Sorry, I took so long to finish it, but it just never seemed right. I still don't know if I'm completely pleased with it. Perhaps I'll figure that out later. Anyway, I know it's not completely congruent with the fifth book, I mention Ginny and Harry, and that doesn't really occur until later, but I didn't see it as that too terrible of a change. Sorry if any of you uber accurate people out there are offended. Enjoy! AnnHoj
Her books were back at Hogwarts, sitting neatly in a pile on top of her desk. She could picture them exactly, a pile of notes she had taken through out the last year or so on the other side, all in order of topic, just like she liked them. They were calling her name and yet, there she was, strolling the streets of Hogsmeade far from the wooden desk that had become her second home during the last few months. She was strolling alongside Ron, though her arm had long left where it had been carelessly looped through his as they both scurried off from their studies to their specially granted free time. Harry and Ginny followed along at her other side, though lagging behind slightly as they carried on a conversation of their own.
Ron looked over to her, giving her a light smile followed by a roll of his eyes that managed to tell her precisely what he was thinking. She kicked herself for how terrible her idea had become; to invite the other two along. She knew how little Ron could stand seeing his best friend and his sister appearing all chummy right in front of his eyes. His mood always fell when he was in their combined presence and he turned irritable and sulked to himself for the whole time they were around. She could understand, although she was a sister to no one, but she wanted him to be his natural easy-going Ron self today of all days.
But then, if she hadn't invited them along it would have been just the two of them. She wouldn't have completely protested against the idea; she actually would have welcomed it with open arms. It was whether he would take it the same way that worried her immensely. She had invited them along as her own safety net, little did they know, because so far, in the few minutes they had been around, they had managed to cause more harm than good.
Hermione picked up her pace, leaving more space between her and the apparently happy, though unofficial couple, thankfully Ron followed evenly at her side. "You've still got a good few hours of studying time left. Are you sure you don't want to go back?" He asked her, sparking their own, although elemental, conversation as they continued down the narrow sidewalk that led to the small festive shop.
"No." She answered confidently, as if she didn't take a second thought as he might have expected. "No studying…not until tomorrow at least." Yes, she was trying to be more carefree for a reason, one which heavily involved Ron, but she knew that if it was too drastic he would probably see clear through it all. And that was something that she simply could not risk at this point. It was too dangerous and could very well scare him far away if it was far too obvious and fell apart right in front of him.
They slipped into the coffee shop, grabbing a table for four in the far corner of the room. She thought Ron was going to gag by the disgusted look that plagued his face after he watched Harry pull out Ginny's spindle back chair for her to sit before he took one for himself. Hermione took a seat between Ron and Harry, just for good measure, in case anything was to set the overprotective brother off.
She could feel the tension hanging in the air and the thicker it got, the more pessimistic she grew. She had wanted to go somewhere, anywhere, with Ron, and just Ron, but they always seemed to do everything in threes; Harry, Ron, and Hermione; the great trio. Harry was one of her very closest friends, sure enough, but it always seemed like her time with Ron was always compromised somehow. She just wished it had turned out more like she had imagined, rather than a big, awkward, embarrassing mess like it, in her opinion, had since become.
Theirs was one of the few tables occupied in the restaurant, so their waitress was soon to stop by in no time. Ron looked over to Harry and his sister, to see that they were too engaged in each other's presence to notice him. He didn't know or really care what they were talking about, but he took the opportunity to lean over Hermione's way. "Can we get out of here?" He asked, not caring if he offended the other two in the process. "Take tea to go or something…" He instantly saw her face fall from where it had previously been held in a pleasant, beautiful, smile.
"Is something wrong?" She wasn't one to condone playing dumb, but she didn't want to admit that things had turned sour since they had gotten there. But she thought better of it. "This was a terrible idea. I knew I…"
He cut her off short. "No, It was brilliant, I needed it." He said hoping to mend over any offense he might have made towards her. "But can we leave those two here and just…go somewhere else?"
