"You know, there's a muggle song about a girl named Rhiannon," Hermes found himself saying.

It was a chilly afternoon in the castle, Hattie out to practice with the team even as the sky poured buckets over half of Scotland. How she or the rest of the Quidditch team could stand it, Hermes would never know. He stayed indoors with the rest of Gryffindor, taking advantage of the window tables to listen to the soothing rattle of the rain against window panes.

"Hmm?" went Ron—known to the government and her own mother as Rhiannon, and to practically everyone else by her nickname—as she glanced up from her homework. "What're the lyrics, then?"

"That's what I'm trying to remember," Hermes said with a frown. His mother liked to play it a lot, so he really should remember.

He hummed the melody as best as he could. There was... Rhiannon rings like a bell in the night, and wouldn't you love to love her? Hermes felt his face heat up. There was no way on earth he was singing that to Ron as she watched him.

What was the later bit? Oh, right—

"She's like a cat in the dark, and then she is the darkness. She rules her life like a fine skylark, and when the night is starless." he half-sang, well aware his voice was rough and unpracticed. "All your life you've never seen a woman taken by the wind. Would you stay if she promised you heaven, will you ever win? "

"What does half of that even mean?" she said, bemused. "Are all muggle songs that vague?"

Then, before Hermes could say anything, she added, almost shyly, "...you've got a nice voice."

Hermes willed himself to look out at the rain instead of at Ron, thoroughly unwilling to learn what his face might be doing.

"Thanks," he murmured.

There was an odd pause where neither of them said anything.

"Anyway, the song?"

"Oh," Hermes said, feeling a bit foolish. "No, there are all kinds of genres and sorts of muggle music, just like wizarding music, with all kinds of lyricists. I think the idea of that song is that Rhiannon is supposed to be so wonderful she's otherworldly and magical..."

Ron tilted her head as Hermes struggled to describe a metaphorical magical presence to a witch.

"...it's like she's a veela!" he declared with triumph. "Veela, they feel like they're so beautiful they shouldn't even be mortal, right? The Rhiannon in the song is like that, she's so wonderful the singer thinks she's more fairy than human."

Ron's face lit up in understanding. It made her eyes really stand out. Then, to Hermes' alarm, the pleased look on her face slipped off some.

"Doesn't really suit me, then," she said, voice gloomy even as she tried to sound casual. "Don't think any blokes are going around thinking I'm too pretty to just be a witch."

Hermes bit his tongue before he blurted out something like I think you're the prettiest girl in our year, no matter how true it was. She was pretty; so tall she was striking, with a thin, tanned face that suited her very well and wavy red hair that she liked to wear in a plait, bits often coming loose to curl around her face. More than once he'd seen boys a year above or below looking at her legs when she ditched her outer robes in the common room, which were very long and very nice. She'd started wearing black tights due to the fall cold, which didn't hurt things at all.

He knew she probably would just say something about being too tall and gawky and ignore him entirely.

Instead he said, "Well, if you ever do want to become an enchanting forest woman for your career, there's plenty of time. You can tell McGonagall that when we have our career meetings."

She rolled her eyes and cracked a smile at that, her face oddly pink. Hermes counted it as a victory.

"I don't need McGonagall thinking I'm a madwoman, Fred and George are already the mad ones in our family. Can't steal their thunder."

"They're the mad ones?" Hermes asked, amused. "Not the one who went haring off to mess with dragons? Or the cursebreaker risking ancient damnation?"

"All the more reason not to go mad, then, half the family's already done it," Ron said.

"It would be a bit passé at this point," he agreed easily. "I do think the luring of foolish wizards to their doom could add some much needed spice to the whole thing, though. The others surround themselves with danger, but you're the one who is the danger."

Hermes really wouldn't mind being one of the foolish men. He absolutely wasn't going to tell her that.

"I thank you for your input, Mister Granger, I'll give it due consideration," she intoned gravely, barely staving off a smile.

For a moment they just grinned at each other. Then, a truly terrific boom of thunder rattled the windows, making them both jump. Ron cursed and hastily spelled the ink she knocked out of its well back in before peering out into the rain, which was really turning into a proper storm at that point.

"With her luck, Hattie's the one that got struck by whatever lightning caused that," she muttered darkly.

"I don't think so," Hermes said with a frown. "We're on the pitch's side, so if it did strike anything in it, we would have seen the light."

"'Sides, she'd probably survive a lightning strike too, at this point," Ron said.

"Don't jinx anything," Hermes warned her.

Ron stuck out her tongue, but dutifully knocked on the wooden table. Hermes matched her.

As they returned to their schoolwork—or "extracurricular punishment" as Hattie sarcastically called Hermes' latest book, which was as thick as three Herbology textbooks—Hermes ruefully realized that he'd just gotten a song stuck in his head in one of the worst places to do so. Hogwarts didn't allow even charmed radios, and though some students smuggled them in, Hermes had no idea if they could access muggle stations.

It seemed to him that there was no reason they shouldn't, but, well, magic. It had rules, but sometimes those rules didn't bother to really make sense.

It was so bad he could barely concentrate on his book. He found himself rereading the same passage on 13th century protection wards over and over as his mind tried to finish the song.

"Rhiannon, Rhiannon, Rhiannon..." he sang thoughtlessly, voice soft and low, drawing out each utterance of the name even longer than in the actual song.

