28 January 1992
On yet another Tuesday, Professor Sprout made lunch arrangements for 5 and set up her office accordingly. The matched four came in, but compared to the previous two weeks, they almost seemed to be excited.
Once they had all settled down, she called on Neville to talk about family. She had assigned the themes randomly and had considered changing a couple of them, especially Neville's, but had decided against it.
"My name is Neville, although you all probably know that as we have all got to know each other a bit..." He mumbled awkwardly before looking down at his shoes, gathering himself and continuing, "I live with my Gran and have done so since my parents became...incapacitated."
Ah. There it was. Neville was still looking at his shoes, so Professor Sprout took a moment to look around the room and judge what the other children's reactions were like. She was pleased to see that they all looked understanding. She only hoped that none of them would ask any awkward questions.
"Gran has always been very kind to me and spends quite a lot of her time trying to make sure that I continue on their legacy." He patted his pocket. For a moment Professor Sprout tried to see exactly what it was he had in his pocket. An heirloom of some sort? It probably didn't matter. "They were aurors, and I can't see myself following in their footsteps in that way, but hopefully, someday, I will be able to convince Gran that there are other ways to make an impact."
"What does she think about your interest in herbology?" Addie asked.
"I don't think she thinks of it as a viable career option, but I should be able to study it as long as I want as my dad was good at herbology."
"Frank always did have an eye for what a plant needed to develop." A trait that he surely didn't get from Augusta, who Professor Sprout remembered from her youth as having been prickly, even back then.
"Yes, his carnivorous plants are still at home in the green house. We give them a full steak dinner fortnightly." He looked at her for approval. She nodded. Sometimes she found it difficult to understand students who had greenhouses at home. Most of them were not nearly as interested in them as she would have been if her parents had had room for one. However, an undetectable expansion charm to create a greenhouse in her childhood flat would have finished the entire building off. At least there were people like Neville, who had enough enthusiasm to make up for even the least enthusiastic library dweller.
Sensing that the family subject had been exhausted for Neville, which was fair enough considering that his was more complicated than the average, she had a proposal for what to do next.
"As we have all had our soup and sandwiches in admirable time, we should go out to greenhouse 4 where I think Neville could explain some of the specimens."
Neville's face lit up.
Professor Sprout guided her ducklings out of her office and down the stairs to the greenhouses. All the way, they all asked Neville questions.
"Is your greenhouse at home like the greenhouses here?" Addy asked.
"Bigger, I presume." Professor Sprout called over her shoulder.
"I suppose it is." Neville admitted abashedly.
"Must be massive then. My aunt and uncle have one at home, and it's basically a plastic tent for the sweet peas."
Professor Sprout couldn't believe what she had just heard. "Barbaric." She muttered under her breath.
"Like for camping?" Cho wondered. Professor Sprout imagined that she was probably thinking of wizarding tents with their gizmos and built in plumbing.
"It's about the size of a toilet cubicle and is held up with a metal frame. They've probably replaced it since I left in September though, as Dudley – that's my cousin – got upset and put his tortoise through the roof."
"Oh, like a marquee," Adrian said. "My grandparents had something like it for their hundredth anniversary."
That wasn't exactly what Professor Sprout would have focused on. She hoped that the poor tortoise was alright.
"Hundredth?"
"Oh, I forget that muggles live for such a short time, Adelaide. It is considered to be a tragedy if someone does not make their 150th year."
"So long? Do wizards get ill? Surely there have been pandemics and the like? The 1910s and 1920s were rife with it."
"Oh no. Illnesses are not quite such a problem with magic." Professor Sprout gave him a stern look. "And plants of course," he added.
"My Great Grandmother on my mother's side who lives in Bavaria is 160 and still powers her own wards." Neville said just as they came up to the greenhouse. "She's even scarier than my Gran."
The main thing that Professor Sprout liked about this group was their willingness to listen to each other. They all seemed to have narrow interests to the same degree, but were perfectly willing to listen to the others about their particular subject. She had seen it with Cho and astronomy, and Adrian and Quidditch, and now she was seeing it with Neville and herbology. At any given time, they seemed to need a moment to process socialisation. However, if you got them talking about their interests, they would talk your ear off and not seem to realise that they were doing so. Time seemed to fly and she always needed to remind them of the bell at the end of lunch. This was the main reason that she had decided to design the weeks in this way. Her original plan had involved each of them talking about a subject, one at a time, every week. However, when she had realised that Adelaide Potter was going to be joining their number, she had been reminded of another young person who had endless energy to talk about subjects that had interested them. Seemingly, everyone she had selected fitted into this group.
Neville left the group feeling energised from talking about herbology. He had had a difficult morning of classes, and this had been just what he needed. As he walked along, he pondered the group he had been drafted into. He knew that they were an odd bunch, and they were all so different yet...so similar. Where he had expected censure for being so interested in herbology to an extent beyond the accepted, he had received encouragement. They all understood what it felt like to be judged for their interests, and had not begrudged him his.
