Fic: A Natural History (HP, Neville, Luna, Remus, G)

[st_aurafina]

Title: A Natural History
Recipient: #36 - Daisy Wheedle, aka gunderpants
Request: I'd love to see some genfic with Luna, Sirius, Remus and Neville if you can manage it. Possibly incorporating Sirius' ghost or his form in a portrait.
Characters: Neville, Luna, Remus, some mention of MWPP
Rating: G
Words: 3,800
Summary: In the summer after Dumbledore's funeral Neville and Luna find they have an ally in deciphering a fragment of the past.
Notes: Thanks to lilacsigil for beta-reading, and to the mods of reversathon for organising and running a great exchange. This fic originally written for Reversathon 2007, here. Written before Deathly Hallows, set immediately after Half-Blood Prince. No DH spoilers.






Neville wove through the crowds of Muggle tourists – who were milling aimlessly around the dinosaur skeleton - and made his way safely up the stairs to the display of plant fossils, which the Muggles largely ignored. His feet were cold in his trainers, his hair was damp from the unseasonable rain, and the heady thrill of a day on his own in London was wearing thin. With all that had happened at Hogwarts, and the unsettling news that arrived each morning in the Daily Prophet, Neville had been quite prepared - and perhaps a little more relieved than he cared to admit - for his Grandmother to keep him safely at home for the rest of his life. As always, she had other ideas. She had been so pleased with the part Neville had taken in defending Hogwarts against the Death Eaters that she had deemed him old enough to visit his parents alone. She had even consented to a visit to the museum as long as he was home in time for tea.

"We shall not bow to the terror tactics of a madman and his bully cohorts," she pronounced, packing Neville's satchel with sandwiches and an emergency package of Floo powder. When she handed him a slim envelope filled with paper bank notes, her jaw was set, as though handling Muggle currency was an act of defiance against Voldemort and his cohorts.

In the Fossil gallery, Neville pulled his sketchbook from his bag and settled on a bench opposite a glass case of petrified ferns, careful to put his back to a stone pillar. He was fairly certain that the Natural History Museum would not be a popular target for the Death Eaters, but there had been increasing numbers of attacks on Muggles this summer, and one couldn't be certain of anything. His grandmother had suggested that Neville invite some of his friends along, but he hadn't wanted to, partly because he doubted they were interested in tracing the divergence of Muggle plants from their Magical cousins, but mostly because on his own, he had only himself to protect.

Still, he had enjoyed visiting his parents – St Mungo's was well-guarded and he knew his way around there well. Neville smiled as he sketched the herringbone fronds of Neuropteris; it had been the first time that he'd ever been alone with his mum and dad, and though they had only sat quietly together on a squashy couch and watched the rain on the window, it had been wonderful. Not for the first time, he pushed to the back of his mind the guilty relief he felt knowing that his parents were perfectly safe: the Death Eaters had finished their work with them in the last war.

He had almost finished with the Carboniferous era when a familiar dreamy voice floated clearly through the burr and mumble of the tourists in the Great Hall below.

"Oh, but I'm not littering. I'm spreading Words of Comfort. Look, I've got plenty, perhaps there's one here for you. You never know when they'll come in handy, especially now."

From the balcony, he could see Luna Lovegood, wearing yellow Wellingtons and a purple plastic raincoat, being escorted to the front entrance, her shoulder firmly gripped by a burly security guard. As she was moved unwillingly along the tiled floor, her boots squeaked in protest, and small pieces of paper fluttered out from beneath the voluminous raincoat. The grown-up tourists did their best to ignore the spectacle, though the younger Muggle children pointed and snickered. Luna, as always, was oblivious to the stares. She rummaged in her pockets, shedding s more scraps of paper as she searched.

"Here." She held out a pale blue triangle to the guard who refused to look at her while he muttered into his radio. "Try 'conciliation'. I think it really suits you."

Neville hurried down the stairs to the front of the hall. "It's okay! I know her! I know her! Don't call the police." He followed the trail of paper through the crowd, picking up the pieces as he went until he was standing next to Luna. He reached them just as the guard was reporting a disturbance in the Great Hall.

Luna tilted her head at his approach. "Oh! It's Longbottom." The security guard regarded this statement with some alarm.

"I know her. She's my friend. We'll go, there's no need to make a fuss." Neville bundled stray pieces of paper inside his satchel while Luna looked at him serenely. He concentrated on looking as harmless as possible – a skill he'd refined through six years of classes at Hogwarts. When the guard was looking merely dubious rather than angry, Neville took Luna's arm. "We'll just go now."

As the two of them made their way down the tiled steps to Cromwell Road, Luna let the blue paper triangle flutter away in a gust of wind so strong that it propelled the rain horizontally. "Somebody will find a use for that one."




