She followed him from the fire side. He was stooped over just inside the tent stowing away his notebooks and field notes.
"You better tell them," she said. "It'd be kinder, you know. Eventually someone else will and by then they'll have only made bigger fools of themselves."
He straitened up and joined her outside. The light of their wands were just bright enough for her to make out his face.
"They didn't really make fools of themselves," Neville responded. "What they said made sense if you didn't know what the battle was like."
He frowned. She thought he looked embarrassed. She imagined that he was trying to decide if he should have kept completely quiet or if he should have stood up and declared himself the hero-snake-killer in front of everyone.
"Don't feel bad for them. They're always nattering on about things they don't understand," she said. She hadn't recognized him from the newspaper pictures. That made sense, it had been three years. He looked different now. His hair was short and he no longer looked like someone had just beaten him.
He had scars on his face. She wondered if he had gotten them in the battle. She supposed he had.
"Why did you kill the snake instead of Voldemort?" she asked. Then as she spoke she remembered the Hor- thing, the piece of the soul that kept Voldemort from dying. It was in the snake.
He answered her as if he knew what she was thinking. "I didn't know about the Horcrux then. It really was like I said at the fire. Harry asked me to do it. I didn't know why. I just did what Harry said."
He sounded tired. She guessed that he had had this conversation before, probably many times.
"Someone asks you to do something and you just do it?" she asked.
He smiled. He grinned. She realized that he thought she was funny.
"Oh, I think Harry wished I would just do what I was told more often," Neville said. "Of course I did what Harry asked; he'd fought Voldemort already more than once. If he didn't know what needed to be done, no one did."
It was odd hearing someone talk of Harry Potter in such a familiar and natural way.
Neville was serious again. "You don't understand what it was like," he said. "None of us had talked to Harry for a year. When he returned to Hogwarts and the battle began, we barely had time to muster ourselves before Voldemort attacked."
He looked at her for a moment, took a deep breathe and began again: "When he told me about the snake, we were losing. Voldemort gave us an hour to gather the dead and wounded and that was almost over. There was no time to ask questions."
He spoke slowly carefully like the words were hard to say. He wasn't describing a great adventure, but a war in which he saw people -- maybe friends – die.
"As if in the middle of a battle I needed an explanation from Harry Potter before I did what he asked," Neville said.