December 1992

There was a spider in the common room.

No, really: An actual, disgusting spider sat right there on the carpet in front of the fireplace. Eyeing Ron with gigantic, disgusting spider eyes. Crawling closer with those freakish, gigantic, disgusting spider legs.

On bloody Christmas Eve.

Well, it wasn't Christmas Eve yet, it was just about ten 'o clock in the morning, but it was December 24th, and therefore spiders were something entirely inappropriate, according to Ron.

He knew what to do, of course. It wasn't the first time something like this had happened. Ron just found it really unfair that contrarious creatures like spiders could exist during this time of the year at all. With all the miles of snow-covered ground in front of the tower's window, and stuff.

What he had to do was: take a really deep breath, close his eyes, and leave. He would go back upstairs to the dormitory, pretend to be asleep, (or try to go back to sleep, for that matter,) and come back down here a bit later. Breakfast in the Great Hall was something he could still have in half an hour, and surely Harry or Hermione would wait for him, or something. Yes, that looked like his best option: Leave and wait for the spider to disappear, too.

Just as Ron was about to go through with his plan, an all-too-familiar voice made him stop in his tracks.

"Ron?" she asked, sounding amused, "Where are you going?"

He turned back around to face her, ignoring the spider that sat between the two of them on the floor, a few metres away. He tried really hard not to wince. She'd caught him in a rather unhappy moment...

"Er, what?" Ron answered, sounding a little dumb even to his own ears. Hermione stood there with a book in her arms, wearing a thick woollen jumper he hadn't seen on her yet. It was green and fluffy. Her book was big and looked boring; however, the green, fluffy jumper looked nice, and one of her eyebrows was raised.

He desperately hoped she wouldn't notice that thing on the floor. She'd only tease him if she saw...

"You seem like you were about to go back up there," she explained, pointing towards the boys staircase. "Did you forget something?"

"Yes," he replied, trying to sound nonchalant, "I left my…wand…on the bedside table. I'm gonna get it, alright?"

"Your wand is right here," she laughed, gesturing at his left pants pocket, where the broken and barely recognisable-as-a-wand was halfway hanging out. Ron looked down. "So, can we go have breakfast? I think everyone's already there, it's so quiet…?"

That was true: while the currently-almost-uninhabited common room was often quiet, it was also often very loud. The Weasleys, Harry and Hermione were the only ones staying in Hogwarts over the holidays, and Fred and George took that as an opportunity to make as much noise as they liked. Everyone else, except for Percy, happily joined them in this. There were no classmates to be bothered with rackety games of Exploding Snap, their laughter and their chats were noisier than usual, and also there was lots of space to practise duelling in. It was awesome!

"Er…yeah, why don't you go first, and I'll join you there in a bit?" Ron suggested, rubbing his neck without meeting her eyes.

She was quiet for a second, which caused Ron to do look up at her, though. Hermione seemed confused and a little quizzical about his behaviour. She narrowed her eyes and looked him over, obviously knowing that something was weird here. That was not good, Ron decided, trying and failing to look normal and carefree. He even smiled at her, which might have made him look even more suspicious, in that instant, for Hermione's eyebrows shot up expectantly. She could read him like a book sometimes. Which was far from practical, because, for a thirteen-year old, Hermione Granger was very experienced in reading books.

He made the mistake of dropping his gaze to the floor again. Only for half a second or so, really! Ron just had to know whether the spider was still there or not, in a similar way, he realised, as Hermione had to know why he was currently acting so strangely.

The spider wasn't there anymore. Oh no. It had moved about four or five inches closer. Towards him.

Ron tried hard to avoid being obvious about his inner panic, as he pressed his lips together tightly and took a small step backwards. His eyes met Hermione's once again - just in time to see her burst with laughter.

"Oh!" she said, giggling like crazy, and stared at the spider, too. "Oh, that's what's going on!"

