Hope Is a Flower

"Hope springs eternal from the human breast; man never is but always is to be blest." (Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man)

I always thought that Neville was, well, a bit of a loser. He wasn't very smart and only, really, just on this side of being a squib. He liked to tag around after us with an air reminiscent of a puppy hoping not to be kicked. His worst class was potions where he was certain to cause some kind of horrible accident at least once a class, and his fear of Snape was so great that he would start shaking- literally- every time he went near the classroom.

His best class was Herbology. I always figured that this was because, mostly, plants move very very slowly. Neville seemed the type who was startled by sudden movements. He flinched excessively during our pick up Qudditch games, and had a tendency to duck when ever Malfoy was around whether a hex had been thrown at him or not. He once told me that he liked DADA because he didn't have to worry about whether he was going to be hit or not. He knew he was going to be hit and that, somehow, made it better.

Of course, if I had lived with his grandmother, I would probably flinch a lot too.

We had always assumed that he would join the Order of the Phoenix. Of course he had never been as deeply involved in it that Hermione, Harry, and I, but he still was Gryffindor enough to know what was going on, and he had more reason for a personal grudge against Voldemort and the Death Eaters than any of us, except, maybe, Harry. So we were surprised when, instead, he took a position as Sprout's assistant and seemed intent on ignoring the war altogether.

Imagine being out in the middle of the hardest downpour you've ever seen. The rain is battering the ground as if any moment the whole Earth will be washed away. The sound is deafening, like standing right next to a thundering train. It's raining so hard the water has no where to go and is steadily rising, covering your toes, your ankles, your calves, and you're strolling through the park like it's a sunny afternoon.

Ignoring the war was like ignoring that rainstorm. Everywhere around us people were dying, being tortured. We were woken from our beds in the middle of the night to attacks, coming like thunder, if the rain associated with a thunderstorm was hot and red. Hogwarts was under the most stress, besieged almost constantly, battles swirling around it, sometimes through it, until it got to the point where students stopping being alarmed at the sound of fighting in the corridors, and, whenever the klaxons blew, just stopped what they were doing and calmly proceeded to the nearest safe-space.

It's hard to ignore a war being fought on your doorstep and yet Neville did. All he talked about were the plants he cared for, and a special project he was doing, some kind of breeding program. You could ask him, point blank, the purpose of breeding plants in the middle of a war, when sometimes it seemed certain that the ceiling would collapse down upon you, and he would just look at you for a moment, like he had no idea what you were talking about, then tell you again about his project. Like the war wasn't happening.

It was, somehow, comforting. Sometimes I would come back from my mission, ashen and stained with all sorts of horrible things. Things, like the memory of blood splattered on you skin, which can't be washed off even with a lifetime of hot showers. I would come back, shaking and shell shocked and almost broken and the second thing I would do, after showering off all the visible dirt and changing, would be to go visit him in the greenhouses, where he would be calmly potting something, brushing his hands through the dirt, pulling a plant out of a pot and cupping its roots in his hands, settling it down gently in another container, tapping the soil tight around it. It would smell like dirt and sunlight and I would be surrounded by plants quietly (in most cases) growing, and Neville would talk to me in a voice just like the one he used on the flowers when he urged them to grow and bloom.

I never listened. I had no idea what he was talking about- it seemed to be random, nonsense. The important thing was that he was talking. He was urging me to grow and bloom. He was surrounding me with everything quiet and gentle. He was telling me all the reasons he ignored the war.

I never realized what a gentle person Neville was until then. Until he gave me the sanctuary of his greenhouses I never realized how much he was like a flower. He was sweet and beautiful and fragile. He had no thorns or poison, had no hard edges. He ignored the war because he couldn't do anything about it. If he had fought he would have been destroyed, just by the experience. He knew this when none of the rest of us did. When we were shaking our heads, wondering how he could keep from fighting, he knew that to fight was to die.

