Fic: "Twenty-Four"
Title: Twenty-Four
For: cynthia_black
Pairing: Ron Weasley/Padma Patil
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2964
Summary: Ron and Padma are partners, working for the Department of Mysteries. While investigating a mysterious cottage in Wales, they run into trouble. Insults, accidental groping, not-so-accidental smacking of a head with a carafe of tea, drooling, discussion of the use of a head as a battering ram, a dance and snogging follow.
Notes: Thanks to my betas for all their help and encouragement.
December 23rd, 2:05 p.m.
Crunch. Creak. Crunch. Creak. Crunch. Creak.
Ron Weasley glanced over at the figure walking next to him. "Are you sure we couldn't Apparate any closer than this?"
"Yes."
They had been trodding over the ice-covered snow for an hour at least. Even with the warming charms, it was not a pleasant experience. Ron sighed heavily, watching his breath billow out in front of him like a cloud of cigarette smoke. It was cold, grey and even
“There it is, just ahead.” Ron’s partner pointed to a derelict stone cottage in the distance.
Ron wasn’t sure he would call that just ahead. It looked like a child’s toy from this distance. He grunted and kept walking.
His partner, Padma Patil, glanced at him sideways and wondered what she had ever done to deserve this. Ron Weasley as her partner. How was she ever going to advance at the Ministry with that bloody fool as her partner? Why did they even have to have partners? Mysteries had never had partners before. She frowned, knowing why - the war. Partners meant that no one was ever out alone. It wasn’t as if they were Aurors though….She gave him another quick look and thought grouchily that she would use him as a shield if they ran into trouble.
December 23rd, 2:50 p.m.
They finally reached the stone cottage. The cottage had been a source of mystery for years to the Muggles that lived in the area; there were regular reports of hauntings and disappearances. Wizards found it a mystery as well -- it was impossible to Apparate near the cottage. The Ministry had finally decided to send Mysteries to investigate it.
Ron stopped and leaned against it, not exhausted from the walk, yet quite willing to rest for a few minutes. Padma already had her wand out and was examining the cottage carefully. He watched her silently, not offering to help yet. She had been in a sulk ever since they had been assigned to be partners. He grumpily thought that she could, in the spirit of the holiday season, try to be a little less disdainful toward him. Or at least not refer to him as ‘the bloody fool’ under her breath all the time.
After a few minutes he pulled out his wand and tromped around the side of the cottage where he had last seen her. There was no sign of her though. “Padma,” he called softly.
He followed her footprints in the snow to the back of the cottage where they came to an abrupt end at a window. The window didn’t look as if it had been opened in years. He frowned. She wouldn’t have gone in without him, would she? He pointed his wand at the window, checking for spell energy. None. He checked the ground for the same, but again, there was nothing.
“This isn’t funny!” he called out, louder now. He was annoyed with himself for letting her out of his sight and annoyed with her too, because it was probably all just a trick she was playing on him.
He continued around the house, finding no other footprints or evidence that anyone had entered the cottage. He scanned the surrounding area, nothing but trees, snow, hills, rocks and more snow. “I hate Wales,” he muttered. He checked the front door of the cottage for spells and finding none, turned the doorknob, somehow not surprised to find it wasn’t locked. He entered the cottage, lighting an illumination spell as he entered.
Ron noticed a small object on the bare wood floor a few steps into the cottage. It looked like a small snowglobe. He reached down and picked it up. That was a mistake.
December 23rd, 2:56 p.m.
“What the bloody hell?” Ron exclaimed as he dropped into a very dark - well, he wasn’t sure where he was.
“Portkeys, I’d imagine,” Padma’s calm voice answered. “Unauthorised, obviously.”
Ron started and reached out his hand in the darkness. “Padma?”
“Yes, and would you please take your hand off my -- body?”
Ron jerked his hand back, glad the darkness would hide his rapidly reddening face. “Er, sorry, Padma.”
