30.13 - Neville Longbottom
Jan. 10th, 2008 01:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocoptera Neville, to his great surprise, turns 30 in Peru. He'd taken for granted that he would turn 30 in the same place he'd turned 29 (and 28, and everything since 25), in the greenhouse and gardens at Hogwarts, but here he is. He'd been all set to stay another summer to keep up with the plants, and he had just fallen into a comfortable routine of watering and weeding when McGonagall - Minerva, he was still reminding himself - had asked her unexpected question.
Afterwards he'd been knocked for such a loop that he'd weeded an entire bed of wriggling radishes the wrong way round - he'd pulled the wrigglers and left the duds, and he was going to have to revise a week of the third-year curriculum to make up for it. After a few more unfortunate incidents, culminating in the dropping and smashing of an entire breakfast service, even the house-elves were looking concerned, and Minerva had quite nicely suggested that he hadn't been on holiday since he'd started teaching and perhaps he'd like to take some time? It had looked impossible until she'd produced a color-coded schedule of volunteers to fill in for him in the gardens if he happened to plan a two-week trip, and Neville had reflected that he'd quite like to go to South America.
When he'd traveled after the war, researching exotic plants and passing the time until he was eligible to teach at Hogwarts, he had never made it to South America. He'd gone through Europe and Asia and spent six wonderful months in Africa. Two weeks was nothing, barely time for three short stops, but it would give him a chance to think, at least, and maybe find his balance again.
"I know someone on the Panamerican Council," McGonagall had added, "You'll have no trouble getting sample permits for plants."
And so he had gone to Brazil and collected butterfly beans in the Amazon, and the rare blue achiote, and he'd gone to Chile and taken samples of the dust lichen of the Atacama Desert, that lived on magic alone and was so dry that if water ever touched it, it would swell to ten times its size and then burst into a slurry of rot. Neville has no idea how he's going to keep it alive in the constant damp of Hogwarts, but he's started planning out an annex to greenhouse four with dessication spells built in. He's been putting off thinking about McGonagall's offer, and it's nice to have something else to mull over.
His last stop is in Peru. The Inca wizards had gone through a period of extreme horticultural meddling, and he's eager to see the experimental terraces at Moray, and to hunt for some of the orchid breeds that had escaped to grow wild in the Urubamba Valley - the fire-breathing draculas, the explosive catasetums, the bipedal "little dancers". He's seen ghost orchids elsewhere, but only Peru has poltergeist orchids.
Neville has always camped on his treks - it's faster and easier to set up a tent in the middle of an interesting habitat than to Apparate back and forth from the nearest city with a wizarding quarter, wherever that happens to be, and when he'd left on his first trip Ron and Hermione had told him they'd had enough of tents for a lifetime and given him theirs. But for his last stop he'd decided to book a room at an inn in Ukhunta Picchu. The hidden city of the Inca wizards was right near prime orchid territory, and besides, being the capital of wizarding South America, there was a Portkey terminal nearby where he could catch a 'key straight back to London. He's a little surprised it's not right in the city, but apparently transit in and out of the city is restricted for security reasons, and everyone is routed through a single Apparition zone.
So, now, he slings his knapsack over his shoulder, picks up his sample case, rechecks the coordinates, and Apparates. When he collects himself, he's a little surprised to see that he's standing in a flat area of packed dirt about the size of the Hogwarts cabbage patch, facing a steep wall of jungly plants, with no one else in sight. He doesn't know too much about the hidden city, just that there is only this one way to access it, but he doesn't have any instructions beyond the coordinates, and if this is like the wall outside Diagon Alley, he could be tapping all night before he gets in.
