Chicken Soup for the Drabbler's Soul

Chapter Two: Broken

Enjoy.

...O...

Broken. Neville Longbottom was broken. Or his spirit was. Why couldn't he just be better at everything? Why couldn't he be like his parents and be good at magic? Better yet, why couldn't he be good at something? Anything?

But he couldn't. He knew it, his teachers knew it, and above all, his grandmother knew it. She knew that he was a failure and would never amount to anything more than a bartender at some rundown pub. She had said that much.

He just didn't understand. Why couldn't he be good at something? Why couldn't he be decent enough at something to not be considered a failure? His parents were both great witches and wizards. They had been in the Order of the Phoenix, and they had fought Bellatrix. He was proud to be their son, but if they had lived to see how he had turned out, would they be proud of him? That was the only question that mattered to him.

Neville looked down at the letter in his hand, addressed to him in the bold, black penmanship of his grandmother. The letter had started off like it normally did—pestering him about his grades and leaving his stuff at home, getting gradually worse. His grandmother had told him, like she normally did, that he wouldn't amount to anything next to his parents. And then she had ranted about Charms, telling him it was a weak, pointless subject.

But Neville was good at Charms, or if not good, then he was decent. He was passable. But that didn't matter, because in the eyes of his grandmother, he was still a failure who would never amount to anything next to his parents. And he was broken because of it.

...O...

Word Count: 285. With A/N and title: 353 (going by OpenOffice word count).

A/N: This was slightly rushed. I don't think I did as well with my writing on this one, sadly. The ending is a little...bad. I'll go back and edit stuff sometime. Hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to criticize.

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-DES