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living_boy's Journal

Created on 2007-01-15 10:25:21 (#12044617), last updated 2007-02-07

66 comments received, 71 comments posted

Basic Account [Gift]

3 Journal Entries, 2 Tags, 0 Memories, 0 Virtual Gifts, 6 Userpics

Basic Info

Name:	Neville Longbottom

Bio

The Basics

Character Name: Neville Longbottom
PB: Sean Astin

Age: 20
Birthday: 30 July 1980
Wand: Cherry and unicorn hair
House in School: Gryffindor
Bloodline: Pureblood

Political View: Pro-Hogwarts. He is on the side of light and always will be. Politics don't come into it - it's a simple matter of his past directing his future. His love of things that live is too strong to ever support death or pain.

He does believe the good in most people, though, and he itches when he sees even the Registered being treated harshly.

Appearance

Height: 5'6
Weight: 150
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Sandy brown
Build: Prone to being chubby
Dress Style: Neville doesn't give much thought to personal appearances. As he's always working, and rarely among people, he dresses to suit his plants. Simple clothes that don't stain easily.

Basic Physical Description: Neville's most discerning characteristic is his awkwardness. It clings to him like a robe pretty much all the time. He speaks clumsily, moves uncertainly. He dresses as though he doesn't know a thing about style (which would be accurate), and he would hardly remember to get his hair cut if it didn't fall into his eyes as he worked.

Personality

Neville is first and foremost shy. His shyness affects every other aspect of him, until usually it's the only thing that people notice about him at all.

Shyness in speaking his mind leads him to stammer, pause, debate before speaking. Those things can lead strangers to regard him as slow. He isn't. He retains a good deal of what he learns. If he's asked to verbalise those lessons it's as good as torture for him, but on written tests he has always scored well.

Shyness about his body leads to physical awkwardness. He takes after his mother in face and body - a sore spot with his gran, that he isn't more his father's son. He was a chubby baby, chubby child, and is now a chubby young man. He's always been awkward in his own skin, which made him clumsy, though with age and a couple of extra inches in height that's starting to change.

Behind the shyness, if someone bothers to get to know him past the shyness, Neville is a Gryffindor through and through. He is braver than he's given credit for - scared to face Snape in a conversation, maybe, but he would jump between Snape and a hex without hesitation. He was willing to fight Death Eaters as a child when he knew more than most how capable of violence and permanent harm they are. He fought with Harry, captured Bellatrix Lestrange, fought hard and loud when the Ministry let her go. And for her he will fight again one day, he has no doubt.

He is fiercely loyal to his friends and to the memory of his parents.

Neville has a keen appreciation for the value of life, from the greatest and least of people to the smallest insects or molds that can affect the growth of his beloved plants.

He isn't a complicated sort, perhaps, but he is a thoroughly decent person in a world where decency is rare.

Psychology

Extrovert/Introvert: Introvert. Extremely. He won't even say hi to someone (without stammering a good bit) unless he knows them by name. He grew up in a painfully repressed household run by a strong witch who showed a lot of contempt for him. He went from that to Hogwarts, where stronger wizards both in class and on staff kept him quiet and scared. Though around his friends he does develop backbone. He will stand up when he's pushed to the edge.
Boggart Would Be: His Boggart used to be Snape, of course. He can now work with Snape, though he still feels intimidated, and that has changed things. His fear itself - powerful wizards who despise him and seek to hurt him - remains the same. Only now that fear has a new form: Bellatrix Lestrange. She represents the worst turns of his life, and it still haunts him that she is free and alive.
Patronus Would Be: He never learned to make one. He gave it his all during the DA lessons in school, but happy memories weren't ever his strong suit. Feeble wisps of smoke were all he ever managed, and he didn't have much reason to try again after the DA lessons. Luckily enough he hasn't faced down any Dementors.

Sexuality

Neville never had much reason to consider his own sexuality. He was never comfortable talking to people about class, let alone shagging. He asked out a few girls to a few dances at school, mostly because he knew he was supposed to. But he never got close enough to anyone to consider himself romantically involved. At heart, Neville is worried he's gay. After all, he never had girlfriends like the other boys in his dorm, and doesn't that mean something? He doesn't want to own up to it - why add one more cliché to the awkward list he already feels like he's got going against him? But away from the pressure of school he is slowly coming to accept himself for what he is, which may eventually mean being able to accept someone else in his life. Whoever that person might be, gender would be the least important factor.

