Chapter 2: Backsons Do
Ron Weasley was exhausted, cold and wet all over.
Which, now that he put it that way, sounded like the wind up to a really bad Fred and George joke.
He was seated on the wooden pylons of the dock jutting out into the Black Lake, teeth chattering. As everyone else was standing and staring at the lapping waves of the frigid waters, very few, if any, took notice of him. Which was par for the course where Ron was concerned, as the best friend of the Boy Who Lived and now a Triwizard champion.
Honestly, if Ron had known that he was going to be inserted into the Second Task as a hostage of sorts, he wouldn't have been so jealous of Harry gaining recognition by being selected for the blasted tournament. Ron had gotten some attention - just not the kind he wanted. And now that his contribution to the deadly competition was over, he was right back to being invisible.
There were exceptions, of course. Hermione, who had surfaced before him with that Bulgarian bear of a beefcake Viktor Krum, had thrown a towel over him and fussed over him, chittering even as her chestnut orbs had scanned the wake for any sign of their best friend. Then she'd been called away to speak with Viktor. Ron didn't believe the tripe Rita Skeeter was writing about his best girl, of course, but he knew Hermione to be more clever than providing the tabloid fake news reporter with any kind of ammo that such nonsense - a love triangle between her, Harry and a professional Quidditch player (of all people - Hermione didn't even like Quidditch!) might be true.
Then, of course, if he wasn't getting briefly mother-henned by his best mate who he was starting to have disconcertingly deeper feelings for, he was getting batted eyes from Gabrielle Delacour, who was ten. Ironic, wasn't it? He got only the briefest of attention from the girl he secretly had a crush on, and all the unwanted attention from the wrong Delacour sister, just because he'd happened to help her to the surface of a mermaid-infested lake. Which, let's be honest, shouldn't that have been Harry's job, as the Champion?
Where the devil was he, anyway?
"Hullo, Ronald Weasley."
Ron turned and glanced about, nearly cricking his neck from where he was one of the only people seated on the dock.
A girl with plaited blonde hair the color of sunlight was staring down at him with protuberant, almost owlish eyes. Ron was struck by the intense silver in them - their shade reflected exactly the color of this overcast day in late February. More startling, though, was the way that she gazed at him: intense. Concerned. Like she cared.
As if that helped - he didn't know this girl any more than he knew Gabrielle Delacour! What little attention Ron was getting, he was getting from all the wrong birds. Hell, his own sister Ginny had yet to fight her way through the crowd and ask if he was all right - after, you know, he'd been taken hostage and held captive overnight at the bottom of a lake!
"Errr... Hello."
The blonde girl squatted down beside him, and her gaze finally left Ron's to gaze out over the too still waters. The silence was oddly companionable, even though the two were strangers.
Ron dared to cast a heavy side-eye towards this girl. She had an ovate, unblemished face, with rounded and dimpled cheeks. An edged bridge to her nose somehow managed to cap off into a button one. On the whole, she was a decent enough bird to look at. Passable figure, underneath the robes - Ravenclaw, judging by the silver and blue accents along the hems of her skirt.
Behind them, Ron caught the sound of Neville pacing back and forth, his mumbling sounding almost crazed. "Oh, my Godric, I've killed Harry Potter... Oh, my Godric: I've killed Harry Potter!..."
"Calm down, Neville Longbottom," the girl hummed in a tranquil voice. "Harry is just taking his time, that's all."
That was a very euphemistic way of saying his best mate was drowning down there, and Ron coughed out a fit of laughter that sounded almost as crazed as Neville's under-breath babblings of guilt. The girl's head whipped around to take Ron in sharply and his nervous chortling petered out.
"What is so funny, Ronald Weasley?" Her tone sounded bizarrely genuine, as though she really wanted to know and wasn't just calling him out for an inappropriate exclamation.
"Nothing," Ron coughed. He peered at her. "You really think he's going to be all right?"
"Of course," she blinked at him. "Your sister seems to think so, but she's clearly more nervous than I am." She shrugged, giving him a helpless smile. "It's the Wrackspurts in her mind, you know."
"The what?"
"The Wrackspurts. They put mad thoughts into your head. Such as irrationally thinking a person is about to die." A beat. "Or urgings that tell you to kiss someone. I've never been kissed - have you?"
Ron gaped at her, utterly baffled. How was he supposed to unpack this? This bird had just careened from talking about his sister to asking him about bloody snogging. "Er... No." He cleared his throat again, loudly. "No, I've never been kissed." He glanced about, hoping no one had heard that, least of all Hermione. But once again, even as he was sitting on this dock freezing his bum off, it was like he wasn't even here.