He looks around. More plants grow on the hillside at the edges of the bare area; he doesn't see any paths or signposts. He turns around and realizes that he must be standing on a ledge halfway up a high cliff; right at his feet, the ledge drops away into a deep gorge, narrowest below him, broadening out into a valley off to the left and right. There's a river far off to the bottom. He takes a quick step back from the edge. Right across from him, the opposite wall of the valley bulges out into a sheer-sided precipice roughly the shape of a pointed tooth, compressing the valley until it's over twice as deep as it is wide. His ledge is right in the bottleneck where the mountain is closest to his side of the valley, and strung across the gap, maybe half again the length of a Quidditch pitch, is a long rope bridge.
Looking at his end, it's shaped like a V; one rope, nearly as thick as his thigh, runs along the bottom, and two more, smaller, run as handrails to either side, somewhere between waist and shoulder height. Thin ropes weave up and down the sides of the V between the hand and foot ropes until the bridge is nearly a solid basket. That's reassuring; he won't have to look down while he crosses it. (Neville has immediately concluded that he's going to have to cross it; there's nothing else here.) What's not reassuring is that it looks like, as it goes, the bridge twists, tilting farther and farther over to the right until by the other end, where it looks tiny and threadlike against the valley backdrop, it's upside down, with the point of the V at the top.
Neville does not particularly like the idea of tipping further and further over until he eventually falls out, but he knows he can cast a levitation charm and just float down to the river, so that's not really an excuse. There's no point in putting it off, so he checks the buckles of his knapsack and sample case, readies his wand, and steps out onto the bridge.
It sways with every step, but he focuses his gaze on the rope about five feet in front of him and keeps up a slow, measured pace. He thinks he's gone about a quarter of the way when he realizes that he hasn't felt himself leaning over at all. He looks up, and is momentarily off-balance with vertigo - the horizon around him has tipped, the mountain in front of him juts at an angle into the sky, and the river below him is flowing crazily uphill.
He shuts his eyes and tightens his grip on the handrails. Ok. He still feels perfectly vertical. He's not expected at any particular time, no one is behind him on the bridge, there's no rush. He can stand right here, if he wants to, for as long as he wants, he's just standing comfortably, he feels perfectly stable. No less a person than Headmistress McGonagall thinks he's qualified to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts; he can surely get across a bridge!
He opens his eyes again. This is clearly an enchanted bridge and he's seen much worse things in his time than an off-kilter landscape. He starts walking again, less slowly, more confidently. The world continues to turn around him steadily until he's looking up at the valley and avoiding the giant empty sky below, and then he's stepping onto stone, he's facing a dark trapezoidal doorway, the mountainside is an overhang above him with a few upside-down plants at the edges of his vision, he's walking down a stone tunnel with the light of the valley fading behind him, and then he's stepping through another doorway into Ukhunta Picchu, the Hollow Mountain.
He's standing in a vast space, an immense cavern that must fill the tooth-shaped peak. The city steps down in terraces below him, filling the bowl that must be the "ceiling" of the cavern with a maze of angled stone walls and green-tiled roofs. The rock around the city stretches up into darkness, but the city is lit to a warm sunset glow by glowing gold shapes that slowly revolve far above it, huge figures of birds and fish and jaguars that would cover the floor of the Great Hall at Hogwarts.
Neville asks his wand to point him to his inn and sets out, down into the city. The streets are full of people, children running around bouncing balls back and forth off the walls, women levitating bobbing baskets of corn. Some are wearing robes like his, some wear brightly-striped ponchos and large, basket-like hats, and a few have skirts made of thousands of freely-hanging knotted strings. He passes by fountains, water zig-zagging through narrow channels before splashing out down tiled walls, and little boxes of gardens growing peppers and torch ginger. Neville can hear and smell a market somewhere nearby, and at one point a man comes by with a string of small llamas, about half of which have six legs.
He looks through glassless windows and open doorways, which are all different sizes of that same trapezoid, and sees rooms hung with tapestries, and courtyard gardens where the plants are real and green and courtyards where they're shining silver and gold. Neville wonders if they apply gold leaf over real trees or if it's all sculpture. All the inner walls he sees are plastered a creamy white, but the stone is left bare where it faces the streets, and he notices that in some walls, the stone blocks run in perfectly horizontal bands, while in some the rocks are irregular, giant polygons fitted together like a puzzle.
