Sorting Priorities (a Romione/Dramione Fic)

Chapter 2 • Lavender Should Take Greater Care When Lending Out Her Notes

Ron sat down beside Hermione as Snape ushered the class into the dungeon, his mood soured by Harry's untimely appearance. He had planned on asking Hermione out before class, but before he could work up his courage, the moment had passed and class had begun. Needless to say, Ron was in a bad mood during Potions, which wasn't helped by his typically abysmal performance in class. By the time Potions ended, Ron's felt positively bitter with the addition of yet another long essay.

When he, Harry, and Hermione went down to the Great Hall for dinner, he shoveled his food down rather forcefully and promptly left, leaving Harry to ask, "What's his deal?" quite loudly in his wake.

After his rushed dinner, Ron sat alone in the common room, contemplating his relationship with Hermione. He really liked her, and he wanted to ask her out, but he had caught her looking at Malfoy quite a bit. Could she like him? Was it even possible, what with Malfoy's toxic attitude towards Muggle-borns? Ron shook his head, berating himself for even entertaining such stupid thoughts. There was no way Hermione would ever fall for that toerag. Besides, he could tell Hermione liked him, at least so far as he could tell. He sat moodily by the fire and pulled out Snape's essay, about to begin, when Lavender Brown walked in.

As usual, Lavender and Parvati erupted into giggles as they saw him sitting by the fire. Ron sighed internally as Parvati nudged Lavender over and made an excuse to turn in early, leaving them alone. Ron liked Lavender well enough, but she could be annoyingly talkative, and she just wasn't the same as Hermione. As she took the chair closest to his, he bent further over his homework, his ears reddening as he hoped to avoid a conversation.

"Hi, Ron!" More giggles. "How are you? Are you working on Snape's essay, too?"

"Yeah." Ron scrawled out another weak sentence, keeping his head lowered.

"It was really horrible of him to assign us another essay," Lavender continued. "As if the first one wasn't hard enough, and now another! He really ought to give us a break." Lavender huffed as she, too, pulled out her half-completed essay.

Ron, now more eager to talk since they had got on to a topic he could go on and on about, started to speak, if a little grudgingly. "Yeah. But he won't just stop on mountains of homework!" Ron was definitely ready to let out all of his pent-up anger at Snape. "He has to take off points because he hates all Gryffindors, and it doesn't help that he's breathing insults down my neck while I try to make a decent potion in that bloody dungeon!" He jabbed his quill onto his parchment, sending ink spreading over his first paragraph. Cursing, he siphoned the ink back into its bottle.

"I know, it's really unfair!" Lavender sympathized. "Maybe if he realized we all hate the class, he'd resign and we'd get a better teacher. Nobody would miss him," she added nastily.

"Hi, Harry, Hermione!" Ron said brightly as his friends sat down beside him after several minutes of talking. "Hey, Hermione, you haven't started Snape's essay yet, have you?" he asked feverishly. He gestured to his own parchment, which consisted of about five inches of large writing. "I can't think of what else to put here."

Hermione began looking through her bag for her notes, stopping as Lavender leaned to the side. "Something smells like burnt cat hair," she complained, looking pointedly at Hermione, who immediately straightened back up, her back stiff and her expression unforgiving.

"I think you ought to have listened to Professor Snape and maybe have taken your own notes for once!" Hermione snapped, stalking to the girls' dormitories.

"What's gotten into her?" Lavender asked innocently as she leaned closer to Ron. "Here, you can borrow my notes..." She reached into her bag and pulled out the day's notes, but she blushed and turned them away from Ron as she glanced them over. "Just... Let me...er...just touch them up..."  Ron saw her hastily wave her wand over several hearts, vanishing them from the page. "Here, since Hermione's being so rude."

"Thanks a bunch, Lavender," Ron said, taking the notes gratefully.

After finishing his essay, Ron returned Lavender's notes and packed up, not feeling too confident about the finished product. He'd found Lavender's looping letters hard to decipher, and he definitely didn't remember hearing some of the things she'd written down in class. Nonetheless, he was finished, and that was what he cared about, bad marks or not. He waited for Harry to wrap up his work before he left for the dormitories.

When Harry and Ron finally went to sleep, Ron drew the hangings around his bed and flopped back onto the pillows, his thoughts on one particular person.

Hermione was great, and Ron really liked her, but he wasn't sure whether she really liked him as much as he did her. Sure, he had caught her looking at him now and then, but that really mean so much? After all, he had seen her look at Malfoy too... He really hoped Hermione wasn't falling for someone else; he really did like her. As he lay on his side,  looking out at the shifting moonlight on the grounds, Ron found himself wishing more and more for certainty--did Hermione really like him? Would she ever agree to go out with him? He needed to know. Why couldn't he have just asked her out  before Potions?

Balling the sheets in his fist, Ron resolved to ask Hermione out next chance he got. He knew he could be risking a lot--their closeness, their friendship, and much, much, much more if he was wrong, but as the seconds passed, his confidence mounted, until he fell asleep with dreams of happiness running through his mind.

However, as the days passed, Ron found it harder than expected to get Hermione alone. The three went everywhere as a group, and whenever Ron and Hermione did have a moment alone, Lavender usually turned up, squeezing in between them and monopolizing the conversation. I'll just have to try harder, Ron told himself; he'd have to make the moment rather than wait for it.