Title: There's Such a Thing
Chapter: Bickering
Author: Scruffyreader7
Word Count: 2372
Character Pairing: Hermione Granger / Ron Weasley, references to Ginny Weasley / Harry Potter (medium) and Angelina Johnson / George Weasley (some) as well as other cannon pairings (as much as can be expected).
Rating: T. It's Ron. He curses.
Spoilers: Deathly Hallows. I'm no JK Rowling, so if you haven't read up to DH, get the hell off fanfiction and plunk your arse down in a bloody library.
Timeline: Post DH. Harry's Generation.
Summary: Nearly four years after the Battle at Hogwarts, Harry and Ginny seem to be doing just fine with their relationship. But Ron has had a string of flings and her 'protector' scares all of Hermione's potentially serious boyfriends off. She doesn't want or need his help, she thinks. But the truth is, if he wasn't involved in her life, Ron would be far, far away from Wizarding London, and nobody wants that. Least of all his bushy-haired, bossy, bookish best friend.
Author's Note: Can I just say how sorry I am for not updating anything? Terribly sorry.
Bickering
They needle. They needle and they prod and they tease and they bicker and it eventually, sometimes but not often, turns into a blazing fight the after affecting cold of which doesn't return to normal for days on end. The first time they argue about getting Harry out of Grimmauld Place and into a new apartment, somewhere he isn't constantly reminded of the sacrifices made to get him into this 'new dawn on wizardkind.' She wants it and he doesn't. He thinks they should go slow, that they should let Harry remember because it's goddamned hard, losing a person you care about. And she thinks that Ron shouldn't always make it about himself and how dare he make this about her because she's lost people too, hasn't she? And in normal conversations they would both have plowed a fist into someone's face for making the other relive their pains like this, but this is Ron and Hermione and only they are allowed to hurt each other. And it spirals on and on until they bring up every terrible thing they've ever said to one another and it ends when Harry shouts at them to shut up because he's trying to sleep. (They try and argue when Harry is asleep, because they don't want to make it any harder for him than it already is. 'It' being adjusting to Life After Voldemort.)
Hermione eventually wins that one because Ginny agrees with her and so does Mrs. Weasley (which is a surprise) so they go shopping for a flat safely in the Muggle world. (Harry is just too famous in the Wizarding sections of Britain). They decorate the flat with warm yellows and reds, the kitchen feels rather haphazard with pots hanging on all surfaces and Muggle appliances everywhere. Ron spends time shouting into until he learns that the microwave is not a 'felly-tone.' Harry and even Ron appreciate the flat, the effort they put into it. On Ron's part this may or may not be because Hermione gave him a bedspread in purple and walls in oranges. They may all have their burdens, but they have havens too. Ron's is quite predictably the Chudley Cannons, Harry's is Ginny, and Hermione's is the public library.
Another time (and another is the word because were the author to list each and every one in order years would go by) is when Ron helps George with Weasleys. The problem is really that he ends up working about sixteen hours a day and that he's consequently working himself to death. Ron doesn't find it appropriate that 1. his best friend is lecturing him on his life (it's his life) and that 2. she wants him to either abandon his brother or the Wizarding public still being terrorized by Death Eaters. Because, being Ron, he's managing to hold two full time jobs. This one actually doesn't end in Hermione's favor, being that he quits the Wheeze's job about six months later and puts in more hours at the Auror office. This means he is in danger more hours, something Hermione finds ridiculous.
These blow-ups begin to follow something of a pattern but not much of one. They mostly happen at the apartment (But sometimes at the burrow, out back because Hermione can't stand to make a scene in front of everyone. Ron could care less, unless it's only Harry. Then he's the one to usher her out of the room.) They both have a radar for when the fights are about to explode. They can tell when it's not just another fight that will leave them breathless on the couch, eating all of the junk food she never buys and making fun of the relationship between his sister and the boy she considers her brother. Their voices rise and their hackles go with them; they realize they're shouting and turn back to hissing until someone says something so appalling that they go back to shouting, defying Newtonian physics. Every action has a greater and louder reaction. (That too, is a trigger for several off-days. Ron can't stand it that she speaks a vocabulary he barely understands, she doesn't want to cut herself open—again—to get rid of something Ron doesn't like.)
And someone, either one, brings up some old wound. Some old secret. Says something so far over the line it's like nothing is sacred and they don't really know each other at all, they have a compass pointing to the most hurtful thing they could possibly say and they latch on and set a course. They bellow and shout and yell and hiss and whisper and cut one another so deeply, just to disappear off to their respective jobs. They rant to their family and friends (in her case, just her family, and only in letters she will never send. Hermione doesn't have friends except for Ron and Harry and Ginny. She can't rant to Harry and Ginny, not only don't they get it, they're both too connected to the other party.) They spend three or four days huffing and puffing in silence until the guilt weighs so heavily that the only people they can talk to Ginny or Harry. "I'm worried about Ron." "I'm worried about Hermione. I—I was terrible." And then they stumble through sudden apologies with weak smiles and go find some takeout in Muggle London or some tiny obscure Wizarding food she's never tried before and curl up on the couch.
