"Briar, are you okay?" Neville carefully questioned after the plants drooped at her touch heavily one day.

She grimaced and plopped back onto the stool positioned behind her.

Neville watched her movements carefully before he took a few cautious steps towards her. He murmured, "What's wrong?"

Briar looked up at him, and something made her want to tell the shy boy everything in that moment. Looking into his round, puppy dog eyes made her want to tell him about all the things going wrong in her life, but at the last second, she clamped her mouth shut and looked back down at her fingers in her lap.

Neville poked out his bottom lip in defeat. He would give her as much time as necessary to open up, but he wished that she would tell him what was wrong. He had never seen plants reflect that sadness so heavily before, and his worry for the raven-haired girl only rose exponentially each time it happened. Why was she always so sad?

She stood up and moved towards the plants that weren't empathic with a frustrated sigh. She cared for those plants with more success while a silence filled the empty space in the greenhouse.

Neville had returned to the plant he was caring for before, recognizing that Briar just wanted to be left alone. He began to murmur to himself softly, but Briar was able to make out his words in the near silence of their work. He whispered, "Briar means a rose bush. Beautiful but guarded by thorns. It's perfect."

Briar swallowed hard and kept looking down, her hair creating a curtain with which she could block out the redness forming on her cheeks.

He thought she was beautiful?

There was an odd fluttering in her stomach, and a small smile slowly stretched across her face. This made her feel giddy and innocent, feelings that she hardly knew anymore.

With a curious thought, she shifted towards one of the empathic plants and extended her hand towards it.

It didn't droop or wither this time, and she knew it was all because of Neville's whispered compliments.

Whether she knew and accepted it or remained oblivious and in denial, Briar was falling in love with the shy Gryffindor boy, the only one who could possibly cut away her thorns and brambles to find the girl hiding inside.

-

On her way back to the Slytherin dorms after her latest tutoring session with Neville, she noticed a couple of figures standing close in a side corridor. She halted in her steps and turned back when she realized what the scene had looked like.

Standing in the corridor was Malfoy cornering a smaller blonde-haired Hufflepuff, and she looked horrified by whatever he was saying. He was standing incredibly close to her, and it was clear to Briar that he must have been bullying the smaller girl.

Briar started to move towards them, plans forming in her mind of what she planned to do to Malfoy to make it clear that he needed to leave people alone, when the Hufflepuff pulled her hand back and slapped Malfoy across the face, the loud smack echoing through the corridor and over to the place where Briar was standing. Briar blinked in pleasant surprise and assumed a smug grin when Malfoy stumbled back a few steps in utter shock.

The girl looked to the side quickly and noticed Briar's proud grin with wide eyes and raised eyebrows on her own face. Briar winked at her before turning and resuming her journey to the dorms. She could tell that the little Hufflepuff could take care of herself. She had a fire in her eyes that Briar recognized in herself, and she knew that Malfoy wouldn't stand a chance harassing someone like her.

Briar slipped into her dorm with a broad grin and noticed her roommates all perched on Pansy's bed, looking seriously at something in Daphne's hands. When Briar looked at them, Pansy quickly shoved the page under her pillow, and they all began to look about the room without glancing at their raven-haired roommate.

She narrowed her eyes and demanded, "What are you doing?"

"Um, just relaxing before dinner, of course," Pansy blurted with her body stiff and still. A sign of dishonesty that Briar knew all too well.

Briar dropped her bag onto her bed before marching over to them and snatching the page out from under the pillow. She blinked in surprise when all of her roommate simultaneously screamed, "No!"

Her eyes fell on the page, and she realized that it was a picture. It was a picture of her and Neville looking at one another during one of their tutoring sessions that year. Briar was smiling girlishly at him, and Neville was a bright red seemingly from head to toe.

Briar tore the picture in half and shoved it into the trash can before leveling a glare at her three roommates. She snarled, "Who took that picture of me?"

The three girls made eye contact and silent vows to not say a word about the origins of the picture.

Briar's upper lip curled dangerously as she looked at each of their eyes. She stepped up to Millicent and bent down to her eye level, her face mere inches away from Millicent's as she demanded, "Was it you, Millicent? Hm? Is that why you're so quiet? If you just tell me now, I promise I won't be mad, but my patience is wearing thin, so if I were you, I wouldn't waste more of my time."

