For The Entire World to See
Neville Longbottom + Nagini
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His wand was not a sword. It was thirteen inches long and made of cherry, which was considered to be a rather feminine material, and to complete his humiliation, its core was the tail hair of a unicorn. Was that really the essence of who he was? Was he as soft and weak as they all said? His wand was a girl's wand, slim and smooth and gleaming. It was weightless in his hands, like the baton of an orchestra's conductor. It was anything but a sword.
And yet he found that he missed its reassuring wood as he raised the Sword of Gryffindor high above his head on weak and shaking arms. Later, people would say that he had wielded it like one of King Arthur's knights, Galahad perhaps, and that it had come down in a masterful arc that lopped the beast's head off and sent it rolling to Voldemort's bare, white feet.
But the truth of the matter was that after he had raised the sword above his head, he was simply unable to control its trajectory, and instead of being directed, its silver tip had fallen as the boy's arms gave up their battle. The fact that Nagini had been in the right place was merely good fortune, a rare breed of luck that had never been on good terms with Neville Longbottom before, but was nevertheless stopping in to say hello. Nagini's head did not roll towards Voldemort; a snake's head, however large, is rather flat on the top as well as the bottom. It flopped to the marble floors of the Great Hall with a rather wet-sounding splat, and its body twitched only minutely before stilling. She was dead, and no one would have to know that his display of heroics was an accident. Or worse, a result of his own weakness.
In Indian mythology, a Nagini is a member of a race or a female deity whose body is mixture of woman's flesh and the cold coils of a serpent. In Neville's panicked state, he confused the legend with the reality of werewolves: if you kill a werewolf in the thick of its transformation, it will reset to its human form.
For a long moment, he stared at the remains of Nagini, half-expecting her to shudder and convulse into a flapping, jerking human body. What would he have done if she did? But the moment passed, and she remained a snake. The battle was won only minutes later. Several hundred people celebrated, surging around pockets of despair and friends and family mourning their losses. But the crowd pressed on, and Neville found himself supported by a myriad of hands. He rode the wave of revelers, lost amongst the sound of cheering and sobbing, until he was carried out of the blinding lights of Hogwarts and into the darkness. Before he was carried over the threshold, he twisted his head to see her, laying alone and forgotten amongst the dead.
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Time had not been kind to Neville Longbottom. While his companions had aged gracefully, the toll of teaching students had worn him down, and at age fifty-four, he felt too old for his own skin. When he first started teaching, he had been full of ideas and creativity and energy, but as the years passed by, so did the children, none of them his own. The students marched in, each generation assured of their own uniqueness and individuality. Sometimes he amused himself by picking out the Draco Malfoy of the bunch, or the over-achieving bossy child, pranksters and diplomats in the making, and occasionally, a small, stuttering child unsure of his place not just in the world but in his own boots as well.
He tried to give special treatment to those tiny Nevilles, offering to let them spend extra time in the greenhouses and attempting to show them rare and unusual fauna. But the variables had changed, and perhaps he would have been successful in his attempt to befriend them if he had been an instructor of anything else. However, the cards had been dealt for him long ago, and so he accepted his fate.
And that's exactly what it was: his fate. Some people argue that fate is the same as destiny, but it's not, and Neville understood this. He did not have any sort of grand destiny in his future; events were not set in motion for him, and there was no happy ending lurking around a dark and evil corner. His faith in his life, though, was absolute, and he took every aspect of it as a given. He belonged in this life, regardless of whether or not he enjoyed or hated it (and truly, it was neither; he was more in limbo than anything else), and being Neville Longbottom, he would accept it.
"Neville? Are you listening to me?"
He looked up from his stew. It wasn't very good, but it was what the tenants of the Leaky Cauldron were eating for dinner, and he didn't want to complain. "Yes, dear?"
Hannah gave her husband a calculating eye. "You weren't listening to a word I said, were you? Tell me what I was saying."
