My disdain for this ship is pretty well documented, but my good friend Kate decided to torment me with a prompt she knew I wouldn't like. Ah well, never let it be said that I would back down from a challenge.

Ship: Hermione Granger / Ron Weasley
Quote: "I'm not wrong; I'm hormonal and I hate my feet!"
Scenario: Hermione is pregnant with her first child. She and Ron go shopping and Hermione tries to buy clothes that she'll no longer fit into
Theme: Never upset the pregnant woman...
Length: 2000-2999 words.

Hormones

Ron Weasley had faced many challenges in his relatively short life. He had fought the foulest of villains, endured long months of hardship and hunger, and yet he could safely say that this moment was quite one of the most difficult.

He was seated on a small pouffe cushion in a very superior looking dressing area complete with large gilt mirrors and flowing velvet drapes. He felt immensely out of place. And sadly, his wife looked as conspicuous in the scene as he did. Normally she fit right in with all sorts of people, she was well spoken, well dressed and, well, Hermione.

In this instance, however, she was Hermione and then some. He watched her turn on profile as she stared at the mirror. From this angle he could see the bulge of stomach, home to their first child. A baby. It was still a foreign concept to him; he worried that he wouldn't be a very good father. Hermione didn't seem to though. But that was only when she was feeling warm and loving and all sharp implements were out of reach.

Her hormones, as the healer had put it at that first check-up, had taken over, creating something akin to an evil twin: an evil twin that was constantly bossing him around, more than she normally did, and complaining of his insensitivity.

That was partly why he was sitting there on the silly little cushion watching his very pregnant wife attempt to squash her now larger self into clothes several sizes too small. He cringed as a seam popped again, followed by a very ominous ripping sound. The reedy looking sales assistant, who had spent the last half hour hovering around in constant anxiety, looked as though she'd swallowed a lemon.

"Miss... Ma'am... I think-" Ron stopped looking at the flustered girl and turned his weary gaze upon his wife, whose face was quickly gaining colour as she flushed in irritation.

"Of course, I'll pay for it. Even if it is poorly made..." Her tone was snappish and she disappeared behind one of the slinky curtains in order to extract herself from the confines of the garment. Ron spared a pained look toward the girl. He had tried to tell Hermione that she might want to consider wearing a different size, not because she was fat, she was pregnant for Merlin's sake! It was hardly a bad reflection on her.

She wouldn't have it though. That was the most alarming part of the whole 'with child' concept for Ron. Hermione now appeared to have some sort of erratic mood disorder tending with increased frequency toward irrationality and melodrama. To speak plainly, she was behaving in a very un-Hermione way and no matter how much he fed her those strange avocado things that she was constantly craving, she wouldn't morph back!

The first few months had been wonderful; they'd both been elated at properly starting their family and Hermione had glowed that hyped up pregnancy glow that everyone went on about. Six months in with swelling and a belly, when Hermione glowed it was only with pent up frustration or hunger. The morning sickness was wretched too. Ron blanched in recollection.

Everything had been well and good when the pregnancy hadn't had any real impact on her life, but now with all the restrictions on her activity and the inability to fit old clothes, she was having an adverse reaction. Hence the failed attempt to try on clothing many sizes too small.

Ron feared he might have to use a severing charm to get her out of the ensemble. He'd never been particularly good at charms, either. Just as he raised his awkwardly large form from the frilly confection on which he'd been seated, Hermione huffed out of the other room with as dignified an air as she could muster. Ron rather admired the effort given the fact that he'd clearly been right about the severing charm.

The dress now more closely resembled a heap of scraps than its original form. He loitered about as she handled the transaction and tried not to peer too closely at the strange slips of paper: muggle currency.

Ron yelped in fright as she grabbed his wrist and yanked him outside the shop door a moment later.

"Hermione! Settle down-" he paused in alarm at the expression on her face, she may have been infinitely smaller than him but she could be rather intimidating when she wanted. He'd never looked at a canary the same way since his sixth year. "I meant... er - blimey, horrible woman in there... and the clothes were bloody awf-"

"Shut up, Ron." She muttered irritably as they headed further through the bustle of London shops. She looked to have descended back to common sense for the time being and he was bloody grateful if truth be told.