Lifestyle

Occupation: Herbologist. His one great love and real skill. He works officially for St. Mungo's, though he does receive a small stipend from Severus Snape for his side work, research on Mimbulous Mimbletonia hybrids.
Residence: He has his own flat near St. Mungo's. His gran helped him pay for it at first, but now he makes enough through Mungo's that it belongs solely to him and he loves it. It's just a small space over a Muggle shop - two little rooms, secondhand furniture, bare walls, plants on every available surface. One framed portrait of his parents, waving and smiling at him when he walks through the door. And, his secret love - a Muggle music box and a growing collection of musical discs. Nina Simone and Robert Johnson, Billie Holliday and other dead American Muggles singing sadly with pain in their voices. When he is home, the music is on. It makes him feel a little bit less lonely.
Financial Status: Scraping by. His parents left a small inheritance, but St. Mungo's took most of their money through the years, and the rest he knew his gran should have.

Family

Parents: Frank and Alice Longbottom, former aurors, former mental patients, formerly living. Died 'in their sleep' at St. Mungo's.
Siblings: None.

Neville is forever shadowed by his family. Old and crackled wizards and witches who would toss him off a roof rather than let him come into his magic at his own slow pace.

At the head is, of course, his gran. That is a relationship that is only growing more complicated through the years. He does love his gran. She raised him, and more than anyone else in his life she served as parent. They are on the same side of the war, and have always agreed on the most important issues - Dumbledore, Harry, the return of You Know Who.

And yet it's always been apparent to him - she made no secret of it - that he was not growing into the sort of wizard she wanted him to be. He always knew what she wanted - her son back, strong and brave and dedicated to fighting the wrongs of the world. What she got instead was mild, gentle Neville. Throughout his life she has openly expressed disappointment in him. Loving, maybe, but more hurtful to a boy like Neville that she realised. She would write letters to his school, to Professor McGonagall. She would send him Howlers, ask things of him he could never carry out.

He came to understand with time that she was trying to mold him into his father. That she was behaving out of love, out of grief she never otherwise expressed over what happened to Frank and Alice.

He loves her, and he knows she loves him. But her constant reminders that he isn't what his father was are a hurt he avoids as often as possible. He visits her, but those visits are strained.

History from student days at Hogwarts to the present time

Neville never had much doubt that he would stick with Harry through the end of whatever war was coming. He knew at Hogwarts, after the battle at the Ministry of Magic, that though he wasn't built for fighting and might even be a burden more than a help, he had to see the war through. For his parents, if for no other reason.

The battle at the Ministry was inspiration for him - he knew that despite his fright he could fight. He could face a wand held by a Death Eater and he could strike out. He could even come out on top.

But the battle also misled him. He left school and followed Harry into fighting with the thought that bat bogeys and tarantallegra hexes would see him through. It was a naive illusion that was soon swept from his mind. In his first battles people died. People were cursed into permanent disability. And the moment they began to fall, every instinct in him cried out to help, to go to the injured and take them to help. But he fought on.

His curses switched from tarantallegra to expelliarmus, to darker curses meant to hurt and cause pain. Never Unforgivables. Never once did he use a crucio, and if he heard it come from the other side he found himself targetting the wizard casting it. To Neville there is no worse sound in the world than that word.

He fought in a battle that led the capture of Bellatrix, the very woman who put his parents in their beds at St. Mungo's. There were aurors and other kids like him at the fight, but it was him who cornered her. Him who faced her down. Him who, though it was her voice that spoke the crucios in his nightmares, felled her with a simple, childish but unexpected petrificus totalus.

It was the best moment in his life - it made the fighting worth it. It made his gran proud, and earned him, later, an Order of Merlin.

It was also the reason why his dive into fighting hit an abrupt stop. Bellatrix was sent to St. Mungo's. Declared insane rather than evil. Her prison was the haven his parents spent his entire life in, and his strong objections rang on deaf ears. He had caught her. He had fought her, and his wishes meant nothing to the Ministry.

His desire to fight drained out of him.

When he received the owl that his father had died, comfortably in his sleep, Neville knew it was Bellatrix. When soon after his mother was dead as well, he abandoned fighting for good. Losing his parents was a sharp blow to Neville. A fierce reminder that avenging the past wasn't nearly as important as protecting those alive in the present.

Neville withdrew back to himself. War was finished, there was no need to fight. He retreated perhaps further than he had to, and settled into the quiet, uneventful life everyone had expected of him.

He wanted to cultivate life, not death. It was McGonagall who helped him get the job at St. Mungo's. His talents in Herbology were good enough, and making any life at all flourish, even plant life, appealed to him after the destruction of war.

His work, the talent he has proven and the skill he is actually praised for, has done what all his friends tried to do so often at school - instilled him with a small seed of self-worth. He is working all the time to cultivate that as he cultivates his plants. And it's growing, bit by bit.

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Name/Nickname: Luce
AIM: and_cbfc
Email: trickylu@hotmail.com

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