The lights in Greenhouse Five at this hour of evening were enough out of place to give Neville Longbottom pause, trying to remember which of his students he'd given permission to work late. Unable to recall giving such permission, he sighed, stepped back into his shoes, and strode back out into the brisk October air.

As he came closer to the greenhouse, he could clearly hear raucous laughter. Probably not two sweethearts looking for a likely place for a tryst, then—and if they had been, Greenhouse Five was not the place for it, he smirked. Brush up against the wrong plant there and you'd have hives for weeks, despite the best efforts of Madam Pomfrey. It wasn't until he had his hand on the doorknob that he heard the whimpering underneath the laughter, and all hint of a smile dropped from his face as he drew his wand and pushed the door open.

The scene froze as though to give Neville plenty of time to take it in. Three fifth year boys stared at him with wide eyes, the bluish lights of the greenhouse bleeding color from their scarves so the green and silver looked black and gray. They were all pointing wands at a cowering first year with shockingly blond hair who was in a state of inexplicable undress, trying to pull tatters of his robes around him to put some sort of barrier between him and the bed of Icenettle he had clearly been knocked into and held against. His lips were turning blue against the cold; Neville could only hazard a guess, but he put the boy's exposure to the Icenettle at around five minutes, possibly more. Fury stoked within his chest as he glared at the older boys. How dare they use his greenhouse and his plants to torment first years.

The shortest of the older boys swore and tried to duck under one of his comrade's arms, supposedly to make a run for it. Wishing dearly that he was allowed to use magic against students—at least these students—he jabbed his wand at what for all the world seemed to be a lattice of unassuming ivy, save for that it was kept in Greenhouse Five. With a squeal, the ivy shot out black tendrils and caught the escaping boy around the ankles, knocking his feet from under him and landing him on the ground with a gasp and a thud. His wand bounced uselessly under a potting bench.

"Anyone else want to try and run?" Neville asked in a low, even voice. The other two Slytherin boys shook their heads. "Wands. Now." Neville held out a hand and the two boys sullenly placed their wands into his hand; he pocketed them. "And Mr. Bale, I'd advise you against struggling. Gladys doesn't much like having her thorns stripped." The boy on the ground stopped scrabbling against the vines wrapping tightly around his ankles and winding their way up to his knees, though he watched the plant's progress with progressively widening eyes.

Keeping one eye on the older boys, Neville pulled on a dragon-hide glove and pulled the first year from the icenettle bed. "Do you know where my office is?" he asked softly. The boy nodded, shivering uncontrollably. "Here. Take my cloak. I will meet you there." He removed his cloak from his shoulders and settled it around the boy's; the last foot or so trailed on the ground as the boy turned and fled. That taken care of, Neville turned a steely gaze to the three fifth years.

"Your behavior is deplorable and inexcusable," he said sharply as he removed his glove; one of the boys flinched, as though he expected Neville to swat him with it. "You are out of bounds after hours, and you've done irreparable damage to a very rare herb—which, it may interest you to know, was to be part of your O.W.L. studies this term and likely on the O.W.L. exams themselves. To say nothing of your abhorrent treatment of a fellow student. I don't particularly care to hear you explain yourselves. I will be informing your Head of House and the Headmistress and you can make excuses to them. Thirty points from Slytherin, each of you, and count yourselves lucky that I'm not setting you detentions on top of it." He wordlessly summoned Bale's wand from beneath the potting bench; the three boys, who had not yet even begun to study nonverbal magic, goggled just slightly. "You can retrieve these from Professor Thatcher tomorrow morning. I think you've done enough with them tonight." A negligent flick of his wand and the ivy released the boy on the ground, who scrambled to his feet. "You are dismissed. Straight to your dormitory. If you're not out of my sight by my count of ten you'll see what I look like when I'm truly vexed."

The three Slytherin boys filed out of the greenhouse, and were Neville not barely in control of his rage, he may have felt a small twinge of amusement as they quickened their steps, casting glances over their shoulders at him to see if he was still watching. The last boy's robe finally swished out of view around a corner and Neville unclenched his jaw and turned to stride purposefully back to his office.

He paused, taking a deep breath to calm himself. Anger wasn't going to help him here; this was going to require some rather delicate conversation if he didn't intend to make the situation worse. He'd need his wits about him, not his sharp tongue or keen desire for vengeance.

The boy was pale and shivering, standing in the middle of the office with Neville's cloak wrapped tightly about him. It was not cold in the office, but the boy's breath still made little puffs in front of his lips as he gasped in what felt to him like Arctic temperatures.