The inside of the café at the tube station was steamy, filled with damp travellers and huge urns of boiling water. Neville settled a tray carefully onto the scratched table, and poured mahogany tea into two chipped cups while Luna flitted from table to table tucking more of her papers between the salt and pepper shakers. Neville looked nervously at the woman manning the cash register, but she was deep in conversation with the tea lady and didn't seem to have noticed. He pulled the bundle of papers he had collected in Luna's wake, back at the museum, and looked through them: tattered shapes roughly torn from larger pieces, each with a word scratched in the centre in Luna's spidery handwriting. The first three he held were Mirth, Serenity and Giggle. He held them out to Luna as she slipped into the chair next to him, and she took them, flicked through the bundle, and handed back a fragment of cream-coloured parchment bearing the word Convivial.

"Here. It's suitable for the occasion." She took one of the crumbly biscuits and dipped it into her murky tea, then nibbled delicately on the end, never taking her eyes off Neville's face.

"What are they for, Luna?" Luna's unwavering gaze made some people nervous, but Neville knew Luna wasn't making a judgement or waiting for him to make a mistake. It was just that she was so interested in everything.

Half of Luna's biscuit fell into her tea with a splash and she fished around for it with a spoon. "I'm implementing an anti-Dementor stratagem. Spreading Words of Comfort will help people to have positive memories in reserve." She lifted the sodden biscuit from her cup with a triumphant expression. "If I were a Muggle, and I felt all my joy slipping away, I might think of that word that I had found on the train or tucked in a book at the library or in my pocket. And that might help me."

Neville grinned, thinking of Luna sidling up to people in queues and slipping paper into their pockets. "It's quite a good idea, actually."

Luna tore open four packets of sugar and upended them into her cup. "I'm glad you think so. I wrote to the Daily Prophet, and I didn't hear a thing about it. But my father said that we could put a leaflet into the next Quibbler."

Neville rubbed the Convivial parchment between his fingers – it was quite thick, like the scrolls they wrote on at school. When he held it up, the light shining through it showed lines on the back of the paper. He turned it over to see a inked sketch of a dark haired boy lounging at one end of a couch, his rumpled hair flopping over his wire-rimmed spectacles. As he stared at the figure, the boy gave him a lazy wave, and propped his legs over the arm of the couch, lying back so that his head nearly disappeared off the edge of the paper. The rest of the couch was lost, bisected down the middle by whoever had torn the parchment.

Luna leaned over the table. "That looks a lot like Harry Potter."




Visiting a former teacher's home would normally be a perturbing idea, but Neville and Luna had fought beside Professor Lupin twice now, and Neville wondered if that was why he felt relatively comfortable sitting on the battered settee in the flat that Lupin shared with Nymphadora Tonks. He nursed his mug of tea in his hands while Luna peered behind books on the shelf in a way that would be intrusive if you didn't know that she was checking for rabid Fishmoths.

Perching on an armchair covered with a bright patchwork blanket, Lupin turned the paper over and over in disbelief. "Luna, where did you find this parchment?"

Luna waved her hands airily. "Oh, all sorts of places." She furrowed her brow. "Maybe from Madame Pince's scrap-paper box? It's quite full, and she doesn’t mind if you take some."

"Who drew a picture of Harry on it, Professor?" Neville leaned forward on the settee. "Is it dark magic?"

Lupin smiled and held the scrap of parchment up so they could see the figure which was flicking a snitch from hand to hand with effortless grace. "I doubt it's dark magic, Neville. I think it's more likely an accident that it has become enchanted into action." The dark headed boy in the sketch stuck his tongue in disgust out at being judged harmless. "And it's not Harry, either, though I can't blame you for thinking that. This is Harry's father, James." He turned the paper around again with a sad smile. "They look very alike." He put the scrap on the coffee table, and weighed it down with his mug. "It would be prudent to round up any other scraps of that parchment, though, in case anyone does try to imbue it with something more sinister than a scribble."




While Professor Lupin Flooed up to the library at Hogwarts, Neville and Luna spread all the pieces of scrap paper over the hastily cleared kitchen table. Luna was very deft at spotting possible matches for the piece of magical parchment, her hands darted all over the table quickly and neatly. Neville found he had a tendency to sweep great swathes of them onto the floor, and once nearly lost a likely piece under the cooker. After a few such disasters, he perched on the bench and let Luna do the work, pointing out potential scraps from a safe distance. The kitchen was very homely – a pot of cheerful Pinwheel Daisies whirred and clicked on the windowsill, and even here in the kitchen books were piled everywhere, great leather tomes and bedraggled paperbacks, stacked in towering piles with tea cups balancing on the top. Even though the rain still pelted against the glass, the room was bright and airy and there was no sign that beyond these walls, a war was brewing. It was well known that Professor Lupin had a new girlfriend, and Neville wondered at the wisdom of making such a commitment in uncertain times. Wouldn't it just give you more to worry about?

