A/N: This was written for the 2017 Romione Fluff Fest for the quote prompt "They know" and I hope you like it...
"Ron."
Hermione's voice comes as a hiss across the sofa, her face bearing an expression of grave concern. He glances around, briefly, to try to discern the cause of her distress, but aside from the usual - the extensive wedding planning chart on the kitchen table, the sample flower arrangements cluttering the work surface - it's just a typical Sunday night at the Burrow.
Relatively typical, anyway.
"What?"
Hermione's eyes dart furtively around the crowded sitting room - there is no such thing as privacy amongst the extended Weasley clan - as though she's about to share classified Ministry information.
"Ron, they know."
It probably annoys her further that he just looks at her, eyes brimming with fondness for her the way they have since they were both stubborn teenagers, but he can't help it. She's just being so impossibly, so wonderfully Hermione right now, and her hand is on his thigh as she leans in to talk to him, and he knows he needs to be appropriately put out about whatever it is she's put out about, but he can't quite get there yet.
"Who?"
"Harry!" she snaps. "And Ginny too, they know-"
"How could they possibly know?" Ron attempts to reason. "There's no way, nobody knows but us."
"They can tell!" insists Hermione. "Look at the way he's looking at us, he knows."
Ron observes his best friend across the room. Harry does seem to be half-watching them as he and Ginny listen to Charlie regale them with a tale of his glory days as Gryffindor Seeker, but maybe, Ron tells himself, it's because of how suspicious Hermione is acting.
Except... the thing about Hermione is that she's usually always right, and then Ron actually makes accidental eye contact with Harry, who furrows his brow at him, and oh shit, maybe he does know. Maybe he's mastered Legilimency, or he's got some sort of sixth sense as a result of evading death so many times, but it seems like something's up. Ron's bouts of paranoia in the past have always been blessedly unfounded, but this is easily the biggest secret he's ever kept in his entire life and now he feels like the truth is scrawled on his forehead in red ink.
But it's not like they planned it, really, even though he had the idea a thousand times before he finally voiced it aloud. Every time she looked at him, long-suffering, with the Muggle telephone pressed to her ear and her mum on the other end of the line, every time they had to pore over photos of centerpieces and tablecloths, every time Hermione begrudgingly added another set of names to the guest list, he thought about it. And two days ago, as they were inking names onto envelopes at their own kitchen table, he finally spoke up.
"This is stupid," he remarks, consulting the scroll of parchment for the proper spelling of his dad's second cousin's name. "I've only met this bloke once, at Bill's wedding, and he kept calling me Rupert."
"But that's the thing about big families," says Hermione around a sip of red wine. "You can't pick and choose who you actually like, you either have to invite everyone or invite no one."
Ron looks at her, his fiancée, the woman he would die protecting, his best friend, the person he loves more than anything or anyone, and he observes the bags under her eyes, her hair piled in an untidy bun, the fact that she's taken to drinking wine in the evenings, and he decides that enough is enough. He's seen her stretch herself too thin before in her determination to be all things to all people and he knows that none of it is worth running herself into the ground.
"So let's invite no one," he suggests, forcing himself to keep a straight face even though this thought is enough to plaster the goofiest grin on his face.
Hermione gives him a weary smile. "Oh, very funny."
"I'm not joking." He shifts around on the wooden chair to face her. "Look, you want to be married, right? To me, I mean?"
"I wouldn't be addressing two hundred wedding invitations if I thought we'd be better as friends," she quips back. "Especially not one to Aunt Muriel."
"So let's just forget all of this," he says desperately, gesturing to the parchment and inkwells littering the table, "and let's just get married-"
"We can't just forget it," replies Hermione, befuddled, "I've bought a dress, your sister bought a dress, and your mum's been working on the decorations for weeks already-"
"Then we'll still do all of that, I mean we'll still have the wedding like we're planning, it's just - it's supposed to be our wedding, right, but it feels like everything we're doing is for everyone else but us."
Ron knows he has a point when she's silent, studying him with her bottom lip between her teeth.
"We wouldn't have to tell anyone," she muses slowly. "They could all think they're attending our real wedding. We'd be the only ones who knew better."
Leaning toward her, Ron catches her lips softly with his. "Let's do it tomorrow," he whispers, his face still close to hers. "It'll be just us. And that way it'll actually be what we want - because I don't need any of this other stuff, all I want is to be married to you."
Her face relaxes into a smile - the first time anything about her has been relaxed for weeks.
"Tomorrow."
"I just can't see how he would have found out," says Ron, his mind now racing through the millions of scenarios that may have led to this information leaking. Their marriage certificate is public record, so any Ministry official on duty could have shared the news, and the wizarding community is nothing if not inclined to gossip, not to mention that Harry is incredibly well-known...
Ron looks back over at Harry, who now seems to be studying him skeptically with narrowed eyes, as though sizing him up. He's seen this look on Harry's face before, interrogating suspects, and it makes his stomach flip.
"See?" Hermione whispers, triumphant. "He knows, somehow. We must seem married."
Ron thinks of the wedding band around his finger, charmed to be invisible for the next two months, and how he hasn't been able to take his eyes off her since that bloke at the Ministry declared them husband and wife, and how he's newly enamored with her, how it's taking all of his self-control not to pull her up the stairs to his old attic bedroom... so maybe he is acting different. He hasn't expected marriage to change all that much for them, but maybe it's more fundamental than he realized.