Neville cast about his mind, only to find nothing there. Swallowing a particularly mealy lump of potato, he cleared his throat and guessed. He felt as if he were jumping off of cliff and didn't quite know if he would fall or fly away. "Mrs. Gibbons, and uh..."
It was enough, and Hannah sniffed. "Precisely! I told her that she can't have a monkey in here. I said, 'Mrs. Gibbons, this is a classy establishment, and I don't care if your monkey can turn into an umbrella; I don't want it hanging about my dining area...'"
Her words faded out, and Neville pushed at the stew with his spoon. It was greasy, and he stared in dull fascination at the sparkling chips of oil floating on its surface like thousands of tiny jewels.
"She talks a lot, doesn't she?"
Neville looked up at Hannah. Though he didn't hear a word she was saying, her mouth was moving, and she wasn't paying attention to him. The woman beside her, though...
"What? I suppose you didn't think you'd see me again, did you?"
There was nothing to say, because this could not possibly be real. The woman, dark-skinned and shining, flashed a grin at him. Her teeth were strangely sharp, and the hairs on the back of Neville's neck stood up. He realized that the woman was naked from the waist up, covered in various tattoos and symbols, and he tried desperately not to look at her heavy, ovular breasts. Hallucination or not, he had been raised not to ogle, and the woman seemed to sense his distress.
"I'm sorry, but is my being nude an issue for you? It shouldn't be; it's what's natural. And what's natural is good for you, don't you think?" To emphasize her point, she lifted her hands to her breasts, splaying her impossibly long fingers over them. Through the gaps between her forefinger and middle finger, he could see the dark buds of her nipples.
The vision smiled. "Do you want to touch them?"
Neville nodded, and his answer seemed to be extracted from somewhere deep inside of him, gleaned from his desires and his fears. "Yes."
He felt a hand on his wrist, and suddenly, the woman was gone, and the strange, muted silence had blossomed into noise. Yes, that was what it could be described as: noise, from the clattering of tenants in their apartments to bugs scritching and scratching as they scuttled inside of the walls, wind outside the inn, and Hannah's words. The return to normalcy was harsh and grating, and he looked at his wife. "What?"
She gave him a strange look. "I asked if you were still interested in adopting a child, and you said yes, and then you just seemed to stare at me. If you're not ready-"
"Oh, no. No. That's... That's fine."
"You don't think you're too old?"
Leave it to Hannah to never infer that she is too old, even though she's a few months older than I am, he thought, and then he immediately felt ashamed for the passing judgment about his wife. When had he become so cynical?
"No. I'm not. I'm... I'm not feeling well; I'm going to go for a walk."
Hannah did not protest, and instead, she scraped the remains of his stew into the pot so that she might serve it to a tenant later.
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He didn't return until the lights illuminating Muggle London dimmed and darkened. Though daylight was still several hours away, the streetlights were retired for the night as if to say that anybody walking about London that late was asking for whatever terrors the night could bring.
Miles McKinley was sleeping, his head resting on the bar he was supposed to be tending. He was the night manager for the Leaky Cauldron, and Neville stared at the slumbering man for a moment before going upstairs. He should report it to his wife. What if somebody stole something while Miles was sleeping? But his concern was an obligatory thought, and he knew that he would never tell Hannah.
He slipped into his pajamas, taking care to fold his clothing and put his shoes beside the door. One time, he would have considered his pajamas to be perfect only for an old man. Now they just felt appropriate, and he knew that he belonged in plain cotton that had faded so much that it was an ongoing debate as to whether it was blue or gray.
Hannah was snoring, but Neville couldn't complain; he had a sneaking suspicion that he did, too. The sound of a soft rain beginning to fall outside drilled into his head with every patter and drop, and he thought that sleep would never claim him, but it did, and he sank into it willingly.
"Hi, Neville."
He opened his eyes. She was above him, and her hair hung down on either side of her head. Its ends brushed the fabric of his pillow, and it felt strangely sensual. "H-hello. Who are..."
