A/N: This is my take on what Hermione and Ron might have been up to while Harry was off having alone with Ginny during those last weeks of sixth year. I hope you enjoy it!

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter. Or Hermione. Or Ron. Or anyone else!

Ron looks like someone has just punched him in the stomach. The Fat Lady's portrait swings shut, nervous giggles break out, and Dean Thomas sets about hastily repairing the glass he just crushed. Blue eyes blinking rapidly, Ron turns to face me.

"Since when does he like her?" he asks, pale eyelashes still fluttering.

"Haven't you been paying attention these past few months?" I fire back. I certainly can't have been the only one who noticed Harry palling around with Ginny after Quidditch practice and inviting her to Hogsmeade and generally worshipping her every move.

Ron, however, turns bright red. "Er-" The column of his throat bobs as he swallows. "I guess I was a bit - preoccupied-"

"Right." The topic of Lavender pulses between us for a second, then evaporates. "Well, he's liked her all year."

"All year? But he never-"

"Would you tell your best mate that you fancied his sister?"

"Yeah, alright," he shrugs in concession. "C'mon, let's go get a butterbeer."

The Gryffindor common room has resumed its typical post-match merriment, complete with elaborate trays of food procured from the kitchen and a smuggled-in bottle of mulled mead, the latter of which Ron eyed warily upon its materialization. Harry and Ginny's very public display of affection is, for the moment, forgotten, though I'm certain it will be the number one topic of gossip tomorrow morning.

Placing a hand on my arm, Ron leads me to the far corner of the common room. This touchy-feely element to our friendship is a very recent development, and though I can't say that I mind it much (or at all…), it also sends my mind into a sort of tailspin. It should be nothing. He's just navigating the room, guiding me through, but I'm so acutely aware of his fingertips above my elbow that I nearly collide with Colin Creevey. It's downright distracting and if I'm not careful, I'm going to catch myself daydreaming about him in class. As it is, I'm already a bit spacey, unable to focus, and it has nothing to do with the butterbeer already in my system.

Ron twists out the cork in the bottle of butterbeer and I find myself staring at his fingers, the way they curled and flexed. He's always had big hands but he's grown into them lately and maybe it's all of the Quidditch, but they look strong, too. Handing me the bottle, he gives me a little smile.

"So where do you think they went?" Ron asks, opening a bottle for himself.

"Oh, Ron, I really wouldn't worry about it too much."

"I'm not… worried. Just wondering."

I almost retort that at this point, he must know all of the secret snogging places in the castle, but instead I simply take a sip of butterbeer.

His relationship with Lavender, that's a thing of the past. It has to be, because he seems fairly determined to pretend like the whole thing never happened. I would love to do the same, but even six months later, I can still recall the way my stomach flipped over when I saw him kiss her. I used to make snide little comments about them all the time, especially when they were still together, but it's time to let bygones be bygones, even though I still don't fully understand why it happened in the first place.

He's also in a really good mood for someone whose best mate just snogged his sister in front of fifty people, so I don't want to mess with that.

"Please don't give Harry a hard time over this," I request, leaning against the back of an armchair.

"Who says I'm going to give him a hard time?" With a grin, Ron picks up a piece of fudge from a nearby tray.

"Ron…"

"Look, my moment to give him grief has passed, I think, but do we have to keep talking about this?"

I'm doing my best to look out for Harry, who undoubtedly has spent most of the school year in a low-level panic over his crush on Ginny, but then Ron bites into the piece of fudge and all I see are his lips and his teeth and his tongue. When he (the world's ultimate sugar addict) washes it down with butterbeer, and his mouth curves over the end of the bottle, my palms actually start to sweat. This can't be a normal reaction to someone you've known since you were eleven, whose house you've spent summers at, whose homework you are constantly checking over - and I've spent ages trying to tamp it down - but the effect he has on me is undeniable.

"No, we don't, but please be nice to Harry, he's been through a lot."

"I'll be nice." He bites into the fudge again and then holds out the half-eaten square to me. "Try this, it's really good."

It's such an intimate thing, sharing food, but I take the chunk of chocolate anyway. Briefly I wonder if he ever did anything like this with Lavender before banishing the thought; I don't want to think about what other sorts of things they might have shared.

The fudge is good, he's right, but mostly I'm focused on this strange moment of eye contact between us. His eyes look so bright and warm and the way he's looking at me is unlike anything I've ever experienced. Has he always looked at me like this? We spent most of the school year actively avoiding each other, and honestly, he was glued to Lavender for a great portion of that. Maybe this is just the first time I'm seeing it. Maybe it's always been there.

