"I cannot believe this is happening."
Neville Longbottom looks at his friends, who are lined up side by side behind the rusty bars and staring gratefully at him. Beside him, Harry Potter stands with his arms crossed, looking mightily pleased with himself.
Neville and Harry are standing outside a cell. A prison cell. Staring into the faces of their three friends who were taken in by the Muggle police for public violence.
"Okay, but I wasn't involved this time. Me, no trouble. Trouble free. I can't believe that's happening," Harry comments, sounding gleeful.
"Right on, mate!" Ron Weasley exclaims loudly from behind bars, and Seamus Finnigan and Dean Thomas let out an entirely too raucous cheer. Neville's face flattens into something displeased.
"Don't gloat," he mutters to Harry in annoyance, then raises his voice to get his intoxicated friends to hear him. "Shut up, you lot. How in Merlin's name did this happen?"
"Welp. There's a story, you see." Seamus clutches the bars of their holding cell and does a little swing against it, getting a giggle out of Dean. Shooting Neville a too-wide grin, Seamus adds, "A story, I tell you."
Neville waits for the story.
He gets nothing.
"I think you overshot the whiskey there, pal," Harry straight up tells him, and it garners a startling seriousness from Seamus that has Neville convinced that the drunkenness was an act for all of two seconds before he opens his mouth.
"The Muggles… make weapons, man."
Ron nods emphatically at this statement, and Neville wishes he knew what Ron got from it, because he understood nothing.
"Come again?"
"Their drinks!" Ron elaborates for them with overly loud, nasal-pitched horror. "We started off with beers—not Seamus, he wanted whiskey—and they tasted bloody awful, you know, like a hippogriff's stale piss, nothing like butterbeer. So we switched to whiskey like Seamus 'cause he said the whiskey had no buzz but at least it wouldn't taste like stale hippogriff piss, right, and Sea'us was right and the whiskey was 'bout as strong as butterbeer, but it didn't taste like hippogriff piss so 'twas okay, so we told the bloke at the bar to keep it coming, and we musta had like seven rounds—"
"Wait, you had seven shots of whiskey?" Harry asks, shocked. Neville's own eyes widen, and a flicker of worry bubbles up within his chest.
"Tell me it's not as bad with Muggle whiskey," he whispers to Harry urgently, ignoring Ron's continued rambling. "That many with firewhiskey would be disastrous."
"It's not like with firewhiskey," Harry assures in response, his voice just as low. "They're drunk off their rockers right now, but that should be about it. Gonna have terrible hangovers in the morning, though."
"… So I just had five shots," Dean is mumbling when Neville tunes back into the one-sided conversation on the other side of the bars, and he turns to find Seamus patting Dean's back and Ron sporting an expression between childish discontent and abject disappointment.
"Not your fault you're a lightweight, mate," Seamus commiserates, the back patting turning into back thumping.
Ron glances to the left at his words, and then right back at Neville. "You weren't listening to me!" he exclaims when he finds Neville's eyes on him, and instantly picks back up where he left off. "So like I was saying, we had 'bout seven shots and we were feeling pretty good 'bout it, aight, and then the hard stuff just hits us, just like that, and I nearly fall right outta the fucking booth. Muggle stuff hits hard, oh Merlin. So hard. Like a bloody Knight Bus to the face, mate, you'da keeled right over."
Neville blinks, sifting through Ron's barrage of words to understand what he's trying to say. "And the fight?" he asks when he's all caught up.
"Oh, buncha jackasses tryna gang up on this tiny squirt of a bloke," Seamus answers, back to using the bars as a dancing pole. "You woulda hated 'em, Harry, they're just the kinda people you'd have wanted t'punch."
"Well, I don't disagree," Harry says, thinking, and Neville glares at him to shut up. Merlin, when did Neville have to be the one in the group to get the rest into order?
"Where were you two, anyway?" Dean asks them suddenly, his eyes turning sharp. "We thought you'd be back by our third round."
Harry's hand instantly comes up to point at Neville. "Blame him. No, really."
Neville rolls his eyes, but he's quite sure that the heat creeping up his cheeks will give him away. To Dean and Harry, anyway. The other two are too hammered to notice anything. "I… may have dragged Harry throughout the shop and lost track of time?"
It hadn't taken more than ten minutes seated in their private booth at the Muggle bar for Neville to burst out of his skin and beg Harry to take him to the large flower shop he had spotted across the street. It wasn't often that they took trips to Muggle London, and even less common that Neville has spotted a plant shop in the areas they frequent when they do go out on the town. This was actually the first time he's seen a Muggle flower shop that was still open at their late hour, and he had been too eager to seize the opportunity to let it go.
"Gave me a lecture about every single flower he recognised," Harry tells the others with an indulgent glance at him, "and boy, does he know a lot of them."
