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Gran had left the garden in a right state.
If Neville had gone on the run from the authorities, he would have at least cast a Water-Weekly charm over the perennials before he left. The marguerite and chamomile have baked in the summer heat, and the dry brown stems of the lavender bushes have been strangled by winding tendrils of devil’s trumpet. The shrubs have lost their shape and are in need of a good pruning, but the sycamore tree is still standing strong. Good old trees, Neville thinks. You can trust them.
Today he’s tackling the thistles. He kicks a pitchfork into the ground, levering it with his body weight to uncover roots a foot long and as thick as his thumb. Thistles have tap roots: a dominant central root runs deep into the soil, while others sprout at right angles at the end, like a faucet. This makes them hell to remove. If you simply pull the root out from the top, it breaks and leaves tiny parts underground, ready to grow again.
Pink thistles remind him of Umbridge. She was a weed if ever there was one. When they thought they’d finally removed her, the Carrows came to Hogwarts, twice as powerful and twice as malign. The roots of evil run deep. Neville gets his hands dirty, feeling along the length of the plant and digging out the surrounding earth with his fingers.
He almost has it when the vulture off Gran’s hat swoops drunkenly onto the fencepost beside him. It folds its dusty wings, coughs out some stuffing, and then announces in his grandmother’s voice: “A young man here to see you!”
Neville stares uncomprehendingly into the vulture’s glass eyes. Since when did he get visitors? Not once has he ever had friends over. No-one in his year even knows his address. Dean spends summers at Seamus’s, and Harry spends summers at Ron’s, and Neville spends summers here, trying not to yawn in front of elderly relatives who talk ceaselessly about the various ailments of other elderly people he has never met.
“Sometime this year, Neville!” the vulture squawks sarcastically, and flies off.
He leans the pitchfork against the garden fence and hurries up the slope, pulling his muddy gloves off and wondering who the visitor could be. Once he sees who it is, he slows down until he’s practically going backwards.
“Back in my day we used to greet our guests instead of leaving them waiting on the doorstep,” Gran chides, reaching out and gripping Neville’s shoulder with her talons. “Do they not teach you manners at school?”
She can’t have realised that this is Draco Malfoy waiting on the doorstep, tucking pale blond hair behind his ear and blinking far too much. He’s lost that starved, hunted look that plagued him all of last year, but although he looks nervous, he’s regained that old-fashioned Pureblood grace. Malfoy is just as pureblooded as him or Ron on paper, but somehow, he really looks it. It’s something to do with his colouring maybe, or the stiff way he carries himself around adults when he’s trying to make a good impression.
Or maybe it’s the dragonhide boots. Neville remembers when they were new and Malfoy showed them them off all over Hogsmeade. He wouldn’t have noticed, if Harry and Ron hadn’t spent every meal debating whether they were cool (because they were cool) or uncool (because Malfoy was the one wearing them). The boots are scuffed now, and sagging at the heel. But they still look cool.
“Actually, they don’t teach us manners at school,” says Neville, accidentally making awkward eye contact with Malfoy and then pretending he hasn’t. He catches sight of a piercing in one ear. A tiny silver stud. Maybe there’s one in the other ear, only Neville can’t see, because his hair is covering it.
Neville jerks his head towards the garden, in order to avert a disastrous potential future in which Gran makes them sit in the parlour and drink tea together. Malfoy follows him. The steep climb downwards is a struggle for him, and he arrives at the desiccated flowerbeds with his cheeks flushed pink. Too posh to walk? Neville thinks meanly.
“What are you doing here?” he asks. He suddenly becomes aware of the dirt under his fingernails, the grass stains on his knees, and that pimple on his forehead that wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d just left it alone, but he hadn't stopped picking it at it, and now it was giant.
Malfoy turns his head to look down the garden as if the answer to the question is there in the grass somewhere. Neville feels another sting of embarrassment. Malfoy Manor has grounds. The grounds probably have a rose garden, private arboretum, fountain, koi pond and a hedge maze. The Longbottom patch is just an ordinary garden forged on an inhospitable slope, left to fend for itself under the shadow of the house. Even with the best of care, it would never be good enough to impress him.
“I came to say sorry,” Malfoy says. The words come out in a grim, stilted way, like he’s being operated by a ventriloquist.
Sorry. It comes as such a shock Neville can’t help but laugh. He kicks his pitchfork into the ground again and leans on it, resting his forehead on his crossed hands for a second or two.
This was one thing Neville was certain would never happen. Not in a million years. Snow would always be cold, water would always be wet, the Cannons would always be at the bottom of the league, and Malfoy would always be an evil little bastard, just like his father. In Neville’s memory, Draco Malfoy was perpetually eleven, with slick-backed hair and a spiteful smile. Laughing at him.