She couldn't hold back the grin that was to follow. It was funny how she had managed to get just what she had wanted in the first place by the means of a terrible mistake, and he, of all people, had suggested it. She nearly forgot to answer him she was pleased with how things had worked themselves out for once. "Yes…they probably wouldn't notice anyway."
No sooner had they planted themselves in their ornate bistro chairs and they were leaving them behind for the counter to order two cups to go. Their talkative friends paused for goodbyes and actually seemed slightly disappointed for a second before Ginny began talking again; something about upcoming DA practice and what he'd be teaching next, and they were forgotten once again. The two remained silent until they had cleared the doorway, worried if they spoke too confidently, their plan would be torn to pieces.
Hermione was actually laughing as she hurried him out of the little shop with her drink-free hand. He couldn't help but join in at the contagious tune of her laughter. It rose and fell uninhibitedly as if she was composing a children's song in the process. It was a bit of a stretch, but he couldn't fight the immediate need to hug her. Without a rational thought in his head, he wrapped an arm around her shoulder, pulling her into him as they hurried down the street like cackling idiots. And luckily for him, however, she didn't resist.
She found it strange how uncomfortable she had become in his presence. They had been best friends for years, yet the fear she held that she could, and most likely would, lose all of that if he was to only found out how badly she wanted to be so much more than that. She didn't want to give it away, so, as illogical it was, she had pushed him away. But it felt so nice to be so close to him and she wanted to just give up the act so badly.
He felt her arm wrap around his waist, although loosely, as he led her down a new street that fell perpendicular to the one which they were last on. "Am I a terrible person to say I absolutely hate to see them together all the time?" He asked her sincerely as the light snow fell around them, sticking to his eyelashes and melting upon his face. "He's my friend…she's my sister. It's just not good."
"You aren't terrible…you're just watching out for her." She wasn't trying to give him the exact answer that he wanted to hear, but she could understand what could cause such a feeling to spread throughout him. He was her big brother and she was his only sister, it was like his job. "She's your little sister…I think I'd do the same, to be honest."
Her answer didn't pacify him completely however. There were still concerns unmentioned burdening his mind. "And what if it all goes sour between them? Whose side do I take?" She could feel the franticness in his voice, and the way he gestured wildly despite the cup of hot liquid in his hand, his voice nearly broke as he spoke. "Friend? Sister?...Either way, it's going to be bad."
"First of all, nothing has happened yet…and you know you can't protect her forever. Some things she just needs to test out for herself." She said, followed by a long swig of her tea. It felt warm against the cold that had crept through her out in the wintry weather. "It might be inconvenient for you, but no one can help who they fall for." She didn't mean for it to contain a double meaning, but it had just slipped out as so. She was the best proof of the statement. First there was Krum, whom had bored her to tears after a while. He was pleasant to look at, but as soon as he opened his mouth, he managed to lose his charm. And worse of all, getting involved with Krum had helped ruin her friendly standings with the one person she had recently come to realize she had loved all along…you know, as if falling for your best friend wasn't complicated enough in the first place.
"Well, until I can settle with that…I think I'm still going to grumble about it for a little bit longer." He responded with a wrinkled nose and a crooked smile as he tossed their emptied cups in a garbage bin he had nearly walked past. He hadn't been paying much attention to what was going on around them or where he was going. Someone could have walked straight into him and he wouldn't have seen it coming, he had been so distracted by her.
"Where are we going?" She stopped right in the middle of the lane, stopping Ron at her side as well as she took a moment to figure out where they were at the moment. She could see the narrow cobblestone road fading to an end a slight distance from where she found herself. Off to her right she could see where the lake was, although covered in snow and a sheet of gray ice, and the fence that roped off the white blanketed field surrounding the Shrieking Shack. He didn't want to admit that he didn't have the slightest clue as to where he had been leading her as this time.