Hermes was so distracted by nostalgic memories of his mother playing Fleetwood Mac in the car as they drove somewhere that he completely missed Ron snapping her Potions textbook up to hide behind it. Her face was growing redder and redder like a burning coal, and her eyes were opened wide.

"Uh," she half-squeaked. "Is that part of the song?"

"Hm? Oh, yes," Hermes responded, still looking at the same passage he'd read seven times now. "I'll try to stop singing, sorry."

"It's no problem," Ron muttered, sinking lower into her seat. "Do whatever you want."

Hermes kept humming little snatches of the song while Ron stared blankly at an illustration of properly chopped wolfsbane stalks and crushed flower petals. Eventually, they both got back to work, however unwillingly on Ron's part.

Just as Ron managed to stretch out her notes into the last of the ten inches the essay required—no extra-large handwriting, because it made Hermes huffy and he was huffy enough about other things—a commotion started up near the tower's entrance.

She looked up to see all of the Quidditch team trooping through the portrait hole, out of their uniforms but still thoroughly windswept and doused by the rain. Hattie finished speaking to Katie Bell about something and made her way to the two of them with a weary smile. Her face was still ruddy from the wind and the cold.

"How's the afternoon been for you two?" she said, dripping rainwater onto the floor.

"Slughorn's boring topics haven't killed me yet, so grand!" Ron told her cheerfully, holding up the almost completed essay.

"Just about caught up with things," Hermes said modestly, having already finished all of the week's work when Ron had just started on Potions.

"Well, bully for you, I'll just…"

"If you sit down at this table like this I'm hexing you," Ron said as Hattie edged to the remaining seat. "Go up and change before you catch your death."

"And you've still got the Charms essay, so get your bag," Hermes told her with some amusement.

Hattie groaned pitifully, reaching up to rub at her forehead, near the scar, as though warding off a headache. "Ron, my dearest, most wonderful friend, please—"

"You don't want my essay, I'm terrible at Charms theory," Ron reminded her.

"Ugh, right." She made a face. "Fine, Charms time. I'm doing it by the fire, though, I'm still so bloody cold. Also, I'm stealing some of those tarts you took from dinner last night."

Ron and Hermes waved her goodbye as she stomped upstairs.

"I don't know why she complains, Charms is one of her best subjects," Hermes remarked once she disappeared up the hallway.

"She's great at the actual charms, but she just doesn't bother with the theory at all," Ron said. "Don't know how you forgot, when you complain about it in class all the time."

Hermes rolled his eyes. "Theory is important—"

"In Transfiguration, sure, but charms do whatever they want. I don't know how theorists even stitch 'em together into something that makes sense."

"They barely do," Hermes said with aggravation.

"There you go, the theory doesn't matter, then," she said brightly.

Hermes barely refrained from rolling his eyes again. He snapped his book back open pointedly, but Ron didn't take the bait, just laughing loudly at his dramatics. She had a nice, throaty laugh.

He kept his gaze firmly on information about protection wards instead of doing something creepy like staring at Ron as she laughed. There was no way he'd be as bad as someone like McLaggen.

He was forced to look up at her, though, when she said, quite quietly, "If I ever get to go to your house, you should play me that song. Or whatever other songs you like."

Hermes didn't even try to stop the smile that bloomed on his face.

"That sounds nice," he said, a little wistfully. It really did, especially after that awfully cramped, sullen summer in Grimmauld.

He imagined sitting her down with the cassettes, teaching her how to use them, her singing along to all of the songs that had been such a constant in his childhood… it certainly wasn't a bad image.

Ron smiled back. "And if you want to keep singing, I don't mind at all."

"I just might."

In the background, Hattie stomped back down the stairs, her book bag thumping against her hip. Neither of them paid attention.

A good few years later, the three of them sat together in a small cottage. It was late at night, with the radio droning quietly in the other room and the moon peeking out from the corner of the window. A welcomed cool breeze slipped in from the cracked window from time to time.

"Rhiannon rings like a bell in the night, and wouldn't you love to love her? Takes to the sky like a bird in flight, and who will be her lover? " Hermes crooned, idly carding his fingers through Ron's hair as she half-rested her head in his lap from where she sat on the floor before his armchair. One of her arms was hooked around his left leg, the other nursed a cup of whiskey.

"Know the answer to that one already," she giggled after another gulp of whiskey, tucking her cheek closer to Hermes' leg, and he smiled widely.

"I regret ever approving of you two as a couple," Hattie told them with a badly-disguised smile.

Ron flipped her off, which made Hermes laugh.

"Get out of my house then," she said lazily. "I didn't have to give you my good whiskey."

"I bought you this whiskey," Hattie protested.

Ron shrugged, almost dislodging the hand in her hair. "It's a gift, so it's mine now. Let Hermes sing and I won't summon the cup right out of your hand."

Hattie committed herself to chugging the whiskey like a very large shot and poured herself some more. She knocked some of that back too.

"Alright, loverboy, go on," she said.

"Is my singing so horrible that you need to be plastered for it?" he asked, grinning.

Ron clumsily patted his knee, her face becoming more flushed by the minute. "You've got the nicest voice. Sing."

"Well, if I've got the nicest," he teased, starting to run his fingers through her hair again. "All your life you've never seen a woman taken by the wind… would you stay if she promised you heaven? Would you ever win? "

Hattie leaned back on the couch, already half-asleep, as Ron hummed along with drowsy eyes, her thumb rubbing circles on Hermes' kneecap.