Chapter 140: August Ponderations

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29 July 1993, Longbottom Manor

The Longbottom matriarch paced in the garden in front of her family manor, her joints aching with each step. She wasn't as young and spry as she used to be, but even that pain wouldn't be enough to distract her from her current issues regarding her grandson.

She knew that something weird was going on and it had to do with Dumbledore. Ever since Neville started his education in Hogwarts, he started to change, and in ways that seriously worried the Longbottom Matriarch.

Before Hogwarts, well, she would admit that she had been slightly overprotective when it came to her grandson. She barely let the boy out of her sight for the better part of a decade, hoping to preserve and protect the last remnant of her son and his wife.

Augusta knew that she wasn't perfect, not even close. She knew that she made mistakes. For example, she was sometimes too hard on Neville, especially when it came to his lessons. She tried to encourage him by giving him stories about his parents, but he didn't seem to appreciate that.

But her grandson was happy before Hogwarts. He was stifled by her protectiveness and her discipline, but he was a hyperactive little boy filled with joy and happiness. Oh, he had a large ego that she tried to curtail, but he was a celebrity, a hero to the entirety of magical Britain, and keeping him away from that was unrealistic. Any child would have been the same. Neville was famous before he could walk, for something that he couldn't even remember, and sometimes Augusta wished that she'd taken him in the muggle world, away from all of this, just so he would have had a normal life.

Still, Neville went to Hogwarts as an excitable little bundle of joy who wanted to make new friends, and instead, he was tangled with things that no child should even have to come close to. Her grandson changed during his time in this cursed castle, and it wasn't for the better.

Without her to support him, Neville spiralled out of control. He decided to have Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger as his friends. She didn't have a problem with either. The Granger girl motivated him to do better in his classes, but the Weasley boy pulled him down. She had nothing against the family, even if they lost a lot of prestige in the last couple of centuries, but the boy was lazy and stopped Neville from focusing on his coursework. He even alienated her grandson from most of the other scions of old families in the school.

Neville's school rivalries escalated, turning from minor pranking and academic rivalries with Slytherin house, into harassment and assault. Her grandson spent most of his free time in detentions, that he had admittedly earned. But for some reason, he was always pulled into a scheme or another. Fighting a troll, smuggling a baby dragon, going through Dumbledore's little obstacle course, confronting the wraith of the Dark Lord who had killed his parents, and that was just his first year.

In his second, he seemed to want nothing more than to escalate. Like breaking the Statute of Secrecy by publicly going to Hogwarts using a flying car without any invisibility charms. People have been killed for less. After all, the safety of the magical world was paramount, and the Statute was put in place to protect it.

But that wasn't it, he used an illegal potion to impersonate scions of powerful families to break into the Slytherin common room. She had to pay a good sum of gold to the families of the victims. If it had been anyone else, they would have been arrested and expelled, but as usual, Dumbledore protected Neville for some kind of ulterior motive that she didn't about that.

It was wrong. Neville should have been faced with the consequences of his actions. She would intervene if it would seriously harm him, but he had to learn that the law applied to him as much as anyone else. Alas, all Dumbledore did was bury everything under the carpet and say that her grandson used some obscure illusion spell. Right, like Neville who had an average somewhere between an Acceptable and Exceed Expectations, would be able to cast a NEWT spell perfectly enough that no one in a room filled with students would have been able to tell.

She had punished him privately during his suspension, but it wasn't enough, and she knew that it barely fazed him anymore. And now, with him being slandered as the possible Heir of Slytherin since he was a Parselmouth – a still unsolved mystery since, as far as she knew, Neville didn't have any magical ancestor that had that particular ability – he was getting angry. No one believed him about the Basilisk stroke that fire, which turned into an inferno when he realized that his friend might never recover from what happened. His friendship with the Weasley boy going up in flames did not help matters.

Honestly, Augusta had her doubts about Dumbledore's story, in the first place. Neville might be a pretty good wizard for his age, especially when it came to Defense Against the Dark Arts, but the tactics that he described about fighting the Basilisk were theoretically possible. Not a lot is known about the fearsome beasts, but it would take a lot of research to figure out those tactics, and Neville's imagination couldn't have come up with the exact correct method for it.

The only thing left was him being trapped in some kind of illusion, but no illusion was vivid enough for Neville to remember smells and accurate sounds. And the chances that a Diary of all things could be enchanted and cursed to do what it did was a bit fantastical.

There were no traces of mental manipulation in his memories, as far as she could tell. Which left her with a single conclusion. Whatever story Dumbledore was spouting wasn't true. Her grandson had fought a Basilisk and killed it with a sword. A basilisk being used during the attacks fit.

She was supposed to be proud, but all she could feel was fear and panic. It would make sense for Dumbledore to deny the existence of a Basilisk in his school, but then, what else was he hiding? What other dangers was the man planning on subjecting Neville to? And will her grandson survive the headmaster's trials that he was so insistent to subject Neville to?

And if she opposed him, would he try to take her grandson away from her, like he tried to take the Potter boy from Black?

And wasn't that a wake-up call? Dumbledore had invited her and a good chunk of the Wizengamot members as an audience to the boy's guardianship hearing, only for him to start painting a child as the future Dark Lord that needed to be controlled.

