. Just gotta be.
Well...that and strange feedback from his super secret time-shift powers. But that's a subject for my next post, in which I try to provide the Big Bang Battleship with a satisfactory Neville backstory...
—Elkins, who really is going to get back to serious canonical discussion of these books one of these days. Really she is.
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on February 28, 2002 2:32 PM
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