Turning the corner on his way to his next class, he found himself faced with...them. A group of people he knew that he could not speak against because of one of their members. When he had first met Harry Potter on the train, he had not expected him to be so conflicting, and he had not expected that he would join Ron Weasley, who had never liked Neville, in playfully teasing him at almost every opportunity. He had expected someone strong and willing to make friends outside the status quo, but other than the time that he had reassured Neville by telling him that he was worth ten of Malfoy, which had of course given Neville a boost to his confidence, they barely talked. He wasn't sure if he had imagined Harry quickly attaching himself to Ron when he had attempted to pair up with him in class. The golden trio were generally considered to be fairly nice, but Neville was not able to say that he considered them to be his friends, and he was able to say for certain that they did not feel dissimilarly to him.
"Alright Longbottom?" That was Ron. It had been unfortunate that Neville was ahead of Weasley as well as both Potters in sorting. If he had been after, he would have gone to Hufflepuff. Potter by himself was nice enough. He asked people how their day had been, he offered to help them carry their books if they had a pile of them. Weasley however, sometimes seemed to be…antagonistic? Neville couldn't imagine why. He had a lovely family and had everything he needed to succeed. Perhaps it was having siblings? He seemed...embarrassed by his family. He seemed disgusted with his hand me down robes. Neville supposed that was what made him gravitate towards Harry: an orphan who had money and seemed to hate his sister. Neville had no idea why that had happened. Adelaide Potter was, by all accounts, a very lovely girl. She was a bit awkward and sometimes put her foot in it socially, but she was kind and courteous and always tried her best. He was aware of what people said about her. Potter is the boy who lived, what must his sister have done to upset him?
Neville was used to dealing with Them. "Alright Weasley."
"Off hanging out with Professor Sprout?" Weasley said jokingly.
The lunch club didn't often talk outside of lunch club, and the one time they had, it had been to make a deal that they didn't talk about lunch club. They were not ashamed of being part of it, but were all aware that people would never let them be if they knew that they had so few friends that they needed to spend Tuesday lunchtimes with Professor Sprout.
"She wanted my help with a new plant she just got. Sometimes two hands aren't enough to deal with plants."
"Loser Longbottom has no friends so hangs out with teachers instead."
Neville didn't know what to say to that as what he had just said was technically accurate. He did have no friends. This had been a recurring theme throughout the times they had met during childhood. Ron would make fun of him so he would go and hide somewhere. The hiding place would already probably have one Ginny Weasley in residence. He and Ginny would then play 'I spy' and rock paper scissors and trade chocolate frog cards, before he would go home. For a long time, he had chosen to simply not engage with what Ron Weasley said or did, thinking that he was mean, but if Harry and Hermione, who were generally nice and simply didn't want to be around him as he was weird liked Ron, then then perhaps he wasn't so bad.
Hermione Granger, who he hadn't exchanged a single word with in ages, chose that moment to join them.
"Why don't you and I spend time together anymore?" she asked.
Neville knew exactly why they didn't hang out anymore. Perhaps it was due to the way that they had met, that being when he had lost Trevor on the train, and following that, the reason they had spent so much time together was easy to explain: loneliness. Since the troll incident, she had been working hard to into within the house, while Neville, who wasn't a savvy as she was, simply didn't fit into the friend group she was in. She was, to put it simply, 'one of the boys' and thought that other girls were shallow and didn't read books. He had heard her talking about Lavender Brown from her dorm and how her focus on accessories proved that she was stupid. Neville couldn't see the correlation. Neville, on the other hand, was not one of the boys, and was quite alright with that. They sometimes didn't object to him tagging along, so there was someone to explain things to, but this was not always the case.
Hermione, for her part, didn't take her role as only girl in the group lightly. She stood up for what she believed in far more stringently than Harry ever did, but also managed to be slightly more accepting of your average socially awkward nerd. There was one socially awkward nerd, however, that Hermione did not like, and Neville preferred said socially awkward nerd to Hermione, so preferred to not have to listen to her insulting her. Nothing ever seemed to be good enough for Hermione. First of all Addie's handwriting reminded Hermione of her little cousin who was six and had just been diagnosed with dyslexia. Secondly, after a solution had been found for this inconvenience to both Addie and the teachers who had been struggling to mark her essays, Hermione had complained that using her 'typewriter' during class was breaking the rules, and dragged her to Professor McGonagall. Professor McGonagall, who had been one of the interested parties who had admitted that they were unable to read Addie's handwriting had said that Addie had reasonable adjustments. By the sigh in her voice, this was clearly a relief to her.
"I've just been busy," he decided to say, instead of anything else that he might have wanted to. "You've been busy hanging out with Potter and Weasley anyway. You don't have time for me."
Like Weasley had said, he had no friends. Even Granger who everyone had kept at arm's length before Halloween had been rehabilitated in the eyes of Gryffindor as being some who one could be friends with. He was incompetent, and was only on the very edge of their social circle. He had no chance, and everyone was fully aware of that.
I'm home safe and have been writing more than ever. Good Omens came out on Friday (highly recommended), so I wrote a two chapter story for that. As a result of Good Omens I am also sort of grieving slightly, but don't mind me.