Oh, she knew that the boy was special. Hell, everyone knew that the boy was special, and everyone wanted a piece of him. He was a known magical prodigy from a very respected family. He had no history of misbehaviour, barely any school punishments, and perfect grades. And his headmaster, someone that was supposed to help him in school, started to demonize him. And people looked like they believed him. She could see the fear in their eyes during Dumbledore's speech, and the gleam in the eyes of traditionalist families at the thought of a new possible Dark Lord that would replace the previous one.

Not that the upstart that called himself Lord Voldemort was a Dark Lord. Augusta remembered the Great War, she remembered Grindelwald. Now, that was a Dark Lord who terrorized the entire world in his presence. He inspired thousands of people to join his ranks with his sheer charisma, and his ideals of what the magical world should be. He never hid his intentions or his goals. He never tortured his allies needlessly, and he definitely respected his enemies enough to face them directly.

Voldemort, on the other hand, was a man who hid in the shadows, striking from behind, making friends fight one another. He was unbalanced, which made sense considering the obvious ritual marks that he made to increase his power. He had literally run out of things to sacrifice in his quest for power and wasn't that miserable. He was strong, very much so, but he acted more like an enabler than anything else. He was the excuse people used to go back to their basic urges, kill and torture people without anything else. He was a monstrous wizard, but it was what he represented that caused so much damage in their society. Noble men and women became monsters because he simply allowed them to become one.

Back to the Potter boy, she thought that his headmaster's plan would win until the boy started talking. He was already an interest of hers because of the fact that Alice was his Godmother. Augusta wished that she could have raised him alongside Neville, but the law was clear. In the event of being orphaned and both magical godparents being unable to take care of the child, the guardianship of a child is given to the closest blood relative, magical or muggle, becoming a ward of the ministry should the guardians be muggles.

It was made decades back by some minister in a vain attempt at getting control over the fortunes of extinct houses. Being a ward of the ministry meant that it could gain access to their vaults and empty them before the century inactivity clause could be used by the Goblin nation to get access to the vault themselves.

Arcturus Black was able to get the muggle guardians to sign away young Harry's custody, and with that, became the boy's official guardian. Dumbledore had told Augusta that he had tricked them into signing the documents and wanted to stop the Black Patriarch from destroying the last remnant of James and Lily Potter. With the muggle guardians being proven to be ineffective, he had meant to use the boy's connection of Alice as her godchild so that she would become his guardian. 

She was all for it until she realized that the boy was more than happy staying with Black and that the headmaster had lied. Again. She had suppressed a smile when she saw the boy use the same tactic as Dumbledore, to literally tear him a new one. He provoked the defeater of Grindelwald without a single care or any fear on his face, and Augusta could admire that bravery, even if it was an idiotic thing to do. At least until Dumbledore lost control at the mention of his sister, attacking the boy with his magical presence, and immediately losing the case.

Augusta was happy for the boy, even if she thought it might have been good for Neville to have a little company at home, instead of just wallowing in his grief alone.

As for the headmaster, for the entire week following the hearing, all the Daily Prophet did was investigate his family, and the possibility that the last Potter's words were true. Alas, with the destruction of Godric Hollows, a lot of the evidence was gone, but the man's reaction was more than enough proof.

Even though she wondered about how the boy got his information, the information itself didn't change much of Augusta's image of Dumbledore. She was old enough to witness his political rise, and how quickly he intimidated and sometimes even destroyed his opposition behind closed doors. She didn't trust him, but he was the only one who had a chance of protecting her grandson from Voldemort if the monster returned.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a screech from an owl next to her. After giving the tired bird a treat, she grabbed the letter tied to its leg and read it.

By the end of it, she was gritting her teeth, something that Algernon, her brother-in-law, who was sitting next to her, noticed, "So, bad news?"

"I guess so. Fudge wants to use Hogwarts to house the dementors for 'Neville's safety'. I think he just wants to appease them enough until Dumbledore build them a new prison to infest."

"Is he mad?" her brother-in-law exclaimed.

"Just desperate. He's afraid that the Dementors would start attacking muggles soon, and that would invite the ICW to investigate. And with two major international events happening next year that he's banking to spearhead the economy, he wants the dementor problem to just go away, and he assumes that Dumbledore could hold them."

"Please tell me that you don't want to agree with him," he begged.

"Of course not. I'm not turning Hogwarts into another Azkaban. This is a school, not a prison. We have a Wizengamot meeting soon to discuss it, but I don't see anyone putting their children at risk because it's easy. Trust me, after what happened last year, if they decide to let Dementors into Hogwarts, I'm going to transfer Neville to another school, tradition be damned."

"Good," Algernon simply answered, "Something is coming. I can feel it. We need to be ready, and we can't risk Neville so brazenly."

Just as he finished his sentence, Neville entered the room, with a determined look on his face, "Gran. My birthday is tomorrow. I want to do the Crest Unlocking ritual tonight."

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I tend to upload drafts of early chapters on there to get people's opinions of them so you can read up to 20 chapters ahead as a bonus.

Thank you guys for your support in these hard times.