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They say that the luckiest thing a person can ever do in their life is meet their soulmate young. Neville's friends have been incredibly lucky — Harry, Ron, Hermione, Luna — all of them met their soulmates during their Hogwarts years, paired off nice and pretty and settled down to have two kids and a picket fence apiece. Neville is a little more uncomfortable with the topic; they tease him about being a prude. It's better than them knowing that his soulmate is Theodore Nott.
Neville gets married to the love of his life in April of 2005, six years after the war ended. It’s in July — over the summer holidays — so that he could get the time away from teaching at Hogwarts. They have the ceremony near the seaside, at an old muggle manor surrounded by an enormous garden. They have the wedding itself outside beneath an arch of roses, and the reception is held inside.
The hall almost isn’t big enough to fit everyone. After the reception dinner, they’d shoved all the tables to the sides and now everyone is forming a circle around the outside of the hall in preparation for dancing. It sort of reminds Neville of the Yule Ball, and of Harry and Voldemort’s duel in the courtyard, and the Order of Merlin ceremony.
There’s a big turnout of friends and family from both sides. Harry and Hermione are there, Ron and Luna, and a number of other school friends. Almost all of the DA could make it too, Padma and Anthony and Lucy, people that he protected from curses with the very skin of his own back. There’s Pansy too — she’s a healer now, married to a journalist for the Quibbler — who smiles at him from one of the far tables. As Neville is navigating through the crowd of people around him towards the centre of the room, he waves at her. She waves back. They did their apprenticeships under the same herbologist, but he became a professor and she works at St. Mungos. They still talk, though; they’re friends. It’s funny how much things can change in six years.
Draco Malfoy is here too, next to his wife Astoria; he offers Neville a hesitant smile. They’re still coasting around each other, even now, but Draco’s getting better. It’s more than some people can say. They’re all trying to get better, and Neville has never been one to hold a grudge.
His grandmother hurries to the dias at the front of the room, gesturing wildly at the live band that will begin playing shortly, and casts a Sonoros on herself. She clears her throat, and the crowd quietens.
“Time for the happy couple’s first dance!” she proclaims, and everyone claps and cheers politely. At the other end of the room, Neville reaches out to his side, and a hand meets his.
He turns and looks at Isobel. She looks back at him, eyes sort of teary. She’s crying, he notices.
“Don’t cry, sweetheart,” he says warmly, “I love you.”
“I love you too,” responds Isobel, and she leans into his side so that she can kiss his cheek.
He tugs her hand, and she laughs, and together they step out onto the dance floor. Her white dress ruffles around her as she moves, a pretty tulle that she’d spent months agonising over. She’d wanted this wedding to be perfect, and it is. He’s never seen someone more beautiful in his life.
The band begins their song, and Neville begins to step into a waltz that he’s been practicing for months, and Isobel laughs as he twirls her around.
They step off the dance floor after half an hour. Seven odd songs have gone by and everyone else has long since joined them, but Isobel says the high heels are hurting her feet and he wants this wedding to be perfect for her too. He seats her down at the head table, promising to get her another slice of cake, and moves away to talk to the rest of the guests around the room.
As he’s walking over to the refreshment table, he sees a shadowy figure in the corner of the hall. Perhaps it’s instincts that have never fully died down, a year of being beaten into paranoia, but his hand flies to the handle of his wand.
He strides over to the corner, expression thunderous.
“Nott,” he greets, “You weren’t invited.”
The other man smiles charmingly, shrugging. “Oh, wasn’t I?”
He brushes his hair out of his face, and Neville’s eyes fly to his fingertips. Sure enough, each of them is dotted with a different soulmark. Each of them shows a piece of Neville’s soul. Neville’s own hands show Theodore Nott’s in turn.
Soulmarks only become visible once you kiss the other person and acknowledge that they’re the one for you. Looking back, Neville doesn’t know how he ever believed it. He thought himself so mature at seventeen, a war hero and a commander; he’d seen the other Slytherins improving and he’d dared to hope that Theo would change as well.
They kissed once, and only once. It was enough. Neville had really thought that that would be it. He believed in the magic of soulmates, the approval of the universe. He’d thought that everything would get better and they’d live happily ever after, just as they were supposed to do.
Turns out some people just don’t change. Sometimes people just don’t want to get better. Their fingertips now show each other’s souls off to the world irregardless.
“I don’t want you here,” Neville spits.
“I’m your soulmate.”
“I hate you.”
“Oh, darling,” Nott says patronisingly, “No, you don’t.”
Neville doesn’t. Try as he might, he can’t hate Nott as much as he should.