Luna interrupted his train of thought with a triumphant squeak, snatching a piece of cream-coloured parchment off the table and brandishing it under his nose. "Look! It's another boy!"

This scrap showed the other end of the couch, drawn in the same faded sepia ink. A tall, thin boy leaned against the arm of the couch, a book tucked under his arm, and his hands in his pockets. His hair had been sketched lighter than James', and there was something watchful about his eyes.

Neville slid off the bench to peer a little closer. "Is that Professor Lupin? Harry said that he was a friend of his dad's at Hogwarts." He watched the sketch for a moment. "It doesn't seem to be moving like the other one."

Luna raised her barely-visible eyebrows. "Oh, he moves. He's just standing very still right now. He doesn't like us watching him." And indeed, as Luna spoke, the boy's lips pinched together, and his eyes narrowed.

Neville blushed – suddenly he felt as though he were spying on the boy. "Let's just put him next to James, and wait for Professor Lupin to come back."

They sat together on the settee in the living room, with only the coffee table between them and the fireplace. Luna put the two sketches on the low table in front of them. The pieces of parchment did not quite meet – there was a distinct difference in the hills and valleys of each torn edge. The drawing of James threw his stolen snitch against the tear that severed the couch, then deftly snatched it out of the air as it rebounded off the boundary of the sketch. Unable or unwilling to see these shenanigans, the young Remus Lupin opened his book and immersed himself in it.

When Professor Lupin stepped out of the fireplace with a flare of green flame and a puff of soot, he was carrying a wooden chest, stuffed so full of parchment odds and ends that the lid would no longer close.

"Madame Pince has been most obliging," he said, pushing aside a stack of books, and setting the chest down on the coffee table. His eyes lit on the second sketch, and he picked it up with a wistful expression. "Ah. Me in younger, better days, I'm afraid."

"It is you, then?" Neville wondered what it was like, to stand at the edge of your second war and look back at a time when there was nothing to be afraid of. How many friends had Lupin lost since someone had sketched them on the couch?

"Yes, that's me. Around the same age as you, I think, perhaps a little younger. Another friend - at the time, anyway - was quite the artist." Lupin put the picture down on the coffee table, then slid it further away from the sketch of James Potter. He pressed his palm onto the scarred surface of the coffee table between the two scraps of parchment, and spread his fingers out, his eyes far away for a moment. "I'd quite like to find the missing piece. If you two don't mind, I'd be grateful for some help."




Neville found the task of sorting through hundreds of scraps of parchment much less tedious than he anticipated – Professor Lupin knew some handy charms for summoning just one colour of paper, and they could quickly discard anything that wasn't cream.

"Unfortunately the charm is quite specific – ask for the cream coloured parchment, and it will ignore those that are taupe, beige, sand, and so on. It's best to remove everything that isn't a permutation of the colour you want, and sort the others by hand." Lupin demonstrated with a whisk of his wand, and all the scraps of powder blue paper leapt from the box like a cloud of butterflies, then fluttered down into a neat pile in the palm of his hand.

Neville filed the knowledge away. The Professor had a way of imparting information that made it easy to understand, and not for the first time, Neville wished he could have had Lupin as a teacher for longer than a year. A thought occurred to him. "Couldn't we search for parchment that was magicked? It must be magical paper to form a moving sketch."

"Well, that's a good idea, Neville. Unfortunately, I know this piece of parchment rather well – my friends and I bespelled it to be deliberately difficult to detect."

"Why?" Luna asked, bluntly.

"Excellent question, Luna, but perhaps a better question to think about is why someone would use a piece of magical parchment for idle scribbling. I have no answer for that – I can only advise that should you ever have need for a large amount of magical parchment, that you make sure you keep all the odds and ends together, so that they can't be used for a darker purpose." Lupin looked evasive, as though he'd rather not elaborate on why he and his friends had needed a large piece of magical parchment.

"Do you know who drew the sketch, Sir?" Neville asked, to distract Luna from asking any more pointed questions.

Lupin's mouth hardened. "Yes, I have a good idea who drew it. Someone who was once a friend. And someone who should have known better. I just hope that it was a careless mistake, and not something more sinister."

Luna shrieked and jumped to her feet. "I've got it! I've got it!" She waved the crisp piece of parchment like a tiny flag. "Another boy!"