"Heavens, Malfoy, take a seat. By the stove, yes, that's a good lad. Some Heartroot tea, that'll do you, let me just brew some up...best when the weather's cold anyway, you know, but even better for the chills from an Icenettle..."

He kept up the patter as he brewed the tea, as though he were attempting to train a Flitterbloom to become accustomed to his presence. It had a similar effect on Scorpius Malfoy; presently his posture became less stiff and frightened and he slouched just slightly more in the chair, leaning over to warm his hands at the potbellied stove in the corner.

The first sip of the tea that Neville gave him returned a flush of pink to his cheeks and lips, and he stopped shivering almost immediately. Neville watched the boy carefully as he sipped his own tea—not Heartroot, it was far too warm in his office for that—and when he began to fidget in the silence, Neville set his teacup down.

"I'm not interested in why you were in my greenhouses at this hour," he said, and Scorpius jumped at his voice. Flighty boy, he was; he acted much the same in class. Was he this way at home, too? "Nor, as a member of the faculty, am I interested in hearing you tell tales on your fellow Slytherins. The proper thing for me to do would be to ensure you have recovered from your bout with my Icenettle and send you off to the hospital wing. By all accounts, I should be sending you off now." Scorpius was studying his bare feet; Neville tamped down a whirl of anger. They'd taken his shoes? To what purpose? What would that prove? "However." Neville paused until Scorpius looked up in trepidation. "As a human being, I cannot just ignore what I saw tonight. It was cruel, it was despicable, and it was wrong. You know that as well as I, I hope."

Scorpius licked his lips, but didn't say anything. A tiny spark of dread lit in Neville's chest.

"You do know that, yes? That what they were doing was wrong? Not just against school rules, but wrong on a fundamental level?"

"They said I don't belong in Slytherin," the boy said in a very small voice. "That...that I'd tricked the Sorting Hat, or bribed it, and that...they were going to weed me out, leave me with the other weeds…"

"Weeds?" Neville said, trying to keep his voice mild. "There's never been a weed in my greenhouses, human nor plant. Clearly they need additional work in classification, if they could mistake you or my charges as such. As for not belonging in Slytherin, well. The Sorting Hat has never been wrong yet, even when it seemed it had made a blatantly obvious mistake." He leaned forward slightly with a small conspiratorial smile. "Trust me, I've reason to know."

Scorpius did not return the smile. "But what if...what if it only put me in Slytherin 'cause of my dad? 'Cause every Malfoy's been in Slytherin?"

"Funny, last I checked, your name was Scorpius, not Draco. That would suggest to me that you are not your father." Neville leaned back in his chair. "The Sorting Hat judges you on yourself, not whose blood you have. If you're in Slytherin—or Ravenclaw, or Gryffindor, or Hufflepuff—then you've earned the right to use that name next to yours. No one else can earn that for you."

"The Potters are in Gryffindor," Scorpius muttered. "Both of them."

"Yes, and Miss Weasley is in Ravenclaw. I will say it again, Scorpius: blood has next to nothing to do with Houses. You are who you are, not who your father was."

"I wish I was!" Scorpius blurted suddenly. Neville arched a questioning eyebrow. "I wish I was my father! He'd never let those berks grab him out of bed, he'd never be sniveling in some teacher's office..."

Neville bit back some rather choice words about why Draco would never have been in this situation. Insulting Scorpius's father would do very little good here. "I didn't notice you sniveling," he said instead, "but you're right in one aspect. Your father was...quite assured of his self-worth." Neville suppressed a sigh. "It's a trait I tend to see among most Slytherins, among many older students, actually, and they tend to try and punish those who lack it. What you've got to remember is, they're trying to punish you to make themselves feel bigger. But you don't need to make others feel small to know what you're worth. You've just got to remember, when they try to get you riled up, try to get you on the defensive..." He nearly laughed at himself then; he could not believe he was going to say these words to this particular boy. "You're worth twelve of any one of them."

"Yeah, right," Scorpius said, with a grimace. "I'm an effing coward, that's what I am. How else did...that...happen tonight?"

"A coward?" Neville asked. "Who had to have two other fifth years next to him to take on one wandless first year? If you're a coward, don't you think that was a bit of overkill?"

"But I didn't do anything. I couldn't do anything."

"Quite right. You were in over your head, and so you did the only thing you could do: bear what you could."

"Until a teacher came to rescue me," Scorpius spat.