“Quite fine,” she said. “We appear to be in a broom cupboard or a small pantry. I’m not certain, but I think we’re in the same cottage. The temperature feels about the same and it has that same smell to it.”
“Did you try opening the door?” Ron asked, carefully, very carefully, extending his arm to find a wall.
“No, I didn’t think of that, Ronald. Nor did I think of trying to Disapparate. I was just going to wait here for you to rescue me, oh great one.”
“Sarcasm isn’t necessary,” Ron replied sulkily.
Padma rolled her eyes in the darkness. Perhaps I was a murderer in my last life. If I have to spend the rest of this life in a broom cupboard with him, I might become one in this life too. She sighed. “There is an anti-magic field as well.”
“We’re going to starve,” Ron said dramatically.
Padma sighed again, reaching into her satchel she pulled out a chocolate bar. “I have chocolate, a few crackers, plus fruit in my bag. And a carafe of tea.”
“In that case, I reckon we’ll just freeze to death,” Ron answered glumly.
Padma “accidentally” smacked the side of his head with the carafe of tea.
December 23rd, 10:03 p.m.
“You’re drooling on my shoulder.”
Padma lifted her head groggily. “What?”
”Drooling. On my cloak.” Ron repeated.
Padma wiped her mouth with her gloved hand. “Am not.”
He didn’t answer, but Padma thought she felt him shrug.
Then she realised just how close she was to him. She must have scooted over when she had dozed off. “Do you know how long we’ve been here? Mysteries is bound to send someone after us.”
“Great, then this cupboard’ll be even more crowded. You’ll have to sit on my lap then.”
She scooted away, frowning, even as she felt her cheeks burning. She considered the situation. If they just sat here and waited to be rescued, it wouldn’t look good on her record. It was bad enough having the bloody fool as a partner, having to be rescued from a broom cupboard would make her look like a bloody fool. They had to find a way out. She was smart, she was a Ravenclaw. She could figure this out. “We have to find a way out, Ronald.”
Ron let out a long breath. “After you, m’lady.”
She stood up. “Bloody fool,” she muttered.
He stood up too, groaning. “I’m so frozen; I can’t even feel my hands.”
Padma, paused, straining to see in the darkness, then reached over and grabbed his hands, causing him to yelp in surprise. She squeezed them tightly. “They’re still there.”
“Oh, that was helpful, thanks.”
She smiled cheekily even though she knew he couldn’t see her in the darkness. “You’re welcome.”
She started feeling the wall again. There had to be a way out. She pulled out her wand and rapped. “Maybe we can find a weak place….if we could break through…”
”We could get outside the boundary of the magical void!” he finished for her.
“Maybe you’re not as dumb and useless as I thought,” she replied.
“What?”
”Oh, did I say that aloud?”
December 24th, just after midnight
“We’ll just have to use your head,” Padma finally said, exhausted from their efforts to break through the very solid walls and door of the cupboard.
“What?”
“It’s the thickest, hardest and most expendable object we have.”
“That’s an insult, isn’t it?” Ron asked.
“How very cunning of you to figure that out.”
Ron huffed and put his hands on his hips. “I’ve had it with your insults, Padma Patil!” he yelled, deciding at least his righteous anger might warm him a bit. “You’ve never given me any respect. You’ve treated me like garden gnome from the very beginning of our partnership and it is going to STOP now!”
He waited for her angry retort, but nothing came. He felt a twinge of panic rising - was she gone? “Padma?” Nothing. “Padma!”
He heard a sniffle from the corner of cupboard. He took the step necessary to reach the corner and slid down the wall to sit next to Padma, whose slumped figure he could just make out.
Padma had pulled her knees up and buried her head in them. “We are going to die here.”
Ron considered that statement. “Yes, but do you reckon you could stop insulting me? I don’t really want the last words I hear to be ‘Ron, you’re a bloody fool!’”
Padma sniffled and chuckled at the same time. She lifted her head, glad for the darkness that hid her wet cheeks. “I guess you’re not going to let me use your head as a battering ram either, eh?”
