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Romione Trope Fest 2024
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2024-02-03
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One Bed

Summary:

The horrors that the three of them—two of them more so than the other, though that’s neither here nor there at the moment—have faced so far on the horcrux hunt have been beyond Hermione’s wildest nightmares. The sight currently facing her is the worst yet.

One. Single. Bed.

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The horrors that the three of them—two of them more so than the other, though that’s neither here nor there at the moment—have faced so far on the horcrux hunt have been beyond Hermione’s wildest nightmares. The sight currently facing her is the worst yet.

One. Single. Bed.

She’s only been in the loo for a few minutes. Just long enough to brush her teeth and change into pajamas. When she went in, there were three beds: a set of stacked bunks and a single, the same as they’ve had for months. Ron was outside, already on watch, and Harry was preparing to go out and relieve him. Already she was dreading the awkwardness of being alone in the tent with Ron. Not that he’s done hardly anything but look at her since he’s been back—damn him and that look, the look that says ‘I just poured my heart out to you in front of Harry and you haven’t even heard the half of it yet’—but one could cut the tension between them with a slicing charm.

And now this? Where are they supposed to sleep? Because that’s the only thing to do, really, since she’s certainly not ready to talk to him yet, and though she might be ready to do other things with him—in theory, anyway—her heart has put a firm Impedimenta on those thoughts too.

She finally notices Harry leaning against the kitchen island sipping on a mug of tea, his eyebrows raised in amusement over the rim of the cup. “What the hell is this?” Hermione demands, gesturing wildly at the space where their perfectly acceptable sleeping area used to be.

Harry continues to drink his tea with an infuriating degree of slowness, and Hermione thinks that she might just serve him up to Voldemort if he doesn’t explain himself soon. “This,” Harry says, setting the mug down with a dull thud, “is me getting the two of you to talk to each other.”

“You have no right to—”

“To what?” Harry interjects. “Make sure my best friends don’t kill each other? You haven’t left me much choice.”

Hermione stalks across the room, her hair crackling with fury. Harry circles the island, dodging her attempts to get her hands on him and wring his neck. “Harry James Potter, this is not funny!” she exclaims, finally surrendering to the fact that he’s faster than her. “You put it back right now!”

The tent flap rustles behind her, followed by Ron’s confused voice. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Hermione snaps without looking at him.

“Er…what happened to the bunks?”

Nothing,” she says again, gritting her teeth as she fumbles for her wand.

Hexing Harry with it is tempting, but the more pressing matter is fixing the bed situation. Hermione brushes past Ron and points her wand at the offending furniture. “Finite.” Nothing happens. She takes a breath and tries again. “Finite incantatem.” Still nothing. She tries Geminio, Engorgio, everything she can think of, but the single tiny bunk remains resolutely unchanged, mocking her with its narrowness. She lets out a groan and turns back to Harry, ignoring Ron’s continued presence. “What did you do to this thing?”

Harry offers only a smirk in answer, clapping Ron on the shoulder as he passes him. “See you two in the morning.”

Hermione clenches her wand so tightly she’s surprised it doesn’t snap in her hand. Ron, against what must be his better judgment, gently pries her fingers from around the wood and sets it on the counter beside her. Under normal circumstances—even what was normal before he left and turned her entire world inside out—she would have given him an earful for taking her wand from her, no matter how good his intentions might have been. At the moment, though, she’s too distracted by the fiendfyre his touch has sent racing up her arm, threatening to consume her.

“It’s not a big deal,” Ron says, already moving away from her, blissfully unaware of the effect he has on her as she remains frozen. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”

He has his boots kicked off and his jumper tugged over his head to fling across the arm of the sofa before Hermione manages to recover. “I suppose you think you’re very clever, getting Harry to do your dirty work for you,” she snarls at him. Anything to distract herself from the glimpse of his pale skin that she got a moment ago when his t-shirt stuck to his sweater as he pulled it off, revealing a smattering of freckles and a trail of ginger hair that disappeared beneath the waistband of his joggers. She needs to think of anything but that.

Ron merely quirks an eyebrow at her before flopping onto the lumpy cushions of the sofa, his legs dangling off the end almost from the knee down. Before, he would have gone toe-to-toe with her, told her she was barking mad, and they’d have had a row that set her heart racing in more ways than one. Now, he doesn’t rise to the bait; it feels wrong. “I didn’t have anything to do with it, Hermione.”