She smiled. "You know who I am, Neville. You should remember; after all, it was you who cut off my head for the entire world to see."
"The whole world-"
"Fine, not the whole world," she said, affecting an exaggerated pout. "But my whole world. My whole world saw my bones and my blood and my head on that filthy floor. I can't believe you didn't recognize me!"
"I-I'm sorry, I-"
"You don't have to apologize, Neville. It was a long, long time ago."
Neville stared. He became uncomfortably aware that the woman was, again, naked from the waist up. "Are you... Are you real?"
The woman gave him a pitying look. "Tell me if this feels real to you."
She lowered herself towards him, placing a chaste kiss upon his mouth. When he didn't push her away, she continued to massage his lips with hers, opening them with the tip of her pink tongue. Neville found his hands migrating to the soft mounds of her breasts; his fingers brushed over the smooth skin he found there, and he began to harden underneath his shield of blankets. The kiss deepened, and his arms wrapped around the woman, pulling her to him. Dream or no dream, he wanted this mysterious creature. He saw up-close the tattoos, and saw that they were not random designs, as he had thought, but depictions of love and death and birth, columns of human fate entwined with snapping serpents and mysterious shadows rimmed with dripping teeth.
Neville placed one hand between the woman's breasts, feeling the indentation of her tattooed sternum, and he trailed his hand lower. She was not a thin woman, and his fingers traveled along the soft, swaying curve of her stomach as he reached for that sweet apex between her legs. He did not see it, but as he reached lower, the tattoos became more violent; Mary Antoinette was laying on her hip, her head somewhere underneath the woman's navel. A ship was sinking on her side; there was a bear in a trap. It would lose its foot if it tried to escape. A man was hanged; ten thousand people died along the curve of her spine, and woven throughout the gristly scene were snakes and dragons of the sea.
Neville paused. His hand was low now, uncomfortably low, and he had not yet reached what he was seeking. Her skin was... smooth. Not like it had been before, like the skin of a child, but smooth like sheets of thin metal overlapping thousands of times to present a unified fabric, like... Scales.
He attempted to break from the kiss, but the woman was unrelenting, and he felt with great horror her tongue splitting into two distinct branches. He gathered his strength, shoving her from him, and was suddenly able to see her for what she was: starting slightly below the line of her hips, her skin turned into a dark, glimmering green trunk that curved around to form a tail. He registered this in the moment it took for the woman to regain her hold on him, and he was suffocated once more under her blistering kiss. His bottom lip split, and the cold length of the woman's tail began to wrap around his midsection, squeezing and pulsing as if it were an artery stemming from the creature. He tried to scream, and found that he couldn't. The world was silent, and he longed for the harshness of the rain, of Hannah's snoring, of the bugs and the tenants and-
"Nev! What's wrong?"
He sat up in bed, feeling his face with his hands. There was no blood or bruising or wetness at all. He patted at his abdomen. His bones weren't crushed. It was as if nothing had happened. He turned his head to Hannah. "Nagini! She... She was..."
Hannah sighed, placing a hand over her heart. "Oh, you frightened me. I thought you were... Well. It was just a bad dream. Get some sleep. And don't make so much noise."
He nodded faintly, but he would not go back to sleep. He was not sure if he could. Dream or no dream, she was waiting for him, waiting to avenge her death, showing him what could have been, what should have been, and what would never be. Why had her memory decided to haunt him after all this time? Why couldn't she stay dead, stay gone?
Neville thought about the snake as the sword had fallen down. He imagined it from Nagini's perspective: the sword would be sharp and cold and sudden, and with a lurch, his head would have been severed from his neck, falling to the dirty, filthy floor, matted with other people's blood and gore. If he had been Nagini, the last thing he would have seen was his whole world looking back at him.
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A/N: Thoughts? Opinions? Is this a mid-life crisis? Is it a hallucination? Is there really some vengeful spirit of Nagini trying to exact revenge on him? Why was he so bothered by the snake's death? Is she real? I'd love to know what y'all think.