Malfoy had changed, yes. Last year, seventh year, he hadn’t smiled once. He had haunted the castle white-faced and twitchy like a rabbit. But the mental image of a sneering, supercilious Malfoy remained, just like how in Neville’s memory Ron was always eating a sandwich, and Hermione always had her nose in a book, and Harry was always not-quite-listening to what you were saying.
Malfoy was always so relentlessly interested in him. What are you doing, Longbottom. Where are you going, Longbottom. What have you got there, Longbottom. Neville had sorted him into the bully category and hadn’t expected him to ever leave it. But bullies don’t apologise.
“What for?” Neville asks, wondering if he even heard correctly. He thinks of trip jinxes, and jelly-leg hexes, and pufferfish eyes chucked into his cauldron and snowballs hitting the back of his head and snapped quills and stolen sugar mice and name-calling and tears. He thinks of Malfoy returning to school after Christmas with cuts all over his face from a broken chandelier.
Malfoy shrugs, hands thrust in his pockets. His face is very white. “For being a dick,” he mutters.
It’s such a crap apology that Neville feels physically angry. He looks away beyond the garden fence to where the sun is setting, casting cold shadows over the pair of them, and tries to ignore hot blood rushing through his veins.
It’s crap, but it’s genuine. If his mum was making him apologise, she would have given him a better script.
But so what if it’s genuine? Malfoy looks so worried and pitiful that Neville is tempted to feel sorry for him, but the thought of that sparks hot spitting fury in his chest. Malfoy isn’t someone anyone should be feeling sorry for, not after everything he did.
He tries not to explode. Is he supposed to be the bigger man, now? Is he supposed to nod along and say oh, it's all alright, water under the bridge, thank you so much for your apology. Is he meant to feel grateful that Malfoy deigned to come directly to his house?
“Do you expect me to forgive you?” Neville asks wildly.
Malfoy looks brittle. “No.”
There’s a silence, and Neville carries on digging while Malfoy watches. He crouches on the ground and pulls at a root too hard. It snaps. Half of it is lost in the soil, ready to grow into vicious weeds again. Neville lets the pitchfork drop and splays his hands out wide, looking up at Malfoy in surrender.
“What do you want from me?”
“A chance,” Malfoy says, eyes glassy like marbles, and this time there’s a desperate, pleading edge to his voice.
Neville shakes his head uncomprehendingly and turns back to the soil. He’d tut if it didn’t make him sound like his Gran. He tries to busy himself picking out leaves of pearlwort and bittercress one by one.
It’s silent for long enough that Malfoy realises that that’s all he’s going to get.
“See you at school,” he says quietly, and trudges up the hill.
*
Later that evening Neville steps on a sugar cube and spills milk onto the saucer. Gran doesn’t notice; either he’s normally this clumsy, or she’s too focused on the oldies music trundling out of the rickety wireless.
“I hope you were nice to him,” Gran says as he places a cup of tea on the arm of her chair. “He looks like he doesn’t eat enough, that boy. Your generation, you don’t know how to eat. I grew up with—“
“Tinned spam,” Neville finishes, having heard this a hundred times before. “None of this fast food.”
“And we didn’t brew tea with our wands, you know! We used a—”
“A kettle, I know, I know. And you walked a mile to and from school, uphill both ways.”
“Cheek,” Gran scolds, but smiles and yanks on his ear with strong, wrinkled fingers.
“I was nice to him,” Neville says to himself, lying in bed a few hours later. “…I think.”
Wasn’t he? He could have told Malfoy to stuff himself, or worse. A Bat-Bogey Hex would have been cathartic, if Neville was the vengeful type. But he isn’t. He just wanted to… understand. Why say sorry now?
Maybe Malfoy was trying to fix his reputation, to build alliances and network for some future career. Or perhaps it was a stubborn remnant of his pureblood upbringing: his parents wouldn’t have let him be lent so much as a quill without forcing him to write a hand-written thank you note.
Neville wallows in a helpless anger that he hasn’t felt in a long time. The seed of it had been planted when he was eleven, an emotion borne in response to unfathomable cruelty, and it had grown and grown, taking root like a thistle.
*
Come the first of September Neville almost misses the train, despite the fact that he was already on it, because the handle snapped off Ron’s case and he jumped down to help. He, Harry and Dean were heaving it in the direction of a porter when the whistle blew and the train was literally moving out of the station. They leapt on, grabbing the brass handrails in the nick of time, flooded with adrenaline far too early in the school year.
Neville walks through the carriages, tilting sideways to fit his shoulders through the narrow corridor. He passes frightened eleven year olds and chatty teens, bored looking fifth-years and a one-eyed Kneazle in a carry-case. It’s one of the laws of the universe that the cool kids sit at the back, and the Hogwarts Express is no exception. He finds his friends in the final carriage.
Luna and Ginny are sitting together, chatting. Hermione is there too, reading a book as usual. Next to Luna is Draco Malfoy, reading the Quibbler.
