A/N: Thanks so much for all the reviews!!!
Disclaimer: I still haven't gotten my hands on them...
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Ron Weasley woke up feeling relaxed and completely at home.
His bedroom at the Burrow still looked almost exactly the same as it had during the years he'd spent in it before leaving for Hogwarts. The walls were still covered with bright orange posters of the Chudley Cannons, and his bed was still covered with an equally bright blanket. The one main difference between all those pre-Hogwarts years and now was the addition of the camp bed, which had pretty much been a permanent fixture in his room over the past few years. The other semi-permanent fixture happened to be his best friend, who was sleeping heavily on the camp.
Ron glanced at his bedside watch and saw that it was already after ten in the morning. He was surprised that his mother hadn't burst into the room yelling at them both to wake up yet, but he supposed that she was probably allowing them a lie-in since it was just the first day of Easter holiday. It was funny how mothers always seemed to know when their children needed rest and when they were just being lazy.
Being careful not to wake Harry, Ron slipped out of bed and made his way through the crowded room to the hallway. Being on the top level of a four story house, it wasn't too easy to distinguish smells that were wafting up from the kitchen. However, he was able to tell that something was cooking, and as his stomach grumbled noisily, anything sounded amazing.
When he arrived at the kitchen, though, it wasn't the smell of fried bacon that made him smile; it was the sight of Hermione sitting at his kitchen table gently bouncing his baby sister in her arms.
Hope
was almost two months old already, but she still looked as tiny as the day
she'd been born. Hermione was sitting
with her legs tucked under her with the infant in her arms; the two girls were
grinning at each other as Hermione lightly tickled the baby's stomach.
"Good to see another bit of life in this house." Ron looked up to see his mother standing by the stove. She looked very much awake and was cooking what looked like a feast for England's entire infantry. She scraped some eggs onto his plate and handed it to him. "Three down, four more to go."
Ron was confused for just a second before he realized what his mother was talking about. She had successfully nourished three of the seven children in the house that morning, but the twins, Harry, and Ginny were still nowhere to be seen.
Ron sat down at the table across from Hermione. She smiled over at him, and he felt the familiar need to kiss her. He didn't, of course, because his mum was standing only about a meter away, and that would be embarrassing. But the urge was there.
It was always there.
He sent her a quick smile in response and turned his attention to his plate, trying to take his mind off of all the feelings that always seemed to course through his veins whenever he was within viewing distance of Hermione. He couldn't help it; it wasn't like he wanted to feel all tingly and excited whenever she was close by, but the feelings always seemed to be there. Maybe he was just a hormone-driven sixteen year old.
Or maybe she was just too beautiful.
It was more likely the second option, though those hormones were nasty little buggers that did pretty well at annoying the hell out of him. But then again, he really did think Hermione was beautiful. He was pretty sure he'd always thought that, way deep down inside of him; growing up, even when they'd been fighting, Ron had always been mesmerized by her eyes and the way the color was a perfect match to her hair. Of course, at thirteen years old, he would just as soon have voluntarily turned himself over to Snape for experimenting as he would have told Hermione Granger that he thought her eyes were beautiful. But the best thing about being sixteen instead of thirteen was that now he could tell her whatever he wanted to.
And she would appreciate it.
As he ate his breakfast in silence, he kept sneaking glances up across the table. Hermione was still busy bouncing Hope, but he managed to get in several pretty good glances before his mother walked behind him and ruffled his hair, sending him a very knowing look hidden behind a warm smile. Ron immediately turned pink and stared down at his plate, mortified that his mum had caught him staring like that.
But once again, he couldn't help it.
He wished there was some way he could do nothing but stare at her. All the time. He would have been happy. She had a million different looks, and he wanted to memorize all of them and store them away in his mind separately. At that moment, she looked very much like a little girl playing with a baby doll. Her hair was down but pulled up partly on each side and secured with two clips; the surprisingly warm late April weather had allowed her to wear a pair of denim capris and a solid white tank top. Her feet were bare, and they jangled to a rhythmless beat as they hung from the side of the chair where she had her legs tucked underneath her. As always, she was naturally tanned, but the early spring date had not given her enough time to be so brown that her freckles no longer showed on the bridge of her nose and slope of her shoulders.
"Mmm, what's for breakfast?" Ginny appeared in the kitchen looking the exact opposite of Hermione. She was still dressed in the shorts and long outgrown t-shirt that she'd worn to bed, and her hair, instead of already being styled for the day like Hermione's, was tied into a high ponytail and hung down her back. Her eyes were still red from her awakening, but she seemed to brighten a bit when she spotted Hope. "Hi, Sissy," she said in, what Ron considered, a terribly annoying baby-voice; her fingers reached out and tickled Hope for a moment before she leaned down and rubbed their noses together.