Unlike the walls of Hogwarts, the blocks fit so tightly that he can't even see the mortar, but it must be there - he reminds himself that even if it doesn't feel like it, these walls are in fact hanging upside down. They must have used a pretty powerful magical glue when they built them!
"There's no mortar," someone says at his elbow.
Neville jumps a little. There's a little old twinkly-eyed man walking next to him, wearing a parrot-feather cloak and enormous gold earrings, and fixing Neville with an instructive look that Neville suspects he himself wears during Herbology lessons.
"You speak English," Neville says lamely. He knows that most Andean wizards speak only Quechua, and had resigned himself to sign language at the inn. "And... you read minds?"
"I'm not using Legilimency on you, boy, I can just tell things. Like you just came in over the bridge, and now you're looking around. Everything here in the city is built the old Inca way. No mortar, and no magic, either, once the stones are in place and the foam-tiles are fired."
Neville thinks of Hogwarts; some of the towers are held up by almost nothing but magic, at this point.
"Inca foundations don't crumble," the old man says, "And it all makes sense from there, the tilt of the walls, the set of the stone - it all knows where it should be. You should see this place dance in a good earthquake!"
Neville winces a little; he's pretty sure he doesn't need to see that, thanks. "But..." he says. "Technically, we're, well..." He holds his hand up and then twists it so his fingers point down.
"No spells but the one big one!" the old man says gleefully. "There are channels all through the rock at the top, so that when the rain falls, it runs down the outside of the mountain and gathers in the ducts around the city rim, and then it runs down through the fountain chains into the big cistern at the center of the city, and then they can open up the drain there to let it out onto the top of the mountain, where it goes down the outside again and runs in at the ducts..."
"Ugh," Neville said, "Stop, you're making my head hurt. You sound like Herm - like a friend of mine from school."
"It's all gravity," the old man says, "Gravity, and careful planning, and everything fit in where it's cut out for."
He winks slyly at Neville. "Know how I knew you'd just crossed the bridge?" he asks. Neville shakes his head. "If you hadn't come in by the bridge you'd be somewhere down there!" the old man cackles, pointing up at the distant lights. "Try to swoop in on one of those brooms or something and you'll fall right off the street when you land."
Neville winces again. He's starting to see why he's heard it called "Ukhunta the Unconquerable."
"I think this is your inn," the old man says blithely. He steps in with Neville and mumbles briefly to the woman at the desk, who nods and smiles widely at Neville and carefully counts out his change from the little pile of Knuts and Galleons he pushes hopefully to her. The local coins are shaped like ears of corn and appear to be made of iron; with as much gold as he sees everywhere, this seems strangely reasonable. When he looks up again, the old man, like cryptic and oracular little old men everywhere, has vanished.
Neville settles his sample cases and hangs up his spare set of robes and has an interesting dinner of guinea pig and about five kinds of potatoes. He thinks a little about his conversation with McGonagall. "Me for Defense!" he has said, astonished. "Don't you mean Harry?"
McGonagall had frowned at him. "Harry Potter is a fine guest-lecturer but I shudder to think what he would make of a curriculum. He wouldn't be my first choice even if he did want to quit the Aurors. You, on the other hand, are one of the strongest teachers on my faculty. Despite your relative lack of experience, a weakness which will solve itself, given time, your students are performing beyond expectation on their Herbology O.W.L.s, and just recently the apothecary manager at Dervish and Banges complemented me on the solid preparation of his new hires, which, Neville, you cannot attribute to their first two years' instruction under Pomona no matter how much you shake your head at me." He had stopped, guiltily. "I have every reason to think that your success in the D.A.D.A. classroom will mirror that in the greenhouses, and you are, after all, one of the heroes of the Battle of Hogwarts!" She had seen the look on his face and cut off the next words of her speech. "You don't have to answer today," she had said instead. "I have other candidates in mind for both Defense and Herbology, so you needn't worry about getting the other position filled either way. I didn't mean to pressure you. But the opportunity is yours should you want it."