The girl's silver eyes expanded. "I've never been kissed either," she admitted, her timbre still maddeningly tranquil, though the tone was almost robotic. "Though I've always been so incredibly curious to try it! Snogging. Your sister has."
"Huh? How the bloody hell do you know so much about my sister? And who the hell has she snogged?"
"Now, it was only just Neville. After the Yule Ball. Ginevra says he doesn't count, though." Behind them, Neville abruptly, briefly paused in his mutterings, locked eyes for a loaded beat with Ron before resuming his pacing vigil.
Ron figured that with how on edge the lad was, it would be almost cruel to attack him for snogging his baby sister under the mistletoe. Though, for Neville's sake, mistletoe had better the bloody hell be the excuse.
It was as if this girl could read his thoughts.
"Nargles burrow in mistletoe, you know. They let off of a pheromone that compels us to share a kiss under it."
"Who are all these animals that try to get us all kissing all of a sudden...?" Ron grumbled, tightening the threadbare towel around his shoulders. The girl was still peering at him; it was unnerving. "And you still haven't answered my question as to how you know my sister."
The girl blinked dolefully. "Well, she and I are very best mates."
It took every freezing muscle in Ron to not lean back leerily over the knowledge that this was the company his sister kept: an odd madwoman in the making, and the school coward who somehow managed to grow a pair of balls long enough to snog Ginny under a sprig leaf at Yuletide. Because apparently, some weird animal who burrowed in the ivy made Neville do it.
That was when Ron realized: he had heard of this girl, from some of Ginny's ramblings over the summer. He nodded slowly. "You're L-Luna Lovegood..." The hitch in his voice, he told himself, was due to his teeth chittering, and not because he very nearly called her something else: the nickname he had heard bantered about the school, in reference to a nutter in Ravenclaw House.
Luna's dimpled lips upturned into a thin smile, appearing pleased. "The very same. And you're Ronald Weasley."
She said his name with something close to reverence, the kind of reverence that Ron had only ever heard when people were talking about Harry. He didn't know whether to puff out his chest with pride or blanche at how he was getting noticed by ladies who were either too young (Gabrielle) or too... out there (like Luna).
Ron nodded slowly.
"You seem cold," Luna stated the obvious after peering at him for a moment. "You oughta get up and move about like Neville is, you know. Cold muscles can atrophy if they're not used. Backsons can burrow in the bloodstream and cause you to cramp."
"Backson?" Ron blinked, agog by her. "What are you blathering on about, woman? Just what is a backson?"
"What I said," Luna blinked. "A backson is a tiny creature that can get into your blood cells and muscles and make them tense up." A slight pause. "They also can sneak into the library and scribble in all the books. They're close cousins to gremlins - are often confused for them."
Ron just stared at her, mouth agape. Luna just stared back, her expression completely serious. Finally, she huffed out a sigh in a manner that almost reminded him of Hermione. "Oh, here..."
Scooting around behind him, now kneeling instead of squatting, she began to work a massage into Ron's shoulder muscles. At first, he tensed, under the realization that some girl who he barely knew was so intimately touching him, but when he looked back over his shoulder, he was met with flinty silver eyes and a raised eyebrow.
"Careful: the backsons."
At her warning, Ron finally acquiesced, and let Luna work a massage into his muscles. Slowly, he felt himself beginning to warm up.
Of course, he would have preferred it if it was Hermione or Fleur Delacour doing the massaging, but he'd take what he could get.
"Thank you..." he grumbled finally.
"You're welcome, Ronald Weasley," she cheeped.
He shook his head, wanting to ask her why she was insisting on calling him by his full name. They had gone from strangers to barely acquaintances not five minutes ago, true, but even so...
Instead, what he asked Luna was:
"Do you really think Harry's going to be OK?"
Luna bobbed her head confidently, staring out straight ahead at the lake. "I do..."
"Why...?" Ron started to ask, when suddenly there was a giant splash as something broke the surface of the water.
Luna sat back on her haunches, and Ron felt the chill return to his limbs as her massage abruptly ended. "Here he is now!"
They both watched as a body arched through the sky and landed on the dock behind them: Harry, wet and shivering and spent. Everyone immediately swarmed him.
Ron scrambled to join the throng, nearly collapsing in relief as he saw Hermione fussing over Harry and chittering about grindelows. He didn't even mind it when Hermione actually kissed Harry on the head in relief.
He definitely didn't mind it when Fleur actually took the time to thank him, Ron, for helping to save her sister and kissing him on the cheek.
True, it was helping, not the actual saving - all that due credit went to Harry, of course. Still, it was something.
Suddenly remembering he needed to do some thanking himself, Ron turned to thank Luna for easing his nerves (and his sore muscles), only to find that she had seemed to vanish into the crowd.