All About You Challenge prompt #10: Write about a character bemoaning the single life.

An inner-Ronalogue.


It made sense, objectively. Kissing was something that teenagers did—and they did quite a lot other than that to hear his brothers tell it. How did he think his classmates passed the time when they were dating, playing Gobstones?

Take Harry. Harry Potter. Of course he was going to get kissed sometime. That was what happened to famous people that girls liked and intellectually he knew it. But Harry wasn't, Merlin knows, Roger Davies or Bill or some other semi-mythical figure that was old enough and cool enough to have a love life. Harry was his age and just as normal and useless, socially anyway, as him and everyone else he knew. Sure, he'd met You-Know-Who face-to-face (loads of times) and gone up against a dragon and a basilisk and all sorts of mad things but to imagine Harry in a situation in which the proper course of action involved putting his lips on someone else's lips was just baffling, didn't sound like a real thing.

And Ginny, little Ginny who wouldn't look Harry in the eye for ages, apparently thought nothing of sticking her tongue down Dean Thomas of all people's throat. He'd known they were together but it hadn't even occurred to him that meant anything more than hand-holding—he tended to assume that romance was about as much a part of other people's lives as it was his, and when his relatives were involved, rather less. But that was stupid, wasn't it? Fred and George had had, if not girlfriends, then experiences; Bill had; Quidditch Captain Charlie, surely; even Percy (Percy!) had been all over the castle snogging Penelope Whoever at his age. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen sounded so grown-up so long ago, like these things would be normal when he got there, but now it still felt perplexingly young.

It amazed him that there were people to whom it wasn't strange. There were classmates he knew and interacted with daily who'd touched mouths like it was nothing. The knowledge that someone had been kissed was bizarre; it colored everything he thought about them. He'd wonder at great length what odd stroke of chance separated their experience from his. What made Harry or Dean or teenage Percy kissable.

With Hermione (HERMIONE!) the thought was almost insulting. He'd always considered her above such base, petty things that, well, that idiot boys wanted to do. The idea that she'd let someone as thick as Viktor Krum so much as look at her funny was utterly disorienting.

He had no idea how it could have happened. What did people say to each other to preface a kiss? All he could picture was the sort of scene people wrote in anonymously to Witch Weekly about, full of longing gazes and romantic one-liners that would make any normal human cringe. He tried to imagine gruff, clumsy Krum stroking Hermione's cheek, leaning down to her. He tried to imagine what it would be like to have someone's face that close to his. In the mirror his nose was giant and eyes droopy as he closed in on his reflection.

He ached to get it, to grow up and be wanted and be a regular person that life happened to.

It was like being stuck on a spell that everyone else could do with no trouble. A sort of furious, feeble, flailing feeling of non-comprehension that he couldn't fix or understand. And it bothered him that you couldn't tell who felt the same, and who was different from him in this way that to his sixteen-year-old heart felt monumental.