There is something precious inside of us that we lose the first time we kill. I remember my first kill- a Death Eater came at me with a curse and I cursed back, harshly, automatically, and he fell. That's all. It was a minute's, a second's work to take his life. The mask slipped off when he was dying and I- I recognized him. He had been in my class at Hogwarts. We had had to do a group project in potions once and barely got through it with out hexing each other. Dead, he was a child, just a child. I was a child looking at him dead. Then Hermione pulled me away, pulled me back, told me to look away.

I lost something precious the moment I looked away, the moment I shut my mind to what I had done, the moment I had gone on with the battle, had gone on to kill or be killed, had gone on to forget the thought I had had, that killing wasn't right no matter why you did it. I had lost something it was important that I lose.

Neville was that something precious entirely. It was something he couldn't lose and walk away from. Instead of fighting he kept it alive. Only now do I realize how important that was.

One day, after a particularly difficult battle, he placed a plant in my hand. It was small, potted in a small plastic pot, a few thin stringy leaves coming out of the ground. It looked half dead, dying, pathetic. He smiled at me happily- he smiled a wide, brilliant smile.

"It's my flower!" He told me excitedly. "The one I've been breeding! It's finally perfect." I looked at the wilted leaves again and thought to myself that he had finally lost it.

"Um...it looks a bit sick." I said.

"It's just a little tired." He replied, his happiness undimmed. "I named it Lux lucis- the Hope flower. I thought it might make people happy."

The Hope flower looked even more shriveled than ever. I thought that it was somehow appropriate. I handed it back to him with congratulations and made some excuse about how I had to go report to Dumbledore.

I didn't see Neville for a long time after that. I was very busy- the war was getting more desperate- and I avoided him for reasons I cannot explain. But every time I thought of him I thought of that little plant, that little pathetic dying plant, and my heart clenched a little, my soul a grew a little more pessimistic, I was a little less certain we were going to win the war.

When word came that he was dead I was too busy to react. The siege had reached epic proportions- we were trapped in a little area of the dungeons, our forces being whittled away one by one, and I had no time to think or breathe or sleep or eat and certainly not enough time to mourn. In the end, they said, he was killed planting the grounds, tending the little flower beds that had been almost destroyed by the war. He had muttered something about how it would make people happy to see the flowers and walked outside despite the warnings.

I thought that it was sad that, after all, he died for nothing, then I went to take over Seamus's watch.

The end came a few days later. Harry and Hermione and I had chased a ragged group of Death Eaters out of the castle and ran right into an ambush. They crowded around us, on every side, laughing that horrible Death Eater laugh. They grabbed me and Hermione, binding us with magic, making us watch as the circle drew smaller around Harry.

Then it opened and the most horrible person in the world walked into the center and threw a disarming spell at my friend. He stumbled backwards as he wand flew up, away from him, and, weaponless, he fell on the ground; not a hero at all, just a teenage boy.

Voldemort lifted his wand and opened his mouth to hiss out the spell to end it all.

And then it happened.

He paused. He paused and the world, the entire world, began glowing. It began beneath our feet, a light indescribable, a smell that I couldn't identify. The light grew until everything was illuminated; the wreak of the castle, the Death Eaters, Voldemort's awful visage, the millions of little flowers blooming from the ground. Harry's hand scrabbled among them, picking a fist-full. He scampered to his feet, faster than his injuries should have allowed, and threw them in Voldemort's face. Then he grabbed his wand and shouted the death spell, and at that moment all the little flowers died and threw us into darkness again.

Hope is a flower which blooms when you have nothing left. Hope grows from Neville's grave, from Ginny's, from Severus's. Hope blooms the moment the snow has melted from the ground, illuminates every year what we have lost and what we have won.

Every year we do another tally, try to figure out which is the greater.

Someday soon we will rebuild the greenhouses and tell the students who the real hero of the war was. Not someone who killed. Not someone who devised battle plans. Someone who had no thorns, no sharp edges. Someone who knew the secret of life, after all.