He goes to sleep with "hero of the Battle of Hogwarts" echoing in his head. The next morning he crosses back over the twisting bridge and has a fine day popping around the valley stalking orchids and trying not to imagine the Sorting Hat saying things like "What would you do if I gave you the Sword today, use it to trim the hedges? I should have put you in Hufflepuff if this is your idea of courage." He grits his teeth and burns his hand catching a fire-breathing dracula and after a few more days of this, he's found every orchid on his list and three more he doesn't recognize, it's his thirtieth birthday, and it's time to go home.
When he gets back to his room Neville ignores the bed and sneaks up to the roof from his balcony. The green tile is soft and springy and he lays back and looks up at the glowing shapes above him. At night, the gold figures give way to silver stars and moons and comets. Their faint light is enough to pick out the rooftops around him. He hasn't spent a lot of time exploring the city, but he's gotten a sense of it, the symmetry of the radiating streets, the alignment of important doorways with the tunnel out to the valley, the way the street level one tier up is the same height as the upper floor of buildings on the tier below. It's so unlike magical Britain, which is a hodgepodge of eccentric buildings squeezed in around the edges of the Muggles, rebuilt multiple times from their own rubble, platform nine and three-quarters slapped on top of the witch-queen Boudicca's grave. This city has never known conquest or revolution or war.
He looks up at the silver stars and reminds himself that they're really on the floor of the cavern, and his perception flips so that he looks down into the abyss and the great bulk of the city hangs behind him. He presses his back more firmly into the soft tiles and spreads out his arms. He can feel the immense integrity of the city above him, tons of rock piled stone on stone, pressing up into the foundations of the roof the way the mountain is rooted into the valley, and all at once he knows what he's going to tell McGonagall.
***
He gets back in time for dinner at Harry's, and comes in dusty and unshaven and is immediately seized in a hug. He's passed from Weasleys to Potters to Weasley-Potters to Granger-Weasleys to Teddy Lupin, who already seems taller than he did at dinner - was it just two weeks ago?
He tells them over dinner about the Amazon, and the bone-dry thirst of the Atacama, and the crazy Incas with their upside-down city and unruly orchids, and he tells them that McGonagall offered him the D.A.D.A. position but that he's turning it down.
Teddy's hair goes orange-red in shock.
"No way," he sputters to Neville, aghast. "You could teach Defense Against the Dark Arts and you're passing it up for a rubbish class like Herbology?"
"Teddy!" Hermione says sharply. He looks momentarily rebellious, and then abashed.
"I'm sorry, Neville, I don't really think Herbology is a rubbish class. It was kinda interesting last year. But... you always told me you wanted to be a teacher like my dad was, encouraging kids and stuff. My dad was the bravest guy ever, and he was a hero of the Battle of Hogwarts like you and Harry, and he taught D.A.D.A. That's a real Gryffindor subject, not taking care of plants." He frowned stubbornly. "You can't just say no to the best class at Hogwarts!"
"Your dad was really brave," Neville tells Teddy, "And he was a great D.A.D.A. teacher. I don't know if I would be a good D.A.D.A. teacher or not. Probably not as good as he was. But... I don't think Defense is the best part of magic anyways. For me, all that was... just something that needed doing."
Teddy nods, tentatively.
"Being a Gryffindor doesn't have to mean fighting," Neville finishes. "Knowing what you really want is another way to be brave."
Teddy looks thoughtful and Hermione looks approving and Harry tells him he wouldn't be surprised if Neville was Head of House by the time James is Sorted, at the rate the old guard is retiring. The butterfly beans flap in their glass bottles and the dancing orchids do a little cha-cha and Neville fits exactly where he is.
