Head-canon and fugue (variations on TMI) - Nev

[wemyss]

 

1. Neville, like Harry and Ron, was commissioned and gazetted immediately upon Riddle’s death, when Kingsley hadn’t Aurors he might trust or time to train ’em.
2. He did his duty and that of about twelve other Wizards besides, including doing his belated training; attained his captaincy; saw that Harry had the rebuilt Aurory well in hand - and was off to Hogwarts like a bird to its nest.
3. Nev is a born don and a natural teacher.
4. He is admired, he is beloved, and by and large his mere reputation as a hero suffices to deter misconduct.
5. When necessary, however, Captain Longbottom BC GGC OM MPC MW, late Royal Corps of Aurors, comes to the fore. At the end of the day, no one crosses Nev. The last bugger who tried that on was Tom Riddle, and we all know what happened to him.
6. That sort of thing is rarely necessary, however. Self-effacing in academical dress and tweeds, Oor Nev, tall, lean now, with an intriguing scar, and dead sexy, has quite enough presence and slow dignity to be going on with.
7. He likes to believe that even Gran, in her last years, had come to respect him.
8. He feels guilty, rather, that he doesn’t miss her more than he does.
9. He feels guilty, rather, that he selfishly misses his parents, even though he knows it was a blessed release to them when they faded at last away.
10. He’s fond of his stepsons, although they are amongst those who most often require Captain Longbottom BC GGC OM MPC MW, late Royal Corps of Aurors, to peep out from beneath the placid professorial persona. He’ll never cease to mourn Hannah, and Luna yet baffles and alarms him at times, but they jog along quite comfortably, and they do love one another.
11. Nev is well aware that the glamour of his war service and his life after had sufficed to allow him, had he so chosen, to cut a hell of a swath through any number of nubile and eager Witches; but Nev is domestic by nature, a born husband-and-father, made for bread and cheese and kisses.
12. Having grown up, with Gran, in Lancs, Nev cannot help but be a helplessly laughing fan of Pterry’s Discworld.
13. Having grown up, with Gran, in Lancs, and having been suspected for some infant years of being a Squib, and the family traditions not having been much for self-segregation, Nev even more than the Weasleys and far more than most purebloods is on familiar terms with the Muggle world. Particularly Muggle cricket. Lancashire cricket.
14. Particularly when Lancs CCC takes on those sodding tykes in the Roses, Nev is reminded that Tom Bloody Riddle was a Yorkshireman. And invariably expresses his lack of surprise that the rival county produced both Voldemort, and Snape.
15. He understands now what drove and affected Snape. He doesn’t care. Nothing excuses the man’s behaviour, to him or to Harry. The Frogs are barking: to know all is not to forgive all.
16. He’s had shouting matches with Snape’s portrait. Damned cathartic they were, too.
17. No one suspects him - well, almost no one: Ginny did, Harry does, young Al and Ron and Hermione do, George laughingly knows, Hannah did, and Luna does - almost no one suspects him of craft and slyness. Like not a few politicians and presenters and playwrights, he can and does, slyly and craftily, deploy Broad Lanky in place of public-school English when he chooses, which, in turn, causes no one to suspect him of craft and slyness.
18. It’s amazing, really, what one can get by with when hiding behind flat vowels and a flat hat.
19. His memory problems are a thing of the past, although he has been known to play the absent-minded don. To the proverbial hilt.
20. That is how he became, by accident, a poet, nowadays regarded as being to Wizarding poetry what Dean Thomas is to Wizarding painting and portraiture. Useful mnemonic, poetry. Most Wizards and Witches can quote from memory, long after their Hogwarts days in Herbology divs, his lines beginning, ‘Alcea rosea, belovèd of bees’.
21. Nev has no use for those who think that a hero of the War, a poet and an academic, oughtn’t to be seen down the pub (let alone have married a publican). He dislikes side.
22. More than that, he likes real ale. Of course he’s a CAMRA member.
23. The more he sees of Molly, and of little Lils, and the more he thinks back on it, the happier he is that Harry and not he married Ginny. She’d have turned into another Gran.
24. Hogwarts being for all practical purposes a public school, Nev is, he knows, all but unique in having never so much as experimented with another lad. This does not mean he’s narrow-minded: Al is a favourite of his, after all.
25. After Harry (and, although he’s too kind to say so, before Ron), he’s closest to Arthur; Ernie; and the much-improved and much-humbled Dudley Dursley. And Den, of course.
26. Like generations of Longbottoms, Leatherbarrows, and Devices, Nev remains an ornament of the Wizarding meeting of the Society of Friends.
27. This has never stopped him being a fighting Quaker.
28. He likes things simple. Simple joys, real ale, good plain cooking (he works it off, assiduously: gardening’s no bad exercise, and he spends a good deal of time in the Sprout Prefabs), cricket, a good book and a pipe of an evening; solid facts and common sense.
29. Luna’s wilder flights of fancy can even now unnerve him.
30. Yet there’s nowt stodgy about Oor Nev. He’s seen it all, and fought it all when wanted, and won through.
31. It’s Nev to whom the younger generation bring their problems.
32. It’s Nev to whom his contemporaries go for advice: Harry not least.
33. And it’s Nev to whom his colleagues turn for final decisions, and did well before he became Headmaster. It is this steadiness, and his ability to rein in the temper that put him rather in Gryffindor than in Hufflepuff, that has made him the truest successor, in all regards, of Albus Dumbledore.