LAST TANGO IN PARIS
Chapter Eleven

Maybe no one else noticed; Neville, maybe to make up for his general ineptitude elsewhere, often saw things other people overlooked. In any case, the battered little leather-bound book in Harry's nightstand drawer marked him as a kindred spirit – which was why when other people murmured about him behind his back for one reason or another, Neville generally kept his mouth shut.

There were some things that even being a Quidditch star couldn't buy you back.

Neville's album wasn't really his, it was Gran's. But she'd given it to him when he left for Hogwarts ... after all, he'd been through the whole thing, beginning to end, every night since he was two.

He didn't remember his parents, not really. Not as they'd been ... before, anyway. How could he? He'd only been a baby. And though he'd dutifully made his regular visits to the stuffy little room in St. Mungo's – first with Gran and then, after she passed on, by himself – he secretly didn't think of the slack-jawed man and muttering woman in the hospital beds as his parents at all. His real parents were in the book: feeding each other wedding cake, sprawled contentedly on the sofa with their faces close together and their fingers entwined, tickling him – Infant-Neville, Longbottom Crown Prince – to make him laugh.

He was their only child, so there were lots of baby pictures – not just special-occasion portraits, but ream upon ream of everyday snapshots. He liked to watch his mother doing mum-things: feeding him, changing his diaper, giving him a bath. Liked to watch her hands ... slender and graceful and soft-looking, with the big family heirloom diamond half-covered in pablum or suds. Sometimes, if he looked hard enough and long enough at those hands, he could almost remember how they'd felt.

Almost.

"What's wrong with them?" he'd asked Gran once – a long time ago, when he was still too small to know better, and had been frightened by the look that came over her. "What happened?"

"Voldemort," she'd said grimly, her dark eyes flashing, her voice cracking but defiant over the forbidden name. "That's what happened. And don't you forget it, either. Don't you go falling in with the wrong sort, once you get to Hogwarts. You do your parents proud."

Neville had nodded, timidly; he knew from experience that this tended to be the safest response to outbursts of this nature. "Will they ever get better?" he ventured presently, and Gran had laughed, a bitter thin sound that didn't suit her.

"Not likely," she said. "Much as we can do these days, nobody's figured out how to regrow brain cells yet." She seemed to be talking to herself, more than to him. "Once the connection's cut, it's gone forever. And he knew it, too—" there was that bitter, scathing tone again—"he knew it'd be far worse to send them back useless, than to send them back dead. Bastard."

Neville, by this time recognising all the warning signs of a full-on diatribe when he saw one, kept his mouth shut.

But he didn't forget a single word she’d said.

It was ironic that he'd been so hopeless at Potions, when it was the subject he'd been most excited about at the outset. That was his aunt's doing – pretty Aunt Lila, his mum's younger sister. He'd spent a summer with her, the year he was ten, in her tidy country-lane cottage with the big garden around back, and she'd taken him round and showed him her cuttings.

"What's this one?" he'd asked, pointing to a scrawny little tree in an earthenware pot, and she'd obligingly come over to bend down beside him.

"That's a ginkgo sapling," she said. "You can make a potion from this that will help improve your memory."

"Really?"

Neville, wondering, had traced one shiny leaf with his forefinger. "Would it help Mum and Dad, then?"

Instantly, he knew he'd said something wrong.

"Oh, sweetie." Sudden tears in the big grey eyes that were so like his mother's. "It’s so good of you to think of them. But I'm afraid they're a bit ... just a bit beyond that now."

"Oh." Neville looked around him at the riot of colour, keeping his gaze down so he wouldn't have to see her fumble with a tissue. "Can anything help them? Ever?"

"Not that we know of."

Aunt Lila took a long time clearing her throat; when she went on, her voice was steadier. "But they discover new things every day," she said, her voice determinedly cheerful. "Keep your Herbology and Potions marks up at school next year, Neville, and you just might be the one who figures it out. If anybody can do it, you can."

It was nice of her to say that.

And he’d learned enough from the plants in her garden that he was ahead of everyone else in Herbology his first year – Herbology, his favourite class, that warm and alive-smelling hour in the steamy sunny greenhouses, potting soil and fine-ground bone meal familiar friends under his steady hands. No pressure to perform, out here; no schedule, no hurry. It paid to take your time, to be gentle and thorough. It feels like I’m a doctor, he’d said once to Professor Sprout, as they disentangled bound roots together after class, and her round wizened face had lit up in understanding; they were in accord, there.

If only, Neville had thought despairingly, night after night – if only Professor Sprout taught Potions, too!

But instead, there was Snape – Snape the sarcastic, the scathing, Snape the cruel. Snape, the boggart in the closet – the monster under the bed, the inevitable embodiment of Neville’s worst nightmares.

