December, 1994

This was... nothing.

No, really. It didn't matter how his head ached from shouting at her earlier, or how his legs felt tired from sitting in the exact same spot for most of the evening, or how he had felt too angry to do much else for hours and hours while everyone else had fun.

It didn't matter what he'd felt and said or how confused she had reacted at first... How confusedly Harry had reacted, too. Embarrassed and confused. But Harry didn't really matter, either, right now.

And it certainly didn't matter what Hermione had accused him of. What she'd implied, standing there in her blue ball gown and her make-up and her flat, pinned-up hair.

None of that mattered at all.

She'd already been so much crazier before already, after all! And their rows had been more serious, too. Ron's brain jumped back to a million small sequences he vaguely remembered, lying there in the darkness of his dormitory bed, the curtains closed and the light gone.

The whole thing with Scabbers and Crookshanks last year unfolded itself again... Ron thought back to the ugly things he'd said about her not being able to control her pet. Guilt crept up in him at the thought of how she must have suffered from all the extra school work her time turner must have caused her, during that time... Although having a time turner in general had not so much been Hermione's problem, rather the exhaustion that her almost endless eagerness to read and learn had induced. Hermione spent way too much time studying, as it was! Putting an endless amount of extra study time and heaps of additional work into Hermione's fourteen year old hands had not been McGonagall's brightest idea, Ron reckoned.

And how much in need of a friend she might have been right then. Right at the moment when an ugly rat (that wasn't even a real ugly rat, but a well disguised, spineless Deatheater, in reality!) had seemed more important than their friendship.

But she really could have tried a little harder to control that cat, Ron thought angrily, in spite of his inner knowing better. Scabbers could easily have turned out to be the harmless, scared little rat Ron had seen in him before the end of their last school year. And Crookshanks could have been Scabbers' cruel murderer.

Ron sighed, shaking his head against the pillow, and gripping the bridge of his long nose between two fingers. She actually hadn't been that irresponsible, he admitted. According to Sirius, Crookshanks was a highly intelligent little guy, and he would probably have found ways towards the suspicious rat he was stalking, anyway. It wasn't entirely Hermione's fault that Crookshanks was such a capable contract killer.

And then, the feeling of Hermione's arms around Ron's neck came to mind, and the internal shock wave Ron had felt when she'd pressed her entire front against his as her apology replayed itself in Ron's entire bloodstream. No, really. Lying here, many months later in his bed in the Gryffindor tower, Ron actually shivered from the weird mixture of embarrassment and awkwardness and shock and... something else... that he'd felt last school term.

Also, there had been that crazy, amazing thing she'd done only a couple of days later... When Draco had acted like a douchebag, as usual, and Hermione had just... she'd... she had punched him straight in the face. All flustered and angry and somehow gloriously ignorant to just how cool she looked right then...

But Ron quickly abandoned all thoughts in this direction, because this wasn't about Hermione being a cool person to hang out with. Not at all. No, this was about how much of a strange, crazy person she could be, and how everything about tonight was just another one of her crazy mistakes! Going out with Victor Krum? No, not going out, Ron quickly corrected, because that was an idea he wasn't fully ready to acknowledge yet. Maybe he'd never be. Because, seriously, Victor Krum?!

Dancing with Victor Krum, THE INTERNATIONAL QUIDDITCH PLAYER VICTOR KRUM, at a school ceremony was about the weirdest thing Ron could ever imagine Hermione doing.

Although the whole "S.P.E.W." thing was pretty ridiculous, too, of course. He almost snorted out loud, right then, spitefully thinking about her desperate attempts to become better at knitting clothes for Hogwarts' house elves. House elves that neither needed nor wanted clothes! And she was running around with these badges, hoping to get people on her side, when really most of the people she talked to probably made fun of her for it right after. How could she be so stubborn sometimes? And how could someone who was as incredibly intelligent be so focused on something so weird? Did she not notice how people were looking at her for it, after she brought up the topic, or did she frankly not care?

She probably really didn't care, Ron pondered. She was like that, wasn't she? Not letting people bring her down, standing up for what she thought was right, and stuff. She didn't really care about gossip. She somehow seemed to stand above it, mostly. And the things that did hurt her, that did make her cry... Mostly it was stuff that he said. Ron. Or... or maybe Snape sometimes, but... Yeah, mostly Ron.

And now she was probably really angry at him for acting like he did all night...

He was really angry, too, but it was hard to make out the exact reason why. It was hard to want to make out the exact reason why, really.

Because, at the end of the day, she was still Hermione and he was still Ron.

In the morning, they would probably get up and everything would be normal again. Well, he prayed that it would be, because the possibility of anything else was too much to process for his tired mind, right now.

They would talk over breakfast. Maybe they would completely ignore the whole Yule Ball thing, or maybe there would be some weird atmosphere, for a few minutes, but nothing more...

Maybe they could completely forget about the whole subject. Yes, that would be perfect.

Except for the fact that Victor Krum was still here. Grumpy, boring, old Victor Krum. Way too old for even talking to any of them! Was that even legal?! An eighteen-year-old guy talking to a barely fifteen-year-old girl? It seemed illegal. Victor Krum could easily be twenty-five or something, the way he looked! Possibly even thirty! Yes, that seemed about right. Victor Krum was old-looking and grumpy and the fact that he chose to ask Hermione to the Yule Ball at all was about the most inappropriate thing Ron had ever heard of. Except for her saying yes, of course. For her to agree to go to the Yule Ball with Victor Krum was her worst decision ever, period.

And it didn't matter in the slightest how she'd looked tonight, Ron added to himself, as he reached under his bed and absent-mindedly grabbed something from there. It didn't matter. Not how she'd beamed, or something.

How she'd basically masked herself for that grumpy idiot; her bushy, unusual waves of hair straightened, her skin all covered in skin-coloured paint, her lashes heavy with some sort of black ink... Was she trying to blend in with the Lavenders and Parvatis and Padmas and Pansy Parkinsons out there, or something?

Ron remembered the intimidating herds of girls he and Harry had watched these past few days. The girls that giggled non-stop and walked everywhere in groups and where so unlike Hermione that they had basically been invisible to Ron before the question of who to bring to the Yule Ball existed. And maybe, Hermione had been invisible, too, somehow. Just in a completely different way. Had she felt invisible, Ron suddenly wondered? He remembered how offended she'd reacted to his Yule Ball invitation... How she'd said that other people did know that she was a girl.

Had Hermione been trying to make more people see her like that, tonight? Was that the reason for her dress and her hair and her make-up, - perhaps even for her "new" teeth?!

Was the way she looked every single day, the way she looked when she flipped through old parchment and ate and chatted and talked and explained and scolded somehow not... good enough for Vicky? Not glamorous enough? Was he so important that Hermione felt the need to change things about her looks for him?

The idea was disgusting.

Hermione wasn't supposed to change. Not like that. And not for someone like Vicky. Even if she admittedly looked … pretty … doing so.

But it didn't matter how she'd looked tonight. How she'd laughed and twirled and how her dress had hugged her body and how she'd exuded warmth or some sort of glow, a few hours earlier...

And it certainly didn't matter, Ron decided, pushing small limbs of that stupid little doll off of his sheets, that Hermione had refused to go to the Yule Ball with Ron instead, the day before.

None of that stuff mattered.

It was really late and time to go to sleep, already.