boy with a scar
dirgewithoutmusic
Summary:
What if Voldemort had chosen the pureblood boy, not the halfblood, as his opponent? This Neville would have had graves to visit, instead of a hospital. He'd still have grown up in his grandmother's clutches, tut-tutted at, dropped out windows absentmindedly, left to bounce on paving stones.
Let's tell this story: Alice Longbottom, who was the better at hexing, told Frank to take Neville and run.
Notes:
sigma-castell asked: Have you ever thought about writing a fic in which Voldemort went after the Longbottoms instead of the Potters?
Chapter 1
Chapter Text
If Voldemort had chosen the pureblood boy, not the halfblood, as his opponent? This Neville would have had graves to visit, instead of a hospital. He'd still have grown up in his grandmother's clutches, tut-tutted at, dropped out windows absentmindedly, left to bounce on paving stones.
Let's tell this story: Alice Longbottom, who was the better at hexing, told Frank to take Neville and run.
She died on the braided rug of their sitting room floor. Frank heard her fall from where he stood in front of the cradle. He did not have time to run.
When the Dark Lord climbed the stairs and saw Frank, he laughed at the small man in front of him. Frank had crooked teeth, a mis-sized nose, big fingers and small, watery eyes. Voldemort looked at him the way children would look at Neville, in almost a decade, at stubby fingers around a rememberall, a wrinkled brow and a stammer. "Move aside," he said, the way a different Voldemort had once offered a way out to Lily Potter. That had been for the sake of another man's love, and this was for his own contempt. "Just let me have the boy. Did you really think you could—"
When Neville met Voldemort again, in his fourth year, when Luna's advice, his own gillyweed knowledge, and Ginny's Bat Bogey Hex lessons had gotten him through the Triwizard Tournament he'd never signed up to enter, there would be a bubbling scar on Voldemort's sunken left cheek. His father had had time for one curse. Frank's love had saved his son, marked him, but his hate had been enough, too, to scar Tom Riddle through every rebirth and transformation he would ever have.
Harry Potter would have grown up as James's oldest son. I think Lily, who missed her sister, and James, who had found three brothers at school and loved them more than life, would have had more children: a little sister who James taught to fly (little Tuney'd be Keeper to Ginny's Seeker, in a decade, and gossip terribly about Harry), a baby brother Lily fervently talked James out of naming Lupeterius. Harry would have grown up spoiled and loved, magical, with toy broomsticks and playdates with the other Order kids— stumbling Neville, the Bones girl and the rollicking Weasley bunch.
If the Potters were never the main targets, never hiding and frightened, I don't think Peter would have turned when he did. Not enough gain. Not enough tail-tucking fear. Peter would have limped through to the end of the war, whiskers shivering in his soul even when they were popping champagne on the night Neville Longbottom's parents died.
They raised delicate glasses that had somehow survived all the first war, laughing, in Godric's Hollow, to the Boy Who Lived. Augusta Longbottom planned her children's funeral and wondered if her grandson's forehead would scar like that. Lily danced in the living room with James, on the garish rug that Sirius had bought them as a joke and that they had kept just to spite him.
But this was a story about Neville now—it would always be a story about Harry, somewhat, because it had never been the scar that made the boy. When Draco Malfoy stole Neville's rememberall, this Harry would still jump on a broom; when Hermione, weeping in the bathrooms, didn't know about the troll, Harry would still run to tell her—that instinct was not something even having loving parents (especially these parents) would have kept from him.