Professor Lupin lined the three fragments together on the coffee table, and Neville leaned over to see. The third piece slotted neatly between James Potter and the young Remus Lupin, completing the couch that Neville recognised from the Gryffindor Common Room. In the middle of the couch, his arms spread wide on either side of him, sat a very good-looking boy. He was leaning slightly forward in his seat, so that his long dark hair fell over one eye. He seemed to be watching Neville, Luna and Lupin intently. Then, with a flick of his head, he stood up, and Neville could see his face more clearly.

"Sirius Black!" Luna had also recognised the boy. Neville glanced surreptitiously at the Professor; his expression was unreadable, his face closed off. These are the people that Lupin lost, his friends, Harry's dad, and Harry's mum too, though she wasn't in this sketch. He wondered what Lupin would say to those pen-and-ink people, if he could send a message back. Would he tell them not to bother? That friendships fail and friends get killed, no matter how much they mean to you? What would Neville's parents say to their younger selves? Uncertain of whether he wanted that question ever answered, Neville turned back to the sketches lined up on the coffee table.

The figure of young Remus Lupin had come alive, and was now standing at the very edge of his perimeter, hands raised up to the border between the sketches as though he were pressing against the glass of a shop window. In the middle section, Sirius Black gave a swift nod towards James Potter, then stood facing the opposite side of his scrap of parchment, towards Remus Lupin and mimicking his posture, put one hand up to the edge of the paper. Between then lay a section of empty space, the pitted wood surface of the old coffee table. Neville reached out, and pushed the scraps closer together, but though the torn edges matched perfectly, and the boys' hands were almost touching, they were unable to make contact.

"Reparo" The Professor's voice was a little thick, as though there was something in his throat. The edges of the parchment merged together, like a zip fastening, and suddenly the sketch was whole, and Sirius Black had thrown his arms around the young Remus. Holding him about his middle, he picked Remus up and swung him around and around. At the other end of the drawing, James Potter rolled his eyes at their carry-on, then stretched out his full length on the newly resected couch and closed his eyes.

Nobody spoke for a few moments, not even Luna. Professor Lupin pinned the sketch on the wall, between a postcard of the Coliseum and a Weird Sisters poster, and stood for a moment watching the figures with a wistful expression. Neville watched him carefully from the corner of his eye, but there was no sign of bitterness or resentment for the way that things had eventuated. Luna rummaged in her pocket, sorting through her Words of Comfort, and selected one written on paper pressed with tiny green leaves. She handed it to Lupin, and he pinned it above the sketch: Constant. Neville swallowed hard, and looked around the flat to distract himself. He was not going to cry in Professor Lupin's flat. He was not going to cry.

The living room, covered in books like the kitchen, was scattered with objects Neville recognised from Lupin's office at Hogwarts – old scrolls tied with frayed ribbons, the gramophone player, the trunk where he kept the Boggart. All around these familiar things were new splashes of colour – a bright orange woolly hat, piles of well-thumbed crime novels with lurid covers, and a jam jar filled with Bertie Bott's Beans. In the tank that had once housed the Grindylow, someone was trying to coax up Flitterbloom seedlings, and he found himself idly tweaking a few dead leaves from them as he thought. Professor Lupin had lost loved ones, but it hadn't stopped him from making new connections, while still being able to cherish what had been precious to him in the past. Like an empty flower bed, Neville thought, there was nothing sadder than earth left barren for fear of the plants dying. There would be nothing to look back on, no fossil record to trace. He couldn't imagine giving up gardening – not even if it were the most dangerous thing in the world. The last two years had taught him that he wasn't a coward, so he wouldn't let Voldemort bully him into living like one. He grinned, remembering his grandmother's great defiance this morning. Perhaps she was right – he was Frank and Alice Longbottom's son, after all.

"Professor," he said, standing by the tank of struggling seedlings. "I think you should probably put these in the sun, if you want them to bloom this year."




Neville stood with Luna at the bus stop, holding the umbrella over the two of them. Luna was adamant that it was unsafe to Floo between the hours of four and seven in the evening, because that was when the Smokestack Syndicate carried out random assaults on Floo travellers, so they were taking Muggle transport to their respective homes. Professor Lupin had insisted they at least borrow Tonks' umbrella for the trip home, and showed Neville how to give the Kenmare Leprechaun that frolicked over the emerald green panels a good wallop if it moved a muscle when Muggles were about.

"Do please return it by owl when you get home – it will be missed otherwise."

Under the umbrella, his hands and feet still warm from Professor Lupin's fireplace, Neville listened to Luna chat about the Quibbler while she handed out Words of Comfort to startled passers-by. He smiled at the Muggles as they walked away, flustered, clutching a piece of paper in their hands. What Luna was doing – making connections, forming positive memories, was the right thing to do, and though doing the right thing wasn't always the safest way to live, Neville knew that it was the most precious.