Neville Longbottom's eleventh birthday passed underwhelmingly and without excess familial fanfare. His grandmother baked an undecorated sheet cake for him in the hour before her bridge club meeting, his great-uncle popped in partway through the bridge club meeting (to the witches' chagrin) and consumed half the sheet cake and a quarter of the larder, and by the end of the day, Neville had received only two presents of particular note, though he was inordinately grateful for them all the same. The first was a twelve-inch wand that had belonged to his late father, which he spent the evening rolling between his fingers and imagining, with a mixture of wonder and strange sorrow, resting in the once-capable hand of his father himself. The second was a toad that Uncle Algie had left in the kitchen between bites of sheet cake, smelling strongly of pond water and the musty interior of Algie's jacket pockets. "You'll want a pet when you get to Hogwarts," he explained as Neville stared at it intently, feeling its coarse, cool flesh rub against the palms of his hands. "And this one's as good a toad as any." Neville did not know this to be true until later, when he sat with the toad and the wand in his cluttered bedroom and found himself warmed by the sight of them. In and of themselves, they were not particularly nice things; by virtue of sentiment, however, they were excellent things, and Neville resolved to treasure them for as long as he was able.

He would attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in a month. In and of itself, Hogwarts was a terrifying place where wizard boys who might as well have been Squibs were ridiculed by teachers and students alike for their ineptitude, and Neville experienced waves of stomach-churning anxiety whenever his grandmother even spoke the name "Hogwarts." Their trip to Diagon Alley, which by all rights should have been an fantastical experience, was instead marked by a sick feeling in the pit of Neville's gut that persisted inside every noisily-magical shop they visited, and by the end of the excursion, Neville could barely recall purchasing his books or being fitted for robes at all. But in the evening following the trip, Neville appraised the books and the robes and the cauldron all laid out beside the foot of his bed, and he found that some of his anxiety had been replaced by an odd eagerness—he was ready for Hogwarts now, and Hogwarts was ready for him. It had invited him to attend, hadn't it? Washed in the dim light of evening that filtered through his curtains, Neville forgot to fear the school of magic that might soon spurn him for his lack of magic, and he imagined himself wearing those neatly-folded robes, carrying that beechwood wand, wandering the halls that his parents had wandered twenty years before. It didn't seem quite so strange then that a school could be two things at once: frightening and awe-inspiring in equal, harmonious strokes. It didn't seem strange that Trevor, his toad, could be both ordinary and extraordinary, or that his grandmother could be both fundamentally formidable and meaningful beyond measure, or that the next seven years of his life could be harrowing and heavenly at the same time. In that instant, the entire world was two things at once, and Neville didn't particularly mind.

The journey to Hogwarts was everything that Neville had feared it would be, but it also managed to be something else, something warm and unexpected. The train station was as packed with noisy, self-assured students as he'd anticipated, and he managed to lose Trevor on the station platform while he was busy ogling the other students' wands. (They'd be able to use those wands, wouldn't they? Neville hadn't even attempted a spell yet—it had been prohibited up to this point, of course, but sometimes that familiar fear would choke him when he ran his fingers along his father's wand's surface, when memories of years spent seemingly ordinary and magic-less clogged his memory. His grandmother often accused him of being forgetful, but he'd never forget her accusing him of being a Squib.) Then he spent half the train ride trapped in a state of tearful panic, because Trevor was gone and Trevor was all he'd had and he couldn't handle so many frightening things at once, and the only person to help him search was a bushy-haired girl who introduced herself as Hermione Granger. She was in his year, she claimed, but she acted as if she'd ridden the Hogwarts Express for years; she marched into every car on that train boldly, championing Neville's search without shame, and though they only discovered Trevor later, at Hogsmeade Station, Neville found himself comforted by Hermione's presence long before then. If every student was as kind as Hermione, he thought, then perhaps Hogwarts would be a safer place for him than he'd imagined.