He couldn't admit he hadn't been paying attention to street signs or shops they passed, but more to how pink her nose and cheeks had become since they departed. He didn't answer, but broke his comfortable stance next to her and headed to the field at full sprint, well, not his full sprint, but just slow enough that he knew Hermione could catch up quickly if she really wanted.
"Ron! What are you doing?" As she caught up with him, he was standing in the middle of a vast drift of snow, not looking towards her, but out towards to rundown house in the distance. She slowed her steps, each one made a little more difficult by the accumulating powder. She kept silent however, as to not cause him to turn around suddenly as she approached him. Once she found herself a few steps away, she mustered a bounding leap and launched herself on to his back. Her sneaky methods caught him more off guard than she had expected and successfully tackled him to the ground. Her fall was cushioned both by his form beneath her and the layer of cold snow beneath them both.
He let out a loud screech as he went hurdling to the ground. "Bloody hell, Hermione!" He exclaimed as he looked up to find who had been the culprit of his stumble. It flew out of his mouth so quickly, that he had not a chance to realize how dreadful it must have sounded to her. He was just about to apologize, when he heard a burst of her laughter.
"That was not what I meant to do…" She trailed off, her face growing redder than Ron's ears ever could. Her laughter died and her words became frozen on her tongue as she looked down to him, chuckling beneath her. She knew that she should move, but she was paralyzed on the spot, captured by his gaze, red tufts of hair sticking out from underneath his knit cap, his lips bent into a smile.
He could feel her heart beat like a rabbit when his chest pressed itself against hers as he took in each breath, along with the scent of her hair invading his nose. Her brown tendrils reached for him like a plant to the sun as they teased his cheek with their presence. It struck him then. There they were, piled like kittens in an abandoned field, slowly being covered in the rapidly falling snow. He could feel her warmth. It could have melted the snow, had there not been so much of it. He could have kissed her right then and there had the fear not made his stomach flop like a fish on land and got the best of his nerves. "'Mione?"
His voice pulled her back down to reality and she quickly scrambled off of him once she realized the lack of distance between them. "I am so sorry." She spoke, now sitting up, feeling the snow melt bit by bit into her jeans. She attempted to stand up, shuffling her weight around until she chose to sit back down at his side.
Despite the cold and the snow, he still lied in the same spot, flat on his back, his limbs spread out around him. She watched him as he continued to lie lifelessly on the ground in front of her. She saw a hint of a grin sneak across his face as began to move his arms and legs like a child on a snowy day off of school, spreading the already crumpled snow into an even more crumpled form of an angel beneath him. "Try it…it's fun…" He suggested to her in a teasing manner, pausing his creation to sit up half way.
"No!" She protested instantly. "It's cold!" She further explained, though failed to realize she had pulled her coat closer to her form as she spoke. She could feel his eyes, saddened for the sole purpose of convincing her otherwise, following her every move. She thought better of the situation. This was the reason she had conjured up this whole outing; she wanted to show Ron that she had another side, a side she had just recently stumbled upon for herself. She wasn't a stuffy, bookish, boring girl, and that was the last thing of which she ever wanted to convince him. She set her logic and the frostbiting feeling spreading throughout her legs aside, scooted herself next to him and laid down.
He rolled over on to his side to see her as he spoke. "See…not so bad." Even after she nodded an answer, he didn't move, but instead kept his focus on her, his gaze wandering nervously from her eyes to her lips and back again.
"So…" She broke the slight silence uneasily. "Are you feeling better?" She felt more comfortable with words hanging in the air. The silence terrified her. A lack of things to say led to awkwardness and unwanted thinking. Talking kept her mind occupied.
He turned away from her, peering up at the pale grey sky, before he gave her any hint of an answer. "You know…I actually forgot about…until now at least…" Even from his profile she could sense a grimace in his features as the thought raced back to him. "I mean, I want Harry to be happy…" She could sense a negative to follow. "But it's hard…first there was Cho…and then my sister of all people!" She raised an arm from where it had laid by her side to rest comfortingly on his shoulder. She'd never seen him be so open with her. He hadn't said much, but it was all evident in the tone in which he presented it; the defensiveness that his arguments usually contained had been, on this occasion, replaced with a rare hint of vulnerability. "It just makes me feel a little more alone. He's got girls…lining up for him practically. And then you've got Krum…" He still couldn't say the guy's name without a certain sting in his voice.
