Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, settings, lines, and references within the Harry Potter universe belong to JK Rowling and affiliated publishers. In addition, any aspects borrowed from the film canon are property of Warner Bros. This fanfiction exists purely for the non-commercial entertainment of fellow Harry Potter fans, and the author is not benefiting from any form of monetary profit. Rated T for language and some sensual implications.
Ronald Loves You ◊ Carmen's Daughter
He doesn't speak fondly of her. He doesn't compliment her extensive knowledge of the wizarding world, even in spite of her being a Muggle-born. He doesn't talk about the way her head of chestnut brown curls seem to defy gravity, or how her eyes are large, chocolate, and expressive like a doe. Instead, he talks out about how much he hates that we share the same House. In between classes, he snarls about how he wishes she'd shut her know-it-all mouth for once, and how he'd like to yank on one of her plaits with the little ribbons on the end, whenever she happens to wear her hair that way.
—then, there's Halloween.
"I didn't mean what I said, you know."
I gaze at him curiously as I pull back the scarlet covers of my four-poster, pleasantly drowsy from the feast.
"About her being a nightmare," he explains, eyeing me sheepishly from his own bed. "I didn't mean it. I mean, she is a bloody know-it-all, but …" The tips of his ears bloom red, discernable even in the low light of the dormitory. "She's nice too, I guess."
"Well," I say with a grin, taking off my glasses and placing them on the little bedside table. "I guess it's hard not to find at least one good quality in someone you've just knocked out a twelve-foot mountain troll with."
Ron doesn't respond, but I swear I see a smile teasing the corners of his mouth as he turns over.
He mocks the way she draws hearts around Lockhart's name, how she enjoys homework more than any thirteen-year-old girl ever should, and at times still seems genuinely annoyed by how often she raises her hand in class—but when she's gone, he's always the last to come to bed, mere minutes before curfew, and I can practically feel his heart breaking. He changes into his pajamas and slips between the off-white sheets quickly, so as not to disturb any of us. But I'm wide awake, and I turn to meet his blue gaze in the evening light.
"With Hermione all this time?" I ask, although it's not really a question.
"Y-Yeah." He nods, looking a bit embarrassed.
"Any improvement?"
He shakes his head. "Madam Pomfrey says she can't hear me … 'cause I guess when you're petrified it's like you're unconscious … but, it kind of makes me feel better to sit there and … you know, talk to her."
"She'll be okay, Ron," I assure him softly. "We'll figure this out."
"We will," he agrees. But his eyes are glistening, and he softly cries tears of uncertainty into his pillow all night.
I don't tell her about it when she's revived—how Ron had spent hours at her nonspeaking, petrified side, touching her cold hands and whispering we miss you, Hermione. I miss you over and over, as if repeating it will make it register in her stone ears—because, in a strange way, I feel like she already knows, in that way that Hermione seems to know everything.
He looks at her with awe-struck azure eyes and a blinding smile, likes she's just announced he's single-handedly won Gryffindor the House Cup, the corners of his toothy grin nearly touching his ears, and his freckled features alight like a firework.
"Why do you look at her like that?" I ask once she's gone to her dormitory to freshen up.
"Like what?" he says innocently, his gaze still lingering on her retreating figure.
"Like you want to kiss her or something, mate," I state, waggling my brow at him.
"Sod off, Harry," he replies defensively. "I just missed her, okay? Didn't you miss her?"
"'Course I did," I say truthfully, deciding not to push the issue any further.
At night, he doesn't cry into his pillow anymore.
Hermione is My Sister by the end of our third year. It's not something grand or important, or something we even feel the need to formally announce to one another, it simply is. Naturally. Seamlessly. She treats me like I imagine an older sister would: bossy and at times (or often) overbearing, but only because she cares. She's nice like a sister, always wishing me goodnight with a hug, and helping me with my homework when I would otherwise stare into the crackling fireplace and allow hours and hours to be consumed by my own thoughts, dreadfully realizing that with every passing minute at Hogwarts I'm brought closer to another miserable summer at the Dursleys.
She's annoying like a sister too, and her comments about my lack of disciplined study habits do not go without criticism from Ron—yet when she's not with us he talks practically nonstop about how he likes the way her hair looks when she wears it in a long plait that touches the middle of her back, or how she likes her tea with two sugars, or how she can eat three bowls of breakfast cereal in one sitting, and how he can't believe he's the only one who's noticed.
Ron's My Brother and Hermione's My Sister—and that indisputable fact is the one thing that makes sense in a world where absolutely nothing makes sense, and I'm more than content with it.
