Author's note: Enjoy!
Disclaimer: The following characters belong to J.K. Rowling, and this story derives from her original works, storylines, and world. Please do not sue me, I can barely pay tuition.
Warnings: Canon-compliant violence and unpleasantness (DH)
Even Better Than The Icing
Neville had many reasons to look forward to Hannah's visits in the Room of Requirement. Many, many reasons. Hannah was, after all, the gift that just kept giving but recently she was also his only real company. The Order had somehow managed to raze the Riddle House that You-Know-Who had been using as one of his bases, so the Carrows were especially ferocious and unpleasant to be around. The rest of the DA had begged Neville to keep quiet and hidden; now would be an especially bad time for him to get caught during one of his midnight raids across the castle. He hated it, frankly, but Hannah's eyes had gotten big and wide like a doe's on the last time that he'd mentioned going out. Her eyebrows had furrowed with worry and she'd even started tearing up—so what was he to do other than say yes to whatever he could possibly do to make her feel better? He wasn't anywhere near as strong to resist her like that.
For the last week or so, he had been waking up whenever he happened to. It was hard to gauge the passage of time in the Room of Requirement, since it had no windows, so he always woke up confused and dazed and disoriented until he managed to find his watch. Maybe if Neville asked, the room would give him some windows, but he had a sneaking suspicion that that would only make this isolation worse.
He would eventually pick at the rations he had for breakfast, usually bread with peanut butter and apples since those things were all non-perishable and they could stock up with Aberforth all at once. Then he lounged around the room, trying to read the Herbology textbooks Ginny had brought him so he didn't go mad and stir crazy. Usually by the end of the day he felt the cabin fever coming on anyways. His legs would bounce up and down as he ate cold beans or creamed corn or soup out of a can, and anxiety took over and sent him into various panics about how the DA (and, frankly, the entire student body and the Wizarding World as a whole) were doing.
He usually calmed down soon after, as various DA members took turns sneaking out to visit him and update him, usually someone from every house so they could properly strategize, get a lay of the whole castle, and disseminate information most effectively amongst the students. Daphne Greengrass and Ernie MacMillan were usually the first and most on time to arrive, since their houses were under the least surveillance. Ginny and Seamus took turns sneaking in from Gryffindor, and Cho had taken over for Luna since she'd disappeared over Christmas—another source of constant anxiety, if there weren't enough. Sometimes they snuck over during their free periods, since they were all seventh years, sometimes they came during dinner, or sometimes they came after hours. It depended on what fresh hell Hogwarts was being flooded with on any given day.
And then, when the work was done for the day, Hannah would come. Sometimes they had only been able to barter with Peeves to cover her run from the Hufflepuff Common Room for fifteen minutes, sometimes she could stay for hours. But it was always the highlight of his day, no matter how long she had to spend with him and no matter what state she showed up in—still prim and proper in her school robes, bundled up in her pajamas with her hair in a nest-like bun, dressed in her favourite and most comfortable clothes, wearing the plaid skirt she looked so nice in… there was never a time or a way for her to show up without Neville being infinitely happy to see her. Unless she had gotten hurt in that pathetic excuse of a class that passed for Defense Against the Dark Arts. She had turned up with a black eye so inflamed once that Neville's mouth had tasted bitter and poisonous for almost a week.
Today she came in with her hair in its usual crown braid, her smile so broad that it crinkled and displaced all the freckles on her face that he now recognized like constellations. She was wearing the skirt he liked and a black blouse buttoned up neatly.
"Hey!" Neville said, happy to discard the copy of The Daily Prophet that he had been staring at without absorbing a single word as soon as the passage door opened. "Hey, love, how are you?"
"I'm amazing!" she said, climbing into the Room of Requirement carefully but clumsily since she was balancing something rather big and broad in her arms.
"What have you got there?" Neville asked. Hannah's smile was on the infectious side and he was well aware that he was smiling too.
"Guess!" she said.
"I… I don't know," Neville admitted. She balanced her load even more carefully in one arm and then puddle the dish towel covering up her treasure with her free hand. A tower of cupcakes on a silver platter came into view.
"Happy birthday!" she said.
Neville's jaw dropped.
"It's… it's my birthday?" he asked. He scrambled for that copy of the paper he'd discarded and looked at the date on the top. Merlin, she was right. Being in hiding had definitely destroyed his sense of time… not to mention that they'd had so much more important things to worry about recently—although Hannah's following tirade seemed to indicate that she disagreed with that.
"It is!" she said, somehow managing to beam even more without permanently injuring the muscles in her cheeks. "I almost reminded you yesterday, but then I thought wait a minute, that will only make the surprise even better—so here we are!"
She held out the platter of cupcakes in his direction and he examined them more closely. She had used green icing to decorate the cupcakes as succulents, topping small piles of icing with little pink flowers or carefully creating interlacing leaves.
"When did you make all this?" Neville asked, stunned at the detail and precision she'd managed to achieve with buttercream alone. "You didn't even have your free period today."
"I skipped Muggle Studies," Hannah said with a shrug. She had a hard time sitting still and listening to all the terrible things that Alecto Carrow said in that class, so she did this quite often. "I asked Kreacher—you know, that house elf who told us that he was at our service because he was Harry Potter's friend? Well, I asked Kreacher for help and he baked the cupcakes and got me everything I needed for the icing. There's a chance there were more cupcakes before but a few didn't make it out of the Common Room. Don't worry I kept all the nicest-looking ones for you, of course!"
She said it all in one breath, so obviously proud of her handiwork and excited to have something to give him. Neville honestly didn't know what to do with all the fondness and thankfulness in his heart. That wasn't exactly new, as far as Hannah was concerned though.
"Do you like them?" Hannah asked excitedly as she looked over his face, trying to gauge his reaction.
"I love them so much," Neville said, trying to match his smile although he didn't think anybody in the world possibly could.
"They're vanilla but we put a strawberry compote inside—turns out, Kreacher's really good at this stuff," Hannah rambled on. "And then there's all kinds of different icings. I made chocolate, lemon, and mint."
"You really went all out," he said.
"I really did," she said with a smile.
"Will you have one with me?" Neville asked.
"Of course!" she said.
So they sat in the hammock he'd been sleeping in and she rested her feet on his lap and they took bites of each other's cupcakes and laughed at each other when they got icing all over their faces. Neville was both pleasantly full and high on sugar by the time they'd sampled one of each cupcake.
"Was this a good birthday?" Hannah asked as she licked lemon icing off her fingers. "I know that it wasn't the best celebration, but it… well, it seemed better than nothing."
"It was the best," Neville said, reaching out a hand. She took it and he pulled her up. She readjusted her legs so that she could lean into him, which was his favourite part of being with her. It made him happy for all the soft and chubby parts of him that she could snuggle into and lean on.
He kissed the top of her head, flyaways from her braid tickling his nose.
"And you know what my favourite part was?" he asked.
"What?"
"Seeing you," he said plainly.
"Oh, stop."
"I'm serious," Neville said.
"I come every day," Hannah protested.
"Fine, I'll be more specific," Neville said. "This is the most bubbly and most excited I've seen you since the start of the war. It felt like I got to see you and be with you without a war in the background. And that was even better than those cupcakes, which should tell you a lot since those were absolutely heavenly."
Hannah smiled and nestled into him some more.
"I'm happy when I'm with you," she said plainly. "Celebrating you makes me even happier."
And Neville wasn't sure who he had to thank for that gift, but he did decide that it was absolutely the best one.
WC: 1584
