Title: Any Witch Way She Can
Genre: Romance / Humor
Rating: T
Pairing: Ron x Hermione (Harry x Ginny)
Spoilers: N/A
Summary: Love is a game. Learn the rules.
Word Count: 1,692
Warnings: 8th Year Fic
Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to JK Rowling. Summary is a tagline from She's the Man, I'm almost certain.
A/N: I no do the sports. Apologies for incorrect references.
Famous romance novels would tell you that the 'happily ever after was the easiest part off the tale. Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy don't waste time from confessions to wedding. There's no hiccup in the love songs and sonnets and plays and poems. Once the two admit their love, the rest, as they say, is history.
But real life, she was coming to realize, was not like a fairytale.
"Ronald, must you do that at breakfast?"
Her… boyfriend (she supposed she could call him that now) looked up, scrambled egg falling from the corner of his mouth to fall onto the Quidditch playbook he'd rested against a pitcher or orange juice. "… What?"
She grimaced at the display. "You haven't completed any of the homework assignments. If you want to complete your Seventh Year studies before you reach twenty, don't you think you should start sometime soon? It's almost three weeks in."
"And it's almost Quidditch!"
"You aren't even allowed to play." She doesn't bother trying to hide the confusion from her voice, since it honestly makes no sense to her. Why bother wasting time with something you couldn't participate in when their classes were something that was going to affect their entire future?
"First match of the season is Gryffindor versus Slytherin." She makes a confused expression, eyes widening and eyebrows arching. "That prat Malfoy came back for Eighth Year, too." Still nothing. "Merlin's balls, Hermoine! It's like you've got no House Pride at all!" When a few team members call to him and Harry, they gather up their things and head off.
"Don't worry, 'Mione," Harry says to her softly as he passes her. "He'll settle down as soon as season's in swing. You know how he is."
But honestly, she doesn't know how he is. She watches Harry meet up with Ginny, her eyes glowing with happiness as she leans up to kiss him swiftly on the lips, before intertwining their hands and walking off after the Quidditch team. Those two – they fit together like a story, like pieces of a puzzle or sides of a coin. They were what happened after 'and they all lived happily ever after' was written.
She and Ron…
… were a little harder to write out.
Hermione organized her love life the same way she did everything else: with relentless perusal of the library shelves and, when that failed, shamelessly eavesdropping on the other girls in the dorm. She came to several, startling conclusions.
1. Dating was basically a Quidditch match. Though she couldn't tell if couples were on the same side or opposing ones. Sometimes it seemed like it could be either or.
2. Harry and Ginny worked well together because they were on the same team. They had the same goals, the same endgame in mind.
3. Ron was a diehard Quidditch player, competing to win against all others.
4. Hermione was a Quidditch fan. She didn't want to participate herself, but she enjoyed watching from the sidelines, a quiet observer. She was always interested in the outcome and rooting for her team, but she didn't want to get down and dirty participating.
5. If she wanted to make sure she and Ron got their easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy ending, she was going to have to reevaluate how she spent her downtime.
It was a fairly straight forward list, as far as lists went. A lot easier to understand that her Astronomy or Arithmancy charts. And it was definitely easier to understand than some of the Seventh Years Divination charts, which looked borderline serial killer-ish. There was just one large problem: she understood Astronomy and Arithmancy. She even understood Divination (to the degree that it was bunch of made-up crap). But she did not understand sports.
She understood the rules. But she didn't understand the why.
They weren't important to her future. Nor to Ron's or Harry's since they both wanted to be Aurors. So she didn't see what the point was in taking up so much time this year focusing on plays and plans and training schedules when not only would they not be doing that as a career, but they weren't even allowed to play on the House team this year.
Hermione tapped her quill against her parchment for a moment, before quickly jotting down a new list.
1. Ask Seventh and Eighth Year girls what house pride entailed.
2. Make trip to Hogsmeade and purchase "spirit supplies."
3. Memorize Gryffindor play book.
4. Take advantage of her continued Head Girl status and potentially learn plays from other Houses.
5 Utilize a series of well-choreographed lists to come up with some plays for the team, making sure to pass these on to Ron in order to win matches.
