2Summary: Neville Longbottom is not the sharpest tool in the shed, but his passion for phrases is equaled by no one. One-shot. Crack.
Trading Blows
Neville Longbottom was a connoisseur of elegant phrases. When he quit muggle school to join Hogwarts, his academic career had been bereft of the one thing he had ever been good at: English. His gran often said to him, "Neville, there are not many things you are good at, but I'll be damned if you aren't a master of our noble tunge," using Chaucer's preferred spelling.
How Neville missed his Shakespeare, his Milton, his Chaucer - his Joyce, his Tennyson, his Yeats - even Ernest Hemmingway, who had once helped him through a grueling night of diarrhea by dulling his sensibilities while he sat on the toilet. Becoming tongue-tied over the Latinate syllables of spells he learnt in his classes had left him in a depression that had caused him to cease speaking entirely for the first half of his first year at Hogwarts. People thought him a squib and a mute. Yet, when he stole out of bed late at night to wander the corridors of the castle in blissful solitude, reciting aloud passages from his favorite poets and writers, he was anything but; and the portraits he passed knew him for what he truly was. "Give us a phrase!" the long-dead inhabitants of the castle walls would demand, and Neville would weave for them a turn of phrase far more enchanting than any spell.
Of idioms he was a master. He could beat around the bush, burn the midnight oil, and cry over spilt milk with the best of them. He was all ears when he needed to be, barked up the wrong tree when called upon to do so, and frequently bit off more than he could chew at dinner. If there was a straightforward way to express a thought, Neville could be counted on to avoid it.
One evening, during his nightly ambulations up and down the forbidden corridor on the third floor, Neville opened the door to a broom closet to discover Dean Thomas and Seamus Finnegan engaged in what could only be described as a celebration of their virility inside.
"What are you doing?" Neville blurted out.
"Only trading blows, mate," said Seamus.
Neville was horrified, because he had been using the phrase wrong all his life. He would need to find a replacement for it. A cursory examination of Tom Riddle's diary the following year led him to bestow this honor on "spanking the monkey", which was how Tom described Hagrid when he confronted him about Aragog.
In his fifth year Neville stunned the school by standing up in the middle of one of his O. W. L.s and asking Umbridge whether he could excuse himself to go spank the monkey.
Umbridge was livid. Neville was convinced that they would soon trade blows, for when push came to shove, that is how it always went down.
end.