---
Notes:
This story is dedicated with love to my summer vacation. ::grin:: Almost everything in this story is based on something real, although the Incas roofed their buildings with thatch, not tile (I figured they'd have come up with something better by now). There really are such things as dracula orchids and ghost orchids, although I've never seen them, and there really is a legend that Boudicca is buried under platform 9 or 10 at King's Cross Station.
Afterwards he'd been knocked for such a loop that he'd weeded an entire bed of wriggling radishes the wrong way round - he'd pulled the wrigglers and left the duds, and he was going to have to revise a week of the third-year curriculum to make up for it. After a few more unfortunate incidents, culminating in the dropping and smashing of an entire breakfast service, even the house-elves were looking concerned, and Minerva had quite nicely suggested that he hadn't been on holiday since he'd started teaching and perhaps he'd like to take some time? It had looked impossible until she'd produced a color-coded schedule of volunteers to fill in for him in the gardens if he happened to plan a two-week trip, and Neville had reflected that he'd quite like to go to South America.
When he'd traveled after the war, researching exotic plants and passing the time until he was eligible to teach at Hogwarts, he had never made it to South America. He'd gone through Europe and Asia and spent six wonderful months in Africa. Two weeks was nothing, barely time for three short stops, but it would give him a chance to think, at least, and maybe find his balance again.
"I know someone on the Panamerican Council," McGonagall had added, "You'll have no trouble getting sample permits for plants."
And so he had gone to Brazil and collected butterfly beans in the Amazon, and the rare blue achiote, and he'd gone to Chile and taken samples of the dust lichen of the Atacama Desert, that lived on magic alone and was so dry that if water ever touched it, it would swell to ten times its size and then burst into a slurry of rot. Neville has no idea how he's going to keep it alive in the constant damp of Hogwarts, but he's started planning out an annex to greenhouse four with dessication spells built in. He's been putting off thinking about McGonagall's offer, and it's nice to have something else to mull over.
His last stop is in Peru. The Inca wizards had gone through a period of extreme horticultural meddling, and he's eager to see the experimental terraces at Moray, and to hunt for some of the orchid breeds that had escaped to grow wild in the Urubamba Valley - the fire-breathing draculas, the explosive catasetums, the bipedal "little dancers". He's seen ghost orchids elsewhere, but only Peru has poltergeist orchids.
Neville has always camped on his treks - it's faster and easier to set up a tent in the middle of an interesting habitat than to Apparate back and forth from the nearest city with a wizarding quarter, wherever that happens to be, and when he'd left on his first trip Ron and Hermione had told him they'd had enough of tents for a lifetime and given him theirs. But for his last stop he'd decided to book a room at an inn in Ukhunta Picchu. The hidden city of the Inca wizards was right near prime orchid territory, and besides, being the capital of wizarding South America, there was a Portkey terminal nearby where he could catch a 'key straight back to London. He's a little surprised it's not right in the city, but apparently transit in and out of the city is restricted for security reasons, and everyone is routed through a single Apparition zone.
So, now, he slings his knapsack over his shoulder, picks up his sample case, rechecks the coordinates, and Apparates. When he collects himself, he's a little surprised to see that he's standing in a flat area of packed dirt about the size of the Hogwarts cabbage patch, facing a steep wall of jungly plants, with no one else in sight. He doesn't know too much about the hidden city, just that there is only this one way to access it, but he doesn't have any instructions beyond the coordinates, and if this is like the wall outside Diagon Alley, he could be tapping all night before he gets in.
He looks around. More plants grow on the hillside at the edges of the bare area; he doesn't see any paths or signposts. He turns around and realizes that he must be standing on a ledge halfway up a high cliff; right at his feet, the ledge drops away into a deep gorge, narrowest below him, broadening out into a valley off to the left and right. There's a river far off to the bottom. He takes a quick step back from the edge. Right across from him, the opposite wall of the valley bulges out into a sheer-sided precipice roughly the shape of a pointed tooth, compressing the valley until it's over twice as deep as it is wide. His ledge is right in the bottleneck where the mountain is closest to his side of the valley, and strung across the gap, maybe half again the length of a Quidditch pitch, is a long rope bridge.
