Sorry it's taken so long to post this! I've been suffering from writers block something chronic. I think I'm over it now for the time being. Thanks to kabg01 for helping me, as usual!
Elphias Doge had just handed over the heavy brass ring of keys to Ron, his rheumy eyes sparkling with emotion after having given them a final tour of the house. They were standing in his - their - front garden, boxes piled up beside the gate, some neatly labelled in Hermione's hand, some just simply with 'Ron', scrawled across them. Crookshanks was spitting and yowling from his cat box, making Hermione dread the reaction she would get when she finally let him out.
"It's an honour to see you moving into here, a real honour. I just hope you'll be as happy as I have been. Honestly, it feels like Dumbledore is smiling down on me, knowing that you'll be moving in here. I just feel guilty about taking money off you at all – after all, you and Harry saved the wizarding world – my house seems a small price to pay for that."
"Please, Mr Doge – Elphias," Hermione amended hurriedly, remembering his insistence that they should address him by his first name, "We feel uncomfortable enough as it is, taking the house for such a low price. You've worked tirelessly for the Ministry and the Order. You were fighting Voldemort before we were even born. You deserve a comfortable retirement. If we thought you wouldn't be able to afford your cruise – I know how much you wanted to see the Bemuda Triangle -"
Elphias winked at her, "I wouldn't worry my girl, I do have the galleon or two stashed away. Plus these arrived today!" he pulled a couple of small, glossy pieces of parchment out from the sleeve of his robes, "Two tickets for a round the world cruise. It looks like I won them in a competition on the back of a packet of cauldron cakes. I don't even remember entering! Still, that's getting old for you I suppose."
"Congratulations!" Ron laughed in disbelief.
"Must be my lucky day. Now I've sent my luggage on to Bournemouth and if I don't go after it soon, my sister Elsie will be rifling through it all, trying to organise me, so I'd better be off."
He tipped his moth eaten fez to them, twirled elegantly on the spot and disappeared. Hermione made to walk through the open door but Ron grabbed her by the wrist, spinning her back towards him.
"Hang on a minute, Gin would kill me if I didn't do this properly," and before Hermione had a chance to ask him what he meant, he had slid one hand behind the crook of her knees and hoisted her up into his arms.
"What on earth are you doing?" she shrieked, clinging on tightly around his neck with one hand and batting him with the other to put her down, too panicked to realise the contradictory nature of the two acts.
Ron carried her over the threshold, before dumping her down on the floor in the hall, "Harry's right, you are sturdier than you look," he smirked, rubbing his forearms.
Hermione scrambled to her feet, pulling at her top where it had ridden up, "I am not! It's not my fault Harry has the upper body strength of a twelve year old girl."
"Unlike me," joked Ron, flexing his biceps. Hermione tried not to look but her eyes were drawn to the definition under his t shirt, resenting the girlish reaction her body had to him showing off his muscular arms like a caveman.
"Well why don't you put those muscles to good use, the oven needs a good scrubbing,"
Ron grimaced and agreed, knowing the sooner they cleaned the kitchen, the sooner food could be produced from it. It wasn't just the oven – the entire house needed cleaning from top to bottom. Elphias was obviously a tidy man by the look of the meticulously stacked books and well organised study they had seen when they looked round, and his beloved garden was still perfectly pruned, but perhaps he had started to find the household spells a bit much. Either that or his eyesight wasn't what it once was because the entire house was covered with a thin layer of black grime that even with magic, needed vigorous work to remove. Hermione offered to go round and remove all of the cobwebs, before they started cleaning, which Ron accepted gratefully.
Hermione almost enjoyed the work, stepping into each large empty room, imagining the shelves in the living room full of her books, looking forward to modernising the bathroom, revelling in the cool green light that filtered into the rooms that backed onto the garden. By the time that Ron called her to tell her the kitchen was done, she had banished enough spiders that it would have given him nightmares for the rest of his life, even with Crookshanks, (who had deigned to forgive Hermione after much petting and stroking and cooed apologies in his battered ear) following her around, eating his fair share.