“Not for at least another hour,” he replied, smiling.
December 24th, 2:10 a.m.
“You should’ve danced with me. At least once.”
Ron was only half-awake and mostly frozen, so it took him in a minute to puzzle out what she was talking about. “At the Yule Ball?”
“Yes,” she answered.
Ron stood up and reached for Padma’s hand, tugging her up. “You’re right, I should’ve.”
If he could’ve seen her face more clearly, he would’ve seen a slightly quizzical, yet not displeased expression on it. “You want to dance now? Here? In a broom cupboard in Wales as we freeze to death?”
Ron grinned, still holding her hand. “Yes.”
Padma rolled her eyes a bit, but closed the small distance between them, putting a hand on one of his shoulders, and letting her head fall against the other.
There wasn’t much room, so they mostly just swayed; Padma humming a tune softly and Ron rather relieved there wasn’t much room, because he didn’t know how to dance.
December 24th, 2:15 a.m.
“Thank you for the dance, Ron,” Padma said softly as she stopped humming and they stopped swaying.
“You’re welcome,” he answered, his arms still around her. He reckoned he should let go of her, but he found he didn’t want to and he didn’t think it was just because she was the warmest thing in the cupboard. Well, it might be partly because she was warm, but there were other reasons as well, involving how she smelled of spices he didn’t know the names of and the softness of her body pressed against his.
So they just stood, neither of them attempting to disentangle from the other. Padma lifted her head and found her nose nuzzling Ron’s jaw. “Ron,” she said in a whisper, not moving away from him, “I want to kiss you.”
Ron opened his mouth to answer, but it hadn’t been a question and she was already kissing him.
December 24th, 3:33 a.m.
“You realise that this - um, new-found attraction we have for each other is probably just the result of being in a deadly situation, don’t you?” Padma asked even as she didn’t move from his lap.
Ron muttered a response, but she couldn’t understand him as his mouth was rather buried in her neck.
She tilted her head back a bit to give him better access and actually hoped that any possible rescuers would not show up for a while.
December 24th, 6:42 a.m.
Ron woke up and started to stretch a bit, but found it difficult to move and he couldn’t quite remember where he was. He opened an eye, but that didn’t help very much because there wasn’t much light wherever he was. Slowly, he became aware that he was not alone and that his hand was resting on something very soft. And it was under Padma’s jumper. A smile spread across his face as the memories moved through the grogginess. He did assume when she woke up she’d probably demand he remove the aforementioned hand, but for the moment, he decided to just enjoy the swell of her breast and the hint of lace that was beneath his fingers.
Padma woke up at that moment, but the idea of Ron removing his hand was not the first thought to pop into her head. “RON!” she exclaimed, causing him to jump and almost rip her jumper. “Look at the door!”
Ron, whose thoughts were still primarily focused on where his hand was and Padma’s warm figure nestled in his lap, glanced at the door. “Yeah, it’s still there and we probably still can’t open it.”
Padma gave an exasperated sigh and elbowed him in the chest. “The light, coming in from under the door! There’s a crack!”
“Yes, I can see you a bit better now,” Ron said, turning his face to peer at hers. He smiled. “Your makeup is a bit smudged, but -“
“We could try putting our wands under the door and seeing if we could do a spell that way!” she snapped. She twisted away from him, pushing his hand away from its comfortable resting spot and pulled out her wand. “I take back every nice thing I said about you last night.”
He shrugged. “You really didn’t say anything nice. Your tongue was actually rather occupied with other tasks,” he pointed out.
Padma wondered if she could leave him to freeze to death alone. Surely, she could come up with a story Mysteries would believe.
December 24th, 7:13 a.m
They trudged through the snow silently. They had deactivated all the other portkeys at the cottage and had been able to remove the magical null from the cupboard once they were outside of it (Padma’s idea about the wands under the door had worked, one spell later, the lock had clicked open and they had been able to walk right out). Unfortunately, they hadn’t been able to remove the Anti-Apparation field that surrounded the cottage. Nor had they found anything in the cottage that explained who had the set up the cottage to trap unsuspecting visitors, or why, but since illegal activity had been discovered, Aurors would take over the investigation now.