No big deal, right?
Correction: such a big deal.
Steps one through three went superbly. The girls (mostly girlfriends of team members) all squealed and seemed ecstatic to help 'update her image,' as they said. They offered her tons of tips on how to support Ron and Gryffindor. They told her all kinds of cute ways to showcase her team spirit. She made a trip to Hogsmeade to purchase the necessary supplies. Ginny let her borrow the playbook (with the caveat that, if she lost it, Ginny would murder her) and it only took Hermione two nights to have it memorizes cover to cover.
Step 4 proved to tad bit more complicated.
Hufflepuff's playbook was easy to get a copy of, though she did feel slightly bad about taking advantage of the First Year girl who was dating the new Second Year beater. She convinced the girl it was for the greater good and who was to argue with one of the saviors of the Wizarding World? For Ravenclaw she had to find someone who didn't give a hoot about sports and bribe them with intel gathered from Hermione's work with the Ministry and the Order.
It was Slytherin that was the real problem.
She wasn't proud of it, but getting their playbook involved breaking some rules and taking some serious advantage of her Head Girl status. Almost the entire Slytherin team had a free period at the same time, that their Head of House mandated they spend in the library. A well-placed time lapse spell that set a fire in the Potions lab at the same time Mrs. Norris had a panic attack and hurtled through the Divination classroom sending teacups flying, meant the last few players joined the team in study hall. Then she was free to sneak into the Slytherin dormitory with the help of a vial of Polyjuice Potion she filched from the Potions lab. Then it was just slipping in behind another student, up to the dormitory, and some rifling through the captain's trunk.
Now to just come up with a new Gryffindor playbook of counter plays and then to bask in the awestruck look of her boyfriend when she won them the game.
Gryffindor won the first match against Slytherin and then lost two matches against Ravenclaw and (horrors) Hufflepuff before Hermione had managed to string together a usable counter-playbook. The Hufflepuff loss had demoralized everyone so much that walking into the Common Room was like walking into a funeral. Some people even cried… Ron might have been one of them, she refused to comment on it. Their next match with Slytherin was coming up in just two days and the team was as moping as she'd ever seen them.
She'd been trying to find Ron for hours on Saturday morning, but he and Harry and the entire Gryffindor team had found some secret location to cry or rally or whatever and she had no idea where that was. It wasn't until two minutes before the game started that she burst through the doors of the locker room after elbowing her way through the crowd.
"Ronald, where have you been?!"
"I – " He turned around and fell silent. A long, slow blink as he took her in. Her hair was braided with red and gold ribbons. Her eyes were outlined in kohl and a cat-like slant. Weasley is Our King was written in glistening letters. She watched his eyes follow them as Our was replaced by My. His eyes were hot when they finally met her again. "Hermione?" His voice was rough and startled.
"I have a plan!" She thrust the sheets to parchment at Ginny.
The redhead flipped through them in surprise, while Harry peered over her shoulder. "A playbook?"
"A counter-playbook?" When ten pairs of eyebrows arched in confusion, she clarified. "I designed these to counter any of the current plays in any of the other Houses repertoire. So there's no move their Chasers and Beaters pull that you won't have the appropriate retaliation for." She held up a hand when she saw half a dozen mouths open to ask what she assumed was going to be the same question. "I am not going to get into it right now with how I… acquired… that information right now, suffice it to say I have it and it is accurate and we should all just move along from there if we want to win this match."
Ron's eyes practically glowed as he stepped towards her. She felt the look shiver down her spine like a ripple of anticipation. "If we want to win this match?"
He was close enough now that she had to tilt her head back to look him in the eyes. Her lips canted in a playful smile as she leaned it. "Well, we are on the same team, aren't we?"
Ron hummed in approval as he pressed their lips together, all thoughts of Quidditch vanishing from his head in the wake of one determined woman in love.