Ron liked to think of life like a chess game.

He didn't know if it was because he had spent too many hours memorizing chess strategies, or if he was just bored. He couldn't explain it, and in fact was so embarrassed by it that he never told anybody, not even Harry. And yet, it was instinct; whenever he met new people or encountered new situations, his mind fit it into a chess game. He had several of these chess boards, and sometimes it got a little hard to keep track of them.

He had a family chess game, and had since he was eight years old; Bill, Percy, and he were on one side, as the bishop, castle and knight, respectively. In the center were his father and mother as king and queen, and on the other side were the twins as a knight (he counted them as one) Ginny as a castle, and Charlie as a bishop. He didn't really count Percy; for one thing, he wouldn't fit, and for another, he didn't like him very much. He hated the way he was always "Percy the Prefect" or "Percy the Head Boy", constantly trying to make Ron just like him, his little protégé. Not that he didn't love Percy; he did, but he didn't deem him a good enough brother to include on his chessboard.

When he first went to Hogwarts, the board he had used most often went like this; Dumbledore was the king, and McGonagall the queen. Harry was the bishop, quietly lurking in the corner in his every day life and eventually proving himself to be worthy of all the recognition he got. Hermione was the castle, always intelligent and assisting wherever she was needed. He himself was a knight again, fiercely loyal to the ones he cared about. The pawns were everybody else in Gryffindor. Snape was the king, Malfoy the knight, and so forth. The one he'd always had trouble with was the queen; after all, who'd be a queen for Snape? In first year, the game had been as simple as that.

As years passed, so did the positions. Sometimes he'd fit in somebody new, therefore taking out an old character. Increasingly, the major figures stopped being adults and started being children, children his own age. The one thing that he noticed over the years was that he was always the knight. At first, he was proud of it; the knight was his favorite piece. But as he got older, particularly in fourth year, he began to resent how Harry managed to slide into the king position, while he stayed in the same place, a simple knight. After the first task, he thought the whole thing was resolved, but then Hermione informed him she was going to the Yule Ball with somebody else, and an unexpected board change took place; she moved to the queen position, and there was a mysterious figure in the king's position. When it was revealed that it was Krum was the king, practically royalty in real life as well as in chess, Ron felt more helpless than ever in the knight's position. It wasn't like King Arthur, where the queen would look his way; she seemed more than happy exactly how she was, and he wondered at how unhappy that made him.

The pawns changed. Now they were the Order of the Phoenix, much more equipped to be in a fighting position.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the board, the opponents shifted. True, the Slytherins were still there; but it was Voldemort who surfaced as king, and the death eaters to be his court.

Throughout fourth and fifth year (though much of the time he had not been aware of it) the opponent became more and more formidable. The game began playing out, and Harry was precariously close to being eliminated more than once. The game scared Ron. Instead of a silly pastime that took place in his spare time, it was a strategic plan to see how close they could go without being knocked from the board. And for the first time, they were loosing men, and those formidable enemies seemed insurmountable.

In spite of this, around the middle of fifth year, Ron noticed yet another shift in the chess game. Krum stepped down from the king's position and strode off the board. He wondered why that had happened. He heard jokes as to why, but he didn't take them seriously. He didn't realize that these jokes were the truth until the end of fifth year, when the queen, Hermione, waved him over, and then it became crystal clear.

He finally stepped out of the knight's position and into the king's position, and was shocked to find that the whole court had been waiting for him to take it. Hermione radiated silent approval, and the cry that went up from the masses was obvious:

"Weasley is our king!"

And all those discarded chess games were worth it, if only for that.

I found this little thing floating around in my computer while editing Girl on a Yellow Bike, and found that I had totally forgotten that I wrote it! So, like the summary said, it's pre-HBP, but I only mention that because it doesn't mention any of the HBP canon, though it still is canon. I hope you enjoyed it!