Story Title/Link: Of Potatoes and Priorities
School and Theme: Hogwarts: Creature Induced Injuries
Main Prompt: Torn T-shirt
Additional Prompts: Garden Gnome, Getting into a fight
Year: 4
Wordcount: 2115
Ron had known how to de-gnome a garden for as long as he could remember. And, sure, it wasn't the simplest task in the world–there was a knack to it, a particular way of spinning the little blighter until it was too dizzy to return any time soon–but it didn't generally pose him any problems these days. He'd spent most of this summer practising, too, so he liked to think he was on pretty good form.
Pride comes before a fall. He remembered Hermione warning him about that once.
It was a gnome like any other, on the outside–grubby, weather-beaten face, more wrinkles than Merlin's stale pants. And he was wearing clothes of some kind, but it wasn't altogether clear what kind of garments they were actually supposed to be under all that mud. Thinking nothing of it, Ron bent down to grab the offending creature by the ankles. He secured a hand around a hairy foot and then jumped back in shock. The damn thing had bitten his hand. It had actually retaliated and fought back. Well, then. Two could play at that game.
"Ron?" Hermione's concerned voice sounded somewhere on his left. "What is it? What's wrong?"
"Nothing," he muttered, ears already glowing red, rather embarrassed at the thought that he had been outwitted by what was, to all intents and purposes, an animate potato.
His humiliation probably contributed to his next action, but he would only come to realise that later. Now, however, in the moment, he simply acted. He punched the thing straight in the nose, watching with satisfaction as the pudgy face gave way beneath his fist. With that he felt like he was glowing again, but in a way that was rather more pleased than pained.
He stepped back to admire his handiwork.
Only that didn't quite go to plan either, somehow, when the stupid flat-faced gnome shuffled after him and started aiming puny fists at his ankles. He bent down to jerk it away from his leg, but the pesky thing was stronger than it looked and hung on grimly, biting at his arm as he attempted to wrench it off himself. And it all went downhill from there, really, and next thing he knew, he was flat-out brawling with a bloody garden gnome. Of all the stupid, ridiculous, pathetic situations he had ever found himself in, this was surely the stupidest of the lot.
And then it got only stupider, as Hermione of all people succeeded where he had failed. She tugged the gnome away from him and tossed it smoothly over the fence. He was used to watching her be the success story while he was the failure, of course he was. But normally that happened in the field of schoolwork, not in a back garden full of gnomes.
Ron sat heavily in the grass and wondered whether his self-esteem would ever recover from this latest blow.
"Are you OK?" Hermione's gentle concern only made him feel worse.
He grunted and hoped she might go away.
Of course, ill-timed persistence had ever been a strength of hers. "Ron? Come on, let's get you inside. You've got a nasty scratch on your stomach there, where he's ripped through your T-shirt."
He glanced down at that and only became ever more mortified, as he noted that his pasty and slightly feeble abs were on display to the world, punctuated only by a line of shallow scratches running the length of his belly.
"Ron? Are you OK, Ron?" Her voice was more than only concerned, now, he felt. In fact, it was beginning to border on hysterical. "Come on, I have some dittany in my room. Let's get you inside and get that shirt off so I can see to it."
"OK. Thanks," he agreed, suddenly interested in the idea of inside. It sounded like a much more enticing plan, he thought, when it involved himself shirtless in Hermione's bedroom.
Without further ado, she led the way back inside the house and through the kitchen where, as usual, his mother was too busy preparing supper for half of Wizarding Britain to notice that her own child was injured. Sure, he wasn't exactly at death's door, but it might be nice to be someone's priority just once in a while, he reckoned. And then they made it through the sitting room, where Harry and Ginny were playing snap, and up the stairs, past Fred and George's room from which a number of inexplicably loud noises were issuing.
At last they arrived at Hermione's room. OK, it was Hermione and Ginny's room, technically, but he would rather not be thinking about his little sister just now. Not when he was about to find himself shirtless in the bedroom of the witch he was, he had to concede, at least a little bit besotted with. Without waiting for Hermione's invitation he shrugged out of the torn T-shirt and deposited himself on her bed. Perhaps he might have hoped that he would one day end up here under different circumstances, but he supposed that this would do. He would simply have to make the most of it.
"Hermione, I-"
"Trust you to get in a fight with a garden gnome." She tutted a little and he felt the last fragments of his optimism crumble to dust. There it was, that judgemental and slightly patronising tone that, it seemed, literally everyone in the world liked to take with him.
"It started it," he grumbled with venom. "It bit me."
"Can you blame him? You were about to throw him over the fence."
"Well of course I was. It was a bloody gnome, wasn't it?" He felt his annoyance and humiliation grow ever deeper.
"Well, yes, but do try to imagine how he felt, Ron. He probably only came into the garden looking for food and you know how dizzy they get when we throw them. It's not very nice for them, is it?"
"I don't want to imagine how it felt, Hermione. You're barking."
"How he felt, Ron. Or she, I suppose, I shouldn't presume, but I read in Gruffling's Guide to Garden Gnomes that as a species they do tend to conform quite strongly to gendered clothing choices, so I thought that he was probably a safe bet."
