#trademarkblue

V:  An abandoned or empty place. (more prompts here)

 Thank you, friend! I got some DH-era pinning for you!

…

The dilapidated house stood alone at the edge of Old St Mellons, on the eastern edge of Cardiff, Wales. It was a quaint little village comprising mainly of 19th-century buildings. When the trio arrived there at the end of February, the weather was still quite pleasant during the day if a little cold during the night, a welcome change from the chill, snow and frost they faced up north.

 After having lived inside a canvas tent for months, the prospect of having a solid roof over their heads had seemed quite enticing for Harry, Ron and Hermione. But all three of them knew that it could be their ‘home’ for a precious few days before they had to move again. 

The charms and protective spells had been put in place as a priority; it wouldn’t do for the villagers to find three ‘lost’ teenagers living in an abandoned house. Any and all trips to find food were planned for the night, and under the Cloak for added measure. Hermione thankfully had the better judgement to cast a Scorgify in one of the rooms for them to occupy. By the look of the building, Ron was sure there was quite possibly a tiny version of Aragog’s family living there. But once they had set up a temporary bedroom by placing their mattresses on the stone floor of what had presumably been a living room, and settled down, he couldn’t deny that it felt more homely than a tent that swayed and flapped its door and windows during the weakest of storms. 

“We still have to take guard duty,” Ron declared as he bolted shut the windows, partly with the loose hanging latches and partly with magic. A storm was beginning to brew in the horizon. “Do we have enough food to last the night?” he asked, dusting his sleeves as he returned to their makeshift beds.

“A tin of biscuits and some weak tea at the most,” provided Harry as he Accioed out their meagre food supplies from Hermione’s beaded bag.

“And two apples,” added Hermione. 

Ron looked up and for one brief moment, was suddenly struck by how beautiful she looked fresh out of a bath. And then her much-too-large jumper slid off her shoulder and he looked away guiltily. “You both should have one each in that case. I’ll go out foraging later in the night if the storm dies down.”

“We share whatever we have,” she declared firmly as she tucked the damp curls behind her ears, and picking up the small bag Harry had left on Ron’s mattress, dug in to pull out her hairbrush. “Most of the pipes have rusted off and there’s no water. I sorted what I could. I think we are good to go for the next two days as long as we remember to put everything back as it was when we leave.”

“You mean, damage everything again,” prompted Ron.

“Yes,” she chuckled. “But I won’t deny that a soak did wonder for my aching muscles,” she replied, as she walked closer and sat down next to him, brushing the tangles off her hair. The faint aroma of soap and shampoo hung in the air around them. It was blissful. Feeling strangely comfortable, Ron dropped himself on the mattress, face down, Hermione sitting mere inches away from him.    

“Hey mate, d’ya think we can sort this thing and light a fire perhaps? What do you say, Hermione?” 

Ron turned his head to his left. Harry was currently on his knees, peeping inside an enormous fireplace. 

Hermione placed her hairbrush down and turned as well. “I don’t know, Harry! We won’t be able to hide the smoke, will we?” She turned at him, eyes barely holding back the anxiety that Ron knew lingered just beneath the surface anyway. 

He propped himself up on his arms. “Yeah, we could do with Hermione’s Bluebell flames, couldn’t we?” he replied looking between his two best friends, “Better not have the old folks turning on us with their sticks and stones, eh?”

Harry shrugged and picked himself up, dusting his knees and arms. “Fine, I’ll draw myself a bath in that case, and take a nap after that. My turn to take watch, innit?”

“The pipes don’t have any water, so you’ll just have to use a spell,” Hermione told him as Harry began rummaging her bag for his clothes. 

“Okay,” he mumbled, and having retrieved a tee and pyjama bottoms, went away.

With Harry gone, Ron flopped back, and somehow by a strange coincidence, landed with his head on her lap. For minutes, maybe hours even, they remained still, the silence of the surrounding broken just by the faint howling of the storm outside. Hermione had not taken her eyes off him. He could see her upside-down face, and feel her deep breathing in tune with his. He had apologised days before and he knew, they had come back to some sort of an understanding. But the details were still fuzzy, he still didn’t know where they stood, didn’t really have the guts to ask if she’d ever take him back- hoped she knew that he’d wait for an eternity for it if need be. 

“I-” he began, struggling to phrase an apology, craving to blurt out a confession he knew he wasn’t allowed.   