"And clearly that was a mistake," Neville interrupts, trying to save face, "because the minute we left you on your own, you got into trouble!"
"I'm more thrilled that I wasn't the one to get us all into trouble, actually," Harry points out, grinning. "Who'd have thunk it, eh? I think it's brilliant."
"Oh mate, that's right!" Ron exclaims with a wide smile, "This is your first time, innit? Congrat-rat-a-tat-ulations!" This is followed up with cheers by both Seamus at Dean. Neville closes his eyes and shakes his head, and thinks fondly of the pleasant night he was having right up till they turned around in the flower shop and found their three friends being hauled away by the Muggle cops through the glass door.
"Oi! Pipe down in there and let us die in peace, ya squirrell-headed freaks!" a questionably dressed man yells angrily at them from the next cell over. Another man, sprawled beside him, looks already halfway to hungover. He throws his head into his hands when the first man yells.
"Dying on the inside," the man mumbles sadly, sounding absolutely inconsolable. Neville's eyes latch onto the bright aqua-coloured wristband hugging his wrist, looking very much at odds with the depressed air about him.
"We're very sorry, mister," Harry calls out apologetically to the man with the wristband, then turns with more aggression to the first. "I'm not gonna apologise to you because you don't deserve it. Why'd you have to yell like that? No need to be so rude."
"Now listen here, boy," the man starts, and the second man sharing his cell immediately whimpers.
"Look at that, you're giving the poor bloke a headache!" Harry interrupts him, levelling him with an annoyed glare. Neville is getting a headache just imagining the potential chaos Harry could cause here. In a Muggle police station, of all things.
The man puffs up at the reprimand, making to speak, but Harry cuts him off yet again. "If you're going to insult us more, I suggest you shut up." The man looks positively insulted. "Don't you start flaring your nostrils at me!" Harry continues at the look on his face. "In public!"
Seamus sneezes loudly, and sneezes again. And again. And a fourth time. They sound like whip cracks in the tense atmosphere.
Neville shares a look at Ron, realises that the redhead is too drunk to do more than cheer Harry on, and commiserates with Dean instead. Dean nudges his chin in Harry's direction, silently telling Neville to get him to stop.
Sighing, Neville steps forward. "Hey, Harry, cool it," he whispers into his fellow Gryffindor's ear. "You're aiming for a trouble-free Harry night, remember? Don't forget where we are."
Harry freezes as he considers Neville's words, then frowns as he realises that Neville is right. "Fine," he huffs, crossing his arms, then abruptly turns to face away from the other cell and stares at Ron instead, whistling to himself. Ron cocks his head, straightens it again, and starts to whistle back casually.
The man who shouted at them looks crestfallen at being denied a fight. Everyone else stays utterly silent until he ambles to the back of his cell, the whistling sounding louder than it is in their silent standoff.
When the man is gone from sight, Harry stops whistling and leans around Neville. "Mr Policeman, sir!" he calls along the bleak hallway, and after a minute, a head pokes around the corner. "I'm sorry, but weren't you supposed to be getting the keys?" The head nods. "Can we hurry this up? I've got nowhere else to be, but I don't want to be here either."
"Just a moment, sir," a strident voice calls, and the head disappears.
Looking around, Neville decides that he doesn't want to be here either. While Muggle prison may not be as gloomy and depressing as Azkaban most certainly is, it doesn't much give him the fuzzies. There's an air about the whole place that reminds Neville distinctly of the bleakest shade of grey-purple he knows—it's the colour of his grandmother Augusta's favourite vulture hat, and the memories associated with that hat causes him to get the chills at the mere idea of the colour. He wants out of here, and he wants out quickly.
"As nice as it is to not be the one getting into trouble for once, it's actually quite boring," Harry comments in the ensuing silence. "Next time, one of you can give Neville the grand tour. I'd rather be in on the fight."
"I'd rather we do not repeat this experience at all, myself," Neville says a little faintly.
Harry gives him a lopsided grin. "What's life without a bit of drama, eh? Gives you quite the rush, I find. We're Gryffindors, Nev. Embrace it." Ron punches the air silently, his head now drooping in exhaustion.
Neville rolls his eyes. "I'm never going out with any of you ever again."
"Aww, mate, you love us," Seamus counters, smiling maniacally.
"And you can't say no to these idiots, no more than I can," Dean adds with a fond look around at the rest of them. "We're both going to get dragged on their next adventure whether we like it or not."
Footsteps echo down the hallway, and a jangle of keys. Relieved, Neville relaxes, knowing that they'll be getting out of here soon.
"Oi, mates?" Ron suddenly says blearily, lifting his head off the bars. "Don't tell Mione about anything that happened, eh?" Seamus snorts, and Dean shakes his head.
Neville turns to Harry, who shares a sly look with him. There's no way they're letting Ron get off so easily.