Neville Longbottom did not believe in prophecy.
He did, however, believe that in acting on their fears, people created the very conditions which they were afraid of.
He reflected on this as he held his father's ash wand in their transfiguration final in their third year exam, twisting it between his fingers and watching it spin back and forth as he waited for his turn to change a turtle into a lampshade.
“That boy won't turn out right,” he remembered the whispered hiss of his Aunt's words, having dragged his grandmother into a side hall to badger her about his lack of magic, “you ought to be prepared to have a Squib.”
He watched Hermione next to him change her turtle into a perfect glass pannelled green light shade, saw her hold her lips in her teeth as Professor McGonagall picked up her shade and turned it around. To others Minerva McGonagall may have looked impassive, stern; but Neville had grown up under the tutelage of his indomitable grandmother and knew how to read the upturn in the professor's eyes as the faint smile of pride.
He closed his eyes and took a breath as the professor came to stand in front of him.
“Mr. Longbottom,” Professor McGonagall said, her tone even, “it is your turn. You have two minutes beginning now.”
She set a plain hourglass next to him, the click of the glass setting on the table beside him Neville's cue to open his eyes.
There was a rock in his gut, a resigned knowing as he lifted the ash wand.
He said the spell, waved his wand.
The turtle grew into a misshapen bowl in front of them, its eyes staring balefully at Neville.
McGonagall flicked her wand and put the poor thing out of its misery, changing it quickly back to itself. The turtle ducked its head into its shell.
“Again,” McGonagall said brusquely. Perhaps she thought it was a mercy to remind him that the sand in the hourglass had not yet reached its last grain.
Neville swallowed a sigh and raised his wand again. He did not need to be a prophet to know the second try would go no better than the first.
After, he stood in the hallway waiting for the other Gryffindors to join him for the long walk back up to the towers.
Hermione joined him first, wringing her hands.
“Oh God,” she moaned, her face white. “I meant to turn my lampshade a pale yellow, not a green. And my shade had black and yellow spots on it because I had been thinking about how pretty its eyes were. Do you think Professor McGonagall noticed? Do you think she'll deduct marks for it?”
Neville shook his head. If he could squeak by with a pass he would consider himself lucky, and he knew what his summer had in store for him: endless sessions with bored tutors, revising fruitlessly in the stuffy sitting room at the manor until he could escape in the evenings to hide in the comfort of the growing things in the greenhouses.
He felt wrung out, ashamed and haunted by his failures and all he wanted to do was snap at Hermione's incessant worrying.
But long ago, listening to the whispers accumulating in the hallways, his Uncle deciding to end the debate for all and haul him up to a top story window of the manor to dangle Neville out above the long drop to the ground by his ankle, ready to see for himself whether or not the Longbottom heir would be allowed to live, Neville had made a choice; if he could not be great, he would be kind.
His Uncle had dropped him, despite all of Neville's pleas.
When Neville hit the ground instead of crashing to his death, he bounced.
And so he turned towards Hermione on this day and swallowed his irritation, putting kindness on his tongue instead.
“I think you did well, Hermione,” he reassured her, his voice quiet. “I hope you know you're one of the smartest witches in our year.”
But Hermione didn’t seem to hear what he had said. She clutched onto his arm, her grip suddenly as strong as a dragon's.
“Ooh, Neville,” she moaned, watching as Harry slipped out the classroom door, looking pale. “There’s Harry, oh I wonder how he did.”
She tore away from Neville, sprinting across the hallway to commiserate with her friend. The two of them huddled around each other, their bodies a tight shield against the world, their faces close to each other, whispering.
Neville shifted from one foot from another, wondering if he should join them. But then Dean came out and found Seamus, and the two of them sped towards the common room together before Neville had a chance to say hello. Ron followed him soon after, and the trio marched off together, whispering to one another. Neville was left alone, awkwardly pushing his book bag further onto his shoulder.
He let out a breath of air, turned away from the emptying transfiguration classroom and made the lonely walk up to the towers by himself.
And so it went for Neville, that mantra he reminded himself of, chanting it again in the solitude of his mind when Umbridge took the school by force, when he watched the prejudice against Muggle borns rise.
“I can choose to be kind,” he reminded himself when he invited Ginny to the Yule Ball dance in fourth year, thinking about how haunted she had looked the entire year previous and wanting to give her a better experience. “I can choose to be kind,” he reminded himself, bringing Lavender a box of tissues as she scrubbed her eyes over Ron in 6th year, or walking along the shore of the Black Lake with a thin and haunted looking Luna.