"Correction…" She spoke up, before he could continue. "No Krum…" A smile broke out on his face, as she knew it would, even though he tried his best to keep his joy at the information bottled up to himself.
"I'm not going to lie…I have to say I like that answer." He couldn't believe he let it slip from his mouth. One minute it was an innocent thought floating through his mind and next thing he knew the words had escaped from his lips and hung heavily in the air above them. His cheeks grew redder by the second as she remained in silence.
"I knew you would…" She said, turning on her side towards him. There was a weakness in her voice that captured him as her eyes caught his. "…that's why I told you."
"What do you mean?" Ron never was very good with vague statements. He was oblivious to so much, even if it was staring him right in the face.
She didn't know how to say it. She hadn't spent much time planning how she would tell him, strangely enough, as she seemed to plan every other aspect of her life to the furthest degree she could imagine. This, however, she had neglected for some reason. Maybe she had hoped that he would figure it out for himself, that he'd be able to read between the lines and he'd just know, leaving her off the hook. But apparently ideas like that didn't work with people like Ron.
Ron had always been too pessimistic to think that anything could happen exactly as he wanted it. He just assumed that if he wanted it to happen, it would be suddenly jinxed that fate would do everything within its power to prevent it from ending favorably. Though this time, as she spoke, he was completely unaware. He simply thought she was speaking in Hermione-like code.
She began slowly to keep herself from slipping in words she didn't mean. "You remember the Yule Ball…and how I said you ruin everything…well, I didn't mean it."
"I figured that…" He interjected, not in the least bit smugly.
"I just…" She took in a deep breath to maintain her composure. "I want to be more than your last resort, Ron…" She eyes searched his nervously, as if she was looking for his answer before he spoke, as a way to prepare herself for the worst thing that could come spewing out of his mouth any second. The longer he took, the more she wished that he would just hurry up and say something, anything. She didn't care so much what his answer was, but that he would just hurry up and put her out of her misery.
"Hermione…I was afraid to hear you say no…because…I mean…" He rambled with little confidence; stuttering, stumbling, and avoiding her eyes like wild fire; just the way he always spoke when particularly nervous, was more and more often recently. He was turning into a bumbling idiot again and he couldn't make it stop for the life of him.
She watched as he bolted up into a sitting position and, in a mere second or two, was standing up hovering above her. He appeared to be muttering to himself while slightly pacing his steps back and forth at her feet, his focus anywhere but on her. She knew, however vain it might sound, that turning away from her was the last thing that he really wanted to do in that moment. She sat up, pulling her knees into her chest, first and foremost because she was cold, but also due the fact she didn't know what to do with herself, what to say, where to be; sitting where she was, standing at his side…in his arm, his warm arms. But she knew, based upon his standoffish posture, that the only pair of warm arms with which she'd find herself acquainted would be her own that draped loosely around her legs as she still sat at his anxiously moving feet.
"Ron…stop moving." She demanded once she stood, her feet planted sturdily in one place, unlike his. He did stop, but only once he felt his arms firmly within the grasp of her hands, one above each of his elbows. "Look at me…" She shook him slightly until he allowed his blue eyes to focus on her rather than the shabby old house behind her. His florid cheeks appeared as if they were on fire, as did his ears and nose, but she knew it was only minutely the fault of the frigid air that managed to waft between them. "What is wrong, Ron?"
His gaze dropped away from her as he dared to speak. "It's just…you…and…" He spewed out a few more incoherent syllables as her fingers slipped from the wool of his jacket. She had always found him most endearing when he was awkward and rose tinted.