Ron, walking ahead of him, points a finger. “Er, are we being nice to him now?”
Malfoy doesn’t raise his head from the magazine but Neville can tell he’s bracing for a fight. He can see the sudden tension in the side of his neck.
“Yes,” say Ginny and Hermione at the same time.
And it’s as simple as that. Ron looks at Harry, who shrugs, and then sits beside Hermione, tucking an arm around her and half pulling her into his lap. Harry joins his girlfriend and slips an arm around her skinny waist. Girlfriend-less Neville squeezes in beside the window, trying and failing to get comfy on the threadbare seat.
He’s opposite Malfoy, but he tries not to look at him.
Later, Malfoy leaves to go to the bathroom. Neville leans over to Harry and asks: “Are you really going to be nice to him?”
Harry pulls a non-committal face. “If he doesn’t start anything. And he probably won’t. He wrote me a letter over the summer.”
“Did he?”
“Yeah, to ‘apologise for his regrettable actions during the war’ or something. Ron, you got one.”
“On proper stationery and everything,” Ron mumbles around a mouthful of sandwich. “Headed paper. The thick stuff.”
“I received a letter too,” says Hermione, looking conflicted. “I can’t say we’re going to be the best of friends, but I’m not going to waste my energy holding a grudge against people who are trying to be better. It’s silly to be divided when we could be working together.”
Luna beams at her. “That’s very honourable of you, Hermione.”
“Um. Thanks.”
Malfoy returns, so Neville quickly looks out the window as if the rolling hills are captivating instead of suffocatingly boring.
Is Malfoy trying to be better? Those three weren’t at school last year, they didn’t see him. The only thing Malfoy was trying to be was ‘not killed’, like the rest of them.
So Neville isn’t worthy of a letter, then. Why bother wasting three knuts on a post owl for old Longbottom? He kicks his heels against the train seat and stews.
*
Classes pass in a stressful blur, like someone has dumped a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle in his lap and expects him to solve it in five minutes. He studies earnestly throughout September and October but eventually his concentration wanes and he picks up Harry’s old habit: Malfoy-watching.
Malfoy looks tired, but don’t they all. Neville doesn’t know if it’s because he’s studying hard or if it’s because the common rooms have turned into party city. What’s more is the professors don’t even mind. They’ve collectively decided that the eighth years deserve a break. One day, Sprout slipped a vial of hangover cure into Neville’s hand and winked at him.
It would be fine if partying in the dorms was a break. But Neville’s idea of a break is something genuinely restful, like sipping rum out of a hollowed-out coconut on a desert island, not staying up until two in the morning with a throat hoarse from singing karaoke. That’s what Gryffindor and Hufflepuff are doing, he has no idea about Slytherin.
Sprout also lets him take over one of the first year Herbology classes. They’re all so damn small, and they don’t know a fork from a trowel. Neville feels very old suddenly.
*
One morning he follows Ron and Hermione out of Charms, but he’s forced to stop in the middle of the corridor. They carry on a few steps but turn back when they realise he isn’t behind them.
It’s that bloody mistletoe. The kind that traps you. It’s only November, but the Christmas season comes earlier every year. Soon it’ll come in January and they’ll spend the whole year eating candy canes and tuning out Celestina Warbeck.
“I’m blaming you,” Neville tells Ron. He can’t move a step unless someone kisses him.
“Hey, I am not my brothers’ keeper! Bad luck mate. Come on Hermione, get him out of it.”
Hermione puffs up like a startled parrot. “Excuse me?”
Neville doesn’t particularly want to kiss Hermione either, but it’d be better than kissing Ron, and he’d rather just move before there are witnesses. If Seamus or Dean get wind of this…
“Well, someone’s gotta kiss him.”
“And I should do it because I’m a girl, I suppose? Even though I’m your girlfriend?”
Ron squints. He knows he’s said something sexist, but he can’t pinpoint what it is.
“I give you my permission,” he tries. “Hurry up, I’ve got Divs.”
“Permission?” Hermione repeats glacially.
While she delivers her boyfriend a prime lecture on bodily autonomy, Neville spots a blond head at the end of the corridor. He cringes internally.
In any other year Malfoy would have pointed and laughed. He would have drawn attention to the mistletoe and how nobody in their right mind would kiss him under it.
Malfoy pauses, taking in the scene: Neville stranded, and Ron and Hermione bickering a few feet away. Malfoy sweeps past like a ghost, as if he hasn’t seen them at all, but as he passes Neville he turns his head.
He kisses him, just for a second, and carries on walking.
It was only a brush of lips. It was over in an instant, too quickly for Neville to react, but the mistletoe falls to the ground. He watches Malfoy’s retreating back.
Ron and Hermione stop arguing when Neville brushes past them along the corridor.
“It wore off,” he lies.