"Accepting help when your back is against the wall doesn't make you a coward. It makes you prudent. It makes you well versed in the art of self-preservation. If I'm not mistaken, those are two qualities very much in evidence on the list one could attribute to a Slytherin." He snorted. "Gryffindor certainly isn't that big on the self-preservation one, I can tell you that." That won a very small, fleeting smile that ghosted across Scorpius's face briefly. "Will you accept, for the time being, that perhaps the Sorting Hat knew what it was doing when it placed you in Slytherin?"

Scorpius nodded uncertainly.

"Then let's move on to what we can do to prevent this happening again. I do mean it when I say you're worth twelve of any of your special friends, but I mean that metaphorically. Don't make my mistake and try to take them on. It's rather...counterproductive."

"Your mistake?" Scorpius asked, wrinkling his brow. Neville offered a small, twisted smile.

"Your dad ever mention me at home?"

Scorpius nodded hesitantly. "Not in a...flattering way."

"I don't doubt it," Neville said wryly. "We got on slightly less as well as a house on fire. Let me try to guess at the words he used...worthless, perhaps? Talentless? Oh, how about 'Potter's mewling sycophant,' I always quite liked that one." He bit his tongue before he said something to damage the rapport he'd managed to cobble together. "Suffice it to say, Scorpius, I've been where you are. And I won't tolerate anyone being kept there. Not if it's within my power to stop it."

"My dad," Scorpius said, realization dawning on his face. "He was...he was like them. He treated you like they..." The misery this revelation caused the boy was plain; he looked physically ill and pulled Neville's cloak more tightly about himself.

"No," Neville said firmly, surprised to hear himself say it. "Draco Malfoy was an overconfident young man with little regard for those he saw to be talentless losers, which unfortunately encompassed most of the school. But not once did he physically torment someone weaker than him for the fun of it." He stopped there, astonished that what he was saying was absolutely true. Had his memories really been that colored by his own misery? True, Draco Malfoy's constant unending digs had made him wary of ever leaving Gryffindor tower, but he had at least had his dormitory to retreat to, had never actually feared for his life, and had his house to rally around him. Well, most of his house. Some of it, anyway. Scorpius did not even have safe haven in his own dormitory, and as far as Neville could tell, had no friends either among the Slytherins or the rest of the houses. Even a good two decades after the war, the Malfoy name was still mud among most of wizarding Britain, and those families with Darker leanings held the grudge with possibly even more vehemence.

Alone, friendless, bearing a name that made him a pariah and with his own House turning against him. Neville hadn't thought it possible to have a worse school life than he'd had himself, but the evidence was hunched over on his chair next to the stove, wrapped in his cloak and staring with haunted eyes into the coals behind the glass door.

"You've got your back against a wall, Scorpius," he said finally, "through no doing of your own. If you'll accept my help, I'll do what I can. It's got to be done slowly—carefully—else it'll all just get worse, but I refuse to just let it this go on if I can do something about it."

"Didn't you say the proper thing to do would be to send me on my way, and ignore it all?"

"Yes."

"You're Head of Gryffindor House. Won't you get guff for helping some loser Slytherin?"

"Likely," Neville said affably. He raised himself from his chair, rummaged around in one of his trunks before pulling out a pair of work robes a student had left behind a few years back. They'd be large on Scorpius, but they'd get him to the Slytherin common room without occasioning much comment, unlike his cloak would. "But as Head of Gryffindor House, I find myself seized by the urge to do noble acts of selflessness that will land me in trouble on a regular basis. Ask your dad about the story of the sword and the snake sometime. That's a good example of how little self-preservation a true Gryffindor has." He handed the robes to Scorpius and politely turned his back so that he could wriggle his way into them.

"I know about the sword and the snake already," came Scorpius's muffled voice. "Why else do you think all the Slytherins are terrified of you?"

"Is that why?" Neville asked mildly. "I thought it was because my detentions are stuff of legend. If you're decent, we're going to stop at Professor Thatcher's office on the way to your common room. If we're going to start the ball rolling, it needs to start by you feeling safe in your own bed."

"Professor?" Scorpius asked as Neville turned, sounding bewildered and a little timid. "Why are you doing this? My father wouldn't raise a finger to help you. He won't even raise a finger to help me."

"It's really very simple, Mr. Malfoy," Neville said as he opened his office door and gestured Scorpius through. "You're not your father."

And, he added silently as he locked the door behind him, I'm worth twelve of him anyway.