He groaned internally as he realised she was directing him to yet another store, another store which by the looks of things did not appear to cater to a present day Hermione. Unable to bear the prospect of another 45 minutes spent like the last, Ron put his foot down.

"I know you want clothes... but are you really going to find anything in here? It's just temporary anyway, isn't it? Not much longer to go, eh?" He went for encouraging but got the feeling he'd failed.

"So you're saying I should just settle then? I should just wear an old sack and hibernate for three months until our baby is born and only then will I be fit to be seen again?"

"No!" He was aghast. "Bloody hell, Hermione, that's not what I said at all."

She stormed on ahead and pushed open the door to another shop, still speaking in that passive aggressive tone of hers. A bloke couldn't win against that tone. "Meanwhile, you get to stay at work, fit your clothes and don't have to worry about hanging your head over the toilet!"

Ron didn't know quite what to say to that, but said simply, "You're wrong, Hermione."

She sighed. "I'm not wrong; I'm hormonal." She paused and glanced down, "and I hate my feet!"

"What's wrong with your feet?" he asked more than a little alarmed. She had the sort of expression on her face that told him he would do well to concede her point and descend into silence. Ron had decided long ago that when shopping with a woman there could be no easy solution.

When shopping with a pregnant woman who was lamentably better at magic than he was, and prone to demonstrations of said ability, there really was no easy solution. If he tried to pamper her or gush, not that he was one for gushing but he knew the merit of a nicely placed compliment as well as anyone, she would throw a rather scathing look in his direction and tell him not to lie to her. But if she complained about the cravings, swellings in strange places or the inability to navigate doorways and he chose to let the comments slide, he was doomed all the more.

She would tell him he was inconsiderate, that it was easy enough for him to impregnate her and get on with life whilst she carried something the weight of troll around her middle. Basically he was screwed either way.

He learned all this the hard way though, because he had stuck his foot in it from early on in the piece and now she, his normally sane Hermione, was irrationally emotional about everything and most of all about her weight. And the proportion of her weight to her clothes, most particularly.

He wedged himself into the narrow space and watched as Hermione steered herself between too-close racks of clothing in the very tiny, muggle shop. His first point of contention had been that really, given her condition, wizarding robes might have been more comfortable. But that had earned him a slap at the back of his head and a peevish response from his wife. She insisted that she wanted muggle clothes as she had grown up with them and would not compromise her identity to conform to any wizarding standards. She hadn't done it at 12 and she wouldn't now at 25 either.

So there he was squashed up against a wall feeling dreadfully awkward as Hermione insisted to the saleswoman that yes she would fit that size of clothing in spite of her sizable belly. He felt an overwhelming wave of déjà vu and had a horribly foreboding feeling that this would be indicative of the rest of his afternoon.

"Ron!" She turned to him for support and the saleswoman looked resigned.

"Er - it's beautiful... the way it...swishes..."

Clearly giving up on him she disregarded his comment. "It's dreadful. I can't wear that one; it looks like Muriel's favourite tablecloth. I need it in green instead." She pushed back the fuzzy strands of hair which had started to stick to her forehead and turned on Ron. "What was I saying before? I can't remember..."

"Something about your feet?" he supplied helpfully, despite the fact that drawing attention to their existence might not have been his best move. Her face crumpled slightly and she glanced down at them distractedly.

Oh, dear. It was one of those moments, he could sense them clearly now. It was like an alarm went off in his head screaming, 'danger, retreat!' in a loud shrill voice. But trapped as he was between the wall and the clothes rack, he could do nothing but gaze at her with his most understanding expression.

At least he hoped it appeared understanding, rather than uncomfortable or apprehensive as it actually was.

"I'm ugly, aren't I? And fat. Too fat for these clothes." She lifted the garments in question and had such a wretched look on her face that he wanted very much to kiss it better. That wouldn't help though. He'd tried that once and thought himself as being very perceptive and thoughtful; she'd left him quite aware of how apparently insensitive he actually was.

Her mournful expression was turning slightly murderous now as each second ticked by without a rebuttal from him.

"Ma'am, your garment." The young girl was back with the item Hermione had requested. Relief coursed through him, though he felt a bit sorry for the girl as his wife's glare found a new victim.

Once she had vacated the space in order to try on her clothes, Ron turned to the girl and gestured helplessly. "She's pregnant..." The girl gave him a look that plainly spoke of how few brain cells she appeared to think he had.

