These are all drabbles written for the competitions on fics-nextgen DOT tumblr DOT com. Each stands alone, which is why I'm posting it as "complete," but I'll keep updating it after the competitions wrap up, so feel free to alert!
Angst competition (first place):
Fred doesn't really care for Herbology. The squirm of the dirt under his fingertips, or the omnipresent fog on the greenhouses. How stupid he looks in the earmuffs, how pathetic he feels without a wand to wave around. It feels like a Muggle thing, boring.
And he doesn't really look up to Professor Longbottom. The war hero. As far as Fred is concerned they can all take their war stories and bury them deep, deep in the dirt, deep with their dead.
One day Professor Longbottom calls him into his office, just to explain how much he liked his essay. Fred knows how to write all right, how to transcend the everyday. "You'll go far," Longbottom promises. "I was a pathetic student when I was your age. Barely brave enough to stand up to my friends."
His friends? All Fred wants is to say once and for all he's not a prankster, a flier, and he never will be. Just to stand up, for once, to his family.
But he doesn't.