Carpet and Acid and Bogans, Oh My!

It was three in the morning, and Neville was tripping. Only quietly, of course. He was still sharing a room with Harry, Seamus and Ron; the same room he'd lived in since First Year. He didn't want to wake them up, so he was sitting on the floor, in the corner between his bed and the wall, quietly marvelling at the lovely swirly pattern the rug made if you stared at it for long enough.

The swirly pattern overlaid the etchings in his head for a while. A pretty good effort for carpet. All the problems in the world could be solved, like that. Take everyone out of therapy, put them on a rug. No more pain, no more guilt, just Lovecraftian lurid dervishes and oblivion.

He liked the swirly pattern. Its innocuously giddy whorls were infinitely preferable to people doing Unforgivable things to his parents. He'd lived with the pictures he'd imagined and his own personal soundtrack ever since the shock of finding out had died away. [died ]

[Swirl. Think swirl.]

The swirly pattern even made him forget his forgetting. His All Torture, All The Time! internal loop tended to obscure other, more trivial concerns, such as the correct uses of armadillo bile and where he'd last seen Trevor. Constantly reminded of these slips by the loud, careless people around him, he was also forced to remember why he was forgetting, and preoccupation with his parents caused him to forget other things again. It was a vicious circle.

Neville held up his hand in front of his face, snapping together his forefinger and thumb. (It took a surprising amount of concentration.) A giggle burst out of him - it was a vicious circle! He found he couldn't stop giggling; he didn't really want to, anyway.

He was having trouble focusing on both his hand and the swirly rug at once, so he settled for looking at his hand, then the rug. Rug, hand. Rug hand rug hand rughand. This only intensified the giggles welling up inside him. The rug! His hand!

A light snapped on. Neville's head jerked up. Ron, sleepily bemused, was standing in front of him. He hadn't noticed. He opened his mouth to try to explain the rug, the swirl, the circle, his hand: the giggles had somehow disappeared, and he couldn't find them anywhere. He exhaled noisily, instead, deflated.

"Neville? What are you doing?" Ron's tone was ripening from bemusement into full-blown bewilderment. It was a subtle distinction, but Neville felt eminently qualified to make it: he met bemusement, incredulity, bewilderment, and their poor relation, stupefaction, on a daily basis. They were usually directed at him.

Of course, at this point he was completely incapable of articulating any of this. He managed something approximating "Fine", instead.

Ron, demonstrating the early symptoms of incredulity, muttered, "You don't look fine". He squatted down in front of Neville, his features beginning to register suspicion.

He didn't encounter suspicion very often. It reminded him of Potions, minus Snape's brilliant line in contempt, of course. Ron saved his contempt for Hermione's house-elfitarian crusades and people he was secretly afraid of. Like Draco.

Neville came back to himself with a jolt; something was waving in front of his face. It took him a few seconds to realise that it was Ron's hand.

"What's wrong, Neville? Are you sick?"

"Never better. I had- I had the swirl, an', the circle, and it was angry...."

Comprehension was dawning on Ron. "Neville, are you...high?"

Neville giggled. Oh, that's where they went! Ron's grip on his arm brought his focus back to the other boy's face. He nodded, still chuckling away.

"Where did you get it? What are you on?"

"'S only a bit of LSD, Ron, don't worry...and my cousin gave it to me, he's cool, you know?"

"LSD...that's a Muggle drug, right? Oooookay. Right. I think it's your bedtime, Neville...right now. I'll just get you some water, too, okay? It's all going to be fine. Really."

Neville only half-absorbed all of this; he was staring at the freckles on Ron's face (in the dimness they were suggestive of patterns - he thought he could see a puppy - he wanted to touch the puppy, but Ron was dragging at his arm). He let himself be guided onto the bed, under his covers, and Ron sat down on the edge of the bed to keep an eye on him.

Neville was suddenly struck by something he'd been wanting to ask for a long time. "Ron," he blurred, "why are you going out with Mary-Sue? She's so annoying."