"She's not a kitten," Ron said dully, looking over at his sister with a look of annoyance.
Ginny looked back at him, pursed her lips for a moment, and then made an incredibly rude gesture, which caused Ron to snort with laughter and Hermione to stare in shock.
"Virginia Charlotte!" Apparently Ginny had forgotten that they were no longer at school, safely away from their parental figures. She looked at her mum sheepishly, knowing already that she was in trouble but at least hoping that she could talk her way out of it.
"Sorry, Mum," she said quickly.
She was saved perhaps by the appearance of yet another face at the breakfast table. Harry had apparently woken up and was now looking very bright and very cheerful, a look he hadn't worn in over a month. He slid into a chair beside Hermione, reaching over to gently rub a finger over Hope's nose before reaching onto Hermione's plate and stealing her half-eaten slice of toast.
She looked over at him rather crossly before reaching over and taking the toast off the plate Mrs. Weasley had just set in front of him. She bit into it and then placed it back on his plate. He just shrugged and ate the rest of it before addressing her as Mrs. Weasley went about chewing Ginny out. "Have you talked to your parents?"
So, that's what the smile was all about...
Gia.
Ron watched Harry and Hermione talk and rolled his eyes just slightly to himself. Lately, everything was about Gia. Harry was apparently willing to risk his own life to see her, and it had recently occurred to Ron that it wasn't just Harry's life being threatened. Ron's own safety was at stake, not to mention that of his family, and Hermione was probably in more danger than any of them, her parents being Muggles and all. But maybe Harry was too caught up in his own hormones to realize any of that.
It was selfish, really.
And stupid.
He wasn't going to say anything, though; it wouldn't do any good at all to have Harry being all pouty and huffy. He'd been that way a lot lately, and it was getting rather annoying. Yes, of course Ron felt bad for Harry; he had more on his mind than any fifteen year old should ever be forced to deal with. But it wasn't fair of him to ask his friends to put themselves into unnecessary perilous situations. But if they really wanted to talk about fair, Ron reckoned that Harry had gotten the least bit of fairness of anyone in the world. Easy living was just not something that was written in the stars for Harry Potter, and since Ron had chosen to be the best friend of the person who was, in many cases, considered to be the savior of the wizarding world, he had been forced to give up his own chance at easy living.
But he was that best friend. Harry had been his first friend when they were wide-eyed eleven year olds, exploring a magical castle in hopes of adventure. He'd been his most reliable friend when Ron's younger sister had virtually been kidnapped and taken into the Chamber of Secrets. He'd been his most loyal friend when Ron spent the majority of his third year fighting with their other best friend over something silly and childish. And last year, he'd proven to be more than a friend when it was revealed that Ron was the thing Harry would miss most.
But now, somewhere deep in the back of his mind, Ron wondered if that would still be the same case now. He wasn't jealous of Gia, really; he was just a little upset that she had suddenly taken so much precedence over himself and Hermione. They'd known Harry for five years, had stuck with him through everything and put themselves into the line of danger plenty of times. He'd only known Gia for a few months, and already she was turning out to be the most important thing.
It was just an odd feeling.
Ron had never felt as if he were the best at anything. In a family of five older brothers, it was
difficult to stand out in anything particular.
And in school, he'd somehow managed to make the Boy Who Lived and the
Girl Who Knew Everything as best friends.
So, it wasn't like it was an entirely new feeling. It was just weird to be second best in
Harry's eyes all of a sudden.
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The Martin's house was nearly as large as the Grangers, but it lacked the elegance and grace of the one owned by the dentists. The Martin's home looked as if it had once been lived in but now basically stood just to give off an appearance. If you looked very closely at the backyard, you could still see the family barbecues and picnics of years before. Of course, they were gone now; years and years had turned the once lively house into a place that spoke of the emptiness inside.
Harry stared at the house in front of him, barely able to believe that Easter holiday had finally arrived. He'd been waiting to see Gia again for months now, and it was driving him mad. And now that the time was here, he was suddenly nervous.
He'd traveled with Ron and Hermione by Floo Powder to the Grangers a few hours after the late breakfast they'd had at the Weasleys. Hermione's parents were in the city and weren't due back until late that night, but it hadn't been too hard to convince both Ron and Hermione that heading over to Suffolk was a good idea. He'd left them just a few minutes before and was pretty sure that they had probably already made it up the stairs to Hermione's bedroom to do God only knows what. Not that he wanted to know, of course; no, he was perfectly happy thinking that they were doing nothing more scandalous than watching a bit of television.
Taking a deep breath, he knocked on the door in front of him. His heart was pounding in his chest, but it slowed immediately when the door opened and he was met with the one person he wanted to see more than any other right then.