And on that first night, it did feel somewhat safe. The size of the castle was frightening, the Great Hall crammed with hundreds of watching students was frightening, and the thought of somehow embarrassing himself in front of Hermione and the other first-years was frightening as well; still, the instant that the Sorting Hat proclaimed Neville a Gryffindor, in spite of his silent pleas to be placed in Hufflepuff (he would not disappoint nearly as many people in Hufflepuff), that cavernous, frightening room erupted with the most enthusiastic applause Neville had ever witnessed in his name, and he took his seat at the Gryffindor table feeling tentatively as if he were surrounded by new friends. (This, of course, was after Neville bolted across the Great Hall in the wake of the Hat screaming, "Gryffindor," his heart still pounding as he returned to the stool to hand the hat to the next person in line.) Even Harry Potter, The Boy Who Lived, joined Neville at that table as an ally, his olive-green eyes blazing with excitement and his light-brown cheeks flushed. Everyone seemed to be accepting everyone on the Gryffindor side of the room, regardless of their background or magical capability (which Neville supposed they didn't know yet—this somewhat tempered his excitement), and everyone seemed genuinely happy that Neville was there with them. And this was how the night ended, with Neville feeling both anxious and content as he fell asleep in his new bed inside the Gryffindor dormitory. The following year would be absolutely fantastic, he thought, if things remained exactly as they were.

The problem came the following morning, when Neville awoke to find that things had slightly changed.

He failed to notice these changes at first. The dormitory, cozy and red-curtained and comforting, appeared just as welcoming as it had the night before; in the groggy haze of morning, surrounded by other boys milling around their quarters and preparing for the day ahead, Neville thought of nothing but the upcoming school tour and the corners of the castle that they had yet to explore. This made Neville nervous, as the prospect of exploration often did, and, while still absorbed in that nervousness, he nearly stumbled into a boy kneeling on the floor in front of him, digging through a small trunk. The apologies stumbled from his mouth as the boy turned and said that it was quite all right, he shouldn't worry about it, but at the sight of the boy's face, Neville's chest was seized with a new, unexpected anxiety.

"I—I'm sorry, but who are you?" he managed to say in the thick of his own shock.

The boy blinked and adjusted his glasses, blue eyes squinting at Neville with what looked like disbelief. His pale forehead was furrowed, and his dark hair managed to appear tidy even at this hour; Neville was sure that he had never seen this boy in his life, not on the train and not in the Great Hall and certainly not before bed the previous night. But the boy was speaking to him incredulously now: "Neville, we met yesterday—at the Gryffindor table? You really don't remember me?"

And suddenly Neville was overcome with self-consciousness, and he was mumbling, "I'm sorry, it's early, I tend to forget things," and he was wracking his brain for any memory of the stranger in front of him when the boy brushed some hair away from his forehead and Neville could see, in all its glory, the jagged edges of a lightning-bolt-shaped scar.

Harry Potter, he thought numbly, and, with this realization, Neville's memory began to return to him.

They had met the night before, to Neville's combined shock and relief. How could he have forgotten meeting Harry Potter? He'd sat at the Gryffindor table directly after Neville, his hair looking exactly like that and his glasses just the same, and Neville had wondered at how incredibly blue Harry's eyes were, how striking they appeared in his small, pale face. This was Harry Potter—what in the world had Neville been thinking?

He stammered his apologies, fled from the boys' quarters, sat in the common room with his hands in his lap and his mind in a state of disarray. Across from him sat a girl poring keenly through a textbook in her hands, and Neville was frightened to realize that he did not remember her, either, until suddenly he did—that was his new friend, Hermione Granger, and somehow he had forgotten her, too. For an instant, as Neville examined her with considerable embarrassment, he thought that she looked wrong somehow—was her hair a bit less bushy than it had been the day before, a different texture, maybe? Did her front teeth appear a bit shorter today? But the moment passed quickly, and Neville's misgivings evaporated into nothing at all. This was Hermione as she had always been, and Neville was forgetful and foolish, and the only thing he should be thinking about was the school tour ahead.

From this point onward, the day passed smoothly. His usual forgetfulness brought him a great deal of trouble throughout the tour, as he tripped over stairs and lost track of the group and snagged his robes on portrait frames, but he'd expected all of that before even arriving at the school, and it embarrassed him less than it might have if he hadn't been prepared. The only strange moment occurred when he attempted to discuss an incident from the night before. At the base of the divination tower, their prefect had just finished explaining the third-year elective courses to Neville and the group when a bearded ghost drifted through the hallway, and Neville thought suddenly of the other ghost that had terrorized them the previous night.