He stared at her, hard, for several long seconds. He had always known, of course, that Hermione had something of an enthusiasm for the behaviours and rights of magical creatures, but it had not entirely occurred to him that this included gnomes. He was sorely tempted to laugh in her face, or perhaps to let her latest comment fuel his fury even further, but somehow he found that there was something holding him back. Something about the very Hermione way that she was simultaneously showing concern for him and for the damn gnome left him feeling even more besotted than he had been before.
He sighed deeply and wondered if this exasperating witch would ever care about him as much as she cared about all of her various creature rights campaigns. Yet again, he found himself thinking that he might quite like to be someone's priority, one of these days.
Meanwhile, it seemed, Hermione had given up on actually speaking to him and located her essence of dittany instead. She was sitting on the bed next to him, now, holding the tiny bottle and looking at the floor, of all things.
"Hermione?"
"Yes?" It came out with a bit of a squeak and he couldn't entirely see why.
"Could I have the dittany? And then I can get on with fixing this scratch?"
"Oh. Erm." She giggled for no apparent reason. "I was going to see to it, if that's OK. Do you want to lie down?"
He wasn't altogether certain that he had the self-control to lie calmly on Hermione's bed but he supposed he was about to find out. He lowered himself carefully onto his back and wondered if there was any subtle way to tense his stomach muscles. No, he didn't suppose there was. In that case, he decided, he had best abandon subtlety and try to tense a bit anyway. He was fully aware that he wasn't exactly the most impressive physical specimen in the world, but he figured that feeble but tensed was probably a better bet than just plain old feeble.
At last, Hermione turned her gaze from the floor and looked over to him. No sooner had her eyes taken in the scratches across his stomach than she glanced away again, lips pressed tight together, eyes lowered once more.
"Hermione? What is it?" He was getting a bit worried about her, if he was being honest. She wasn't usually the giggling and glancing away type.
"Nothing." She shook her head briskly. "Nothing at all."
With that, she visibly straightened her shoulders and turned back to look at him. Breathing with audible care, she opened the bottle and began to tend to his rather pathetic wound. He felt the sting of dittany and gave a slight hiss.
"Sorry," she muttered at once, placing her palm flat against his stomach in what he supposed was meant as a soothing gesture but instead had completely the opposite effect. "I should have told you it might sting."
"S'OK," he assured her, trying to remind his abs that they were supposed to be tensed, damn it.
Suddenly, for reasons that were unclear to him, she recoiled. She jumped to her feet, and snatched her hand away, and spilt a little splash of dittany over his chest as she went.
"That's it," she snapped and he waited for the rest of her sentence.
Three seconds later, he was still waiting. "What's it?" He asked cautiously.
"You're doing this on purpose," she accused him and he was left still wondering what in the name of Merlin it was. "You're just messing with me, aren't you? You knew this was going to drive me crazy enough as it was, and then you thought I know, let's just screw with her even more with those damn abs. And I'm telling you, Ron, it's not fair!" Her speech made, she started striding towards the door.
"Wait!" He managed to assemble his wits sufficiently to jump to his feet and go after her. "Hermione. Stop, please. I'm – I'm not trying to mess with you. I don't see how I could."
Something of the bewilderment in his tone must have made it through to her. "You really don't?"
"Like my stomach would be enough to mess with anyone," he said with a nervous shrug. "It's not the greatest, is it?"
"It's the nicest stomach I've spread dittany on recently," Hermione informed him briskly, cheeks tinged pink.
He gaped at her and felt his own ears start to burn.
Gathering his thoughts, he tried for a witty comeback. That was supposed to be his contribution to an average conversation, he seemed to remember. "Then you've clearly not seen enough stomachs recently. Go look at some others, get back to me when you're ready to admit I'm right."
"I don't really want to look at any others," she told him in an unexpectedly small voice. "I'd rather keep looking at yours."
His shock at her previous statement was nothing compared to his shock at this. "What?"
"Not in a creepy way, of course," she rushed to assure him. "I'm not trying to – to make you uncomfortable, or anything. I just meant that, you know, you're you, and – and I think I should stop talking now before I make this situation even worse than I already have."
"I don't think you need to worry about that one," he reassured her, a smile spreading its way slowly across his face. "You just made the situation quite a lot better, as far as I can tell."
"I did?"
"Yeah. Listen, d'you want to finish with that dittany? Because I think after that I might have a few embarrassing things to admit to you and I'd rather you fix me first in case I screw it up."
"Are you saying what I think you're saying?" She asked, gesturing him back to the bed.
"Yeah. I mean, I hope I'm saying what you think I'm saying." He stretched himself out on the mattress without argument.
"I guess we'll find out, soon enough," she said, looking down at him with a pretty pink blush staining her cheeks and with a smile that, he thought, made getting into a humiliating fight with a garden gnome almost worthwhile.
It was quite something, he decided, to have her look at him like he was actually her priority.
a/n Thanks for reading!