That’s the problem with soulmates. They’re not picked at random. The magic that goes into assigning them is nebulous and likely will never fully be understood by wizards, but some patterns have been spotted through the ages. Most noticeably, magic seems to pick the person that you are most likely to forgive. Isn’t that just what love is?; the ability to see all of someone’s faults and still want to stick with them? Harry and Hermione, Ron and Luna; they understand each other in ways that Neville can’t comprehend. They smooth over each other’s sharp edges and adapt to those that remain. They don’t hold grudges, they forgive, and they forget.
That’s why Neville Longbottom could never fall in love with Theodore Nott. He abhors the idea that the universe thinks him capable of forgiving him.
Now, Neville is normally a very patient person; one must be if they want to teach classes of eleven-year-olds how to use pruning shears. He is normally very forgiving when one has transgressed against him, so when Pansy and Draco and god knows how many Slytherin students have come up to him over the years and asked for forgiveness, he has given it. Let it not be said that Neville does not forgive those who deserve it.
Theodore Nott is a bigot, a bully, and a conman. He has charmed his way back into polite society without doing an ounce of penance for all the harm he did during the war, and he has not changed his beliefs even a little. If he had been alive during the first war, he would have been laughing alongside the Lestranges as they tortured Neville’s parents into insanity. Magic thinks that Neville Longbottom, of all people, should be cosmically tied to an unrepentant Death Eater, because it thinks he of all people would forgive him his faults.
Absolutely not, Neville thinks. Fuck the universe, fuck magic, and fuck Theodore Nott.
“Leave,” Neville says, “Or I’ll get someone to escort you out. I don’t need you upsetting Isobel.”
“Really, Neville?” laughs Nott, handsome face marred by an ugly frown at the mention of Neville’s now wife. “Why would you marry that mudblood if you could marry me?”
Neville's soulmarks itch. The universe urges him to reach out and caress Theo's face, smooth the lines on his forehead away with his fingertips. Instead, Neville balls his hands into fists and socks Nott right in the jaw.
There’s a commotion after that as Ron and Harry drag Theo out of the hall. Neville slices a piece off of his wedding cake, plates it, and brings it across the hall to Isobel. She smiles at him. At the end of the night, as they’re saying their goodbyes, Pansy pulls a bruise ointment out of her bag and carefully applies it to his aching knuckles. Neville’s grandmother kisses his cheek as she leaves. The hall is big and empty and quiet, and Isobel and Neville walk around in the gardens outside it for hours after their wedding ceremony concludes.
At midnight, they catch a portkey away. Neville folds his nice robes away and helps Isobel out of her dress, and they fall asleep together.
Even as his honeymoon starts, even as they swan off to some villa on the coast of Spain for a week to lie around and do nothing as husband and wife, the soulmarks don’t fade. Neville catches Isobel frowning at her own hands a few times. She’s probably wondering why her own soulmarks haven’t faded yet.
Isobel’s soulmate is dead. She’s a few years older, so she had more time to meet her soulmate and love him. Isobel’s hands are marked by the soul of a dead man and her palms show off the fact that he’s dead. According to all the stories, when two people with dead soulmates fall in love, their soulmarks can fade away and they can become each other’s soulmates. Isobel is probably waiting for that. Neville doesn’t have the heart to tell her it might never happen.
He frowns down at his own hands. His soulmarks are still there. It’s Neville’s eternal curse that no matter what he does, Neville can’t make Theo hate him enough for their soulmate connection to fade away. Hatred and death are the only two options to destroy a soulmate bond; if asked, Neville would deny wondering if he could just leave Nott's unconscious body in the middle of one of the more dangerous greenhouses and claim plausible deniability. At least then his hands might be clean. At least then he and Isobel could be each other’s soulmates instead of this.
Neville loves his wife. He fell in love with her fully knowing they weren’t soulmates. It’s probably just Theo’s reappearance that’s giving him doubts again. It happens; magic doesn’t like its grand plans being disobeyed, so it pushes soulmates together. When you love them, that’s not a problem, but when you don't, it feels like a betrayal to the one you actually love.
They go on walks together, hand in hand, and it’s like electricity at the contact between them. Neville kisses her forehead every night, and she kisses his cheek. They’re not soulmates, but it’s alright.
On the last day of his honeymoon, Neville wakes up in the warm sun next to Isobel. He looks down at his fingers, and they are free of soulmarks. It’s a strange site, really. His fingertips are pale, clean; he has not seen them all unmarked since he was a baby.
Nott hates him, then. Neville almost cries in relief. His soulmate hates him and he hates his soulmate and now they’re not soulmates anymore. His hands are clean. He is free.
He looks over at Isobel. Her hands are bunched in the sheets, her fingertips not visible. If the universe has any kindness left in it, they will now be unmarked as well, and she and Neville can form new soulmarks together.
He lies back down in bed, rolling over to lie against her side. When she wakes up, they’ll check their hands together, but for now he’s content with waiting. They weren’t soulmates before, and he will love her no matter whether she becomes his soulmate or not. They’ve made it this far already; fuck the universe, fuck magic. They chose each other.