"I don't understand what's got her knickers in a bloody twist," Ron says as he angrily kicks his dress shoes under his bed. "I'm only looking out for her—that ruddy pumpkin head shouldn't even be looking at her; he's way too old! Aren't there laws against that sort of thing, anyway?"
"It's not like they're doing anything, Ron," I reason. "I mean, it was just a dance, right?"
"It's never 'just' anything with blokes like that, Harry. Hermione can't really think Krum only wants to dance and talk, can she?"
"You didn't need to yell at her though, mate," I reply in a soft tone. "Girls don't like that."
"I wasn't yelling!" he insists. "I was just … you know. Trying to get my point across."
And hours later, after Ron has fallen asleep, I find her in the common room, staining her pink pajama shirt as she wipes away her silently cascading tears.
"How did you know I was down here?" she asks as I sit next to her on the sofa before the fireplace.
"I didn't."
"Couldn't sleep?" (I nod.) "Me neither."
"Mmm." I hold my arm out, silently inviting her to come closer. She places her head on my chest and looks up at me with dewy eyes. "Why is he so mean to me, Harry?"
"He doesn't mean to be. He'll come around … you looked really beautiful tonight, by the way." I wipe a tear from the side of her cheek. "You still do."
She closes her eyes and sighs sadly against me.
Hermione is a girl. It's only as we plan for a war, with the D.A. sneaking about, Umbridge watching over the school like a hawk, and myself still moaning in my sleep every night as thoughts of Cedric Diggory's lifeless body invade my dreams, does Ron choose to remind me that Hermione is, in fact, a girl.
"Whadayou mean?" I slur sleepily as I turn over in bed. "I thought she brought that little detail to your attention during the Yule Ball Fiasco last year. Or have you forgotten already?"
He rolls his eyes. "You know what I mean! Of course I've always known, but … she's grown a bit over the summer, yeah? I mean she's …" He struggles for a moment, before settling on calling her shapely. "Haven't you noticed?"
"Hermione's like my sister, mate … I don't look at her that way."
It's only sort of a lie. It has caught my eye on more than one occasion since returning from the holiday: the previously unseen curves that now swell beneath Hermione's faded jeans and casual jumpers; the way her skin seems to glow, dark vanilla and blemish-free. She's pretty—but not pretty like Cho Chang is pretty, with her glossy black hair and plump lips. No, Hermione is pretty the way a brother is allowed to think his sister is pretty.
"What are you saying?" Ron asks, a little defensively. "Hermione's not like my sister too?"
I don't respond, feigning sleep.
Ginny's eyes are light brown—the way a cup of tea looks after that much needed splash of milk is added—and I silently beg her to look at me, to catch a mere glimpse of those eyes at the table in the Great Hall, or across the sofa in the common room. The thing about Ginny's eyes too is that they are rarely wet with tears, like Cho and Hermione's often are.
She's your best friend's little sister, I tell myself. She's your best friend's little sister. She's your best friend's little sister. She's your best friend's little sister—
Hermione is crying, again, after witnessing Ron and Lavender snog. I don't know what to do, so I sit there next to her at the end of the stairs in the otherwise abandoned corridor, allowing her to weep unashamedly into my shoulder, occasionally murmuring I love him, Harry, I love him so much, I've always loved him.
She asks how I feel when I see Dean kiss Ginny. Ginny, who stands only an inch above five feet with red hair that falls to the small of her back. Ginny, who isn't pretty like a sister, but pretty like a girl I want to kiss—like a girl I'd like to snog into oblivion, actually. Ginny, who makes my heart pound with a certain rhythm decidedly more intense than that I experienced with Cho. Ginny, who is Ginevra only on school papers, but Ginny to her friends and family. Ginny, who has always been there, right in front of me, wanting but no longer waiting, as evidenced by her recent romantic pursuits.
"It feels like this," I reply, squeezing her hand, and I don't think I'll ever get the scent of her strawberry shampoo or the salt of her tears out of my shirt.
—but by the next morning, she's taken up an almost condescendingly detached and disingenuously indifferent attitude toward the exhibitionist pair, and I'm back to skipping around the increasingly obvious reality that my two best friends are in love, all the while I continue to steal hopeful glances at the way the light from the fireplace dances across Ginny's soulful brown eyes.
They whisper, all the time. They think I don't hear them; but I do, almost as loudly as if they are screaming in my ears. Sometimes I'll walk into the tent after catching some ill-fated fish and they'll jump apart quickly—and I know it's not all happening only in my head because it occurs even when I'm not wearing the locket. But, more often, she sneaks out from her bunk bed in the night to sit with him while he's on watch.
