Disclaimer: Sadly, I don't own Ron or Hermione. JK Rowling does.

The Spinney

Hermione had never enjoyed surprises. Once, when she was very young, her parents put together an extravagant birthday part for her. Normally she would share a birthday dinner with her parents and grandparents then spend the rest of the evening reading the books she'd received. But for her ninth birthday her parents had decided a little girl deserved at least one proper birthday and planned a whole event at the nearby lake in the last week before school. They told Hermione that they were just going to spend a day in the park, and then surprised her with her entire class swimming in the lake.

She spent the entire party sitting under a tree reading "The Hobbit." Not one of her classmates wished her a happy birthday. Up until that point her parents hadn't realized the extent of her ostracism from her classmates. She'd kept that information from them on purpose and after a silent car ride back home she ran upstairs and slammed the door to her bedroom, crying all night.

No, Hermione had never liked surprises. It wasn't that she didn't believe in pleasant surprises. She simply tended to know more than the people around her, and how was she to make sure everything went perfectly if they kept information from her? She knew that made her a control freak. But she was constantly balancing so many things in her life. The only way she could keep everything in order was if she knew every possible factor. That was her method of survival; it made her excel at her job and had kept her alive during the darkest of times.

So it was a testament to the depth of her trust in Ron that she didn't panic when he dragged her out of bed at nine in the morning on a Sunday (A Sunday! Ron never woke up before eleven on Sundays if he could help it), told her he had a surprise for her and tied a blindfold over her eyes. And though she complained a little, she still let him Side-Along Apparate her to a mysterious location, lead her down what sounded to be a suburban road and then ceremoniously scoop her into his arms.

"What are you doing?" She demanded, hoping he mistook the nervous giggle in her voice for excitement. She caught whiff of something similar to mildew and crinkled her nose.

"It's a Muggle tradition when you get engaged, I read it somewhere." His voice replied from somewhere above her left ear.

Hermione furrowed her brows. "You mean carrying the bride over the threshold?" He must have nodded, because she felt his chest shift in such a way that seemed to indicate him moving his head. "Ron, that's after the couple gets married, not engaged! Besides, you don't just carry the bride around randomly; you carry her over the threshold of your new home together."

Ron deposited her to the ground with enthusiasm, but gently. "Okay, I messed up the engaged versus marriage part but…" He untied her blindfold. "Ta-da!"

She squinted to adjust her vision. At first she thought everything still seemed dark because she had just been blindfolded, but after a moment she realized it was legitimately dark. They were standing in a dingy, worn-down front hall of a house. A house that seemed to be just as dingy and worn-down as the entranceway. Hermione turned to Ron, who was grinning widely at her, a feeling of horror weighing down her gut. "Ron, what is this?"

"Our new home!"

This was why she hated surprises.

"Ron, you can't be serious!" Hermione's eyes darted around, frantically taking in details that made her anxiety increase. Several steps on the stairwell had rotted through. There was a hole in the room to her left, which may have once been a living room. Burn marks adorned the grimy walls. And the smell was definitely mildew. "This place is a wreck! It looks like it's been used as a drug-dealer hideaway for a decade." The full implications of what he'd just said settled in and a stormy expression crossed her face. "You didn't serious buy a house without consulting me, did you?"

Ron's grin had long since disappeared and he backed away nervously, holding up his hands. "No, of course not." He appeased. "But this would be a great place to buy. I talked to the landlord and it's ridiculous how cheap it is."

"Ridiculous." She repeated. "It's ridiculous that this death-trap is even for sale. It's ridiculous that you even considered buying it for one moment, let alone brought me here." There was a squeak from somewhere above that sounded very much like a rat and she shuddered. "This is a joke, right? Because if it is, let's leave before any squatters try to chase us out with knives."

"There are no squatters." He rolled his eyes, and Hermione felt a stab of irritation. How dare he have the gall to be exasperated with her at this moment? "I checked the place out before I brought you here. It's perfectly safe. Obviously it'll need a bit of work done, but- "

"A bit?" Hermione couldn't believe what she was hearing. "The cost of repairing alone would be more than the price of a house twice its size. Why do you think the landlord hasn't bothered fixing it up?"

Ron raised his brows. "Because he's a Muggle." He said slowly, as if she were a simpleton. "And we're wizards. I'm not saying it would be easy, it would obviously take some work and time."

"Time that we don't have." She countered, unable to believe that they were still having the conversation. "You only have one day off a week, I'm constantly swamped with work even when I'm home, and most days neither of us get home until eight."

"You're getting an assistant in a couple of months, that'll take most of the work of your hands," Ron reminded her. "And once we get Borgin me and the other high-ranked Aurors won't have to put in so many extra hours."