Millicent blinked rapidly as her breaths came out more quickly. She suddenly blurted, "It was Creavy!"

Daphne and Pansy both groaned loudly at Millicent's inability to keep a secret.

"Why was he following me, Millicent?"

Millicent was quiet for a few seconds until Briar assumed her most frightening smile and enunciated slowly, "Why was he following me?"

"Because we asked him to," Millicent cried.

Briar nodded and took a step back. Millicent let out a relieved breath once she had backed out of her space. Briar pulled her wand out of her pocket and lazily pointed it at Daphne and Pansy. She chuckled, "And would you two like to tell me why you so stupidly asked him to?"

They both stared at her with wide eyes. After she leveled her wand at Daphne, Pansy groaned, "Briar, stop! It's obvious that you fancy the boy, and we don't mind, but you just won't ever talk to us about things, so we're forced to resort to such lengths to get answers."

"Maybe you don't need answers about my life. Have you ever thought of that?" Briar snapped and pointed her wand at Pansy.

Rolling her eyes, Pansy slapped the wand out of her face, and it clattered onto their bedroom floor a few steps away. Pansy hissed, "We're supposed to be your friends, but you won't talk to us about anything! You treat us as if we're just these three nuisances that you unfortunately have to live with. We're supposed to be your friends, your family-"

"I don't have a family!" Briar exploded with an unsettling haze of tears coating her eyes.

All three girls looked at her sadly with pity in their expressions. Pansy whispered, "We're trying to be there for you, but you never let anyone in. We want to help you, but we can't if you don't tell us what's going on in your life."

"I don't want your help," Briar whispered shakily as a couple tears slipped down her cheeks. She swiped at them angrily and tried to resume her previous glare, but she knew her expression was a watery excuse of her normal glare.

She swiped at her tears and fled the room, feeling heat rising up her neck at knowing her roommates had just seen her cry. Anger boiled in her veins at the fact that they had brought this out in her, and shame was weighing down on her heavily, making each of her limbs feel as if they were dragging her down.

Her father told her it was weak to cry. This was the second time she'd cried in the past few months. Maybe she was weak, she thought.

The corridors were abandoned as she hurried towards one of the main bathrooms, irritated that fleeing her dorm was becoming a regular occurrence. Why couldn't her foul roommates just leave her be? They were only making things worse.

She whipped around a corner and gasped when she crashed right into a tall frame.

Briar stumbled back a few steps and looked up to find herself gazing into Neville's concerned face as he took in her watery expression and red-rimmed eyes. He stammered, "B-Briar, are you-"

She shook her head and stumbled backwards. Her shame started to feel suffocating as she realized that another person had seen her cry now. She hurried down the corridors, slipping into the nearest bathroom, not caring if it was a boy's or girl's restroom. She didn't even look.

She pushed into a stall and slapped her hand over her mouth when an uncontrollable sob worked its way out from deep inside her chest. She pressed her hand over her mouth in an attempt to hold her sadness in, but this only made her sobs come out more forcefully.

It was as if her roommates had taken the cap off her bottled up feelings, and now they were spilling out with no chance of stopping any time soon. She winced when a particularly loud cry slipped through her lips. She was red with embarrassment, but she couldn't stop the hot tears that were slipping down her face.

She wrapped her arms around herself. She felt so alone.

The weight of her pain was suffocating and slowly crushing her. She couldn't breathe, she realized with a panic. Her breaths started to come out more labored and rushed, but they stopped altogether when she heard a soft voice whispering on the other side of the stall, "Briar, will you please come out?"

"Neville, go. I don't want you to see me like this," She pleaded in a gasping breath.

"Please, Briar?" His voice cracked as his shoes scuffled closer to the door of her stall.

In a moment of weakness, she whipped the lock open and slipped from the stall. Neville didn't look at her with pity, horror, disgust, or any of the other emotions she had been expecting to see on his face, and this made her break down even further.

He hesitantly stepped forward and held his arms out to offer her a hug. With her body shaking and hot tears still dripping down her face, she closed the gap between them and let Neville wrap his arms around her. She gripped the front of his robes while he just gently rubbed the tips of his fingers over her back in circles and softly hummed some song that Briar didn't know.

After a moment, her tears stopped, and she stilled against him. Being with him made her feel comfortable and protected, and for the first time since she was a child, she realized that with him, it was safe for her to cry.

———