It had not been a great day, Ron reflected. Hermione, as usual, had been busy at her dueling lessons with Professor Riddle. That girl never took a break, not even on weekends. Either she was training, or studying, or eating so fast Ron worried she would get sick. And then she'd disappear back into her room in the Slytherin dorms to sleep. Or train more, Ron supposed. He wasn't sure exactly what she did once Ron and Harry walked her back to the dungeons.
So when Harry had had his second mental breakdown of the fall semester, knocking his head against the wall of the dorm room they shared in Gryffindor Tower, Ron had been at an utter loss. "Look, mate, you'll do fine," he soothed, patting Harry awkwardly on the shoulder.
"Mum and Dad are gonna kill me," he moaned, and slammed his head against the wall with a slightly greater force than before.
"Don't say that," Ron argued. "They love you and you'll do fine."
"It's OWL year!" Harry exclaimed, removing his head from the wall to glare at his best friend. "OWL. Year. And I need top marks in Charms, Potions, Transfiguration, Arithmancy, and Herbology to get accepted into the early Healer track. Why the hell am I taking Arithmancy? I should have taken Care, or DADA with Hermione. I'm gonna die!"
Harry had started banging his head against the wall again. With a resigned sigh, Ron dragged Harry from the battered piece of architecture and onto his bed. "Calm down," Ron told him seriously. "It's, like, the second week of term. And you're doing fine." He allowed himself a bit of a grimace. "Better than me, really."
"You have less classes!" Harry exclaimed. "The Auror track doesn't even require Herbology!"
"Yeah, but I'm taking Runes. Babbling is a pain in the afternoons, did you know that? It's like she only had enough patience for the morning classes. Now stop griping and get ready for breakfast. I want to see if I can drag Hermione away from Riddle to play chess with me."
That made Harry stop. "She's terrible at chess," he reminded Ron.
Ron grinned crookedly, feeling the butterflies in his stomach he always got when thinking about Hermione multiply in number. "Yeah, I know," he said.
Harry snorted and, rubbing at his forehead, stalked off to the bathroom. "You're in trouble," he called over his shoulder.
"I know," Ron repeated to himself in the empty dorm room.
Later, as he trekked down to the Great Hall with Harry, he contemplated his best female friend and potential love interest. She had recently cut her hair, apparently on Riddle's recommendation. "Hair gets caught when fighting Dark wizards," she had sniffed. "The Knights of Walpurgis aren't going to stop and let me untangle myself while they're shooting curses at me." Hermione had then given Harry a critical glance. "You'd make a terrible Auror," she decided, lingering on his glasses. "All anybody's need to do is summon those and you're effectively blind."
"Good thing for the Ministry that I'm not gonna be an Auror," Harry said cheerfully. This was in the middle of the first week, and Harry was just coming of the tail of a rather large panic attack.
"Good thing for Dark Wizards too," Ron said slyly, helping himself to a piece of bread. "You'd steal the robes off their back for a lark."
Harry had grinned widely. He had his father's tendency for mischief but his mother's neurosis about grades, which made for a rather strange combination in Ron's opinion. And Hermione was Riddle's protege duelist with one eye on the Auror track and another on possible becoming a bounty hunter, but she had only mentioned that once so Ron still wasn't entirely sure if she had been joking.
Then there was him, the youngest boy in a family of seven kids. Bill was the cursebreaker, Charlier the dragon handler. Percy took the bureaucratic Ministry job, and the twins had been throwing around the idea of opening a store. Ginny already knew she wanted to play professional Quidditch. Ron? He had no idea what was left for him, so he had shuffled the pamphlets Percy had sent to him and picked one off the top.
Auror.
He had wondered if he really wanted to stand between Hermione and her dream job, then decided he might as well. She might be able to help him if he turned out to be pants at the required realized he would probably regret it later, when he inevitably failed the end of the year tests.
But it really had been a bad day, because Hermione wasn't around to deal with Harry's neurosis, he had gotten his essay back from McGonagall and saw the P scrawled at the top, and Fred George had put dung bombs in his trunk that morning. Not to mention he had seen Draco Malfoy skulking around the corridors, looking like he was up to no good as usual.
So Ron made his way down to breakfast in the Great Hall all by himself, and sat at his customary position at the far end of the table. He glanced briefly over to the Slytherin table to see if Hermione had come up to eat, and there was a noticeable gap where she usually was. He wondered if she had somehow managed to schedule more dueling classes with Professor Riddle, and decided it wouldn't be too out of character if she had.
Ron picked his breakfast, wondering if the rest of the day would be as bad as this morning has been. He glanced up at the head table, eyes sliding off the headmaster's seat.
Ron could count the number of times he had seen the aging headmaster, other than at meals, on one hand. The man was elusive and rather detached from the student population and was only called upon when extreme disciplinary action was called for—as Hermione said. "Professor Riddle told me he's going senile," she confided one day with a toss of her brown curls.
Ron remembered snapping, "Merlin, can't we talk about something other than Riddle? Or dueling?" he added the last when he saw her open her mouth, eyes narrowed indignantly.
"I'm never going to get into the Auror program if I don't work hard," she snapped back. "You of all people should know that muggleborns can't get anywhere unless they're exceptional."
Harry had jumped in with a frown. "Or unless they've got friends in high places," he told them. His own mother was a muggleborn witch who had become the leading Healer at St. Mungo's through both hard work and Dumbledore's dubious patronage. It certainly had helped that her husband was a well-known pureblood Auror, but Ron knew better than to say that in front of Harry—or Hermione.