Entering the previously dirty room, Hermione was pleasantly surprised to see the difference made with a few well-placed scourgifies and presumably a lot of elbow grease, if Ron's sweaty brow was anything to go by. The work surfaces, which she had previously assumed were a dull gravy brown colour, were now a shining golden pine. Even the floor tiles revealed a pattern that she hadn't previously noticed. The windows sparkled and the oven was spotless. All of a sudden, Hermione could see herself cooking here, calling Ron in to taste a spoonful of something she was stirring on the hob. It wasn't like the small galley kitchen that they had owned together previously that had made squeezing past each other to reach the plates or get to the fridge such a game. Rather, it was more like the kitchen at the Burrow – the heart of the home. A family kitchen, she realised with a jolt.
"Well? Don't you want to tell me I've missed a bit or something?" Ron asked, standing close by, his hands on his hips.
"I think you've done brilliantly," she beamed at him before dissolving into giggles, "It's just…Oh…at the risk of repeating myself, you've got something on your nose!"
Ron scowled and swiped ineffectually at the black smudge. Hermione pulled him by the arm to face her and tapped him gently on the nose with her wand. The smudge vanished and she stroked her finger gently down his long nose. She was acutely aware of the intake of breath this caused him to take and her hand tingled with the desire to ghost her palm over his cheek, to run the pad of her thumb against the roughness of his stubble. Instead she just showed him her finger.
"There you go, all clean."
"Thanks mum," Ron laughed, breaking the moment between them as though he hadn't even noticed it, making Hermione deflate slightly, "So, do you want to unpack some of these boxes? I moved all of the ones marked 'kitchen' into here."
Hermione tore her eyes away from the freckles that dusted the bridge of his nose and began to examine the boxes. Already she was aware that the small kitchen table she had brought with her was not sufficient. She could transfigure it into something bigger but it wouldn't be the same, she realised as she thought fondly of the vast oak table in the burrow, scarred and scorched with countless meals – the table where Molly and Arthur had taught their children until they had been old enough to go to Hogwarts. They needed something like that – somewhere they could sit elbow to elbow at Christmas lunches, somewhere they could enjoy dinner parties with their friends, somewhere they could quiz the children about how their days were over nutritious meals. Then she mentally slapped herself; what was she thinking? There wasn't going to be a cosy family future for them! As soon as she had figured out how to overturn the law (and she would do that, if only for the sake of those like her friend Amy Jones, married to a former Death Eater), then Ron wouldn't be able to get away from her quickly enough, back to his ever moving procession of blonde witches. Her shoulders slumped in defeat, she lifted the tiny table out of the box, placed it on the floor and expanded it back to its full size, then did the same with the chairs.
"Reckon we can always stretch it a bit when we have dinner parties and things" Ron smiled at her, the corners of his eyes crinkling.
Hermione frowned in suspicion that his thoughts had been mirroring her own so closely, "You'd want to do that?"
"Well, yeah, if you want? I'll help with the cooking! And not just eating bits and saying I'm testing the food."
The way he said it sounded convincing, and the pleading look in his eye made her believe that he really did want to spend time there, with her. More tantalising visions of the life they could have together drifted into her mind and she returned his smile with a wide, genuine one of her own, "Well if you want to, that sounds great."
Of course, she had to go right ahead and spoil it with the next item she pulled out of the box, the cork board that she kept all of her notes and things on. As she expanded it and performed a sticking spell to keep it on the wall, she heard Ron coming up behind her.
"What's this?" he asked, pointing to a multi coloured roster.
Hermione's cheeks coloured. She had made it for them in the run up to the move, thinking she was being helpful but she could tell before she even explained it that she had made a mistake. Would it be bad form to modify Ron's memory and pretend it had never been there? But it was too late, he was peering more closely at her neat handwriting in the multi-coloured squares.
"What in the name of Merlin's dangling plums is this?" he jabbed at it with his finger, "Have you really, honest to goodness, drawn up a planner that schedules when we shag?"
"I thought it would help,"
"10-10.30pm on Wednesdays? A whole half an hour? Well let's just hope I can last that long! After all, the romance of the situation might overwhelm me!"
"Well there isn't anything scheduled in afterwards…." She tried weakly, knowing it sounded pathetic even to her ears.
