Fourteen years ago, a Death Eater named Bellatrix Lestrange used the Cruciatus Curse on my parents. She tortured them for information, but they never gave in. I’m quite proud to be their son.
This hurts. A lot.
One of the scenes that I will never be able to forget from the book is the scene when they’re at the hospital and Neville’s mother comes and gives him the sweet wrapper. She’s been tortured to insanity, but some part of her, some tiny diamond hard fragment of who she was, smothered by the shattered remains of herself remembers her son enough to want to make him smile.
She gives him a present to make him smile, and you just know Neville took that sweet wrapper home with him and put it in a box with all the other random pieces of rubbish she has given to him over the past 14 years.
This is why Neville’s story makes me hurt much more than Harry. Neville’s parents are still there. He can still see them and touch them, but he can never and will never know what they think of him, of what he has become. But no matter what happens, he will do every damn thing he can to be a man they would be proud of. Even if he’s scared, he will be brave because they were.
Re: Neville will never know what they think of him: it’s interesting that Harry, for all he never knew his parents, interacts with them quite a lot for an orphan. Both the Priori Incantatem spell and the Resurrection Stone let Lily and James talk to Harry. They tell him how brave he is and how proud they are and how much they love him.
Neville gets a bubblegum wrapper.