Hermione had nodded at Harry's statement. "I need to be the best," she said firmly, and left soon after that.
Ron remembered sitting back in his chair with a groan and a sigh. "She's gonna work herself to death," he muttered. Harry winced. "She's just got a chip on her shoulder, Ron, you know that."
"I still don't understand why," he grumbled. "She was fine until second year, and then she came back from Easter break with a note promising private lessons from Riddle and suddenly everything's about being the best."
Harry sighed. "That's her story to tell, Ron, you know that."
"And I don't understand why she told you!" Ron exclaimed, feeling his familiar temper bubble to the surface. He felt hurt all over again like that wintry day in second year when Hermione had cried into Harry's shoulder and refused to tell him, who was supposedly her other best friend, what was wrong.
"I don't know why either, mate," Harry replied with a strange sense of honesty, and began to pack his book bag. "See you in Charms."
So now Ron sat at the Gryffindor table, feeling utterly alone and becoming progressively more annoyed. He was picking at his bacon when someone plopped onto the bench next to him. "Hello," said dreamy voice, and Ron glanced up, surprised. "Luna," he said. "What are you doing here?"
"You look lonely," she explained in her simple way. He raised an eyebrow. "I've been lonely before," he pointed out.
"You're the kind of lonely I can help with," she replied. Ron laughed. "How could you possibly help me?"
Luna gave him an appraising look, then stood from the bench with a queer smile on her face. She held out one small hand to him, and tilted her head. "Why don't we go for a walk?"
Ron glanced around, and saw that no one was looking at him. He took out his wand and cast a Tempus charm. "Luna, we have class soon."
Luna smiled wider. "When has that ever stopped you?"
He considered for a moment, then smiled back at her. "Let's go."
The two of them left the Great Hall and made their way onto the grounds. Luna led him by the hand and Ron let her, bemused. "The Giant Squid is grumpy today," she said, and began to skip. "So why're we going towards the lake?" Ron asked.
She laughed, a clear, ringing noise that made the side of mouth tug upwards. "To cheer him up, silly," she told him. "Sometimes grumpy people should be left alone, you know, but sometimes the worst thing you can do is to leave them in their own thoughts." Ron was mulling over the insightfulness of her statement when she added, "The nollywhatsits have been eating at you today," she said, completely seriously.
Ron groaned. "What are nollywhatsits, even?" he asked.
She shrugged and said, rather pointedly, "What do you think they are?" Ron was at a loss as to how to answer this question.
Luna Lovegood, he mused, was peculiar. Everyone at Hogwarts, even the firsties, knew that the blonde was spacey on the best of days and outright batty on the others. He had never really spoken to her for the first few years she had attended, but the previous year, Ron had been rather out of luck for a date to the Yule Ball.
"Harry," he remembered whining, "How come you got a date?" His best friend had managed to pull Parvati Patil in their year, somehow.
Harry blushed but smiled anyway, and said slyly, "It might've worked out better if you thought to ask sooner, you know," he said.
Ron had groaned. "Girls always travel in packs," he pointed out, quite rightly. "I haven't managed to ask anybody before now."
"What about Ginny's friend?" Harry asked.
"Looney?" Ron asked then. "But she's—"
"Unattached," Harry said firmly.
Ron caved and asked her, and they had struck up a strange kind of friendship after that. Luna would greet him in the halls with her detached gaze and wide, unfaltering smile. Ron would say a few choice words to her Ravenclaw roommates. Ron would chuck bacon at the Lovegood owl—a surprisingly normal-looking Western Screech—and Luna would fold origami cranes. She would make them out of parchment scraps and animate them with a finicky spell Ron hadn't managed to master , then send them to him at the oddest times. He had received one in the middle of the night once. It had landed on his face during one of his better dreams and woken him with a static jolt.
Now that was a spell he couldn't even find in the library, much less recreate.
Faced with answering Luna's question, Ron only did what any good Gryffindor would do. He made something up.
"I think," he said slowly, imagining what exactly a nollywhatsit would do, "that a nollywhatsit is a bit like a bed bug."
Luna nodded, her protruding eyes looking at him very seriously.
"Because they nibble at you when you're not paying attention to them," he continued, "And they made the next day very annoying."
Luna nodded again. "Quite," she agreed. "They have a single tooth, you know, but their saliva is poisonous to humans. It makes your mood go—" and here she made a sound where her voice started high and woooped to a low, and swooped her hand from shoulder level to somewhere by their knees. She popped back up with a smile and a tilt of her head. "I'm glad to see someone else sees them," she said seriously.
"No, Luna—" Ron started, not wanting her to jump to conclusions, when she laughed and stood on her tip-toes. She put an arm around his shoulder. "I'm just teasing," she said airily.
Ron had to laugh, then, at the irony of Luna Lovegood teasing him.
"I'm feeling better already," he admitted, and Luna's arm tightened around his shoulders. "Good," she said. "Because I have a feeling that everything is going to get worse before it gets any better."
And no matter how many times he laughed as they walked back to the castle, he couldn't dislodge the sick feeling in his gut.
A/N Did you spot the reference? It's to a particular work by a rather prolific Dramione writer who is friends with Shayalonnie. Also if anyone has any guesses as to what happened to Hermione in second year, drop them in a review!