His pale lashes brush his cheeks as he closes his eyes, signaling the conversation closed even as he shifts and squirms on the sofa, trying to get comfortable. Hermione allows herself a final huff of annoyance as she crosses to the single bed and extinguishes the lights in the tent.

Whatever spell Harry put on the bed, he neglected to do anything similar to the bedding, leaving Hermione no choice but to sleep under Ron’s blanket, her head on Ron’s pillow. Despite her anger, she can’t help but drink in his scent, that familiar woodsy, spicy aroma with just a hint of something sweet, as if he’s always got a Chocolate Frog in his pocket.

The bed is more comfortable than it was before, too—some sort of cushioning charm, maybe, that Hermione wishes she’d thought of herself when they first landed in the woods—and she feels a pang of guilt at the sound of Ron still fidgeting on the sofa.

You didn’t do this. It’s not your job to fix it.

She’s thinking about the bed, of course, but the same could be said of her relationship with Ron. They had formally declared exactly nothing about their feelings for each other before he left, but it was there. She knew it was. It was infused in every innocent brush of their fingers as they studied maps and books together, in the way he said her name, in the way he looked at her. Different than the look he gives her now, but equally weighted with emotion and things unsaid.

But then he left. Gone, in an instant, without a second thought or backwards glance at her. In her more clear headed moments throughout those interminable weeks, she thought it mustn’t have been about her. He’d rowed with Harry that night; he was tired, hungry, worried about his family. Not that that was an excuse—they all were feeling all of those things—but she tried to tell herself that his feelings for her were a separate issue.

Are they? She doesn’t know. He nearly said as much the night he came back—damn if his story about the deluminator wasn’t the most romantic thing she’d ever heard—but she’s been too hurt to hear more. And besides, they’re still on the mission that spawned their hesitation in the first place. If there were no Voldemort, she thinks they’d have been properly sorted last summer, enjoying their seventh year at Hogwarts, maybe as Head Boy and Girl. Their own living quarters with plenty of privacy for—no, don’t go there.

Instead they’re here: Hermione wide awake staring at the canvas ceiling of the tent; Ron tossing and turning on the sofa across the room. She wonders if the lumpy cushions are the only reason he can’t sleep, or if perhaps his brain is torturing him with this same line of thought—or worse. He’s hinted at something more with the locket, some particular brand of malice that the cursed necklace saved just for him.

But she hasn’t been ready to hear more about that either. It’s a waiting game, like always. Waiting for her heart to give her permission to let him back in, or for Ron’s newfound patience with her to give out and for him to force his way back in. She thinks she’d be okay with either, honestly; on a fundamental level, she appreciates the space he’s given her since he’s been back, but it also feels like a hollow shell of their relationship. It doesn’t feel like them.

“Ron?” she calls tentatively. She doesn’t want to rouse him if he’s actually fallen asleep, though she’s fairly certain from the sound of his breathing that he hasn’t, and his answer comes without missing a beat.

“Yeah?” She hears the hope in his tone, and it twists her stomach into knots. Only once or twice has she addressed him directly since his return, and she knows they’re both wondering if maybe the ice is beginning to thaw.

“Whatever Harry did to the bed…it’s more comfortable now.”

A soft snort comes from Ron’s direction. “That’s nice for you.”

“Do you want to share?”

There’s a moment of loaded silence before Ron asks, “Share what?”

She could only possibly mean one thing given the context, but she doesn’t blame him for asking because it’s such a wildly ludicrous suggestion that she also can’t possibly mean that. “The bed.”

The tent is so quiet that she’s sure Ron can hear her heart pounding, hear the way her breath hitches when his blankets rustle and his feet touch the floor. His steps are slow and methodical as he approaches the bed, full of hesitation. He stops at the edge of the mattress, and suddenly his wand is in her face, though there’s humor in his voice when he asks, “Who are you, and what have you done with Hermione Granger?”

Hermione swats at his wand and rolls her eyes. “Very funny,” she retorts, injecting her voice with as much sarcasm as she can muster. Her heart is leaping in her chest, screaming at her— This! This is what we’ve been missing!— but she’s determined to let sensibility win. She hasn’t forgiven him, and she frames the suggestion to share the bed as a matter of logistics. “You’re no good to anyone if you don’t get some sleep, and this bed is still plenty big for the two of us.”

