Shortly after the most humiliating and gruesome experience of Michael Corner's young life, he'd lied to about twenty of the people he respected the most in the world. They'd been talking about bones, and breaking them (they were a morbid bunch) and he'd told them about how he'd broken his leg- badly enough that his tibia stuck out of his shin, mind- by falling out of a tree.
The thing was, he'd jumped. He'd tried to do a flip, even. He had been nine, and stupid, and it had worked on the Auror Erwin radio show, and he'd regretted it very quickly. But at eighteen, Michael was a Ravenclaw and had a reputation to protect, and he wasn't about to make himself into the kind of idiot who tried to do flips out of trees. So he'd lied.
Shortly after his nineteenth birthday, Michael commits perjury. He is testifying against the Carrows, and he tells the Wizengamot that he'd been caught in the dungeons unaware. This had led, obviously, to his gruesome, humiliating torture. (And the torture was the point of the testimony, and it doesn't matter that Michael's lied about how he'd gotten there.)
Neville gives him a look that means he's noticed the lie.
He tries to explain himself to Neville, two and a half years after the war, but Neville is far less willing to cut Michael slack for the lie than Michael himself is. Neville wants to know why.
It was like jumping out of that tree, right? He'd jumped on purpose, and that changes everything.
If he'd fallen out of the tree on accident, then he doesn't look like an idiot. If he'd gotten caught unawares in the dungeon, then he doesn't look like a hero, and that's the way he likes it. He's not an idiot. And he's not a hero.
"You lost me at the part where you fell out of a tree," says Neville.
"I jumped," says Michael. "That's the point."
"No matter what you tell people, it doesn't change what actually happened," says Neville. "You still know you went back."
The truth is that Michael does know he'd made that choice. He had been a hero, just for that moment. Michael knows that.
He just also knows that it was a fluke. He'd made his choice and then he'd spent the next day and the next week and the next month dearly regretting it. He wouldn't do it again, not in a million years, not for a million twelve-year-olds. And he has no intention of forgiving himself for that and he has no intention of telling Neville about it, either.
Even if he doesn't want to be a hero, he certainly doesn't want to be a coward.
Michael gives up on explaining himself satisfactorily. He throws out an excuse. "I guess it's about the press." The press loves a teenage war hero and Neville knows it too well.
"Ugh, the press," says Neville, and they drop the subject.