*
The blink-and-you-miss-it kiss replays in his mind while he crushes daisy roots for tinctures at the back of one of the greenhouses. Is he supposed to feel grateful to Malfoy?
Okay, he does. He could have been stuck there a long time, and if more people arrived it would have been hot gossip. But is this some sick of way apologising, of making up for past behaviour? Because that’s just not on. He didn’t ask for help. And if he’d wanted to be kissed, it would have been by… well.
Neville has had crushes on a lot of people.
On Harry when they first met, because he was Harry Potter, Boy Who Lived, just like the legend except he was walking and talking and real and his eyes were properly green. On Anthony Goldstein, because he’d lent him a quill in History of Magic once. On Padma, when she’d started wearing that kohl stuff around her eyes that made her look like an Egyptian goddess. On Fleur’s younger sister, who’s name he’s forgotten, because she’d sat with him at lunch and asked him to pass the butter in a heart-meltingly French accent. On Harry again, after he fought that dragon in the Triwizard tournament. On Luna, for a long time, although that had morphed into a real, deep love — but the platonic and protective kind, not romantic.
And on Draco, a little bit, although he shouldn’t have. Draco Malfoy had a stupid swagger and a loud mouth and stupid perfect white teeth and he could transfigure an eagle into a carriage clock and back again in the blink of an eye. He was everything Neville wasn’t. Talented, skilled, graceful, confident.
Teenaged Neville didn’t know if he wanted to be him, or be under him. Or over him. He’d have taken whatever he could get, to be honest.
*
Neville pulls a library book off the shelf at random and skims it for any mention of the seven uses of horklump juice. He puts it back, sighing. He already knows the seven uses of horklump juice, but the assignment requires him to cite sources, so here he is in the library on a Friday evening, searching for proof of common knowledge.
“Stuck again?” comes a soft, male voice.
Neville looks up. Malfoy had appeared between the shelves, quiet as a mouse. He follows Malfoy’s gaze up above his own head to spot more bloody mistletoe. He hadn’t even known it was there. Good thing he’d noticed before closing time, you couldn't exactly shout for help in a library.
Malfoy approaches him. They’re roughly the same height now, but Malfoy’s slim grace still makes him feel small and dumpy. He had been smaller than him for years, always a few steps behind, until one final growth spurt had evened things about. A late bloomer, in so many ways.
Neville watches dumbly as Malfoy enchants a book to slide off the shelf and hover open in front of their faces. Neville squints over the pages, not sure what he’s supposed to be looking at, and then a coaxing finger on his jaw leads him to turn his head smoothly into a kiss.
Like the first time, it’s over before it begins. Neville doesn’t even have time to close his eyes. He only has time to notice an old chickenpox scar above Malfoy’s left eyebrow. Neville has one just like it.
Then Malfoy leaves, disappearing silently between the shelves on the other side of the library, sandwiched by Oneironautics and Pteromancy. Neville closes his eyes now, trying to relive the memory, the gentle pressure of Malfoy’s lips on his. He’s jerked out of reverie by the book landing on the table with a thud. The levitation spell wore off.
Some people working at the desks glance in his direction, but they quickly put their heads back down. Neville sighs and replaces the book on the shelf. Then he pulls it out again: the seven uses of horklump juice are listed by Florence Merriweather at the end of chapter three. He notes down the citation on a scrap of parchment and shoves it in his pocket.
*
Malfoy had kissed him like it was nothing. That was the puzzling thing.
Because kissing wasn’t nothing, was it? Unless Malfoy kissed people all the time. Did he? Neville had never seen him kiss anyone, not even Pansy Parkinson.
And kissing a boy was something. Kissing a man. Boy-man, Neville thinks. I’m still something in between.
It wasn’t that common, although it wasn’t as weird for him as it was for the Muggleborns. For some of them, anyway. Justin Finch-Fletchley had taken to kissing boys like a duck to water.
Malfoy had kissed him, was the thing. He’d kissed Neville right on the mouth, like it wasn’t disgusting or embarrassing or humiliating or beneath him. He’d just done it. Like it didn’t matter.
*
Malfoy is squeezed up in a corner of the sofa in the common room, with his knees up by his chin. Neville doesn’t know who let him in. Ron and Harry play pick-up Quidditch with him sometimes, and Hermione’s working with on some Arithmancy project that makes Neville’s eyes glaze over whenever she starts talking about it. No-one’s working now, because it’s a weekend morning, and they’re all still asleep.
Now, Malfoy is using a Quidditch annual as a makeshift desk to write a letter, and has a pot of ink balanced on the arm of the sofa. Not Malfoy— Draco, everyone calls him, except Ron. His head is tilted at an odd angle as he writes, displaying a long creamy neck. Neville watches his quill loop and twirl. He can’t help but ask:
“Why didn’t you send me a letter?”