And there was no use going over all that old history again, not when Neville’s chronic misadventures in the dungeons had ceased to be even a running joke and had passed into the dubious realm of Hogwarts folklore. Even with the best of intentions – the positive thinking, the meticulous preparation, the hours of nightly studying and extra practice with … with the smart girl, Harry’s friend, what was her name again? – even then, every passing hour of that class had been worse than the one before it, and Neville had slowly, surely come to this hopeless conclusion: he was never, never going to be able to cure his parents.

I’m sorry, he’d whispered that night to the photo album, in the privacy of the hanging curtains. I’m sorry, Dad. Mum. So sorry. I just can’t do it. And they’d smiled back at him from the book as they always did, blind and unknowing … younger and prettier than the blank-eyed residents of Room 35’s twin hospital beds, maybe, but no more real, no more whole.

After that, he stopped trying, mostly.

It had come as a pleasant surprise to find that life wasn’t like school – that you could pick the one thing you liked to do and were good at, and form your whole life around it. His high score on the Herbology NEWT and a glowing recommendation from Professor Sprout had gotten him into a apprenticeship in the Florida Everglades. From there, he’d landed a spot in a prestigious journeyman’s programme in Fiji, working with underwater plants and helping to restore a pollution-damaged coral reef. He'd been recruited straight out of that programme to Paris, to head up the new Division of Tropical and Marine Plants in this, one of the finest botanical gardens in the world.

And somewhere along the way, he had looked down at himself with a sort of vague surprise to find that months of daily snorkeling and tramping through thigh-deep swampland had trimmed his waistline and given him muscles where he hadn’t used to have any – oh, not big bodybuilder muscles like he saw on the lifeguards at the beach, but a kind of lean toughness that, combined with his gardener's tan and the thinned-down-but-still-angelic English-choirboy face he hadn’t yet managed to lose, added up to a total package he’d never thought to aspire to.

He still felt like the old Neville underneath.

Even now, with his bachelor flat in Montmartre and his dream job, even under the appreciative sidelong looks from the passing demoiselles who sauntered in giggling flirtatious packs through his gardens, part of him still expected Crabbe and Goyle to materialise out of nowhere and shake him down for pocket money, still expected Ginny Weasley to pretend not to see him coming across the dance floor toward her. Still heard Snape’s spittle-flecked whisper, harsh in his ear: idiotic – moronic – useless – a failure.

It had taken almost all his courage to approach the girl under the chestnut tree.

He probably wouldn’t have done it, familiar as she seemed, if it hadn’t been for the book; she had a novel propped open on her knees, expertly holding it steady and turning pages with one hand while the other fumbled with the cap of her water bottle, and something about her profile as she looked down at it made light bulbs go off in his brain: I know her – I know I do. I've seen her do that a million times if I've seen it once.

She just stared at him for a minute or so after he spoke, though, and his resolve began to falter –close up like this, she looked less familiar. Less like a schoolgirl, more grown-up. He coloured under her steady look, shrugged and mumbled something suitably apologetic ... and then, to his surprise, saw her face light up with recognition and a very real pleasure as she said his name.

Funny.

The way she grabbed his hand, the things she said – we haven't heard from you in years; you look terrific – made it seem like they'd been not merely acquainted, but good friends. Why, then, couldn't he think of her name?

He was embarrassed, but she shrugged it off and said something else that struck him funny – it's not you, it's me. Odd ... why would she think that? And then she told him who she was, and before he could grasp the knowledge it slid out of his memory again, like wet garden hose through slippery hands, and he found himself, to his own bewilderment, saying, "I'm sorry. I don't know anyone by that name."

She looked baffled for a minute, and then somehow deflated, as if she'd just gotten bad news she'd been expecting for awhile. So that's how it works, then, she mused to herself, and turned back to him, her eyes just a little bit too bright.

"It doesn't matter," she said, though it was clear that it did; he just didn’t know why. "We were friends, that's the important thing. You do remember that, right?"

He nodded, mostly because she looked so desperate to have him agree with her, and she smiled, visibly relieved.

"You can call me Kate," she said. "It's after my mother, you know."

"Kate," he repeated, and frowned – that wasn't the name he wanted to put with this face, for some reason.

But he let it go – she was so pretty, this mysterious Hogwarts girl, so fine-boned and melancholy and at the same time eager; glad to see him in a way that wasn’t like the giggling French girls’ frank sexual appraisal, as much as it was like a drowning man eyeing a life preserver.

A connection, that’s what she wanted. Well, Neville could understand that – after all, he’d been an Englishman in Paris for the last year and a half, hadn’t he?

She was still hanging on to his hand. He gave it a friendly squeeze before dropping it and smiled reassuringly.

"So, Kate," he said. "Are you new to town, then? Or are you just visiting?"

**