The day was officially getting worse. He sighed and leaned back into the rack to get comfortable. It wasn't completely horrible, if one was to ignore the jab of metal hangers, the squawk of irritable customers, or the cloying smell of incense burning in the wretched shop. If he weren't painfully aware of how very unmanly it would appear, he might have descended to sobs of frustration long before.

Normally Hermione wouldn't bring him shopping with her given how dreadful a companion he was in such an instance. She did this time as punishment though, he was astute enough to realise that. It was all because he had accidentally, or perhaps unthinkingly, let slip the horrifying dream he'd had about her. In the light of day, he had seen the humour in it. Alas, she had not.

He closed his eyes, thus blocking out the uncomfortable surroundings and recalled the look on her face when he had told her he'd had a dream in which he had died, squashed beneath the mammoth weight of her stomach. He could still remember the phantom burning sensation in his throat as her weight crushed him. She wasn't actually that big anyway, but dreams exaggerated these sorts of things, in her horror she had ignored that comforting reminder.

The following morning she had asked him about his restlessness and idiotically he told her. Her lips had pressed close together forming an ominous white line of tension.

She made him sleep on the lounge room sofa for three days after that. In fact it was only after he'd appealed to her, claiming a variety of spinal conditions as a result of the too-short couch, that she had allowed him back on the proviso that he came shopping with her.

When he'd told Ginny and Harry about it the former had shaken her head in disgust, muttered something about Neanderthals and hit him across the back of the head. Harry had given him an aghast look.

"You can't ever say something like that when she's pregnant!" Ron had been quite peeved that his best friend, a father himself, hadn't seen to it that he was apprised of all these tricks and tips. It would have made the last six months infinitely easier.

"Ron. Please stop looking like you're about to undergo a colonoscopy." She had her arms crossed in front of her and was tapping her foot impatiently. Come to think of it, he hated her feet too.

"A colo- what?" His look screamed bewilderment. She did it on purpose he knew; would come out with random muggle sayings that he couldn't possibly comprehend.

"Never mind... what do you think?" She bit her lip as she always did. It told him of her anxiety and frustration. He couldn't quite understand how she came to be so upset by a clothing store, but then he remembered the sheer horror of his dress robes at the Yule Ball and it stopped him cold.

He sighed wearily. "Hermione, you know I think you look great whatever you wear." She looked at him as though weighing up his words and he smiled crookedly. He could see the corner of her lips quirking as though she too was fighting a smile.

Success!

She pressed a small hand to her stomach in a subconsciously protective way that she had taken to doing, it always scrambled his insides a little each time he saw it. Extracting his lanky form from the depths of the clothing rack, Ron moved forward to turn her around to face the mirror.

He wrapped his arms around her and rested his chin on the top of her head. He loved the way she snuggled against him instinctively, even if she was annoyed or inclined to hex him.

Hermione fingered the soft fabric, "it is quite pretty, isn't it?" He agreed. It was. "I put a stretching charm around the middle. I wanted to prove that hideous girl wrong." She grinned at him, and his heart clenched.

"I suppose you're counting down the seconds till we leave, aren't you?" Ron didn't bother denying it, she knew him far too well. Annoyingly well sometimes, now wasn't one of them.

He felt elated as they left the horrible small shop with its rude employees and strange musky smell.

"Shall we grab some lunch now, then?" He could think of nothing better than nipping down to The Leaky Cauldron for one of Tom's specials. Being thoughtful made him ravenous.

She laughed gaily and he felt a prickling sensation of dread on the nape of his neck. "You didn't really think we were finished, did you? We need to pop into Grizelda's now."

"Grizelda's?" His whispered tone was pained. He could have sworn he heard her cackle.

"Of course! My feet are swelling, I saw you cringing Ron Weasley, don't deny it." She looked at him shrewdly and he ducked his head. There was no escaping this one; it was going to be a very long day. His steak and kidney pie was slinking further and further out of reach.

"Shoe shopping... lovely." With as much gallantry as he was humanly able to muster, sadly this was not in the realm of knightliness, he gestured for his lady to walk on in the direction of Grizelda's: the holy grail for shoe lovers all around. Located in Diagon Alley, it was, thankfully, the first non-muggle store they would have entered all day.

Perhaps he'd get that pie after all.