He leaned closer to Hermione as the memory overtook him. "You think Peeves will appear again soon?" he whispered to her while they walked, not bothering to hide his trepidation—his head had felt sore for an entire hour after that confrontation.

But Hermione only eyed him with obvious confusion and said, "Who's Peeves?"

Neville scrambled to explain: "The ghost from last night. The one that threw all those walking sticks at Percy on the way to Gryffindor Tower. Percy said he'd tell the Bloody Baron, and then Peeves stuck his tongue out at him and dropped more walking sticks on me, and—"

Hermione's brows were raised, but her eyes were empty of recognition. "I don't remember that," she said, and she turned away as Neville's cheeks burned with embarrassment. She'd been with the group last night, hadn't she? He could've sworn she'd patted him on the shoulder after Peeves had evaporated.

In any case, if Hermione didn't remember, Percy would. Neville caught his attention at the head of the group, and as Percy slowed and cocked his head toward Neville, he asked Percy if Peeves appeared often, if there was a way to keep Peeves from getting upset, if they had to use magic to repel the ghosts because Neville wasn't sure if he could do that yet. Then Percy blinked at Neville and said, "Who's Peeves?", and Neville felt as if the stone floor of the castle was collapsing underneath him.

He ducked his head and muttered, "I don't know." And as he spoke, the statement became truth, and Neville was left with a hollow place in the back of his mind and the sense that he was forgetting something very important, that the world had become only one thing when it should have been two.

That sense followed him through the following few days, as classes began and fear of failure overtook him and actual failure followed in its footsteps. He embarrassed himself more times than he could count—he did have real magic, he learned, except it was unreliable, faulty magic and it seemed determined to humiliate him in front of every professor Hogwarts had to offer—and yet the students of Gryffindor house forgave him for it. Despite being one of the smartest witches in their class, Hermione seemed surprisingly understanding of Neville's minor crises, offering to help him perfect the wand techniques and incantations that he managed to routinely bungle, and Harry Potter and Ron Weasley offered him kind words whenever Neville attracted the wrath of Professor Snape. But these gestures did nothing to resolve the nagging feeling in Neville's chest that he was forgetting things outside the scope of his schoolwork. At nights, he would lie awake in bed, attempting to dredge these things from his mind until slumber eventually claimed him and he fell asleep unsatisfied.

Then one morning, Neville woke to find that the world had changed again.

Harry was changing in the corner—different Harry, green-eyed, shaggy-haired, brown-skinned Harry from the welcome feast in the Great Hall. And then Neville's brain was filled with thousands of memories of different Harry from the week prior, struggling in charms class and chatting with Ron and losing points from Gryffindor house (Hogwarts had a point system?). Then he entered the common room, where bushy-haired, long-toothed Hermione sat with a book in her hands, just as she had every morning for the past week (had her hair ever been straighter than this? Or had it always looked this curly?). And a student in the corner whispered to his friend about how Peeves had stolen his copy of Hogwarts: A History, and Harry emerged from the boys' quarters wearing a shabby-looking pair of crooked spectacles that he seemed to have owned for days, and Neville's system was flooded with anxiety and relief in equal measure.

There were two different Hogwarts. There were two different Harry's, and two different Hermione's, and two different versions of all the rest of the students that Neville had grown to care for; there was a world where Peeves existed and a world where Peeves did not, a world where Hogwarts kept track of house points and a world where students were driven by achievement alone. There was a world where the castle was dusty and shabby-looking, where the students looked a little more unkempt, where everyone behaved a bit more thoughtfully; there was a world where the castle shone, where the students were beautiful, where people spent less time thinking and more time acting. And Neville regularly made a fool of himself in both of them, and he was loved in both of them; he remembered things that he shouldn't and forgot things, too, and somehow it was still all right.

His existence wouldn't be particularly special, but perhaps it would be enriching in its own right. Harry Potter be The Boy Who Lived, but Neville would be The Boy Who Lived Twice.