Hey friends! If you're wondering why this story is reappearing, it's because the old version was found by a spam bot. I was having to delete 12-15 spam comments every day, and it just got to be too much to deal with, so I had to delete it and reupload. Hopefully that solves the problem. I hated losing the reviews and favorites, but I took screenshots, and hopefully we can build the audience back up! Thanks friends! - Cassie

Tons of thanks have to go to Maggie, Katie, and Heidi, without whom this would be a lot closer to my first draft than any story deserves to be.

Written for the Reviews Lounge collaboration challenge Rainbow Magic. Check it out!

DISCLAIMER: Neville's not mine. Wish he were; he displayed some serious awesomeness in DH, but alas, I can only admire from a distance. And write fanfiction about him.

Edited and updated in 2018.

Finding Yellow

He was eleven when his mother gave him the first gum wrapper. It was crumpled and dirty and it had a corner missing, but it was the first thing his mother had ever given him, so none of that seemed to matter. He had been telling his parents about getting his Hogwarts letter and how much he was looking forward to school, but when that square of red paper fluttered down from his mother's hand into his lap, he stopped mid-sentence, staring at it.

When his grandmother saw what it was, she sighed. "Good Lord," she muttered. Then she smiled brightly. "Yes, thank you, Alice dear. That was very nice of you." And she rose to help Alice back to her bed, sighing and calling back over her shoulder, "Stick it in the bin, Neville dear. What she was thinking . . ."

But he didn't. He kept it. And the next time they visited, when she dropped another one in his lap, he kept that one, too. And before too long, he had an entire rainbow of gum wrappers from his mother, every color but yellow. His mother didn't like the yellow gum, the nurses told him.

The fact that his gum wrapper rainbow was incomplete shouldn't have bothered his, but it did. As much as he tried to tell himself to stop being so foolish, to push it to the back of his mind, his thoughts kept being drawn back to that missing color, and he found himself, every Christmas and birthday, actually disappointed when his mother handed him a green or blue or red or orange or purple gum wrapper. Not at the gift itself, not at the fact that the only things his mother ever gave him were empty candy wrappings, no. Just at the color of the offering, because that missing color came, unasked, to signify what was missing out of his own life.

Yellow meant happiness. Yellow meant friendship. Yellow meant peace. He had none of those, not really. Those were things he thought he would never know. There was only one aspect of yellow in Neville's life, the worst aspect of the color. Cowardice. Weakness. A lack of bravery. His yellow was what he was most ashamed of having.

He had long known that he was never going to be as brave or as smart or as talented as his parents had been. He had grown up knowing that because he had grown up hearing that. The words may have been spoken with love, but they still dared him to measure up, even as they told him he never could.

And there was some part of him that thought if he could just have the missing color, if he could only complete what was hidden, unfinished, then he could measure up. He could be as great as his parents had been. He could finally make his grandmother proud. All he needed was yellow.

If his life had been a story written down, then his mother would have handed him a yellow gum wrapper when he visited her by himself for the first time just before he left for his seventh year at Hogwarts.

She didn't. On that day, that visit, the wrapper she gave him was orange. His fifth.

He tried not to let his disappointment show. The last thing he wanted to do was leave his mother upset, when he knew it might be the last time he saw her. So he thanked her sincerely, kissed her on the cheek, and helped her back to bed. And he headed off to school, no closer to finding that missing color than he had been before. But something was different this time. He had a new resolve, a new determination. If he couldn't find yellow, he would just have to make some of his own.

And something changed, once he made that decision. All of a sudden, it didn't matter that he wasn't as brave or as smart or as talented as his parents. The fact that he was Neville Longbottom, that awkward Gryffindor who couldn't do anything right, wasn't important anymore. The students at Hogwarts needed help, and so, instead of wondering what his grandmother would think, he helped them. There were things that needed to be done, and instead of worrying about if he could and what would happen to him if he did, he just did them, and didn't care about the consequences. He became an entirely new person, and it was exhilarating. He believed in himself so that others would believe in him. For the first time in his life, he took a stand. For the first time in his life, he mattered.

And when he came back from their detentions, exhausted and aching from their torture, he never let it show. Like he had learned from his mother and father long ago, you can color others' emotions with your own. So he would stride, not stumble, from their dungeons, his head held high in defiance. The looks on the faces of his peers was worth every bruise. They were proud. Of him. And he was determined to earn their pride.

Because he learned something, and the longer he lived in Hogwarts that year, the more the lesson sunk in. The missing color didn't matter. It no longer represented who he was. He had become the whole rainbow, and they couldn't touch him. They couldn't hurt him, they couldn't keep him from being seen, and they couldn't change the reaction people had when they saw him. He was doing something and he couldn't be stopped.