Looking at his end, it's shaped like a V; one rope, nearly as thick as his thigh, runs along the bottom, and two more, smaller, run as handrails to either side, somewhere between waist and shoulder height. Thin ropes weave up and down the sides of the V between the hand and foot ropes until the bridge is nearly a solid basket. That's reassuring; he won't have to look down while he crosses it. (Neville has immediately concluded that he's going to have to cross it; there's nothing else here.) What's not reassuring is that it looks like, as it goes, the bridge twists, tilting farther and farther over to the right until by the other end, where it looks tiny and threadlike against the valley backdrop, it's upside down, with the point of the V at the top.
Neville does not particularly like the idea of tipping further and further over until he eventually falls out, but he knows he can cast a levitation charm and just float down to the river, so that's not really an excuse. There's no point in putting it off, so he checks the buckles of his knapsack and sample case, readies his wand, and steps out onto the bridge.
It sways with every step, but he focuses his gaze on the rope about five feet in front of him and keeps up a slow, measured pace. He thinks he's gone about a quarter of the way when he realizes that he hasn't felt himself leaning over at all. He looks up, and is momentarily off-balance with vertigo - the horizon around him has tipped, the mountain in front of him juts at an angle into the sky, and the river below him is flowing crazily uphill.
He shuts his eyes and tightens his grip on the handrails. Ok. He still feels perfectly vertical. He's not expected at any particular time, no one is behind him on the bridge, there's no rush. He can stand right here, if he wants to, for as long as he wants, he's just standing comfortably, he feels perfectly stable. No less a person than Headmistress McGonagall thinks he's qualified to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts; he can surely get across a bridge!
He opens his eyes again. This is clearly an enchanted bridge and he's seen much worse things in his time than an off-kilter landscape. He starts walking again, less slowly, more confidently. The world continues to turn around him steadily until he's looking up at the valley and avoiding the giant empty sky below, and then he's stepping onto stone, he's facing a dark trapezoidal doorway, the mountainside is an overhang above him with a few upside-down plants at the edges of his vision, he's walking down a stone tunnel with the light of the valley fading behind him, and then he's stepping through another doorway into Ukhunta Picchu, the Hollow Mountain.
He's standing in a vast space, an immense cavern that must fill the tooth-shaped peak. The city steps down in terraces below him, filling the bowl that must be the "ceiling" of the cavern with a maze of angled stone walls and green-tiled roofs. The rock around the city stretches up into darkness, but the city is lit to a warm sunset glow by glowing gold shapes that slowly revolve far above it, huge figures of birds and fish and jaguars that would cover the floor of the Great Hall at Hogwarts.
Neville asks his wand to point him to his inn and sets out, down into the city. The streets are full of people, children running around bouncing balls back and forth off the walls, women levitating bobbing baskets of corn. Some are wearing robes like his, some wear brightly-striped ponchos and large, basket-like hats, and a few have skirts made of thousands of freely-hanging knotted strings. He passes by fountains, water zig-zagging through narrow channels before splashing out down tiled walls, and little boxes of gardens growing peppers and torch ginger. Neville can hear and smell a market somewhere nearby, and at one point a man comes by with a string of small llamas, about half of which have six legs.
He looks through glassless windows and open doorways, which are all different sizes of that same trapezoid, and sees rooms hung with tapestries, and courtyard gardens where the plants are real and green and courtyards where they're shining silver and gold. Neville wonders if they apply gold leaf over real trees or if it's all sculpture. All the inner walls he sees are plastered a creamy white, but the stone is left bare where it faces the streets, and he notices that in some walls, the stone blocks run in perfectly horizontal bands, while in some the rocks are irregular, giant polygons fitted together like a puzzle.
Unlike the walls of Hogwarts, the blocks fit so tightly that he can't even see the mortar, but it must be there - he reminds himself that even if it doesn't feel like it, these walls are in fact hanging upside down. They must have used a pretty powerful magical glue when they built them!