She raised a hand to his face and silenced him; her fingers traveled from the scarlet lobe of his ear, along his jaw, grown into faint scruff over the last few weeks, to where one lonely finger came to rest under his chin. She lured him closer to her form, drawing his chin down to her level. She quickly caught his lips within the soft embrace of her own, warming the both of them in the process. She felt the cold inhabiting her completely disapparate to a place where it was desired far more than it was in that moment. She pulled away from him a moment later, wondering what she had done.
A look of shock and awe was plastered across his face, unlike the grin that had grown upon hers. She couldn't help but laugh against his lips as she kissed him again. Though this time, he had welcomed the idea far more, now that it came to his as less of a shock. He engulfed her in his arms, though restricted by his winter attire, his kisses trailing across her cheek.
He took a step backward, away from her, though not in the last bit in a repulsed manner. She still remained close, her slender fingers still entangled with his on either hand, as if he didn't want to let her go, but some great force had made him do it. His eyes had forgotten completely about the house behind them, on the line of trees off the side, the lake in front of them, everything to which they had previously been drawn. Now, he found it impossible to take them off of her. He opened his mouth to say something, but he was shushed instantly.
"I think I get it now." She answered, pulling her hands in his up to her chest. She pulled him closer to her again, her forehead resting against his. She took a moment to abandon a quick peck upon his up curved lips before she said anything more. "Do you think they've missed us much?" She referred to Harry and Ginny, that, until that second, she had forgot still existed.
"Probably not…" He loosed his hold upon his one hand, keeping the other delicately in his as they began their stroll back into town. "…but…I don't really care." He added with a laugh.
When they found themselves back on the block containing Madam's shop, two distinct figures stood just outside the door; one with fiery red hair, just the same as Ron's but in a longer length and the other with an untamed head of black peaks and a scarlet and gold scarf draped around his neck. As Ron and his girl got closer, the unpleased looks upon their face grew more defined with each step. Ginny stood, her arms folded across her chess, her foot tapping out a tempo against the sidewalk.
"Where the hell have you two been!" Harry exclaimed as the two became close enough to him for his yelling to not be bothersome to the whole neighborhood. His arms were flailing outward toward the guilty party, but Ron couldn't wipe the smile from his face. "We've been waiting for hours!"
"We haven't been gone for hours…actually…" Hermione corrected her friend matter of factly, her unfailing smile producing a question mark upon Harry's face as evident in his features as the scar was on his forehead.
"Well…what were you doing? It's cold out…" Ginny took over interrogating, the next best thing to legilimancy, but not nearly as effective.
Ron let his arms sway back and forth in his new found happiness as he spoke. "Oh, you know…just chillin'." He hadn't noticed that the distracting movement of his arms had made the fact that Hermione's small fist was still very much within his obvious, and now both Harry and Ginny had taken notice to the little hint of what must have happened while they were away.
Harry took a long look at the two of them, an examining look, but neither Ron nor Hermione seemed to acknowledge it. He couldn't help but notice the patterns of wet and dry spots on their clothing, the dampness mixed with a little bit of mud clinging to the knees of Hermione's pant legs, the way strands of her hair had fallen out of the thick brown plait of her hair that draped over her shoulder. He raised an eyebrow at the way Ron's hat was on a little crooked and the back of his jacket and pants were completely wet as well. "Hey…at least you had fun, right?" Harry said, with a playful punch to Ron's shoulder.
Ron stood confused, trying to process everything thing that his friend had just said and done, as Harry began strolling away with Ron's sister. He looked over to Hermione with a terrified expression masking his usual features, as he had just realized. His eyes grew larger than their intended size and he spoke frantically. "Wait!...Does the think that…that we…"
"Let him think what he wants to think…" She finally answered once she had stifled her laughter and replaced it with a sly smirk upon the lips that Ron so badly wanted to kiss again.
I have to credit my friend Cara with the "just Chillin'" line. I know she doesn't actually read fan fiction, but it's her phrase, I simply borrowed it and needed to give credit where credit was due.
Reviews graciously welcomed. Tell me what you think.