RP: Al Potter, Neville Longbottom
Who: Al Potter, Neville Longbottom, Severus Snape (later) Where: Hogwarts Library, after work When: evening, 18 November, 2025 Summary: Al remembers his sister.
When, still grieving after their parents’ deaths, Al first began talking to his sister, he faced his fear of a mad murderer and instead discovered that it wasn't the 'mad' preceding the 'murderer' that he feared most, but the 'ruthless' and the 'random'. Of course, the person he spoke to - and wrote to - was neither ruthless nor random. And seeing her mind opened up in Severus' memory only sealed that conclusion. Underneath, Lily was just the person Al remembered her to be, all human: broken and mended, flawed and hopeful, worried and occasionally happy, and never-ever normal.
Why strive to be normal? All that Al experienced, all that he lived through, all that he’d heard: from his mother and from Dad and from many strangers and acquaintances, showed him that it achieving total and complete normality in the eyes of another, not to mention multiple others, was both, a pointless and unachievable task, and a convenient motivation technique to bend someone to act according to another’s wishes.
So, in summary, Lily was, just like the rest of the world always was, not quite sane and very much human, in their own unique way. She was not ruthless. She was not random. In fact, Lily made perfect sense: a person being pushed to the edge of her breaking point by life, desperately holding onto what was left of herself and of her hope, despite the odds.
Until she ran out of hope and let go, the only way that she could.
Hope...
After the siege Al kept writing to Lily. He was deaf and devastated and she was insane and imprisoned and letters were more easily shared than any conversation.
The beauty of letters was that they could do so many creative things, things spoken words never covered. Take acrostics, for example: first letter of every sentence forming the brief message within a message was a wonderful way of asking Lily questions, like:
'That's not a name... it's a word. But a good one.'
…
Hope...
When Lily's final note was handed to Al, his eyes automatically searched for acrostic patterns in it, but the note contained no hidden messages. If you put the first letters of every sentence in the first paragraph together, it was nothing but an endless stream of vowels.
A scream of vowels, desperate and raw and silent.
The note’s writing merely said what it did and Lily’s hope was dead along with her, dead in more ways than one.
’I won't ever be free, not with my name, but I can't toss it aside when it's so much of what I am. It will haunt me, and my daughter.’
Her handwriting was so steady. So final. And Al's mind kept drifting, to other words he'd seen written out on paper or his Mobius strip of parchment these few days... so many other words... Jamie’s.
'As long as you are a Lestrange, expect me to go to every Wizengamot hearing and tell them how you want to hold on to that. I will speak to every reporter. I will talk to Uncle Percy. I will use every ounce of political power and fame I have to prevent your release, because I will not let my father's killer out of Azkaban...'
What stirred Al’s unease - really stirred it to the point of a steady burn in his chest - is that Lily believed Jamie in the end, enough to drive her decision. Why did she? I told her his words are variable. Variable words are not to be relied on or trusted or followed. Why didn't she dismiss them as such?
Why did she have to believe the ruthless and the random in them, over the reason that Al tried to give her instead?
‘Individuals who hate others because of a meager collection of letters used for identification should be immediately dismissed and thoroughly disregarded as irrelevant.’ I was so clear on that. But she still listened to him. She believed him too much.
Why? Jamie’s words change as quick as his moods.
Random and ruthless acts... but not only acts, words too. If there was anything to fear in the world, it had to be that, not the madness or the murder. How many others in this world spat out words like Jamie did at some point of their life? How many more listened and believed those words as facts and acted upon them out of desperation.
Someone must speak against other instances in time and it ought to be Reason.
At that thought, Al’s very soul ached to speak, more than ever. But the only way to truly speak in this world and be heard for what you say, not who you are... is to leave names behind. For good.
What's in a name?
Al was annoyed by being a ‘Potter’ more than once in his life, but for the first time, he truly abhored having that one label attached to his every action. He was more than a name: a name was not even something he chose for himself. But somehow, a thing meant only for ease of identification, also began to dictate one's place of belonging, one's association, one's way of life, one's admission of guilt or one's innocence.
Has the rest of the world always been this shallow and this ignorant? In such sorry state of the humanity, what was left to hold onto?
Only freedom through complete anonymity... Or, in her case, through death, he thought, glancing ruefully at his sister’s funeral announcement: innocent-pink and Potter all over. How ironic. Of course it would be Potter now, for the history always bent to those left alive to write it in the loudest way and Jamie wouldn’t bury a Lestrange that she became.
Enough. This is the time for reason.
And in that quiet moment between the Hogwarts library shelves, in the silence of books and notes, in full contemplation of words and memories, a rebellious, revolutionary, and Ravenclaw part of Al, the part that always remained oh-so-quiet before, emerged with a vengeance and made itself known.
Perhaps only to him. For now.
But that was only until the others had a chance to read his words.