Dog-ear: to fold down the corner of a page in a book.
November 17, 2005
Between his seven years of school, his career as an Auror, and growing up with five brothers and Ginny, Ron Weasley should have had the best ducking reflex in Britain. As it was, however, the spool of ribbon aimed for his head bounced off his temple and rolled away under the sofa trailing a pink, silky tail. Hem managed to get his arms up in time to block the deluge of scrap paper, but that meant he didn't see the heave roll of parchment flying at him.
"Ow! Ah – bloody hell, Hermione, what's the matter with you?" he demanded, peeking cautiously between his arms at his wife.
"Do you know what these things are?" she snapped, gesturing at the fallen projectiles. She stood halfway up the stairs, wand still raised in her right hand, a book clutched in her left and an all-too-familiar furious expression on her face. Her long, bushy hair seemed to be trying to stand on end.
"Your only-slightly-less-dangerous substitute for canaries?" Ron guessed.
"These are all things you could use as bookmarks, Ron!" she fumed, stamping down the rest of the stairs and coming to stand before him, fists planted firmly on either side of her bulging belly. She flourished her book under his nose. "Why do you insist on defacing every book that comes into this house?"
She peeled apart a few pages, displaying the crumpled and creased corners to him.
"That's my book! I can do what I want with it." Ron said stubbornly.
Hermione thrust the book in his face with noise of frustration and attempted to storm into the kitchen, but her seven-months-along belly turned into more of an angry waddle.
"I like marking the places I want to go back to!" he explained following her. "It's not a crime, is it?"
Hermione slammed a cupboard door in response. Ron watched her angrily sloshing water in the kettle in preparation to make tea, allowing two years of marital experience to sink in.
"You're not just upset about the book, are you?" he inquired at last.
Hermione whipped around, hair flying. "Oh, yes, of course," she said, voice oozing sarcasm. "It can't just be the defacement of my most valued possessions that's got me this upset. It has to be something else. Something far more rational like the fact that after seven years of solid, relentless effort in MLE, the sexist bastards at the top are already deciding who will replace me in two months. Or it could be the fact that I've come to hate mirrors because I'm a bloody elephant these days, or just maybe that my feet hurt and your spawn is kickboxing with my bladder and no matter which way I lie down, I can't fall asleep! It obviously has to be one of those reasons because getting this upset over a load of crumpled corners is insane!"
By the end of her rant, Hermione's voice had risen to a bat's screech and tears had begun to pour down her cheeks. She swiped at them angrily, sniffling behind her sleeve. Ron turned on his heel and disappeared into the sitting room. Hermione was about to melt into a sobbing puddle of pregnant hormones on the kitchen floor, feeling exactly as she had done in school with the two most emotionally awkward boys in the castle as her main source of comfort when he suddenly reappeared holding a small, blue photo album.
"I want to show you something," Ron said, guiding her gently to a chair with a hand between her shoulder blades and flipping the album open before her.
It was a picture taken almost two weeks before at Neville and Hannah's wedding. Hermione wanted to cringe away from the flash-glared image of herself seated in a corner of the hot, crowded ballroom draped in what most people must have assumed was a circus tent fashioned into dress robes to fit over her bulbous belly, shoes kicked off under the table and not even a drop of butterbeer to soothe the affair.
But Ron ran a finger reverently along her profile, wrapping his other arm around her expanded waist.
"Hannah made a pretty bride, but she didn't have anything on you," he murmured, leaning down to kiss her. He splayed his fingers over the round bump of their child and pulled back long enough to add, "And pretty soon you'll be replacing those sexist bastards at the top anyway."
Then he took the corner of the photo album page and firmly folded it over. A reluctant smile tugged up the corners of her mouth, and she took the dog-eared corner and pinched the crease hard so that it could mark the page for a long time to come.
A/N: Woah, two updates in under a week, what is this? Crazy, huh? Well this one's for HermioneLunaPotter who pointed out to me that, for shipping these two as hard as I do, I have written very little about them. Mostly that is because I feel like JKR got them perfectly and I don't want to mess up the carefully balanced dynamic she set up. I hope I haven't done so here. They're not like they were in the books, but they're married now, so…. Anyway, thank you all for reading and don't forget to contribute to the review drive!