Ron's sharp inhalation of breath made the mattress shift. "What! What are you talking about? And we're not 'going out', we're dating, thank you very much".

Neville sniggered. "Heheheheh, dating. She likes it up the arse?" Ron's aura of smugness rapidly vanished, as did he. Struck by a sudden thought, Neville murmured "Truly, yours is an arse that won't quit", and snickered to himself.

Eventually he kind of figured out that Ron must have stomped off in a huff, but he didn't really care, because he was about to fall asleep. Plus, his bedding felt pleasantly rough against his skin. He fell unconscious thinking about that instead.

"They're round, and red, and they give you a bit of a shock when you put them in your mouth, but then they kind of turn sour and give you this enormous rush of energy. You feel like you could replace the Snitch, and you wouldn't need a broomstick to do it."

"Ron! That's Electric Currants, not electric currents! The assignment is 'Explain why electric currents are good for you if you're a Muggle, with reference to at least three common devices', you ninny. E, not A. They're homophones, but in context there's an obvious difference in meaning at least, if not in tone! Why don't you get it?"

Hermione had something of a weary air. They'd clearly had this sort of argument many, many times before, and not only in Advanced Muggle Studies. She felt like she was living in an Anne McCaffrey novel: she spent most of her time arguing with a 'powerful' male, waiting for him to notice her, so he could sweep her off her feet and she could bear his children and, eventually, become a nosy harridan.

(Ron kept droning on in the background. Like she cared.)

Those books were a load of sentimental tosh (they got the dragons all wrong, for a start). No way! No. Fucking. Way. She wanted to be a character in a Diana Wynne Jones novel. They might have terminal identity crises, but at least they weren't always bloody subjugated to the patriarchy.

So she went and slept with Ginny.

(And there would have been much laving, except the glowing green carbon rod from Ginny's wand-alternative experiments started to roll off her bedside table. They both scrambled for it. The laving was forgotten - they settled for other, less icky synonyms. Crisis was averted.)

(The laving, irked at being ignored, attempted to perform the principal soliloquies from Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth, but everyone else in the room was having far too much fun to listen.)

"Hermione's disappeared," said Harry.

"Yeah, I know," replied Ron. "She's not in the common room, or the kitchens. She's not even in the library."

"Wow, she must really not want to be found, eh?"

"Yeah. She's been acting really weird, lately, too. She ran off right in the middle of the conversation earlier. I thought she would've been interested, too. I'd read a whole chapter of this Noam Chomsky guy just to impress her! I thought my explanation of why You-Know-Who's got it coming to him was really good! It had references and everything!"

"Ron? Shut up."

"Right."

"...So," Harry began, a mischievous glint in his eyes, "how are things with The Mary-Sue?"

Ron snorted. "She goes home for the holidays in a couple of days. I'm hoping I can just kind of gradually cut her off, but knowing her she'll force me to do stuff over the break anyway. She scares me. I don't want to tell her it's over directly, so maybe if I give it some time she'll take it a bit better."

Harry was sceptical. "Yeah, and I'm getting married next week to live in a caravan with my wife and twelve kids."

To his surprise, Ron's eyes glazed over momentarily. "You are going to be Hogwarts's Own Bogan," he intoned, spookily.

"Ron, what the hell is a 'bogan'?"

He shook himself. "What? Haven't got a clue. Speaking of 'acting weird', have you talked to Neville lately? This morning, I tried to wake him up and he kept saying "Leave me alone. The hat's in the fridge". He's really starting to worry me. These drugs...I don't know anything about them. Wizards don't usually bother with Muggle stuff. It's not cool."

Harry shrugged. "Don't ask me. I'm not into that sort of thing, and Dudley's not imaginative enough to consider using any white powder more adventurous than sugar. If he wanted to, though, I bet Aunt Petunia would buy them for him. 'Only the best for my ickle Duddykins,' and all that".

Both boys exploded with laughter at the thought of Aunt Petunia making a 'deal'.