"You played brilliantly," I find myself saying, mostly because it's true and he needs to hear it.

His face goes slightly pink and he drinks from his bottle again. "What if I told you that I drank the rest of Harry's Felix?"

"You didn't."

"No, I didn't," he replies, suddenly serious. "But thank you."

"Well, it would have been a waste," I tell him, "because you don't need to take a potion to play well, you never have."

"No, I just need to think that I've taken a potion."

"No, you just need confidence." I can no longer have him thinking that I don't have faith in him. "Ron, you can do anything you want, you just keep getting in your own way."

Why, everytime I try to compliment him, does it come out as a criticism? All I want is for him to know how valuable he is, how talented and clever and just plain wonderful, but the words never seem to come out the way I want them to.

"Yeah, you're probably right," he muses. "You usually are." He grins once again. "So I'm going to need your help with my Potions essay."

"I'm sure it's fine. You got an Exceeds Expectations on your OWL, remember?"

"Somehow," he chuckles. "But seriously, I do need your help."

"Fine." I can't help but smile up at him; he has managed to make himself completely irresistible.

The bottle of mulled mead makes another appearance, presented to us this time by Cormac McLaggen. He gives me a smarmy smile and hands me the bottle, crossing his arms over his broad chest.

"Don't worry, Weasley," he smirks. "This one's not poisoned. At least, I don't think it is."

I can't imagine a time will ever come that I find Ron's poisoning humorous rather than horrifying, and I open my mouth to reply, but Ron's hand lands on the small of my back.

"You probably need it more than I do, McLaggen," Ron quips casually back. "You must be knackered from watching the match from the stands, aren't you?"

As my eyes widen, McLaggen sputters incoherently and then stomps off, mead in hand. Ron looks at once proud and guilty, but he's clearly holding back laughter as he turns to face me.

"That was behavior unbecoming of a prefect, Ron," I pretend to scold him through my own smile.

"Oh, at least say it with a straight face." He drains his butterbeer and sets the bottle on the tray behind him. "Come on, we don't need mead anyway, I think I have something in my trunk."

His hand closes around mine, big and warm and slightly calloused from countless hours playing Quidditch, and he starts walking to the boys' staircase. Surreptitiously I glance around to see if anyone is watching, but everyone seems rather distracted by the circulating bottle of mead, so it's up the stairs we go.

It's not until we step into the sixth year boys' dormitory that I realize I've never been alone with Ron in here. While he kneels down in front his trunk and begins digging through, I sit down on his bed and take in my surroundings. It's oddly tidy in here - Dobby must have made a visit to clean during the match - but the Marauders Map lies open on Harry's nightstand. He must have forgotten to erase it before he left for detention this morning, because the castle is swarming with students. Behind the Herbology greenhouses, Harry and Ginny's dots are overlapping.

"Aha!" Ron exclaims, standing up with a small bottle of amber liquid in his hands. A label across the front reads Dr. Ubbly's Oblivious Unction.

"Ron," I begin warily. "What is that, really?"

"Firewhisky."

"Ron," I hiss, scanning the room like Professor McGonagall is going to show up at any second, "how on earth did you sneak that into school? Filch-"

"Filch can't tell the difference between Firewhisky and goblin piss." He sits down on the bed next to me, our legs almost touching. "He's an idiot, he trusts the labels. It's how my brothers have been selling love potions all year."

"You are a prefect."

"You keep saying that," he observes, aiming his wand at a pair of stray socks that have been evicted from his trunk and Transfiguring them into small goblets. Levitating them into the air, he floats one into my lap.

"You just did all of that non-verbally." I'm trying not to marvel too much at it, since he's truly a great wizard, but the goblet is absolutely perfect.

"Oh. Yeah, I reckon I did." Ron unstoppers the Firewhisky and pours a small serving into each of our glasses. "Cheers."

It's smoky and it burns on the way down, but I hardly notice. Ron has shifted around on the bed so that our thighs are flush against each other and we are completely in a room that will surely go unoccupied for hours. Anything could happen.

"You're not going to get me in trouble, are you?" asks Ron slyly, filling his glass again.

"Huh?"

"With McGonagall," he clarifies. "About this illegal substance here?"

"Oh, I suppose not." I look down at the stone floor in an attempt to diffuse the tension between us. "We'd better go back down there, otherwise people might think…"

"Think what?"

"What Lavender thought," I mumble with a suddenly bright red face.

"Oh." Ron gulps down the Firewhisky and stands up. "Right. Yeah. Let's go."