His mum still can't find out, though, and if Harry knows, then Ginny knows, and Ginny... she's skilled at a great many things, but keeping secrets is not one of them.
"Oi, Harry!" Ron calls across the room, firing a meaningful look at Hermione. "And Ginny, come here for a second."
When everyone stares, even Percy, Ron just shrugs. "It's just best man and maid of honor business, don't worry about it."
Harry dutifully clambers up from the floor and pulls Ginny to her feet, and the four of them trek up the creaking staircase to Ginny's old bedroom. It's exactly the same, right down to the Weird Sisters poster, and Ginny and Harry both sink down onto the old twin bed. Ron stands before them, Hermione at his side, and decides his height is absolutely giving him an advantage here.
"Look," he says confidently. "We know you know."
The reaction is anticlimactic: just two puzzled faces gawking up at him, then each other, then back at him.
"What do we know?" asks Harry, looking to Ginny for guidance.
"I don't know how you figured it out," Ron continues, "but it's not that big of a deal-"
"Yes, it is-" Hermione interjects.
"But we really don't want anyone else to find out until at least after the wedding," Ron concludes, "so please don't tell anyone. Especially you," he adds to Ginny with an accusatory finger.
"I still don't know what we don't-" Ginny interrupts herself with a dramatic gasp of astonishment. "Are you pregnant?"
"No!" replies Hermione, indignant, "and we wouldn't get married just because of that, we just wanted to-"
At the look on Harry's face, she stops. There isn't even a hint of the smug satisfaction Ron had expected, nor any of the genuine happiness he had displayed when the pair of them had gotten engaged. Instead, Ron watches as his face vacillates between confusion and shock.
"You don't mean you actually got married, right?" he says softly. Of course. The one time Hermione is wrong. "Just that you're going to get married?"
They can still salvage this, Ron thinks, and backpedal their words, but that would mean not just keeping a secret from Harry, but flat-out lying to him. And he just can't do that. He's never lied to Harry before and he's not about to start now.
"We got married yesterday," says Hermione, who is clearly of the same mind as Ron, making Ginny's eyes widen into saucers.
"Wait, you actually got married?" Harry looks stunned, almost... offended. "You got married without me?!"
"Wasn't aware three people could all marry each other, mate," Ron can't help but crack back, mostly to mask the guilt boiling in his stomach.
"We're still going to have the wedding we've been planning," Hermione chimes in frantically, "it's going to be the same, except-"
"Except it won't even really count?" Harry's brows are raised in defiance. "I mean, what, you couldn't send Pig with a note? We live five minutes from each other."
"You're not meant to take it personal," says Ron. "There wasn't anyone there, just the bloke from the Ministry-"
"Lucky him," scoffs Harry, though Ron detects the vaguest hint of a smile behind his scowl. "It just sucks that I missed it, I feel like I've been there for everything else."
"I know," says Hermione gently, "and it's not like we didn't want you there or anything, but we really wanted it to be just us for once. We just wanted to have something that was ours and not anyone else's, and it was, so..."
Harry's green eyes pierce into them as the tension rises in the small bedroom and Hermione and Ron exchange nervous looks. They never intended to hurt anyone with this, which was the primary reason for keeping it under wraps.
"I won't tell anyone," Harry states finally. "I'll spare you your mum's wrath."
"You lot are mental," Ginny declares, still regarding her older brother with a sort of amazed disbelief. "I mean, I already knew that, but - wow."
With that, she rises from the bed and saunters from the room, leaving Harry to gaze after her.
"We'd better go before people start to suspect something," Hermione decided, her hand curling around Ron's as she leads him toward the door. Her own invisible ring has twisted around her finger so that the gemstone is pressed into Ron's palm, and he's reminded, for the hundredth time that day, that this is real now. It's not some hazy day in the future with a dance floor and champagne toasts, it's just them solidifying what they already know: they are made for each other.
"What made you think that I suspected something, anyway?" asks Harry as the thee of them traipse down the stairs.
"You kept staring at me," Hermione tells him.
"Because you kept staring at me, it was creeping me out," Harry laughs. "God, Ginny's right, you lot really are mental."
They're just about to step back into the sitting room when Mrs. Weasley appears before them in her apron.
"There you two are," she says as Harry slinks away. "I've been looking for you, I've got an idea for the seating chart."
Dutifully they follow her into the kitchen, hands still clasped, and listen while she explains her plan to keep Mr. and Mrs. Granger, "who already have enough to be getting on with", as far from the appraising eye of Aunt Muriel as possible, but halfway through her spiel she stood and regards the couple before her suspiciously.
"You sent out the invitations over the weekend, didn't you?" asks Mrs. Weasley, the question directed at Ron.
"Er-" Ron's hand tightens around Hermione's. "We almost finished addressing them the other night."
It isn't a lie: they did almost finish addressing them... but then they decided to get married instead.
"Well, you've got to send them soon, dear," Mrs. Weasley admonishes him, "because some of those owls at the post office are just dreadfully slow, and you want to make sure everyone's able to be there, right?"
Hermione has sucked her bottom lip almost entirely into her mouth to curb her laughter.
"Right," Ron chuckles. "Of course."
"You only get one wedding day," Mrs. Weasley continues, "so you need to be sure that it's perfect."
"It will be," Hermione says confidently, and when her eyes land on Ron, he knows she's thinking the same thing he is: it already was.
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