A/N: I had the idea in my head of Ron doing this for months... and also there's no such thing as too many missing moments, right?

I'm Not Wearing That

The problem with having exactly four Sickles to his name was that Ron always felt that he fell short whenever his friends' birthdays would come along. Usually Harry's was okay, because during the summer he could send an owl laden down with his mum's finest baked goods to compensate for whatever it was the Dursleys made him subsist on, but Hermione was a different story. September was always a tough month for his family, thanks to the mass expenditure on school supplies, so he felt guilty asking for anything more from them. Besides, the time he had splashed out on a gift for her (borrowing the funds from Fred and George in exchange for deep-cleaning their room, which had been a harrowing experience), she'd simply called the perfume unusual and he didn't think she'd ever worn it, so it had been a bit of a bust.

There were always the old Hermione stand-bys: books, fancy quills, unspillable ink, but those things all felt dreadfully generic to him. They were the sort of thing someone who only knew the bare minimum about Hermione would get her, and he knew she deserved more than that. The only problem was that four Sickles was barely enough to purchase a tin of fudge from Honeyduke's, much less anything that Hermione might actually want…

So what did she actually want? She wasn't the sort to get caught up in material items; he had never seen her wear jewelry or lose her head over new clothes the way some of the girls in their year did. Even if he could come up with an idea for some sort of Muggle contraption that she would like, it was the eighteenth of September already. He had been wracking his brains for weeks now and had come up empty time and time again, because Hermione just wasn't the sort of person who wanted stuff. She wanted Voldemort dead and gone, she wanted Ron and Harry to actually buckle down and do their homework, she wanted freedom for all house elves-

Ron sat up straight in his bed, a smile stretching wide over his face (it was just lucky that Harry and the others were already asleep). In one fleeting moment of brilliance, he knew exactly how to make Hermione's seventeenth birthday special.

In the morning, he woke before everyone else and began searching through the detritus in his trunk. It had to be here somewhere, he never would have thrown it away, but he had accumulated an astonishing amount of Chocolate Frog wrappers and scrap bits of parchment over the years, so it took some digging before he found it buried underneath a package of Owl Treats. Carefully, like it might break, Ron cradled the thing in his hands. It was a little dusty, a little dingy - he hadn't touched it in two years - but it would certainly suffice.

He was the first person in the common room that morning, anxiously watching the girls' staircase for a sign of her. Usually she was already waiting for him and Harry in the mornings so they could all go to breakfast today, but today he wanted to be the one waiting for her. Just after seven, she descended the stairs, her rucksack nearly bursting with textbooks, and paused on the bottom step when she saw him.

"Happy birthday," he said brightly, standing up from the armchair by the fire. He almost reached his arms out to hug her - that was the sort of thing friends did, wasn't it, give each other birthday hugs? - but held himself back.

"Thanks," she smiled. "Wow, you're never up this early, why are you-" She cut herself off, eyes narrowing. "What are you wearing?"

"What?" he asked, playing innocent.

"This." She jabbed a finger into the badge on his chest.

"Oh, that?" He shrugged, using every ounce of willpower he possessed to keep from smiling. "I'm just supporting the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare."

Her expression drifted from shock to confusion to amusement. "I didn't think that you even kept that-"

"Of course I kept it," said Ron. "You'd've hexed me if I didn't, but anyway, it's important to you, so, yeah, I kept it."

"And whatever happened to Mr. I'm-Not-Wearing-That?" she asked, echoing words from their fourth year.

He had been so pigheaded back then, so hellbent on telling her that she was wrong, that she was barking mad for messing with the elves - and he still thought it was a little bit mental at times - but he'd been in denial about a lot of Hermione-related things that year. Things he'd slowly come to terms with over the past two years, things that weren't about house elves at all but about the fact that he couldn't stop thinking about her, that when she kissed him on the cheek last year he had felt it on his skin for weeks, that all he wanted was to be closer to her, always closer. He just wasn't the same stubborn fourteen-year-old anymore.

"Like I said, it's important to you." He gestured back to the badge. "So, happy birthday. I wanted to get you something better, but - well - this is all I could really afford-"

As his face blushed red, she stood on her toes and hugged him, and his throat went dry. Out of instinct he looped his arms around her waist, holding her torso to his and wishing he could freeze time because he'd done it, he had actually made her happy and it hadn't taken stacks of Galleons to do it. All of those things that he never let himself wish for, maybe they weren't as out of reach as he thought.

"It's perfect," she said, releasing him as Ron reluctantly took his hands back from her waist. "Ooh!" Her eyes lit up, face shining. "Since you're up so early, maybe we have time to teach you how to knit - we could start making hats again, those are the easiest…"

On the outside, Ron groaned (he hadn't quite bargained for this), but internally, he knew he'd do whatever she asked.

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