A/N: Spontaneous oneshots are spontaneous. Youtube videos birthed a bunny baby, but don't expect more - summer courses are eating me alive.
She spotted him sitting on the castle's front steps, staring blankly into the sky, and she sighed. Carefully, Hermione made her way closer and when there was no response, she gently rested an arm around Ron's shoulders.
He started, and she smiled to reassure him.
Harry was with Ginny and would be taken care of, as well as he allowed, but Ron had openly idolized Dumbledore from the moment they met and she—Hermione shook her head at herself. She worried about him. She worried about both of them, but right now, she felt Ron needed her worry more. Sometimes she and Harry forgot he had been born into this world of magic and had known Albus Dumbledore in his family for as long as he'd been alive. To see a man he and everyone he knew had thought invincible, fallen…
"Hey, Hermione."
She tried another smile and got a small one back. "How are you, Ron?" As he seemed to search for an answer, she settled on the step beside him, leaning against his shoulder as they had so often sat in the Gryffindor common when Harry and the world were falling apart. An arm came up to wrap around her shoulders and she turned her face into his shoulder.
She needed this, too, she was not too petty to admit.
"We'll be alright, Hermione." The smile came easier this time, more sincerely. It always astonished her when Ron the Teaspoon showed this sort of emotional awareness, and expressed it. She patted the hand on her shoulder—"I know."
They sat together, taking comfort in the warmth and the eternally beautiful Hogwarts view, for over an hour. At last, Hermione broke the silence with a question.
"What was that—that spell? When everyone, after Dumbledore…" Ron was silent for a moment and Hermione wondered in a cruel, private corner of her mind if this was another piece of the wizarding world she was just expected to know or forever be denied.
"It's not a spell, not really," Ron's voice was very quiet. "The closest I can think of is the Patronus. I've only seen that, that sort of showing on a smaller scale at the last rites for my great-uncle." He swallowed, breathing slowly and she could almost feel the wheels turning in his strategic brain, trying to work out a way to explain something he just understood. Like chess, Ron could never quite explain why certain things just made sense and others – particularly academic others – didn't. She almost smiled, but he finally spoke again and something in his voice stilled her.
"It's not a spell. You saw, no one says anything, sometimes you don't even need a wand. It's just—it's pure magic. The sort we don't practice anymore because it's too big and too messy. Little showings when things get really emotional, though—those we can't really help. It's like an instinct, like accidental magic."
"When a lot of us gather together and feel the same strong emotion, it shows. It's not as flashy as purposeful magic on its own and it's not as messy as the old pure magics, but that's why it only shows when we're gathered." Ron cut himself off, frowning and running a frustrated hand over his face. Hermione stayed quiet, letting him think and trying to take it in, trying to understand this new puzzle piece in her world like Ron understood it.
Finally, Ron tried again.
"I really don't know how to explain this, but you probably already know it and just don't know it. Big events like the quidditch games and the Yule Ball, when a big group of us all get worked up in the same way – you feel that, don't you?" Hermione frowned, thinking back to the Yule Ball and recalling how the fairy lights always seemed brightest near the greatest concentration of excited dancers, or how, at the boy's quidditch games, sometimes she would swear she saw them glow in the shadow of the goal posts – as if lit by quiet magic.
"Oh," she breathed. Ron sighed a little with relief, "Yeah."
"It's little things, when everybody's letting off that much magic and it just hangs there with no direction. Usually it lights up and rises; the simplest spells are simple for a reason, our magic wants to do those things."
Hermione stared at him, stunned at this new tidbit she'd never known, half-infuriated and mostly just awed at the magic that could still surprise her every day, she murmured, "Wingardium Leviosa."
Ron nodded, grinning lopsidedly, "Lumos. Yeah, so, that's what that was. Everybody was just hurting and there were so many of us together; it was too strong. McGonagall's old enough she's probably seen it happen before, in the last war, I'd think, so she knew to direct all the magic somehow – just a little encouragement so we didn't all end up glowing or on fire."
Hermione snorted, muttering, "Seamus." Ron barked a laugh like he hadn't expected it and Hermione grinned; that was the first laugh she'd heard in days.