Draco looks up, startled. Neville shifts uncomfortably, regretting speaking but at the same time needing to know the answer.
“Everyone,” he continues, “well, some people said you wrote them apology letters. But you didn’t send one to me.”
Draco looks back down at his parchment. “You’re different.”
“I’m special, am I?” he says wryly.
“Yes! Alright? You are. You never fought back.”
Neville opens his mouth in protest. He did plenty of fighting. Against the Carrows, and Snape, and Death Eaters storming the covered bridge, and that bloody great snake whose head he’d sliced off.
“You’re the only Gryffindor who hasn’t punched me in the face,” he says quickly.
“I’m sure Hermione hasn’t punched you in the face.”
“No, she slapped me. Left a red handprint on my face for about a day. Snape refused to remove it for me.”
“Well I never.”
“I know I deserved it. But I— I never got punished for what I did to you. A few detentions, maybe. When I got caught.”
Is that what the mistletoe is, Neville wonders. Does Draco think kissing him is a punishment? A good deed he must endure stoically?
“You deserved more than a stupid letter,” Draco says quietly.
“Maybe I deserved something better than ‘Hi, sorry for being a dick’.”
“I don’t— What do you want me to say? Of course I wish I hadn’t been a prick to you my whole life, and you’re a million times the wizard I’ll ever be, you’re good and I’m not, and there’s nothing I can do to make up for it. I deserve to be punished and I don’t deserve to be forgiven. I know.” Halfway through this speech Draco started packing up his writing equipment with shaking hands. He screws the lid on his ink pot; it takes three tries.
Neville hates arguing. He doesn't understand what’s happened, does Draco really think all that?
“Listen,” he begs, and Draco does, but the words don’t come. “You can’t rush it. So… so…”
He’s paused with an elegant, ink-stained hand on the edge of the portrait hole.
“So wait,” Neville finishes.
*
McGonagall fiddles with the gramophone while they wait for a lecture on appropriate Yule Ball conduct, such as leaving room for Merlin and not smoking gillyweed cigarettes down by the lake. Little does she know she’s only giving them ideas.
They’re sitting in uncomfortable chairs: all the boys on one side, and all the girls on the other, which Neville thinks is terribly boring. Draco is standing behind them, leaning on the windowsill in a temporary way as if he’s planning to slip out of the assembly at any moment. Perhaps he is.
“Who you asking?” says Ron.
Neville shrugs. “Luna, I suppose.”
“Thought she was already going with someone,” Harry chips in. “Quentin Quimbley? Quimbleby? Quimbob?”
“Oh.”
Ron, bored by this exchange already, cranes his neck around. “Oi, Malfoy, you still going out with Parkinson?”
Draco fixes him with a strange, offended look. “I was never going out with Pansy.”
“Eh?”
“Truly. Never.”
Harry glances at Draco and leans into Ron’s ear, whispering: “Uh, I don’t think she’s his type, if you know what I mean.”
Neville knows what Harry means, but Ron doesn’t. He leans back again and asks Draco what his type is.
Draco considers this, as if he hasn’t thought of it before. “Strong?” he suggests.
I’m strong, Neville thinks. And it’s true. Lifting bags of soil all day and chopping wood for Hagrid had transformed puppy fat into, well, muscle.
“What, like Bulstrode?” Ron asks.
Draco looks aggrieved, and Harry laughs privately, shaking his head.
Neville doesn’t know what to think.
*
Glittering frost coats the grass, save for criss-crossing paths of green where students have walked to and from lessons. Neville’s breath forms clouds as he makes his way to Greenhouse Four in a doomed attempt to clear his mind. The walk is, at least, distracting, as he thinks he can sense water seeping into his boots, and the cold bites at his knuckles. Pretty crystals of frost cling to bare branches and ruby red rosehips peek out from among the white.
He crunches across the gravel path and tries to use his personal key from Sprout to open the door, but it’s already unlocked.
There’s only one student here: Draco, standing behind the workbench, framed by falling tendrils from the grapevine on the trellis above him. Neville steps into the humid air, bathed by the familiar scents of citrus and mint and eucalyptus.
Relief washes over Draco’s face, only to be replaced quickly by a frown.
“It’s not on purpose,” he says. “I didn’t know you’d come.”
“What isn’t?” Neville asks, but his question is answered for him when he follows Draco’s gaze up to the ceiling and spots a sprig of enchanted mistletoe among the vines, holding him hostage. Those Weasley twins have a lot to answer for.
Classes ended a few hours ago; he must have been waiting a long time. The look on his face suggests he was thinking he had to spend all night there.
Neville closes the door behind him and approaches the workbench, dumping his bag and wiping his palms on his trousers out of habit.
“Do you need some help?”
Stupid question. Of course he does. Does he want some help, is the real question.
Draco nods without mocking him. Neville steps closer.