"The other high-ranked Aurors and I," Hermione correctly automatically, then sighed. "I know all that, but that reprieve is supposed to give us time to get married. And hopefully start a family." Her heart ached with a longing that had begun when she first saw Fleur with Victoire and had only grown with each baby her various in-laws had. School and career had always been her primary focus. When she was young she'd assumed that she wouldn't have kids until she was at least thirty, if at all. She was never one of those people who imagined what her children would be like, or thought of all the things she would make sure her children learned. Family had never been one of her goals. At least, it wasn't until Ron. But with Ron she wanted everything: she wanted the big church wedding, she wanted him to hold her hand while she gave birth to their children, she him to teach their children chess moves while she taught them to read, she wanted to dance with him at their children's weddings. She saw Molly and Arthur, sitting in their living room holding hands, with grandchildren climbing all over them and that's what she wanted her life to look like in fifty years. She'd thought Ron had felt the same, but if he was getting distractd now…

"I'm doing this for our future kids." Ron told her firmly, taking her hand. "I've been looking at houses for a few months now, because I wanted to find the perfect house and surprise you with it. And real estate is really bad right now. Even with all our savings, the best we could afford is one of those new condos in a crowded neighborhood full of identical condos, with two bedrooms. We'd end up moving out in about five years once we could afford better or our family got bigger. It would just be a house. It wouldn't be a home. And I don't want our kids to grow up in more than one house. I want to create a home for them that will be like the Burrow is for me." He smiled at the thought of his family home and Hermione unconsciously mirrored his expression back at him. "This place…we could make a home out of this place."

He took her hand and led her to the kitchen. One of the counters was smashed and the window was boarded up, but it was nice a spacious. He gestured to the backyard out the window. "There's so much space back there, and plenty of coverage. We could do magic and our kids could practice flying without worrying about Muggles seeing. Those woods would be ours too. They could play in the forest and go exploring." He drew her away from the window and now addressed the kitchen. "We could put a table in that little niche there," he pointed to an alcove in the corner of the room. "And there would be room to add another table and more chairs if we had company. Our kids could sit there doing their homework after school – because I figured you'd want them to go to Muggle primary school." Hermione had mentioned that once when they were still in Hogwarts, that she thought even Wizarding children should go to Muggle school to learn basic Muggle customs and knowledge before they went off to Hogwarts. Her heart warmed at his attentiveness and let him lead her up the stairs, hoping over the broken steps. "We'll fix those, obviously." He joked, "Or we could leave them there as a sort of obstacle course – it would stop them from running up and down the stairs." In spite of herself, Hermione laughed. "This would be our room." It was barren but large. "It's big enough that we could have a nice little sitting area, and a desk so you could do your work in here if you got up in the middle of the night. There's this nice little room I'm thinking we could convert into a study downstairs." They walked further down the hall. "There's three bedrooms, but since we only want two kids we could always convert the largest one into a playroom. And it would leave room in case of an accident." He winked and walked back down the stairs.

Hermione was now following closely behind without him having to be ushered. "My favorite room is the living room." He gestured to the room with the hole in the floorboards. "There's lots of empty wall space that we could fill with bookshelves that stretch from floor to ceiling. This will be where the chess table goes, obviously."

"Obviously," Hermione repeated, seeing the room transform before her eyes. She would fill the bookshelves the way her parents had, putting the more difficult ones higher up so that as her children would be able to reach harder books the taller they grew. They would remove the wallpaper and re-panel the walls, staining the wood a rich brown. The room would be warm and scarlet like the Gryffindor Common Room, so that if they went to Hogwarts and were in Gryffindor (and how could they be anything other than fierce little Gryffindors with Ron as their father?) they would feel like they had a piece of home already. The large fireplace across the room would be the center of their home, where they would roast marshmallows on raining days when there was nothing else to do inside, and dry off their drenched bodies after playing in the snow all day, until they were nice and toasty.

After a while, she realized Ron had stopped talking. Hermione looked at him curiously. He was gazing at her with adoration and wrapped his arms around her. "You see it, don't you?"

She snuggled closer. "Yes." She breathed. "I do. It's going to be beautiful."

Ron's voice rumbled in his chest. "Good, I'm glad." He hesitated. "Because I actually did buy it."

Hermione pushed herself away from him in outrage. "You what? What if I hadn't agreed?"

"It's not a big deal, I just would have Confunded the landlord and destroyed the paper-work-"

"Ron, that's illegal! I can't believe you would ever think of doing such a thing!"

And that's how Ron and Hermione became the proud owners of a ramshackle house in York named "The Spinney."

A/N: "The Spinney" is the name of an actually London home near Scarborough that I found on a real estate site. I was just trying to find an actual street address I could use to put into the last sentence, but I was looking at this nice cottage that sort of resembled the home I envisioned for Ron and Hermione and in one of the pictures there was this little plaque designating the house "The Spinney" (which means a forest or wooded area). I'd wanted to give their house a name for easy reference like "The Burrow" but everything I could think of was too cliche or corny. I liked the idea of their home having a name that came with it, since it had a whole history before they ever came along (I was originally going to put in a bit of the house's backstory into this, but it dragged down the story. That will be another story. I'm thinking of doing a story from the house's point of view, which describes a lot of Ron and Hermione's home-life, while also fitting in the backstory of the house. What do you think?)

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