Gia squealed in delight and instantly launched herself at Harry, wrapping her arms tightly around his neck and squeezing him until he could barely breathe. But he didn't mind a bit.
In fact, it was the most comforting feeling in the world.
A few moments later, Gia pulled back and turned around to glance behind her; then she grabbed his hand and yanked him into the foyer without saying a word, only holding a single finger to her lips in the silence symbol.
"Who's at the door?" A woman's voice drifted from somewhere at the back of the house, and Harry realized that it must be Anne, Gia's step-mother.
"No one," Gia called back, shoving Harry up the front stairs. "Just someone selling encyclopedias!"
"Bloody solicitors!" was the last grumbled reply Harry heard before Gia was literally pushing him up the steps.
"Go!" she hissed. "I'm in trouble, and you're not supposed to be here!"
Harry turned back around to glance questioningly at her, but Gia just shook her head rapidly, her eyes giving away the fact that he wasn't supposed to say a word. When they finally made it up the stairs, Gia grabbed his hand and yanked him into her bedroom. As soon as she had shut and locked the door, she grabbed him by the neck and kissed him.
Harry felt all the blood in his body rushing through his veins almost immediately. He had nearly forgotten what an amazing sensation it was to kiss this girl, but he remembered quite quickly.
"Why are you in trouble?" he asked when they finally pulled apart.
Gia grimaced and shrugged nonchalantly.
"I skipped school the other day, and I got caught. No big deal, but my dad's pissed. He's not even here, so who cares?"
Harry grinned at the blasé attitude Gia had toward being in trouble. "Where is he?"
She shrugged again. "I don't know. Paris... Venice... Berlin... I don't know, somewhere. I don't really care at the moment."
And with that, she kissed him again, this time slower and more deliberately.
It made him dizzy.
And then, as if by some odd sort of magic not taught at Hogwarts, his mind went completely void of all the bad things it was so used to being plagued with. He forgot that his best friend was having odd visions about interrogations. He forgot that his worst enemy had gone snooping through his things just weeks before. He forgot that there was a war brewing outside and that he was the center of it. He forgot that his least favorite teacher had recently informed him that he was nothing more than an accident, which had been at least convenient enough to get his mother into a family of wealth. He forgot that his favorite teacher had finally returned to teaching after a week's leave, looking sicker and graver than was even imaginable. He forgot that there were hundreds of people who wanted nothing more than to be the one to turn his body over to an evil dark lord set on taking revenge for thirteen years of exile.
He forgot all of it.
Harry wouldn't later recall all of the details to the next thirty minutes. They blurred by in what seemed like only seconds. They ended up on her bed somehow, and she definitely wasn't being shy about anything. Harry found his hands wandering to places that he hadn't gotten the chance to explore during Christmas break, but Gia seemed only too eager to share then. And after four months of dreaming and fantasizing, Harry was far too eager to ignore her open invitation. Over Christmas, they'd kept everything above clothing for the most part, but that just didn't seem enough now, and Harry was eternally grateful that she didn't protest when his hand slid under her shirt. In fact, she was making quiet little noises that somehow told him that protesting was the furthest thing from her mind.
"Gianna Nicole!" A loud
knocking jerked both teenagers to alertness immediately.
Gia leaned up slightly on her elbows, looking extremely cross and flushed as
Harry tried to think up the proper hexing for someone who would dare to
interrupt something like this. "What?"
she called, obviously annoyed.
"What are you doing?" demanded Anne's voice from the other side of the wood. "Open this door."
"Shit!" Gia cursed softly. "Fuck!" She looked frantically around her room before shoving Harry up and in the direction of her closet. "Hide!" she hissed before jumping out of the bed herself and pulling her shirt straight.
Harry, who didn't particularly fancy getting caught in a girl's bedroom by her parents, did as he was told and hurried to the closet. It was on the other side of the room, facing the door that Gia was headed to. He could see her struggling to look presentable as he peered through the slanted wooden panels of the closed door. He watched the unraveling scene as he struggled to regain control of his body and his senses.
"What?" Gia asked again, even more annoyed as she opened the door to her step-mother.
Anne was an attractive woman, obviously too young to be Gia's real mother, with waist length raven hair and dark brown eyes, the exact opposite of Gia's blonde and sea-green combination. It was almost amusing to see the way she and Gia stared at each other with equal amounts of contempt.
"What have you been doing?" she asked haughtily. "I've been calling you for half an age, and you've just been ignoring me."
Gia rolled her eyes. "I've been doing homework," she lied smoothly. "And I didn't hear you because I had a headset on."
Anne pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. "Your father called and said he's staying in Munich for an extra week."
Gia shrugged. "So?"
The older woman huffed up just a bit. "Well, I certainly hope you have a way to school when classes start back next week because I'm not going to wake up and take you."