It makes sense, really, to cup the back of Draco’s head so he doesn’t fall off balance. And since his other arm is just hanging there, it makes sense to rest it on Draco’s shoulder. Draco doesn’t object, so Neville leans in and kisses him.
He doesn’t stop, because he doesn’t want to. Draco kisses back, smelling faintly of soap and tilting his head ever so slightly. Neville can hear him breathing.
It’s not like it was kissing Hannah Abbott during that game of Truth or Dare in fifth year. She let him kiss her for three full seconds, but she just sat there, and didn’t do anything more than let him.
His body takes from his brain and he clumsily pushes Draco back into the shelf behind him, making pots of herbs rattle and threaten to fall. Draco’s hands squeeze tightly around the tops of Neville’s arms, and he takes this as a signal to stop, but when he pulls away Draco only chases his mouth, pressing closer, deeper.
Am I doing this right? Neville thinks. He must be, if Draco’s reaction is anything to go by. It’s mad and inelegant and uncoordinated and it’s turning him on.
Neville licks his own lips to wet them and accidentally licks Draco’s mouth. He feels fingernails digging into his bicep, along with a hot curl of his embarrassment in his gut — and something else too risky to acknowledge.
He steps back, out of breath suddenly. The mistletoe is lying on the floor.
“That ought to do it,” he tells the ground, and runs away.
*
The cool air in the adjoining greenhouse calms his mind. Desert plants are kept here, so the air is dry and not humid like in the main house. Neville opens drawers and runs his hands over trays of seeds, distracting himself with the sound and sensation of it.
When he comes back, Draco is gone.
*
He walks in on Luna affixing a sprig of white mistletoe to the keystone of the arched entrance to the clock tower.
“Everyone likes to be kissed,” she explains.
“Okay, well, let’s say that’s true, which it isn’t, but even if you do want to be kissed, it’s not fun to be trapped for hours, is it?”
Luna hums. She has silver tinsel in her hair. “Good things come to those who wait.”
She pecks him on the cheek, unsticking herself from the enchanted verdure above the stepladder and hopping to the floor. Neville sighs.
“Are you going to the Yule Ball with anyone?”
“Mm, dear old Quentin asked me, but he came down with peacock flu. I’ll go with you, if you like.”
“As friends,” he clarifies.
“I know,” she says. “You are watching out for Nargles, aren’t you? They like to hide in mistletoe.”
“Stop putting it up, then.”
Luna smiles pleasantly and waves something invisible away from his left ear.
*
The music at the ball is outdated, the drinks are disappointingly unspiked and the dance floor thins out around 9 o’clock because all the fifth and sixth years are outside snogging in the rose bushes. Neville puts in an effort out of loyalty to McGonagall, since she organised it, but as soon as she turns to talk to Flitwick he heads to the afterparty.
He arrives even later than he means to, because he’s held up by a gaggle of fourth year girls swooning over him in front of the Fat Lady, giggling and asking for autographs. Then he can’t remember the password, but luckily somebody opens the portrait door for him from the inside.
“I don’t know why they’re interested in me,” he mumbles at his saviour, who is Draco Malfoy.
“Because, why wouldn't they be. It can’t have escaped your notice that you’re a walking wet dream,” Draco says offhandedly. He blushes slightly when Neville stares, and downs the rest of the liquid in the crystal cut goblet in his hand. He summons two more from the drinks table and hands one to Neville. He drinks it. It’s whiskey, and it goes straight to his head. The room is packed, and loud, and someone’s doing an Irish jig on the coffee table.
“I think that’s part of it,” Draco babbles, “that you don’t realise it. Anyone else who looked like you do would be insufferably up themselves, but you’re all— all modest about it. It’s like you don’t even know what you look like.”
“Maybe because someone constantly reminded me how fat and ugly I was.”
A familiar flash of fighting spirit lights in Draco’s eyes. “Maybe you shouldn’t have listened to an insecure child who was obviously acting out.”
“What did you have to be insecure about?”
Draco laughs out loud, a little hysterically.
It’s too loud in here, so Neville takes the stone steps up to the dorm, and Draco follows him, and there’s no mistletoe this time but somehow they’re kissing again, clumsily falling against the wall and pressing into each other. Neville puts a hand on his elbow to pull him gently upstairs.
Luckily the room is empty, and as they fall onto the bed Draco performs a complicated wave of his wand that sends the curtains closing around them and dampens the noise from downstairs, sealing them in their own private bubble. Neville’s grateful for it, because he couldn’t cast that kind of charmwork even without any alcohol in his system.
Neville leans over him, and Draco hooks his ankles obligingly behind Neville’s thighs, wrapping around him like a spider. You’ve got me, Neville thinks.
Gravity and lust pull him down and he sinks into another kiss, feeling slow and sluggish because of the alcohol, his body finally moving at the same speed as his brain. He dares to open his mouth a little and Draco, ever the mimic, does the same. A thrill shoots up his spine as the kiss becomes sloppy and heated.