"There's no mortar," someone says at his elbow.
Neville jumps a little. There's a little old twinkly-eyed man walking next to him, wearing a parrot-feather cloak and enormous gold earrings, and fixing Neville with an instructive look that Neville suspects he himself wears during Herbology lessons.
"You speak English," Neville says lamely. He knows that most Andean wizards speak only Quechua, and had resigned himself to sign language at the inn. "And... you read minds?"
"I'm not using Legilimency on you, boy, I can just tell things. Like you just came in over the bridge, and now you're looking around. Everything here in the city is built the old Inca way. No mortar, and no magic, either, once the stones are in place and the foam-tiles are fired."
Neville thinks of Hogwarts; some of the towers are held up by almost nothing but magic, at this point.
"Inca foundations don't crumble," the old man says, "And it all makes sense from there, the tilt of the walls, the set of the stone - it all knows where it should be. You should see this place dance in a good earthquake!"
Neville winces a little; he's pretty sure he doesn't need to see that, thanks. "But..." he says. "Technically, we're, well..." He holds his hand up and then twists it so his fingers point down.
"No spells but the one big one!" the old man says gleefully. "There are channels all through the rock at the top, so that when the rain falls, it runs down the outside of the mountain and gathers in the ducts around the city rim, and then it runs down through the fountain chains into the big cistern at the center of the city, and then they can open up the drain there to let it out onto the top of the mountain, where it goes down the outside again and runs in at the ducts..."
"Ugh," Neville said, "Stop, you're making my head hurt. You sound like Herm - like a friend of mine from school."
"It's all gravity," the old man says, "Gravity, and careful planning, and everything fit in where it's cut out for."
He winks slyly at Neville. "Know how I knew you'd just crossed the bridge?" he asks. Neville shakes his head. "If you hadn't come in by the bridge you'd be somewhere down there!" the old man cackles, pointing up at the distant lights. "Try to swoop in on one of those brooms or something and you'll fall right off the street when you land."
Neville winces again. He's starting to see why he's heard it called "Ukhunta the Unconquerable."
"I think this is your inn," the old man says blithely. He steps in with Neville and mumbles briefly to the woman at the desk, who nods and smiles widely at Neville and carefully counts out his change from the little pile of Knuts and Galleons he pushes hopefully to her. The local coins are shaped like ears of corn and appear to be made of iron; with as much gold as he sees everywhere, this seems strangely reasonable. When he looks up again, the old man, like cryptic and oracular little old men everywhere, has vanished.
Neville settles his sample cases and hangs up his spare set of robes and has an interesting dinner of guinea pig and about five kinds of potatoes. He thinks a little about his conversation with McGonagall. "Me for Defense!" he has said, astonished. "Don't you mean Harry?"
McGonagall had frowned at him. "Harry Potter is a fine guest-lecturer but I shudder to think what he would make of a curriculum. He wouldn't be my first choice even if he did want to quit the Aurors. You, on the other hand, are one of the strongest teachers on my faculty. Despite your relative lack of experience, a weakness which will solve itself, given time, your students are performing beyond expectation on their Herbology O.W.L.s, and just recently the apothecary manager at Dervish and Banges complemented me on the solid preparation of his new hires, which, Neville, you cannot attribute to their first two years' instruction under Pomona no matter how much you shake your head at me." He had stopped, guiltily. "I have every reason to think that your success in the D.A.D.A. classroom will mirror that in the greenhouses, and you are, after all, one of the heroes of the Battle of Hogwarts!" She had seen the look on his face and cut off the next words of her speech. "You don't have to answer today," she had said instead. "I have other candidates in mind for both Defense and Herbology, so you needn't worry about getting the other position filled either way. I didn't mean to pressure you. But the opportunity is yours should you want it."