The more I think about it, the more I've come to realize that the Felix Felicis was responsible for two breakups: Dean and Ginny, and Ron and Lavender. Since Harry had been under his Cloak, Lavender had thought that Ron and I were up in his dorm doing Merlin-knows-what and so she proceeded to very loudly and publicly proclaim that she was done with him. Ron had been more relieved than anything, and I had tried to be discreet about my own joy over it. After all, just because he doesn't want to be with Lavender doesn't necessarily mean that he wants to be with anyone else. And if people know that we snuck away, the Hogwarts rumor mill will be relentless.

If people are going to talk about me and Ron, I at least want what they're saying to be true.

So we go back to the party, and if Ron wasn't already the man of the hour for being the star Keeper on the team, his contraband Firewhisky does the job. Over the hours, the bottle is slowly depleted as shots are shared and goblets of butterbeer are spiked. Ron never leaves my side, so everyone keeps looking at me as if they're expecting me to take points from Gryffindor, but it's so hard to want to punish any of them. It's not every day that Gryffindor wins the Quidditch cup, and the night is starting to feel remarkable, like one that will be frozen in amber when I look back on it in fifty years. There's an energy in the air that I've never felt before and it's not just from the few sips of Firewhisky I took in Ron's dorm.

And Ron… Ron deserves a good night. After nearly dying earlier this year, after spending seventeen years in the shadows that his older brothers have cast, he deserves this night to be on top of the world. Not only that, he deserves a million more nights like this. I just hope my words from earlier in the night have gotten through to him, because he truly can do anything he wants. He's so much more than he realizes.

As the crowd in the common room thins, I'm curled up in a squashy armchair near the fire with Ron perched on the arm. He makes a big show of looking at his watch, then looks down at me.

"It's nearly midnight," he comments. "Where're Harry and Ginny?"

"Stop worrying about it."

"Maybe I'm worried for their safety," says Ron. "Harry's a bit of a marked man these days."

"You are not," I shoot back playfully.

"Okay, fine, I'm not, but he's been snogging my sister for hours and it's time they came up for air."

"I think you're going to have to get used to this."

On the sofa across from us, Neville Longbottom regains consciousness with a gasping breath, eyes darting around the common room. I hadn't realized it until now, but the three of us are the only ones left in the room. The fireplace crackles away, filling the silence.

"You look tired, Neville," Ron says pointedly. "You oughta just go to bed."

"Yeah," Neville agrees around a long, noisy yawn. "Yeah, alright, I'll see you lot later."

His footsteps fade as he makes for the stairs, and Ron and I are alone once again. The fire and a few lanterns provide the only light in the room, illuminating the golden strands in Ron's hair.

"I must say, I'm impressed," says Ron. "You've outlasted everyone else at the party and I didn't even think you really liked Quidditch."

"I like Quidditch players." Whoa. What have I just said? That's not even necessarily true, I like Ron for Ron, he just happens to be on the Quidditch team too. He's going to think I'm talking about Viktor Krum or Cormac McLaggen or, heaven forbid, Harry.

"Really good Quidditch players, from what I hear."

"Well, you won, didn't you?" It seems the words are just falling out of my mouth, a few sips of Firewhisky having completely demolished any sort of filter I may have had.

"Yeah," Ron nods as a smile spreads across his face. "Yeah, we did."

Sliding off the arm of the chair, he settles in next to me. We've been best friends for years but we've never been this close to each other, never crammed into a chair, practically on top of each other. The charge between us that's been building all night has reached its peak and my heart starts thudding powerfully against my ribcage. This moment feels like a turning point, like we've reached a precipice and we can either walk away or jump.

I want to jump.

"You were amazing," I tell him softly, not sure if I'm still talking about Quidditch.

Ron's blue eyes slip down to glance over my lips and then connect onto mine again. He's really going to do it.

"You're the amazing one," he breathes.

It happens in slow motion: he leans in, his breath warm on my face, our eyes close and his nose bumps mine and then, across the common room, there comes a great squeaking of hinges and the Fat Lady's strident, ingratiating voice.

"What are you lot doing out at this hour?" she scolds, her annoyance effectively destroying the moment.

"Sorry," says Harry's voice, though he doesn't sound sorry at all. Ron jumps up, raking his fingers through his hair, as I briefly join the small group of people who would like to hex Harry Potter into a jelly.

"What are you doing here?" Ginny asks as I stand and make my presence known as well.

"Er-" Ron looks over at me. "Nothing, just - nothing." For the second time that night, he looks like he's been punched in the stomach.

"Right. Well, I'm going to bed," Ginny declares, passing by me on her way to the girls' staircase and grabbing my arm. "Night, Harry."

I try to steal one last look at Ron, but he's already trudging up his own staircase.

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