“It’s okay,” she said quietly, and then, as if straight out of his dreams, threaded her fingers in his hair. He closed his eyes in bliss. “This feels a bit like home, doesn’t it?” he mumbled lazily after a while. 

Her fingers paused and he heard the softest of sobs; he was up in a flash, even before the heartbeat passed. 

“Hermione?” he asked, and then, very cautiously placed his palm on her cheek, tilting her face up a smidge to meet her eyes. “What’s the matter?”

 She seemed to struggle with the words for a while before she spoke. “What if, y'know, they attacked my parents’ place too?” she whimpered, “This is how my home would look, wouldn’t it?" 

He exhaled heavily, his inner turmoil struggling to break free. "They are safe,” he promised,   his thumb stroking her cheek, “You took care of them like no one else could, Hermione.”

“They’ll be okay, won’t they, Ron?” she asked again, as if begging him to assuage her fears, biting her quivering lower lip. He had visualised many situations where Hermione bit her lips; this didn’t come anywhere close. He ached to pull her into his arms, not that he was allowed. 

“They’ll be fine, and we will be too, all of us,” he replied, with enough conviction to convince her as well as himself.

She sucked in a deep breath and nodded once. Slowly and reluctantly he pulled his hand away, fisting his fingers tightly, and placing it on his lap to avoid touching her. “Should I get you some tea?” he asked.

“Maybe later,” she replied with the faintest of smiles, her left hand playing with the hem of her jumper, the right resting next to her on the makeshift bed. 

He quietly contemplated on his next course of action. What he truly desired was to stay close, wrap her in his arms. What he was allowed was pulling away before she initiated the distance. 

“Get some rest,” he suggested at last and pushed himself back. 

“Ron?" 

"Hmm?”

“Mind if I, y'know…" 

As he looked curiously she inched closer, and then, as if gathering all her strength, lowered her body on the mattress, her head resting on his thighs, the slightly damp curls sprawled over them. He sucked in a breath and met her eyes. There was a smile lingering on her lips. At that moment, she could have said those words, he knew instinctively, but she didn’t- she didn’t need to. Instead, she closed her eyes and snuggled deeper as she turned to her left. His fingers found their way into her hair, threading through the soft curls, and she sighed contently. So did he.

The house was broken down and abandoned for sure, but for Ron and Hermione that night, it felt like home. 

Ron: My biggest fear is not being a good Mom...I know that sounds corny, but it’s true. More tangibly, tiny tree frogs creep me the eff out!

2. Smells that remind you of home?

See my answer here.

3. What movie can you watch over and over again?

Just one?? Ok, I'll go with The Fifth Element, due to its combination of action, humour, and romance. Not to mention amazing costumes, great visuals, and excellent music.

Thanks for always playing along <3

5) If you had to choose a favourite out of all of your multi chaptered stories, which would it be and why?

I’m sure it won’t shock anyone to know my favourite is Love Me Forever. I’ve poured sweat and tears into that fic; it’s taken me about 4 years to write. Above all, it’s my favourite because writing it made me feel like I found my action pace (ie, how fast things need to happen in my writing for me to feel good about it), and because it proves I can write novel-length stuff. It makes me believe that, maybe, I will be able to write my Original Fiction idea.

12) Who is your favourite character to write for? Why?

Ron <3 

When I started writing, the fandom was all about idolizing Hermione and bashing Ron. Over my years of writing, my heart continues to fly out to Ron, for things “fans” have said and for his experiences in canon. Things seem to have switched now which is a shame, but it hasn’t changed the way I use my writing to share my view of the characters and defend them from crap (from idealization to pathologization, it’s a big spectrum of stuff flung at them from what I’ve seen). So, even though Hermione needs some defending now, it hasn’t impacted my writing or my feelings, and Ron continues to be number one. 

17) Post a line from a WIP that you’re working on.

Right. Okay. This is a line from an unidentified WIP:

lol and another anonymous person said “ It’s an obvious one, but…Ron Weasley?”

This one goes out to @trademarkblue who sent in this prompt about ninety years ago - I hope you enjoy it! I've had the idea of Ron doing this in my head for MONTHS and finally wrote it out. 💕

***

The problem with having exactly four Sickles to his name was that Ron always felt that he fell short whenever his friends' birthdays would come along. Usually Harry's was okay, because during the summer he could send an owl laden down with his mum's finest baked goods to compensate for whatever it was the Dursleys made him subsist on, but Hermione was a different story. September was always a tough month for his family, thanks to the mass expenditure on school supplies, so he felt guilty asking for anything more from them. Besides, the time he had splashed out on a gift for her (borrowing the funds from Fred and George in exchange for deep-cleaning their room, which had been a harrowing experience), she'd simply called the perfume unusual and he didn't think she'd ever worn it, so it had been a bit of a bust.