He goes to sleep with "hero of the Battle of Hogwarts" echoing in his head. The next morning he crosses back over the twisting bridge and has a fine day popping around the valley stalking orchids and trying not to imagine the Sorting Hat saying things like "What would you do if I gave you the Sword today, use it to trim the hedges? I should have put you in Hufflepuff if this is your idea of courage." He grits his teeth and burns his hand catching a fire-breathing dracula and after a few more days of this, he's found every orchid on his list and three more he doesn't recognize, it's his thirtieth birthday, and it's time to go home.
When he gets back to his room Neville ignores the bed and sneaks up to the roof from his balcony. The green tile is soft and springy and he lays back and looks up at the glowing shapes above him. At night, the gold figures give way to silver stars and moons and comets. Their faint light is enough to pick out the rooftops around him. He hasn't spent a lot of time exploring the city, but he's gotten a sense of it, the symmetry of the radiating streets, the alignment of important doorways with the tunnel out to the valley, the way the street level one tier up is the same height as the upper floor of buildings on the tier below. It's so unlike magical Britain, which is a hodgepodge of eccentric buildings squeezed in around the edges of the Muggles, rebuilt multiple times from their own rubble, platform nine and three-quarters slapped on top of the witch-queen Boudicca's grave. This city has never known conquest or revolution or war.
He looks up at the silver stars and reminds himself that they're really on the floor of the cavern, and his perception flips so that he looks down into the abyss and the great bulk of the city hangs behind him. He presses his back more firmly into the soft tiles and spreads out his arms. He can feel the immense integrity of the city above him, tons of rock piled stone on stone, pressing up into the foundations of the roof the way the mountain is rooted into the valley, and all at once he knows what he's going to tell McGonagall.
***
He gets back in time for dinner at Harry's, and comes in dusty and unshaven and is immediately seized in a hug. He's passed from Weasleys to Potters to Weasley-Potters to Granger-Weasleys to Teddy Lupin, who already seems taller than he did at dinner - was it just two weeks ago?
He tells them over dinner about the Amazon, and the bone-dry thirst of the Atacama, and the crazy Incas with their upside-down city and unruly orchids, and he tells them that McGonagall offered him the D.A.D.A. position but that he's turning it down.
Teddy's hair goes orange-red in shock.
"No way," he sputters to Neville, aghast. "You could teach Defense Against the Dark Arts and you're passing it up for a rubbish class like Herbology?"
"Teddy!" Hermione says sharply. He looks momentarily rebellious, and then abashed.
"I'm sorry, Neville, I don't really think Herbology is a rubbish class. It was kinda interesting last year. But... you always told me you wanted to be a teacher like my dad was, encouraging kids and stuff. My dad was the bravest guy ever, and he was a hero of the Battle of Hogwarts like you and Harry, and he taught D.A.D.A. That's a real Gryffindor subject, not taking care of plants." He frowned stubbornly. "You can't just say no to the best class at Hogwarts!"
"Your dad was really brave," Neville tells Teddy, "And he was a great D.A.D.A. teacher. I don't know if I would be a good D.A.D.A. teacher or not. Probably not as good as he was. But... I don't think Defense is the best part of magic anyways. For me, all that was... just something that needed doing."
Teddy nods, tentatively.
"Being a Gryffindor doesn't have to mean fighting," Neville finishes. "Knowing what you really want is another way to be brave."
Teddy looks thoughtful and Hermione looks approving and Harry tells him he wouldn't be surprised if Neville was Head of House by the time James is Sorted, at the rate the old guard is retiring. The butterfly beans flap in their glass bottles and the dancing orchids do a little cha-cha and Neville fits exactly where he is.
---
Notes:
This story is dedicated with love to my summer vacation. ::grin:: Almost everything in this story is based on something real, although the Incas roofed their buildings with thatch, not tile (I figured they'd have come up with something better by now). There really are such things as dracula orchids and ghost orchids, although I've never seen them, and there really is a legend that Boudicca is buried under platform 9 or 10 at King's Cross Station.