The visit to his parents just after his seventh year was the first time he had ever gone, not out of a sense of duty, but because he had something that he really wanted to tell them. "I know this won't mean anything to either of you," he said, sitting between their beds, "but we won." There were days he woke up and could still hardly believe it. "It means something now. Everything you fought for, everything that happened . . . it was for this. We won. He's gone. And I just wanted you to know. I wanted to be the one to tell you." His parents looked at him blankly, but because he hadn't expected anything different, he wasn't disappointed.

Neville smiled. "You know, you taught me something, Mum," he said to her, and she turned her dull eyes to him, head tilted to one side. "Whether you meant to or not. You taught me that there are some things that can't be given. Some things have to come from inside you. I never knew what I was capable of until I had to make my own courage. See, I thought the incomplete rainbow meant I would never have it, when really, it was just that I had to find it for myself."

She continued staring at him as he spoke, rocking back and forth a little. Then she pulled something from a drawer and held it out to him insistently. He held his own hand beneath his, palm up to receive whatever it was she was giving him. A gum wrapper fluttered down.

It was blue. Neville laughed. "Exactly," he said quietly. In a world as unpredictable and turbulent as his had been recently, it was nice to know that some things didn't change.

That was all many years ago. The time when incredible feats of bravery were necessary to get through each day are long past, and now his life is as simple and quiet as teaching at Hogwarts can be.

That was his last visit to my parents, telling them he'd been hired to replace Professor Sprout as the Herbology teacher. That day, in the hospital, he was telling his parents about getting the notification and how excited he was to be going to teach at Hogwarts when his mother shuffled up to him and dropped a gum wrapper in his lap. Red.

He let his previous sentence trail off as he looked down at it, smiling a little, sadly. His mother hadn't stopped giving him gum wrappers in the years since the end of the war. And now she stood by his chair, anxiously waiting for him to accept her offering. He did, as always, picking it up and putting it in his pocket. "Thanks, Mum," he whispered, and he led her back to bed.

"It's been a long time since I've needed the rainbow and that one missing color," he told her, still holding her hand. She looked up at him, catching on to his slight sadness. "You can give me as many gum wrappers as you want," he said with a smile. "I will add them to my collection at home. I'm only saying that I don't need you to finish the rainbow for me anymore. But I do wish that there was a way to finish it for you. I wish you could find your yellow."

For in the time since his last year at Hogwarts, he had grown to realize that, although it really didn't need to signify anything, that incomplete rainbow had become a better analogy for his parents' lives than his own. They needed happiness, friendship, and peace far more than he did, now. Their lives were the incomplete ones, the ones missing that vital, vibrant something. And he knew that it didn't matter how dutiful or loving a son he was, he couldn't give it to them. He would never be able to. Just like his mother was never going be able to give him yellow because she didn't have any yellow wrappers to give. She simply didn't have them.

Maybe, somewhere, somehow, his mother knew that something was missing. Maybe, locked away inside her, hidden from thought and memory for so many years, was the little piece of Alice Longbottom who knew who her son was, had always known. If that was true, Neville guessed, than she likely found her inability to give her son yellow as frustrating as he once had.

Some years later, he received the message from Mungo's that his mother had passed away. Part of him mourned because his mother was gone, but part of him knows, also, that the woman who sat in the bed in St. Mungo's wasn't his mother and hadn't been for a long time. And he knows, too, that she was better off wherever she was then, that the part of her that was Alice Longbottom, his mother, was free again.

When he got to the ward, to do the things that had to be done, the first thing he saw was his father, sitting in his bed, looking bewildered and lost. Every so often, he would glance to where his mother's bed had once been and stare at the now-vacant space.

"How is he?" he asked the nurse. She looked at him sadly.

"He only knows something's missing, poor dear."

The nurse then told Neville then that his mother had been inconsolable the last few days of her life. She was constantly agitated, constantly unsettled and upset, looking always toward the door of the ward, as if waiting for someone to walk through it. "She had something she wanted to give you," the nurse told him, and then she spoke of a battered envelope that his mother had refused to let out of her sight. She clutched it to her person or set it on the seat of the chair he always occupied on my visits, and nothing any of the nurses said could convince her to give it up.

"I haven't opened it," she said as she handed him a dirty, much abused parchment envelope. "Didn't seem right to. But it was very important to your mother that you get this, dear. Maybe you'll know why."

It took him a very long time to open that envelope. He sat in my office, staring at it for hours that night, wondering what on earth had been so important to his mother. It was likely nothing, he tried to tell himself. Just a delusional woman's fancy.

Finally, in one fluid motion, telling himself to expect nothing, he upended the envelope over his desk and stared down at what fell out of it. Slowly, so slowly, a smile spread across his face, even as tears pricked at the corners of his eyes, and Neville wondered if maybe, just maybe, there hadn't been some part of his mother all along in the vacant woman he had always known. For sitting on his desktop were five gum wrappers. One red, one orange, one green, one blue, one purple, all identical to the countless others he had gotten since the age of eleven but for one thing. They were, every one, colored over with yellow ink.

His mother had finished her rainbow after all.

Please review. It really does make my day.

Realmer