He hopes his body doesn’t betray just how thrilling he finds it. Unless Draco’s does as well. That would be….
Heavy footsteps across the creaking floorboards jerk him out of dangerous thoughts. Someone is calling him.
“Nev? You awake?”
For fuck’s sake. It’s Ron.
Draco is looking up at him, all swollen lips and wide eyes, vulnerable in a way Neville never could have imagined him being. A rush of power overwhelms him.
“Nev. Nev. Nev!”
“What!” Neville shouts. Draco’s fumbles his hand across the duvet, finding his wand and cancelling the silencing charm.
“What?” Neville says again frustratedly, hovering over Draco on his elbows.
“Malfoy was looking for you,” Ron says from behind the curtain.
“Oh?” He looks down amusedly at Draco, who bites his bottom lip. “What did he want?”
“Dunno. Did you want to borrow the map? I can ask Harry…”
“No,” Neville says quickly. “That’s alright. I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”
Ron stumbles away, finally leaving.
Neville’s arms are getting tired, so he rolls off Draco and onto his back. The niffler’s out of the bag now, he should explain.
“Harry’s got a map that shows where everyone is in the castle.”
“I know. Everyone knows about that.”
“Oh.” The cogs in Neville’s brain turn slowly. “But you’re here?”
Draco faces him on the pillow, confused. “You think I don’t want to be seen with you?”
“Yeah.”
The first time, he’d kissed him in the blink of an eye, like a covert operative doing a dead letter drop. The second time, it was why he’d levitated that book, wasn’t it, to hide them from view. The third time— well, that was Neville’s doing.
“I said I was sorry,” Draco says, and there’s something painful in his voice.
“Talk is cheap,” Neville replies, because it’s something Gran used to say, not because he really means it.
Draco rolls onto his side. All Neville can see is his back.
He never knows the right thing to say, and his tired brain is running on autopilot. He doesn’t risk saying anything else.
Draco leaves quietly, and Neville falls asleep to the mantra of I always screw everything up.
*
Harry ambushes him in the fountain courtyard. Neville is absentmindedly watching some second-years play gobstones in a chalked circle on the ground, pretending they’re the reason why he can’t focus on finishing this essay he has to hand in in approximately six minutes.
“Have you forgiven him yet?” Harry asks, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Draco,” he adds, as if he could have been talking about anyone else.
“What?”
Harry sits beside him on the gap in the cloister wall. “Cause he’s not sure if you have. And it’s really not fair to carry on with him like that if you haven’t.”
The words ring in Neville’s ears. Have they been talking about him behind his back? Maybe they don’t need to, since Harry has that map. But It’s not Harry’s business. It's nobody’s business.
“Not fair?” he asks. “You think I’m being unfair?”
Harry shrugs. “A little bit, yeah.”
Neville stares open-mouthed.
“Fuck off, Harry,” he says shakily.
Harry raises his eyebrows, as surprised as Neville. He never swears. Not out loud, anyway. Not at other people.
“Okay,” Harry says, looking concerned instead of angry, and heads off to class.
Is Neville the only one who remembers things these days? How ironic. He should buy them all a shiny glass Remembrall to remind them that Malfoy was a bully.
Was, he admits to himself. Used to be.
There was a rumour he’d used an Unforgivable on Harry, and then Harry split him open for it. Harry wouldn't talk about it. But he thinks they should all forgive him.
Isn't the thing about Unforgivables that they’re, you know, unforgivable?
Maybe he paid the price. He said he’d been punished for what he did — except for what he did to Neville.
He did say sorry.
What punishment would he even be deserving of? The only thing Neville can think of holding a personal grudge against him for is teasing, when he gets down to it. Playground antics. Unkind, but not necessarily untrue. His whole family had thought he was born a Squib, after all. It was the incessant nature of it that made it awful, always making him piggy-in-the-middle, never letting up.
He knows, from the others, that Draco’s done things he’s not proud of. Harry said it came down to family, and survival, and what’s done is done and the noseless bastard’s dead anyway so he just wants to play Quidditch and forget about it for a while.
Neville doesn't play Quidditch. And, forgetful though he is, some things stick in his mind.
Draco must remember too, since he wanders round the castle with his head down and doesn't bother anyone except to help firsties with their Potions homework and occasionally free Neville from enchanted mistletoe.
And be freed by him…
Merlin.
Neville can’t concentrate in Transfig, he doesn’t finish the homework, instead he lies and says he lost it. McGonagall clicks her tongue at him Scottishly but he can’t bring himself to care one iota.
It’s nobody’s business, he thinks on a loop, feeling guilty at the memory of telling Harry to fuck off. It’s nobody’s business…
*
The next day he bumps into Draco coming round the corner of the Quidditch shed.
He drags him behind it. He has strength now, he might as well use it.