"How surprising," Gia said dryly.
"And you better not skip again, young lady," she went on sharply. "Because you won't get off so easily next time, let me assure you of that."
Gia looked away with a bored look on her face. "Whatever," she said blankly. "Is that all you wanted?"
"I'm going to meet a client for drinks, so I don't know when I'll be back." She pointed a perfectly manicured nail at her husband's daughter. "And don't even think about going anywhere or having anyone over."
Gia sighed loudly and then put on an obviously very false and overdone smile. "Yes, ma'am," she said sweetly.
Anne glared at the younger girl before pulling a rather disgusted face and flipping the fingertips of one hand through Gia's curls. "And do something about your hair. You look positively awful."
Gia's fake smile faded and she returned the glare for a long moment before rolling her eyes and shutting the door on her step-mother. She twisted the lock and turned back around, flopping back against the wood of the door and crossing her arms over her chest. When Anne's footsteps faded away, Harry opened the closet door and stepped out.
"I hate her," Gia said simply, her face clouded with dislike.
Harry chewed on the inside of his lip. "At least she's leaving," he said in an attempt to make the situation seem better.
Gia rolled her eyes and walked to the window where a white sports car could be seen backing out of the driveway. "Out to meet a client for drinks," she repeated snidely. "What she really means," she went on, turning away from the window to face Harry again, "is that she went off to fuck some other man behind my father's back." She shrugged her shoulders effortlessly. "Not that he has any room to talk, considering the fact that he's probably only staying in Munich for an extra week because he found someone even younger and more waiflike than Anne to share a hotel room with."
Harry looked at the pure and utter contempt on Gia's face and realized just how completely messed up her family was. And then he laughed at how ironic it was.
Gia looked back up at him, a flash of hurt covering her face briefly. "What?" she asked, confused.
Harry shook his head, dismissing the notion that he might be making fun of her situation. "I was just thinking about how we both got screwed up by our parents." She eyed, clearly still confused, so he clarified. "There's this teacher at my school, who went to school with my parents, and he hated my dad. And now he hates me." He rolled his eyes at the thought of Snape. "Well, a few weeks ago, he basically informed me that my parents were never really in love, that my father was pretty much a racist, and that the only reason my mom and dad got married is because my mom got pregnant with me."
Gia's eyes widened slightly and her mouth dropped. "Was he telling the truth?"
Harry shrugged, not feeling particularly emotional about the situation at that moment. "Who knows? I don't even remember my parents, so for all I know, it could very well be the truth."
Gia shook her head silently and then, as she caught Harry's eye, they both smiled smiles of disbelief, a true sign that they completely understood each other. "We are so fucked up," Gia mumbled before glancing away and then back to Harry.
Then they both laughed.
The situation, though made up of an incredibly thick subject, confirmed just one thing. They already knew more about each other than anyone else ever had.
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"Are you sure your parents aren't coming home anytime soon?" Ron glanced nervously around the upstairs clearing of the Granger home.
Hermione turned around and looked crossly at him. "Not until after dinner. What is your problem?"
"Oh, nothing," he said sarcastically. "I'm perfectly okay with having your dad murder me."
Hermione rolled her eyes. "He wouldn't murder you, Ron," she said matter-of-factly.
"Right," Ron muttered unconvincingly. "Just make sure you say a nice eulogy at my funeral, okay?"
Hermione giggled before hitting him playfully. "Oh, shut up," she said briskly, taking his hand and pulling him with her into her childhood bedroom. She pushed the door shut with her free hand and then grabbed his own free one. "My parents aren't going to come back, okay?"
Ron stared at her, feeling a very familiar hormonal urge start to build within him. Just the thought of being alone, really alone, with Hermione for the first time in months was enough to make him lose his bloody mind. There were so many things he wanted to do, not even a percentage of which were proper, and he knew that she wouldn't let him do even a fourth of them. But still.
"My mum thinks they're here," he said quietly. "She wouldn't have let us come if she'd known they weren't."
"Well, what your mother doesn't know," Hermione said slyly, "won't hurt her, now will it?"
Hermione, acting all coy and sly like that, was surely going to be the end of him. Mesmerized by the way she was trying so hard to appear innocent, he couldn't do anything except shake his head and mumble, "No, I don't reckon it will..."
And that was the last time Ron concerned himself with his mother for the rest of the afternoon.
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I know, I know.
This whole chapter was sort of pointless to the plot, but I figured a
semi-fluffy chapter was in order since the next few chapters will be a mix of
complete and utter gooeyness and straight up angst. If anything seemed rushed in this chapter, I'm sorry. If anyone had trouble comprehending what was
going on and why they were back at the Burrow and the Grangers, please let me
know, and I'll try to fix it.
As always, I love your reviews!!!!
