*I highly believe that Neville needs a little love in his life. And now he's going to get it. So there to all of you who find such an idea repulsive.*

*If you know or read or have even watched the movie of Harry Potter, you'll know the characters that are created by me and the ones by Rowling.

She Was the Window Down

Neville lolled about in his azure-striped pajamas in the sun-flooded pantry of his grandmother's cottage, stout legs folded quite contently under his rather, well, large backside. His eyes, dull with the glee of the first week of summer break, glided back and forth over a leaf of his new book, Seldon Ritter and the Pursuit for the Lotus of Pollock, a birthday present kindly bestowed upon him from his most cherished professor, the benign and maternal Sprout who was ecstatically eager to kindle his love of seeds and soil.

"Dear?"

"Yesfm, Grndmurm?" he replied as politely as he could about a cheek-full of gruel and sausage. A primary cause for his fondness of summer was he could gorge himself as much as he desired and there were no schoolgirls present there to object, ridicule, or titter over his ever expanding gut. Oh well.

"When you're done with breakfast, trot over next door and ask to borrow some tea bags."

Neville's eyes dilated and a squeal escaped his fleshy mouth. "Grandmum!" he exclaimed. "Please...not next door, anything but----"

"I don't see what the commotion's about," Grandmother returned in a justified manner. "Honestly, you treat those people like charlatans and convicts. Simply because the breadwinner was in Azkaban for a slight misunderstanding----"

"Yes, Grandma, but----"

"---and Dumbledore combed through that quick and simple, and anybody can see that he was as innocent as a fresh primrose. You haven't forgotten to water them, have you? That is one of your chores. And by the way, Neville, I'd like chamomile and not mint, please. Mint is a rotten, nasty thing for the sinuses."

Neville assented with a brief bob of his skull, perched on its doughy neck, and shuffled upstairs to his bedroom, golden toast flakes randomly drifting off his pajamas as his grandmother's voice plagued him inexorably.

"I think you'd see it in your soul to be a tad more gentle with them. Those poor babes of his, their mother only died...now, what was it? Five years ago. Tragic, it was marrow cancer, I believe. Galatea was such a sweet little thing. Tiny, but sweet. Why, the rest of those people are simply giants! How did they get so large?"

The dread of his impending task was beginning to form a cloudy mesh over his belly, but he continued to dress himself in short slacks, white shirt, and beige robes. He left the door ajar, as custom and gentleman cordiality imposed, and continued to listen to his grandmother's drawl.

"That man should be canonized for undertaking the task of three children! My gracious, one was certainly enough at my age. They all attend that horrid Durmstrang Academy, right, Neville? There has to be something there other than dark arts, I'm certain of it. They're just not that sort, you know? Now...Ludwig graduated just this year, correct? Sober one, isn't he. I think he was employed as a concocter of volatile brews for the Armed Force Board. So intelligent."

Lacing his sneakers with gauche fingers, Neville pecked his grandmother's creased ivory forehead and exited out the porch door, her voice trailing behind him like ripples glide after a small boat on the glassy water.

Trudging through the snarled brush of the tiny thicket that was a green facade between the two cottages, Neville anticipated the worst. These folk at regular hours was harrowing enough, but at morning meal? They must be lupine and ravenous. If he'd been younger, he would have fled for fear of being devoured.

He could only hope that a certain someone didn't open the door.

When he approached the abandoned and slightly-decrepit inn, he rapped meekly on the door, quivering greatly. Reluctantly it seemed, the door opened and a lank-haired, ashen, bespectacled stork of a young man immerged in rumpled day clothes. "Yes?" was the delicate inquiry.

"Um, hi, Ludwig. How's, um, testing drafts going?"

The question took a brief moment to calculate. "Oh, splendidly, splendidly," he shrugged off hurriedly in his monotone voice. "Is that it?"

For a second, Neville wanted to say yes. "No. Uh, Grandma wants to know if we could borrow some tea bags."

Another thin, perhaps a tad more florid and robust, face greeted him in chafing sports garb that revealed a very toned chassis. "Hallo, Neville."

"Um, hi, Midas." Well, so far so good. Midas wasn't that bad. In fact, he was quite good. Sport-devotee, but eccentrically jovial.

"You wanted tea bags," Ludwig reminded him dully. "Well, how many? Oh, no bother, I recall. She wants six for her bridge party this afternoon. I haven't forgotten. All chamomile. Wait, please." He drifted off into the dank, musty hallway and far out of sight.

Midas grinned, flashing a mouth of stained and jagged teeth that made Neville cringe and battle an impulse to cling to his gums for his life. "So, what, you're fifteen now?"

"Yeah, fifteen."

"Isn't that something. Dorrit's just turned fourteen. Still a baby, I think. Very large baby, six feet tall like the rest of us now, but still a baby. You're at least five feet, right?"

Neville felt a twinge of resentment. "Of course!"

"Ah, should've guessed. Dorrit! Come say hello to Neville."

A looming girl with artificially blonde hair and mismatched pajamas drifted into the hallway. She flushed slightly. "Hi, Neville."

"Urg, hello," he sputtered. Not only was she six feet tall, but she'd shed quite a few rolls of fat, leaving a rather lean body. She'd also abandoned her smudge spectacles, and two slightly squinty sapphire eyes greeted him quite nicely. Such a pretty thing...and she'd always been just the window down. They'd never, naturally, fraternized (Even though his own social status was nothing to flaunt, he'd always thought himself above the flabby, mole-like Dorrit.), but now? He'd be opened to a chat....

"What are you all doing standing like a gaggle of dimwits in the doorway?"

Neville gaped and nearly swooned on the tattered doormat.

Robed in a billowing black dressing gown, Severus Snape drifted into the threshold and out onto the porch where Neville was stationed. He tilted his gold specs to observe Neville better before silkily greeting, with a stifled sneer, "Oh, hello, Neville."

Neville clamored for his inhaler. God, the man was frightening at seven in the morning. If Snape was his dad, he'd probably spend all of his life running and hiding in the shed.

Snape's irregularly angular eyebrows grazed his widow's peak forehead. He swiveled about and observed his two children rather expectantly. "Where's Ludwig?"

"Father," Ludwig replied, presenting Neville rather abruptly with a scarlet, palm-sized satchel of tea bags.

"Have any of you invited Master Longbottom inside to join us at breakfast?" Snape goaded.

"No, it's okay, I already ate," Neville assured him hurriedly, backing away like a tiny mouse from a serpent. "Just getting these for Grandmum."

"Ah, yes. Do tell Cynthia that her flowers look spectacular, I always deemed them so. She's fairing well, I trust?"

"Um, yeah, she's great."

The word "yeah" seemed to make Snape shudder every time it was uttered.

Served him right for being such an uptight stuffed-shirt.

"Pleasant morn to you then, Neville."

Ludwig promptly shut the door.

Neville emitted a profound sigh of relief and tore into the woods, clasping the satchel in his tiny fingers.

Snape watched him zip off their property through the dingy windows with a trace of amusement.