The single word from Alice's lips—"Frank?"—shattered the decade-long silence of the Janus Thickey Ward. Augusta Longbottom, a woman forged in the fires of grief and stoic pride, let out a sound that was a mixture of a gasp and a sob. She rushed to her daughter-in-law's side, her gloved hands hovering, afraid to touch lest the miracle dissolve like mist.
"Alice? My dear girl, can you hear me?" Augusta whispered, her voice thick with a hope she had long since buried.
Alice's eyes, no longer vacant but filled with a deep, swimming confusion, flickered from her husband's blank face to her mother-in-law's. "Augusta?" she rasped, her voice weak from disuse. "What… what happened? The last thing I remember… Bellatrix…" She shuddered, a phantom pain crossing her features, but the all-consuming, mind-shattering echo was gone.
Ariana, meanwhile, had stumbled back, a wave of profound magical and mental exhaustion crashing over her. The intricate, dangerous weaving she had performed had drained her reserves to a critical level. The world seemed to tilt, the edges of her vision greying out. She leaned against the wall for support, her breathing shallow.
"Miss Dumbledore!" Augusta cried out, her attention snapping from her daughter-in-law to the pale, swaying girl.
"I am… depleted," Ariana managed to say, her voice barely a whisper. "The process… it is taxing. I need to rest."
The Healers of St. Mungo's, alerted by Augusta's frantic call, descended upon the room in a state of controlled panic. They saw Alice Longbottom, lucid and speaking for the first time in twelve years, and they saw Ariana, looking as though her very life force had been siphoned away. It was a scene that defied every law of magical medicine they knew.
Ariana was immediately settled into a private recovery room, where Madam Pomfrey, summoned from Hogwarts at Dumbledore's insistence, took personal charge of her care. She administered a series of gentle restorative potions, her face a mask of awe and deep concern. "Child, what have you done?" she murmured, sensing the profound magical void within her patient.
While Ariana rested, the news of Alice's recovery spread like a controlled wildfire through the highest echelons of the magical world. Dumbledore arrived, his expression one of profound, stunned gravity. He spoke at length with a weeping, overjoyed Augusta Longbottom.
Alice's first, insistent request, once the initial confusion had been soothed, was to see her son.
Neville was pulled from a Herbology lesson and brought to St. Mungo's by a tight-lipped but visibly emotional Professor McGonagall. He walked into his mother's room with the hesitant, familiar dread of his weekly visits. He saw her sitting up in bed, and his heart clenched, preparing for the usual blank stare.
But then she looked at him, and her eyes focused. A real, true smile, tremulous and full of a love he had only ever dreamed of, touched her lips.
"Neville," she whispered. "My boy. Look at you. You're so… so tall."
Neville stopped dead. He stared at her, at the mother he had never known, who was now looking at him, seeing him. The carefully constructed walls around his heart crumbled. He let out a sob and rushed to her side, burying his face in her lap as she stroked his hair with a weak but loving hand. For the first time in his life, Neville Longbottom was being held by his mother.
Meanwhile, Augusta sat with the still-unresponsive Frank. "We must wait for the girl to recover her strength, Frank," she told him, her voice full of a new, fierce patience. "Her body is frail now, but the mind… the mind is there. We will have to be patient." The healers had explained that while Alice's mind was free, her body was weak from years of inactivity. Physical therapy would be long and arduous. But it was a journey they would now take together.
Ariana slept for nearly twenty-four hours, her magic slowly, painstakingly replenishing itself from a deep, internal well. When she finally awoke, she felt a profound, bone-deep weariness, but the critical emptiness was gone. The first person she saw upon opening her eyes was Hermione, who had refused to leave the chair by her bedside, her face etched with worry.
"You're awake!" Hermione breathed, a wave of relief washing over her. "You were so pale.
Dumbledore said you performed a type of soul-magic he's only ever read about in forbidden texts."
"It was an exercise in conceptual severance," Ariana said, her voice still weak. "I did not heal her. I simply… unhooked her from her pain." She sat up slowly. "I need to see Neville."
She found him in his mother's room. He was sitting by her bed, reading a Herbology textbook aloud to her. Alice was listening, her expression one of quiet, tired contentment. When Neville saw Ariana, he stood up, his eyes shining with a gratitude so immense it needed no words. He simply bowed his head, a gesture of profound, heartfelt respect.
Ariana nodded back, then looked at Alice. "How are you feeling?"
"Tired," Alice said, her voice a little stronger. "And… quiet. For the first time in a long time, my head is quiet." She looked at Ariana with searching eyes. "Augusta told me what you did. I don't understand it. But… thank you."
"Rest and recover, Mrs. Longbottom," Ariana said gently.
Her gaze then fell on Frank, who still sat in his chair, staring at nothing, a faint, placid smile on his face. Ariana felt a pang of her own depletion. She knew, with an absolute certainty, that she did not have the strength to perform the same feat again, not yet. It would take weeks, perhaps months, for her magical core to fully recover from such a profound and invasive act of will.
One look was enough. She had to leave. She needed the familiar, ambient magic of Hogwarts, the quiet of her dormitory, the grounding presence of her books and her friends.
"I must return to school," she announced quietly.
Augusta Longbottom intercepted her in the corridor. She did not offer thanks or platitudes. She simply took Ariana's hand in her own two, her stern face etched with an emotion that went beyond gratitude into something akin to reverence. "Our House is yours, child," she said, her voice thick. "Forever. Whatever you need, whenever you need it, you have only to ask."
It was a vow of fealty from one of the wizarding world's proudest matriarchs.
Ariana returned to Hogwarts that evening, exhausted but resolute. She had done something impossible, something that had changed the lives of her friends forever. But it had come at a cost. As she lay in her bed in the quiet of the Gryffindor dormitory, she felt the deep, lingering ache of her spent power. She had healed a mind, but she knew the coming battles would require a different kind of strength, a strength she now had to carefully, patiently, rebuild. The game was far from over, and she had just played one of her most powerful cards.