“Is this some kind of punishment for you?” he accuses.
“Is what a punishment? This? You tell me.”
Kissing me. “Being nice to me. Is it like a penance, or something?”
Draco fixes him with a blazing look. “No,” he says forcefully.
Neville drops his arms, ceasing to press Draco against the wall of the shed, but Draco lifts his, to tentatively grip Neville by the shoulders.
“I just want to,” he says. “I always wanted to. I didn’t know how.”
Neville softens. He’d wondered if it was something like that, to be honest.
Because, because. Malfoy was always so interested. He’d read in a fortune cookie once that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it's indifference.
Which was a rubbish fortune at the time, but it’s relevant now.
“I’m shit at dealing with people,” Draco says to the blue sky and the tiny figures on brooms soaring above the Quidditch pitch.
“Dealing with people,” Neville repeats.
“Not dealing,” he says frustratedly, the hand on Neville’s shoulder tensing. “Talking. Communicating. Being friends.”
Neville knows what that’s like. And Draco’s not the only one. He’s been on the receiving end of more than one of Hermione’s accidentally backhanded compliments, let alone being Petrified and left on the floor for hours when he interfered with some secret mission. The Weasley twins are still managing to pull pranks on him three years after graduating. He’s learnt that Seamus and Dean aren't that helpful when it comes to advice, and that sometimes you’re better off talking to a cactus.
“Do you think about revenge?”
“No!” Neville says, shocked. Christ, what’s Harry been telling him?
Draco sucks his bottom lip into mouth and releases it, reddened and slick. “So, if you don’t want to punch me in the face, what can I do?”
“To stop feeling guilty? It’s not my job to tell you that.”
“No,” Draco says calmly, holding him at arm’s length. “This isn’t about me. This is about you. How can I prove to you that you can trust me?”
“I don’t know,” Neville says, because he doesn’t. “Look, it’s not like I’m forgiving you just because I fancy you. It’s because… I dunno. You’ve changed. I’ve changed. We’ve both changed. The world’s changed.”
Something about this makes Draco smile.
“That’s fine. I’ll take fancying. I’ll wait for the other thing.”
“I don’t think you’ll have to wait very long,” Neville admits.
The pale hands on his shoulders slide to his neck and Draco leans in until their noses are touching, teasingly.
“I want to kiss you,” Draco tells him easily. “Etcetera.”
Neville raises his eyebrows. “Etcetera?” He can only imagine.
“Mmm.”
“Shall we… Shall we go and do that, then?”
*
Blearily, Neville hears his name. Then he hears Ron say, “Nah, he’s still asleep.”
He pushes back his bedcurtains ever so slightly and pokes his head out. “I’m not asleep,” he yawns. “What did you want?”
Harry and Ron stare at him, astounded. Ron raises a pointed finger accusingly. “You’re awake! Then who’s snoring?”
Neville frowns. “The Mimbulus,” he says, gesturing to the snoozing cactus on his bedside table and accidentally knocking a tapered candle to the floor in the process. It rolls away under a bed.
“You didn’t think that snoring was me, did you?” Harry and Ron are still staring. “Guys, I’ve had this plant since, what, fourth year!”
“We always thought it was you. Wow, that was a mystery we didn’t even know was a mystery. I guess it’s solved.”
“Anyway,” Harry says, “we had an idea.”
“Oh no.”
“Listen, listen. I hang Draco from his ankles off my Firebolt, and you can pelt him with eggs.”
“What, so I can miss?”
“Or,” Ron says, “We tie him to a chair in the nuddy and you can do whatever you want with a Fanged Geranium. I don’t know where Sprout keeps the Devil’s Snare.”
“I don’t want revenge,” Neville tells them honestly. Pair of idiots.
“You don’t?”
“It’s alright. We made up.”
He pulls back the bedcurtains, behind which Draco is sleeping peacefully on his front, shirtless. The line of his back rises and falls as he breathes.
“Oh, right.” Harry nods. Ron’s face goes through twenty-five facial expressions before settling on ‘innocently perplexed’. “Who shall I hang from my Firebolt then?”
He nudges Ron, who starts and shrugs. “Eh. Let’s go find Ernie. He’s annoying.”
Harry grabs his broom and pushes Ron out of the dormitory.
“Have fun,” he winks.
When they’re gone, Draco opens one eye. “Your friends are so fucking loud.”
“They’re your friends as well, I think.”
“Lucky me.”
“Lucky you.”
“Sure you don’t want to throw eggs at me?”
“I’m sure.” Neville hums, stretching lazily. “Up for more etcetera?”
Draco exhales a laugh. “And so on, and so forth.”
Neville joins in. “And what have you.”
“Come here, then,” Draco demands, and the old attention seeker comes through: petulant, needy, wanting. Luckily for him, this time Neville wants to be wanted.
fin.