"It's. Not. Funny!" Ron hissed, staring at her in annoyance. He really should have never told her and Harry about the whole spider crisis with his teddy bear, ten years ago; she clearly wasn't taking the matter seriously enough. He tried to break through to her:

"It's Christmas, okay? It's not normal for spiders to be in here at Christmas!"he explained furiously.

That only made Hermione laugh harder, and it took about a whole minute for her to calm back down again.

"Are you done?" Ron wanted to know, rolling his eyes at her.

"Y-yes.", she nodded, while obviously trying to suppress another wave of laughter. Her face was very flushed and her brown eyes were lighter than usual. "So, you see a spider down here, and you let it keep you from having breakfast?"

"I wasn't really that hungry," Ron shrugged, right as his stomach gave a loud growl to prove him wrong. Hermione's lips twitched.

"How come you still haven't had breakfast, by the way?" Ron asked her, partly to distract her.

"Oh, I was in the library all morning. And then I had a look at the Potion. It definitely won't take much longer until it's ready," she told him. He gave a nod, halfway excited and halfway nervous to hear so. It wasn't like Ron didn't look forward to finally finding out about Malfoy being Slytherin's heir (or not); he just wasn't really that fond of the general idea of drinking Polyjuice Potion. Any Potion that included a part of Crabbe's or Goyle's body would surely be sickening.

"Anyway, now that I'm here, we should get going, don't you think? The others might come back soon, and we don't want anyone to, er, see you looking for your wand, do we?"

Ron didn't quite get what she was on about for a second, but then Hermione smiled and pulled a tissue out of her skirt pocket. She kneeled on the floor, close to the spider, and - Ron held his breath - smashed it between two layers of the tissue. She didn't carefully let the spider crawl there, she didn't levitate the spider out of the window, like Ron's Dad always did; no, she actually smashed it with her tissue-clothed fingertips. And Ron couldn't help but to stupidly grin at her for it.

"So," she said, standing back up and brushing non-existent dust off of her skirt in the process, "Ready to have breakfast?"

The way she'd said that... Like it wasn't a very big deal or anything, the way she'd just bend down and smashed the spider.

But it was kind of wonderful, really.

Ron wondered what she would have done to the spider if he hadn't been looking. Would she just have ignored it, when seeing it? Would she have pulled out her quill and gently let the thing crawl on there, before opening the window and softly blowing or dropping it outside? Ron had seen her do so with other bugs before. A ladybug once, at least.

And ladybugs were obviously entirely different than spiders. Ladybugs were harmless. Ladybugs were pretty.

But then again, Hermione didn't really seem to think of spiders as something dangerous or revolting, either. She found the fact that Ron was scared of spiders hilarious. And she probably wouldn't be superficial enough to judge a bug for its looks, so it didn't really matter whether ladybugs were prettier than spiders, either. Even though they SO obviously were. Everything was prettier than spiders.

He glanced over at her, and well, she looked like she always did. Not agitated from the spider incident, or anything. She actually looked... quite happy. And maybe she was. Maybe she was happy to have helped Ron. Hermione flashed a small grin at him, right then, and he chuckled. Perhaps she was kind of proud, or something. Perhaps this was a bit of a reward for him (and Harry) saving her from the troll in first year. Now, she had saved him in return. From a spider, okay, but if you asked Ron, a spider could easily be more terrifying than a troll. And Harry and Ron hadn't killed the troll, back then, either. They'd just made him leave her alone and faint. She'd literally smashed an enemy for Ron. That was something very nice, actually. If the two of them hadn't been even so long before already, they would certainly be now.

It occurred to Ron, as they were walking through all the heavily decorated corridors of their school, this was the first Christmas he and Harry would spend with Hermione. She hadn't been here last year, but this time around, she'd be.

She would be able to try all the special Christmas dishes at dinner, and to exchange presents with Ron and Harry face to face, perhaps there would even be time for them to build a snowman all together. Hermione would be right here next to them, talking about homework and Polyjuice Potion and reading books and also eliminating spiders for him, as it seemed.

And maybe, all of this meant that Christmas would turn out even slightly better this year than usually. It certainly felt like it might.