"He hasn't a clue what he's doing, does he?" comes Ron's voice from outside the tent, low and gruff as the locket jingles around his pale neck.
"None of us do," she replies softly; miserably.
"It's mental. The whole bloody world's mental …" A second later, he laughs, and it's emitted as a low and lugubrious growl. "I would at least have liked to see 2000. Would that really be too much to ask for? For You-Know-Who to hold off on killing all the Muggles and Muggle-borns and blood traitors for just a couple more years so a bloke could see the year two bloody thousand? I guess so," he concludes sardonically. "Do you ever think about how things could have been? If we'd never signed up for this?"
She's silent for a moment, and it feels like I'm being stabbed in the chest. "I don't have time to fantasize about how things could have been. All that matters is how things are, right now."
"Oh, come on. Like when we're eating sour berries for dinner, or being woken up in the middle of the night to keep watch—don't tell me you haven't thought, just once, how things might be if we hadn't agreed to come with him, if we'd never even become his friend—"
"Don't say things like that, Ron. Stop it—it's the locket talking."
"Whatever." He grunts dismissively, deep in his throat, and Hermione comes back in some minutes later, wiping her eyes.
"Leave the Horcrux."
He does—and her cries, albeit soft and muffled by the dingy old blankets that she hides beneath, pierce my eardrums like the banging of a gong; every night, all night afterward. It's all I can hear: My Sister crying, her stomach lurching in unsatisfied hunger after a barely edible meal of mushrooms and charred fish, her very being wasting away in the miserable old tent that I sit before while I'm on watch. She occasionally whimpers in misery, and it will come out as little infantile "ohhhhhs" in her sleep.
Sometimes I get angry, and want to storm into the tent and shake her in her solitary bunk: stop crying, you silly little girl, you bloody cry baby, you're not the only one who's starving, clueless, and probably going to die in this bloody war, you're not the only one who misses him to death, who's without the one you love—but then I remember the locket pulsing against my chest, and I unclench my fists and sigh.
On the rare occasion we Apparate close enough to a Muggle farm or village to steal some decent food (she hesitates to use the word "steal", as she always insists on leaving behind an appropriate amount of Muggle money), I watch her gobble down whatever we can manage to prepare—scrambled eggs on toast, beans over rice, stale bread with butter—and smile weakly at me.
"I haven't had my period in months, Harry," she speaks bluntly to me one night, after I insist she has my share of bread. "And I'm usually as predictable as the sunrise. I can't tell you the last time I've felt clean—truly clean. Even when I'm fresh out of the bath I still feel dirty. I feel sick because we don't have much to eat—and even after we do eat a lot, I still feel sick, because I ate too fast." She chuckles humorlessly. "It's like my body is just giving up on me from the inside out."
"Don't talk like that, please," I tell her flatly. "You're all I've got now, Hermione."
Hermione doesn't say anything, but finishes her bread, and climbs silently into her bunk. It's the first night she doesn't cry herself to sleep—but not because she's no longer hurting, but simply due to the somber reality that she's too weak to produce any more tears.
She smiles—warmly, genuinely, and without strain—and only then do I realize how long it's been since the last time she did it.
I twirl her around and around, her untamed curls whipping me lightly across the face as she allows me to clumsily guide her in our awkward waltz. The soulful male voice lowly emanates from the radio, steadily growing softer as I bring her close and place my chin on her shoulder. She doesn't push me away.
The choir fades into a nostalgic static. She pulls back, staring at me with the sort of desolate melancholia that could only come from a teenage girl on the run in the middle of war, in a miserable tent with barely enough food to eat, and without the boy that she loves. The corners of her mouth fall back into the frown that's been more or less permanently etched on her face since Ron left, and her brown eyes are dark like the night that surrounds our tent; our lonely home.
"Harry," she says softly, her lips barely moving. And in the moment of silence that follows her utterance, I'm reminded of the cloud of suspicion that has hung over our heads from the very beginning of our friendship: the whispers in the corridors, the articles by Rita Skeeter, the skeptical and jealous inquiries from Cho and Krum—and even from Ron, whose last words to her had been 'I get it. You choose him.'"
Had she?
In a split second, I decide she's not My Sister right now: Hermione, with her wild hair pulled back in a ponytail, the first few buttons of her blue plaid shirt undone, exposing her honeyed skin, and her tongue running along her full lips as she looks at me nervously. She's a girl, and I'm a boy, and now that we're in the center of war with a good chance of dying with every passing minute, we should be allowed to do what boys and girls do when they're alone and scared and in desperate need of comfort. No matter how abhorrently wrong it is—and no matter how I'll never, ever be able to forgive myself whenever I think of Ginny or Ron.