Plenty big is a gross exaggeration, but it’s big enough. Hermione slides all the way to the inside edge of the mattress and turns on her side, away from Ron. It takes several long minutes for Ron to follow, sliding under the covers beside her inch by inch, as if he thinks at any moment she’s going to roll back over and hex him. That’s probably a fair assumption, considering their history, but it’s not something he has to worry about tonight.

Once settled, Ron lays stiff as a board at the other edge of the mattress. She’s slept on the bunk beneath him for long enough now to know that he is a deep but restless sleeper, always unconsciously moving or rolling over or kicking the blankets off or pulling them back up through a ceaseless chorus of snores. Tonight, there is none of that. He is still not sleeping.

Neither is she, of course. The palpable tension building in the small space between them is almost unbearable. This was a stupid idea she had. So naturally, she blames Ron.

“Will you relax?” she hisses over her shoulder at him, as if his sleeping in the bed beside her is a perfectly normal occurrence that shouldn’t have either of them so wound up.

“If you want me to be comfortable, then you need to relax,” Ron fires back. “This was your idea.”

“Well, if you’re not comfortable, then you might as well just go back and sleep on the couch.” Hermione flops over onto her back and gives Ron a hard shove in the arm to move him in that direction. He’s so close to the edge of the bed that he almost tumbles off it, but he catches himself and rebounds back toward her, his eyes flashing with irritation.

“Hermione, what the fu—”

The swear dies on his lips as he realizes the position they’re now in, one of his hands on either side of her face as his body hovers above hers. Her palm lands feebly against his chest, a ghost of the initial impulse to push him away, and she feels his heart thundering against his ribs. Neither of them moves, too terrified that the next decision they make is going to be the wrong one, and a different but familiar tension settles over them.

Ron seems to be even more frozen than she is; the only movement is his eyes flickering across her face, searching for an answer, and Hermione knows that she has to be the one to decide where this goes next. She could still push him away, and he would go without a fight.

She doesn’t want to push him away.

Her fingers curl into a fist, pulling the fabric of his t-shirt into her grasp. “I’m still mad at you,” she says breathlessly. She would hate how desperate her voice sounds if she had any brain cells left functioning to care about such things. As it is, they’ve all abandoned their posts to focus on the way Ron’s eyes seem to darken with every passing moment and the attempt to catalog the exact shade of pink of his tongue as it darts out to wet his lips.

Ron gives a tiny nod in answer. “I know.”

“And this is not why I asked you to share the bed.”

His laughter vibrates against her hand. “I know that, too.”

“But I missed you,” she admits in a whisper. Ron’s expression softens, and the way he breathes out her name, his husky voice caressing every syllable, pushes her over the edge.

Hermione tugs firmly at his shirt to pull him down to her, and any lingering hesitation between them vanishes as their lips crash together. It’s impossible to doubt Ron’s feelings for her when his mouth is on hers, hungry and insistent after so much time spent holding back. She notes with some amusement as his tongue seeks hers that he tastes a bit like chocolate too, which should be impossible since there hasn’t been any in the tent for weeks but doesn’t totally surprise her.

She meets every move he makes and matches it with equal fervor, letting her hand drift up past the stubble on his cheek to tangle in his hair, pulling him even closer. Ron groans softly as he drops his weight to his elbows, engulfing her. Now that they’ve started, Hermione never wants to stop kissing him, but her lungs are beginning to protest, and she forces her lips away from his with a deep gasp for air.

The rapid rise and fall of Ron’s chest tells her he has the same need, but he doesn’t pull away from her completely, alternating his breaths with soft kisses to her cheek and then her neck. “I’m sorry, Hermione,” he murmurs, pressing the words into her skin. “I’m so, so sorry.”

His apology puts a lump in her throat and tears in her eyes. She knows he’s sorry for leaving—she does, she knows— but it doesn’t make the pain go away. Still, she takes a deep breath and tugs his face back to hers to look him in the eye when she replies, “I know you are.” It’s the best she can do right now. She’ll forgive him eventually—she’s probably further along that path than she wants to admit, already—but it’s going to take time.

Ron seems to understand, his nose brushing against hers as he nods and leans in for one more gentle kiss before rolling off to his side. “Reckon we should put the beds back?”

Even if Hermione knew how to, she’d rather not. At least, not for tonight. She shakes her head and snuggles up against Ron’s side. He settles the blanket over them both, letting his arm curl around her shoulders as she whispers, “In the morning.”