"And what's this before it? Dinner at the Burrow? Well that's sure to put me in the mood! Oh no thanks to second helpings of trifle mum, I'm scheduled in to bonk Hermione later and I don't want to be too full. Come to think of it, it's ten to ten, we've got to run, I don't want to miss my slot. Gods Hermione, I know we'd joked - at least I thought it was a joke anyway! I knew you had a schedule - we'd even laughed about it being like a homework planner, and I accept that I haven't helped things, being so busy but I didn't realise you actually had it all written down to the minute!"
"Yes you have been busy!" Hermione jumped on what he had said, glad of a way to swing the argument round onto him, "Let's not forget who splinched themselves trying to rush around all over the place. Heaven forbid that I try and organise our lives a little bit, no it's much better to carry on in chaos. I was actually trying to make things easier for you – I know how you put off chores when you don't want to do them."
"Let's not forget that I splinched myself after you kicked me out of bed!" he glared at her, perhaps hoping that she would back down but she just folded her arms stubbornly over her chest. He ran his fingers through his hair in frustration, making it stick up wildly, before letting out a gusting sigh and continuing in a calmer tone, "Is that what you think? That it's a chore that I want to avoid? Hermione, going to bed with you is hardly like revising for a test or putting the bins out."
"I just like to be organised," Hermione admitted, the wind leaving her sails as soon as Ron had made an attempt to halt their argument.
"I know. And I do need a kick up the arse sometimes. But I'd like to think that that wouldn't include shagging!"
"Well, putting the bins out is on Friday morning, see there, in blue."
"Married to Hermione Granger, what the hell have I done?" Ron shook his head dazedly, although the humour was back in his tone.
Hermione decided it was best leaving him to try and remove the doxy infestation in the living room curtains that rivalled the one they had encountered at Grimmauld Place while she made a start in the bathroom. Being with him was like being on a rollercoaster or some other fairground ride that swang dizzyingly from desire to discord and back again all in the space of a few minutes. Worse still was that she wasn't sure she wanted to get off but she didn't know how much longer she could stay aboard the ride and keep the strict demarcations that she had imposed on their relationship in place.
oooOOOooo
It wasn't until lunch time that they came across each other again, when Hermione unpacked the bag of sandwiches and ginger beer she had brought with her and they sat cross legged on the dusty carpet of one of the bedrooms to eat. Mercifully, several hours of hard cleaning seemed to have left the both of them in a better mood
"So how is this going to work?" Ron mumbled through a mouthful of ham sandwich, "Are we just going to divide the house down the middle or what?"
Hermione swallowed the lump of cheese that had suddenly stuck in her throat. Typically for them, they had skated over the details of sleeping arrangements. For a moment she wondered whether Ron would take her up on an offer to share her bed every night, not just the ones where they needed to be intimate. The thought of his warm, solid presence next to her every night filled her with a sudden longing that hit her like a sucker punch. But after her failed attempt to admit her feelings, she didn't feel she could put herself out there again. Affecting a look of casual consideration she said in a careless tone, even as her throat tightened around the words, making her voice sound squeaky, "I suppose I hadn't really thought about it. I mean, you work funny hours going abroad, and I would probably wake you up getting up early to go to work…"
She trailed off and was just gathering the courage to add a 'but' to the end of her sentence when Ron's shoulders dropped and he brushed the crumbs off his hands in a businesslike fashion.
"Right you are, separate bedrooms then. Message received loud and clear. I'll take this one and you can have the big one down at the end, that suit you?"
"But – " the word dropped out of Hermione's mouth before she could stop it. Ron just raised one eyebrow, looking impatient, as though he was keen to get back to work. Thinking fast, she tried to come up with something to say, when all she could think was 'but I'd sleep so much better if your feet were tangled up with mine and I could hear your breathing in the darkness' and stuttered out, "But…would it be ok to turn the box room into a study? I really need somewhere to work on things when I'm at home and my office is so full of marriage law documentation I can barely see my real work. You could use it too, if you wanted," she added as an afterthought.
"Sounds great," Ron agreed coldly, "After all, there's barely room for a bed, even a really small one. Best just use it as an office. Dad's owled me the decorating spells so I'll start in there to practice before I get the hang of it. He says getting the colour right is the tricky bit but it's not like you're going to want it any specific colour is it, you know, for an office. Not pink, or blue or anything. I'll start now."