My head is swimming, almost drunkenly, as I lean forward an inch, my eyes locked in her dewy stare.
"No, Harry." Her tone is firm despite it being barely above a whisper, and she gently presses the tips of her fingers to my parted lips. "No, darling … no."
That's the first and last time she ever calls me darling.
By the time we reach the Forest of Dean, the voice of the locket is constantly whispering in my ear, like in those old Muggle animations where an angel would appear on a character's shoulder, and a devil on the other (the Horcrux, obviously, representing the latter). Whenever I wear it, I can't bring myself to look at Hermione for more than two seconds at a time, because then the voice will come, as distinct and discernible as if it is a real person: He left you. Your best friend. He left you when you needed him most. And now you can go in there and take her—take the girl that he loves. He deserves it. Go do it, Harry Potter. Imagine the look on his face when he sees your lips pressed against hers …
I bury my face in my hands, feeling hopelessly degenerate, and say Ginny's name over and over again, until a bright silver light distracts me from the Horcrux's influence.
—and some time later, my best friend taps me on the shoulder, his hands still dripping from the pond.
"Mate," Ron says softly as we walk back to the tent, the destroyed locket bumping against the side of his leg with every step. "You've gotta understand. I've been mad for her since second year … but it was always you. Everyone thought there was something between you two; always. And after so long, I couldn't help but think the same thing … and, the locket … it kept telling me—"
I shake my head. "She loves you, Ron. She's always loved you."
The tent comes into view, and Ron stops dead in his tracks, the defeated Horcrux swaying back and forth on its golden chain.
"Harry," he says, pleading. "Don't tell her. Don't tell her about …" He looks down at the locket.
I nod, and the leaves crunch beneath our feet as we press forward to the sleeping girl in the tent, with her curls hanging over her face and the covers pulled up to her chin, and the dried residue of tears ever-present on her face.
—nights later, they're whispering again.
"You left us. You left me," she sniffles.
"I know. I'm sorry."
"I was crying, screaming, begging you not to leave me. And you looked me in the eye and Disapparated. You—" she chokes on her own words.
"I pray you'll come to forgive me. That's all I want."
"Never again, Ron. I'll die if you do that to me ever again."
"Never, Hermione. Never again."
What follows is near silence except for some faint shuffling, hushed tears, and soft utterances of shh, it's going to be okay, and I turn away from the entrance of the tent and stare into the inky blackness of the sky, wondering what Ginny is doing.
At Shell Cottage, Ron refuses to leave her room. She shakes weakly on the bed, her eyes closed, mumbling incoherently under her breath, a thick layer of sweat glistening on her forehead. Fleur has to quite literally push him out of the door, insisting that she must strip her to address her wounds. He collapses in the hallway, sobbing.
"Her arm, Harry," he cries, wretched. He grasps onto me, the veins in his hands bulging. "Her arm, it says—"
"Shhh," I say quietly, although I too am crying. "We're all safe now. Fleur is going to take care of her."
Ron shakes his head against my shoulder, his tears and nasal leakage brushing onto my torn and bloodied shirt.
"I'm never going to forgive myself, Harry," he says softly, hiccuping. "Never gonna forgive myself …"
When she's clean and changed into a white nightgown, she calls his name as if it's the only word she knows, and he stays by her side for the rest of the night.
The day after the battle, Ron and Hermione skip stones by the lake. Ginny and I hang back, sitting beneath the shade of an old tree, watching them.
They stop every so often, embracing each other unashamedly, with Ron running his lips along the scar on her left forearm, pressing Mudblood to his thumping heart. Hermione cries a little as she smiles, and brings him forward to whisper something into his ear—I'm much too far away to tell what it is, although I imagine it's something like I love you; it's all over now. At least that's what I had told Ginny, the moment I found her.
She smirks against me.
"They're really together now, aren't they?"
"It would seem so," I say, stroking her hair.
"About time, don't you think?"
Nodding, I tilt her chin upward to kiss her, and her lips are warm and taste of the sweetened milk from her breakfast cereal, all the while Ron caresses Hermione's face, brushing the bittersweet tears from her lips before leaning in once more. I close my eyes on this beatific picture: the girl I love at my side; with Ron and Hermione, My Brother and My Sister respectively, related not by the blood in our veins but in every other way imaginable, kissing and loving one another as freely as they have both wanted for a very long time, and I smile as Ginny and I proceed to do the same.
Fin