Of course, they have their good days. So many good days it feels like they should all be put in a wall of sepia photos. The day she applied for a grant for house-elf education, he sent flowers with the reasoning that if she won there would be flowers all over the place but that even if she didn't she'd spent weeks doing all that work for the grant and somebody should recognize that. The day after almost everything stabilized and Ron formally graduated to full auror, and Hermione had tried to squeeze the life out of him. The jokes or ridiculous coworker stories they send one another via paper airplane. The times they manage to drag Harry out of pubs where everyone knows his name for those few days a year, laughing with one another about it's that time of year again, here he goes again, just like old times.
It is never like old times. Never, and she wishes it was. Because they all knew where they stood back then. Or at least they knew more clearly. Because they fought about silly things back then, and those silly things seem so much less personal than the silly things they fight about now. Like Ron being her protector. They fight about that a lot. He thinks it's exactly how it should be, because that's how they are. Forged in fire, whatever that means. The bi-yearly psych examination the Ministry forces on everyone calls them 'dangerously co-dependent'. This worries her but no one else. Well, it worries Ron's string of flings, but they are flings and she thinks little of it other than as a triumph that they actually agree on something. Ron thinks it's exactly how it should be; they don't involve Harry in this. Harry would say that he's sorry that he fucked them up, and they would tell him not to make it about him like he always does because this is about them and then they'd really have a problem. Fighting with Harry is not something anyone undertakes lightly.
Today they aren't fighting. They aren't even needling, because Ron is sulking. It's so typically Ron it almost makes her laugh, but she doesn't, because then they'd be fighting.
"I don't see why you won't let me at least meet the bloke."
She crosses her arms and peers at him over the rims of the glasses perched on her nose, Harry's, jokingly lent, but now Harry looks dangerously squinty-eyed. If he tries to see any harder he's likely to explode his eyes right out of his head, or so Ron thinks. Hermione is much too rational to think such things.
They are in the apartment. Wedding plans are scattered all over the place but discreetly. Last week Ron and Harry bled all over some stationary before Hermione could stitch them up and Ginny threatened to re-open the wounds if they didn't find a way to not bleed on her papers. Because the season is still on Hermione doesn't want to say much. Ginny is terrifying during the season. Harry curled into a loveseat, drooling over a magazine and losing his queen to Ron's knight (Harry has to trust Ron's word on which pieces are which, because he can't see them).
She rolls her eyes and Ron, for whatever reason, looks pained. Well, he always looks sick when he's upset, pale with white lips and freckles that stand out for miles. "You're favoring your knight," she says because that's all she can think of. She doesn't like thinking of Ron's lips, avoids noticing if they're chapped or swollen, or in this case, white and pouting.
"That doesn't answer my question. I don't see why I can't meet him. Harry has." Ron uses his knight, again, just to irk her.
Harry resettles under his blanket and cranks up the fire a notch with his wand. "Not much to meet."
A moment later, he adds, "It's cold in here." It is blatantly obvious to everyone that Harry wishes to end the bickering, and soon.
If she weren't so intent on winning her argument, and if it wasn't Harry, she would probably have taken someone down for that first remark (she's had far too many people in her life say that there wasn't much to her but the three B's: books, bushy hair and bossiness). But it is Harry, and for some ridiculous reason she wants to keep Ron away from this boyfriend. And that relies on winning this particular squabble.
"You're behaving like a child, Ronald."
"Stop treating me like one and I'll stop acting like one. God."
Before she answers she turns to Harry—"Merlin, you'd need years worth of correctional spells, better stick to glasses."—then back to her book, licks her finger and thumbs the page, and says as quietly as she can but so that he will still hear her, "This is exactly the reason why. I hate it when I feel like I'm your mother."
Ron, in the midst of moving a piece on the board, goes very still and suddenly leaps up. His blue eyes are blazing and suddenly the ill look he's been sporting up to this point turns into something else that makes him look holy. Avenging. His hair is a crown of glory, and she wonders if any of his girlfriends saw him like this, if they understood him to his core like this, could see all his imperfections and still declare him godly, body, mind and soul. Probably not.
"What ever, Hermione," he says, and it is his lack of worded elegance that makes her shrivel in on herself. She knows Ron cannot express what he wants in the ways he wants. She knows this, and she still traps him in on himself and makes him feel stupid and all of the things she tries so hard not to do. Ron stalks to the door and tears it open, turning around to nod at Harry. Ron studiously avoids meeting her eyes.
"Oh, and by the way, Harry; checkmate."
When the door slams behind him, and Hermione's book has slid from her hands to her lap and then to the floor, she stares at the door, and then at Harry. He too is wild-eyed and confused. She mutters to the open air, "What. The. Hell."
A/N: There's really only one thing I want to explain and three I want to clarify. Hermione and Ron aren't necessarily religious, but trust me, you don't have to be to use words like god and Christ, or to describe Ron in the image of Michael. I have a feeling that Hermione's parents aren't all that religious either, but the grandparents she has in my head were, and they took her to church a lot. Being a wizard or witch doesn't exclude one from religion, and I get the feeling too that Molly Weasley would have tried pretty hard to take her kids to church at least for Christmas, because about once a year is how often you can get all the Weasleys wearing Muggle attire.
Also, the whole flowers thing is totally real. My mom applied for a grant and my dad sent her flowers when she applied instead of when she got the grant, because then everyone would be sending her flowers but until then no on would appreciate the work.
On other subjects, Harry and Ginny are engaged, and Ron and Hermione are clearly, currently not together. I've attempted to incorporate as much information as I have from transcripts of interviews conducted with JK. If you catch me using fanon (or worse, Americanisms), please call me on it.