It wasn't until Hermione could hear him crashing about in there that she realised what he was getting at. When did he become so sensitive and she become the insensitive one, she wondered. She had only been making a throwaway comment to cover up her embarrassment and she'd managed to upset him. She was tempted to let him burn his anger out while she went and got on with another room but she realised that they needed to start communicating properly, after all, that was what had split them up before.
With a deep sigh, she followed Ron down the corridor to the smallest bedroom. Her hand hovered over the door to knock before she lowered it and twisted the handle open
"Ron, I'm s –ARRGGHH!" Hermione's apology turned to a scream as Ron turned in the direction of her voice and the paint spraying from the end of his wand covered her from head to toe.
"Oh Hermione! I'm so sorry!"
"That was meant to be my line" Hermione muttered, pulling her sodden vest away from her skin and wondering if magic would get the paint out of her hair, when she noticed that although Ron had apologised, he wasn't looking very sorry. In fact he was looking more amused. Yes, his cheek was twitching in an attempt to bite down a laugh. Well, she'd show him!
"Repulso!" she said as she pointed her wand at herself. Most of the paint flew away from her in every direction, and she was satisfied to see a good amount of it splattering over Ron, some even landing on his mouth which was open in shock.
By the time he had finished spluttering and wiping his lips, Hermione was doubled up with laughter at the expression on his face, forgetting that it was his amusement that had caused her to retaliate in the first place.
Ron took a step towards her, sharklike, his wand raised, "You think you're so clever don't you. Well, I reckon you've forgotten one thing."
"What's that?" she tried to find the door handle behind her, not wanting to turn her back on him.
"I'm the one who knows the paint spell," Ron laughed, blasting her with another splash of paint.
Dropping her wand, Hermione threw herself at Ron, knocking him to the ground as she tried to rub the paint that covered her into his face. Suddenly she realised that she was straddling him and rubbing her chest his face, giggling hysterically as she did so. He obviously sensed her hesitation and used her moment of weakness to regain control, grabbing her by the wrists and managing to flip her over and in that moment the atmosphere changed from something playful to a charged suspense - a question that needed to be answered.
His face was almost totally covered in cream paint, his blue eyes shining starkly out at her, his hair, also thick with paint was sticking out in every direction, yet he had never looked more gorgeous to her. Her laughter died on her lips as his fingertips slid a trail across her collarbone, leaving clean lines in the paint up the side of her neck. One of her hands was trapped above her head by his, his hand circling her wrist easily. For once, neither of them got embarrassed, or nervous or laughed off the situation, and just the look of serious concentration on Ron's face as he painted swirls and stripes over her shoulders and up the sensitive underside of her outstretched arm made her lips part and a breath that sounded embarrassingly like a moan slip out of her mouth. Even this didn't make Ron smile though - his eyes closed and he took in a deep intake of breath of his own as he pressed closer to her. Hermione was acutely aware of the pressure he was applying between her thighs as he settled between her legs, feeling a pulsing ache for him to move closer still, add delicious friction with a roll of his hips, maybe to run those teasing fingers that were now moving with frustrating slowness over the exposed skin at her waist, along the seam of her jeans that was tight just there against where she wanted him. She wrapped her legs around him, pulling him closer towards her and was rewarded when he ground himself against her, feeling his hardness even through their clothes, him murmuring her name in a voice rough with desire. Her breathing stuttered as she wound her hand up around the back of his neck, pulling him down towards her. Their lips were mere inches away from each other before he paused, giving her one last chance to push him away, not that she had any intention of doing such a thing. She needed him now, all of him, and to give herself in return - not just the careful, awkward touches and caresses that they had shared in their Ministry mandated lovemaking. She was ready to let go. Her lips touched his with what felt like an electric jolt.
Suddenly something large and silvery shot through the wall of the bedroom, causing Ron to scramble away from her in shock. Hermione let out a shriek of surprise when she saw Harry's patronus canter to a stop in front of them and begin speaking with Harry's voice.
"It's Ginny….not looking good…the baby…we're on our way to St Mungo's…think she's in labour…get here when you can."