When they get close to me

"The Dementors affect you more than the others because there are horrors in your past which the others don't have." Harry hears Lord Voldemort. But what about Neville?

Missing moment from DH; sequel to "Just When Everyone Thought They Were Safe."

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Laughter. When the Dementors get too close, Ginny hears Tom Riddle laughing at her.

She doesn't say this the first time, that day on the train when Harry passed out, nor the next year, nor the next, nor the next.

She finally tells it to Neville in her sixth year, when Harry has vanished and the Carrows rule Hogwarts. They're huddled up in the his dormitory, with its empty beds where Harry and Ron and Dean are all missing, waiting for Seamus to get back from a mission. It's not a dangerous mission really, this time. Only to meet up with Ernie MacMillan in Greenhouse Three – the one with all the Fierce Plants in it which is only open to Seventh Years and therefore quite a good place to meet up.

Professor Sprout has a handy knack of addressing the Carrows very loudly when they approach the greenhouses, which gives enough time to bolt. The only risk is, therefore, as Ginny points out, Dementors.

She tells him. She doesn't ask, but she does look the question.

"No," says Neville, shaking his head. "I don't hear anything nasty like that."

Ginny goggles at him. "They don't affect you?!"

His fingers pick at the edge of the blanket, but he doesn't look down or look away. "They don't make me hear anything nasty, Ginny." Then he smiles, a brave, reassuring sort of smile, and because he smiled, and because they're friends, and because he isn't haunted by awful, maniacal laughter (Neville tells the truth; he wouldn't lie to her) Ginny hugs him.

She's just let go when Seamus comes back, for which Ginny and Neville are both rather glad. Seamus has come back in one piece, too, not a scratch except a bruise where one of the Fierce Plants in Greenhouse Three smacked him with a stray tendril, so the leaders of Dumbledore's Army have a fairly happy debriefing. Ginny almost skips off down the stairs back to the Common Room. Seamus goes into the bathroom to see if he can do anything for the bruise by putting a cold flannel on it. They don't want to waste the few first aid salves they have on something as minor as a plant attack, but he's beginning to resemble half a panda and that might worry the younger students.

Neville goes on sitting on the bed. His fingers go on picking at the edge of the blanket. It's getting frayed, a thin woollen fringe developing. Thin and threadbare, like the threadbare mane of the stuffed toy lion he had when he was little. He still has the lion actually. It's buried at the very bottom of his trunk.

Babyish, really, to bring your lion with you. But Neville's glad he did, this year, because if anything happened to Gran, the house would be empty, and he wouldn't like anything to happen to the lion. Gran would be upset, if anything did. It was his father's stuffed toy lion.

Gran, or maybe Dad, must have passed it onto him. Before – everything. Because when the Dementors get close, Neville doesn't hear anything nasty. He hears the clock ticking in Gran's hall; the little steady tick-tick-tick of the pendulum and then the bong-bong of the hour striking. It strikes four times: the four o'clock of the long-ago morning when Gran woke him and picked him up, because it was four o'clock in the morning and Mum and Dad had not come back from the special Ministry 'Do' they had been unexpectedly invited to, for which Neville had been dropped off at Gran's for the evening.

It's not a nasty noise.

It's the tick-tick-tick of his parents' minds ebbing away under the Cruciatus curse.

That's what he hears. And he feels the threadbare mane of the lion between his fingers.

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