His kindness took on the hard sword's edge of defiance in his seventh year. He wouldn’t let the Carrows get away with spouting their propaganda against Muggles in their classes. He knew some thought him insane to stand up to them, given the beatings he suffered, but he knew that silence would be more dangerous and insidious an enemy to his Muggle born friends than any beating the Carrows could give him.
He noticed sometime near Halloween that year how the staircases always seemed to turn just the right way to take him away from the Carrows bloody path. He began to trust it when the classrooms disappeared without explanation for him; that if he kept walking down the hallway he would find some terrified younger year student who needed his wand to protect them from leering bullies or free them from the monstrous detentions the Carrows enforced.
After the Christmas break, Neville returned to school and found Luna was missing. He and Ginny caught each other's eyes across the too empty tables of the dining hall, the unoccupied chairs all speaking of students whose fates were unknown; fled, murdered, or held in some type of horrible prison sentence for the crime of being born.
The Carrows kept trying to banish the extra chairs, to ignore those lives missing from their school. But every morning, Hogwarts would return them, the vacant spaces at the tables stubbornly refusing to narrow.
Ginny and Neville's resolution hardened. He wasn’t doing any of his homework, and never had he dreamed that his professors would merely ignore his consistent absences; but he had a rebellion to run. He accompanied vulnerable half Bloods or children from families who had dared to defy Voldemort to and from all their classes, he taught clandestine defense classes with Ginny, he ran an underground student newspaper that screamed the truth of the Death Eater’s depravities from where he fixed them to the walls with a permanent sticking charm. He refused to allow the injustices to pass by silently and unprotested.
The children of the school would know the truth of the blood and atrocities that lie just underneath the splendour of the Pureblood supremacist's fine clothes and manners. If he had to make himself into the thorn that pricked them, the blood pouring true and screaming its own testimony; well, so be it. He would pay the price if he had to.
By April he began to think that the Carrows might actually kill him. He retreated to the Room of Requirement, which he had been tending all year. Other students could get it to grow, but Neville seemed to have a knack of getting exactly the shape it needed to take for the exhausted students who hid there.
When Harry returned and Voldemort came, it was no question to Neville that he would stay by his side to fight. This conviction stayed with him, unwavering, even as he saw Harry carried, limp, in Hagrid's arms. His entire year he had defied Death Eater’s who could order him killed at any time. He saw no reason to change this with Harry’s death. And so when Voldemort chose to mock him, Neville chopped off Nagini's head.
And Harry woke up.
Together, the school fought again to vanquish its terrible foe.
When it was all over, the Death Eaters dead, surrendered or fled, Neville supposed he should feel triumphant.
Instead, looking at the bodies on the ground around him, he just felt tired.
He thought the exhaustion might fade, but he found in the months that came that its weight was his most constant friend, so reliable it became unwelcome. He wondered sometimes, in the glare of the midday sun, if it would ever leave him.
Years passed, and Neville began to slowly grow out the day terrors and nightmares that the war had branded into the depths of his innermost being. New growth pushed up past those old burnt roots and Neville became a shape that could fit into his surroundings again without the looming terror that someone would come to prune him back into something that fit their small and mean view of what the world should look like.
He returned to Hogwarts and he coaxed growth out of even the stubbornest of plants in his job as Herbology professor. The things he tended grew wild and uninhibited around him, children and plants alike, sprawling out into the world with joyful abandon. He tracked mud everywhere he went through the school, but it disappeared as soon as he noticed it.
Hogwarts liked him. Even the walls of Hogwarts seemed to stretch out to touch him when he walked by, his fellow professors told him. He hadn’t had to worry about trick stairs or moving staircases for years; they seemed to always rotate to the right spot for him.
When the Sorting Hat found its way back on his head one year when he and the professors were considering how to best coax the castle to grow a new wing in the Ravenclaw tower, he thought he heard a laughing whisper say “just ask the one Hogwarts has chosen to make the request.”
The professors, for some reason, seemed to think this meant him.
So he put his hands on the bare rock of the lodestone of the castle and did what he only thought was honourable, kind, and just. He asked the Castle to grow for them.
No one seemed surprised when by morning, a new spire gleamed in the light of the breaking dawn.
Neville did not believe in prophecy.
But he did believe that people, through their choices, could forge a destiny stronger than the most unbreakable chains, or sweet as the rising dew in the freshest of mornings.