There were always the old Hermione stand-bys: books, fancy quills, unspillable ink, but those things all felt dreadfully generic to him. They were the sort of thing someone who only knew the bare minimum about Hermione would get her, and he knew she deserved more than that. The only problem was that four Sickles was barely enough to purchase a tin of fudge from Honeyduke's, much less anything that Hermione might actually want...

So what did she actually want? She wasn't the sort to get caught up in material items; he had never seen her wear jewelry or lose her head over new clothes the way some of the girls in their year did. Even if he could come up with an idea for some sort of Muggle contraption that she would like, it was the eighteenth of September already. He had been wracking his brains for weeks now and had come up empty time and time again, because Hermione just wasn't the sort of person who wanted stuff. She wanted Voldemort dead and gone, she wanted Ron and Harry to actually buckle down and do their homework, she wanted freedom for all house elves-

Ron sat up straight in his bed, a smile stretching wide over his face (it was just lucky that Harry and the others were already asleep). In one fleeting moment of brilliance, he knew exactly how to make Hermione's seventeenth birthday special.

In the morning, he woke before everyone else and began searching through the detritus in his trunk. It had to be here somewhere, he never would have thrown it away, but he had accumulated an astonishing amount of Chocolate Frog wrappers and scrap bits of parchment over the years, so it took some digging before he found it buried underneath a package of Owl Treats. Carefully, like it might break, Ron cradled the thing in his hands. It was a little dusty, a little dingy - he hadn't touched it in two years - but it would certainly suffice.

He was the first person in the common room that morning, anxiously watching the girls' staircase for a sign of her. Usually she was already waiting for him and Harry in the mornings so they could all go to breakfast today, but today he wanted to be the one waiting for her. Just after seven, she descended the stairs, her rucksack nearly bursting with textbooks, and paused on the bottom step when she saw him.

"Happy birthday," he said brightly, standing up from the armchair by the fire. He almost reached his arms out to hug her - that was the sort of thing friends did, wasn't it, give each other birthday hugs? - but held himself back.

"Thanks," she smiled. "Wow, you're never up this early, why are you-" She cut herself off, eyes narrowing. "What are you wearing?"

"What?" he asked, playing innocent.

"This." She jabbed a finger into the badge on his chest.

"Oh, that?" He shrugged, using every ounce of willpower he possessed to keep from smiling. "I'm just supporting the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare."

Her expression drifted from shock to confusion to amusement. "I didn't think that you even kept that-"

"Of course I kept it," said Ron. "You'd've hexed me if I didn't, but anyway, it's important to you, so, yeah, I kept it."

"And whatever happened to Mr. I'm-Not-Wearing-That?" she asked, echoing words from their fourth year.

He had been so pigheaded back then, so hellbent on telling her that she was wrong, that she was barking mad for messing with the elves - and he still thought it was a little bit mental at times - but he'd been in denial about a lot of Hermione-related things that year. Things he'd slowly come to terms with over the past two years, things that weren't about house elves at all but about the fact that he couldn't stop thinking about her, that when she kissed him on the cheek last year he had felt it on his skin for weeks, that all he wanted was to be closer to her, always closer. He just wasn't the same stubborn fourteen-year-old anymore.

"Like I said, it's important to you." He gestured back to the badge. "So, happy birthday. I wanted to get you something better, but - well - this is all I could really afford-"

As his face blushed red, she stood on her toes and hugged him, and his throat went dry. Out of instinct he looped his arms around her waist, holding her torso to his and wishing he could freeze time because he'd done it, he had actually made her happy and it hadn't taken stacks of Galleons to do it. All of those things that he never let himself wish for, maybe they weren't as out of reach as he thought.

"It's perfect," she said, releasing him as Ron reluctantly took his hands back from her waist. "Ooh!" Her eyes lit up, face shining. "Since you're up so early, maybe we have time to teach you how to knit - we could start making hats again, those are the easiest..."

On the outside, Ron groaned (he hadn't quite bargained for this), but internally, he knew he'd do whatever she asked.

***