“Tomorrow is Christmas,” Ron said as his stomach rumbled slightly. “Mum is making roast turkey, ham, potatoes, gravy, stuffing --”
“I don’t celebrate Christmas,” Padma said, interrupting his food fantasy recitation.
He glanced at her. “Right, but if you don’t have plans, you could come to the Burrow.”
Padma wrinkled her brow. “Why would I do that?”
Ron glanced down at his feet for a moment. “Because I don’t think it was just the near-death experience that - ” he paused, searching for the right words. “That led to what happened between us.”
Padma didn’t answer, she felt distinctly confused and wanted to sort it out in her head before she just started talking about it. They were partners, he drove her mad most of the time, yet….she didn’t regret snogging him. In fact, the thought of doing it again kept popping up uninvited in her head.
Ron sighed and kept trudging through the snow. Maybe he should just let it drop, he thought to himself. No, he decided, I’m not going to give up this easily.
He stopped walking. “Padma, I’m quite willing to see that we get every dangerous, deadly assignment, just so that you’ll kiss me again.”
“You’re quite mad, Weasley,” she answered. She considered him for a moment, the determined expression on his face, the way his red hair stood out so brightly against the backdrop of the snow that surrounded them and she wasn’t sure what the reason for the feelings were, but she knew she couldn’t deny that they were there. Perhaps Ravenclaw logic was just no match for love, or in this case, the beginnings of love. Perhaps he wasn’t just a bloody fool. Or perhaps she was a bloody fool too.
“Am I?” he asked.
She nodded. “Yes, because your attempts to send us to an early grave won’t be necessary.” To prove her point, she threw her arms around him and kissed him, deeply and for quite a long while as neither of them noticed the cold, the crisp wind nor the snowflakes falling on them.
December 25th, 2:05 p.m.
Padma sat next to Ron on the floor next the fireplace at the Burrow, their legs just touching, both of them smiling. Laughter erupted from her mouth as Ron’s niece (Fleur and Bill’s eldest daughter), pulled a loose thread she had discovered on Ron’s jumper and took off with it, and in just a moment, unravelling most of the sleeve, gleefully shrieking as she ran through the house with it.
Padma couldn’t remember when she had felt so comfortable, so warm. She couldn’t remember when her feelings had ever changed so drastically in just twenty-four hours. She had always questioned everything, but this, she decided, was not to be questioned, it was just to be enjoyed. Her hand dropped to rest on Ron’s leg and she leaned over and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “Thank you for inviting me, you bloody fool,” she whispered into his ear.
Ron grinned and tilted his head to whisper in her ear, “There’s a broom cupboard just down the hall.”
Padma quirked a brow, but her eyes were observing Ron warmly. She stood up, taking Ron’s hand and heaved him up as well. She pulled out her wand and severed the loose yarn on Ron’s jumper to prevent further unravelling. “So we won’t be followed,” she whispered.
“You’re so clever,” he replied, tugging her toward the broom cupboard.
She tucked her wand away snugly as they weaved their way to the broom cupboard. “And you’re rather clever for a bloody fool.”
Ron’s only reply to that was to pull her into the broom cupboard, secure the door behind them and kiss her soundly.
The End
For: cynthia_black
Pairing: Ron Weasley/Padma Patil
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2964
Summary: Ron and Padma are partners, working for the Department of Mysteries. While investigating a mysterious cottage in Wales, they run into trouble. Insults, accidental groping, not-so-accidental smacking of a head with a carafe of tea, drooling, discussion of the use of a head as a battering ram, a dance and snogging follow.
Notes: Thanks to my betas for all their help and encouragement.
December 23rd, 2:05 p.m.
Crunch. Creak. Crunch. Creak. Crunch. Creak.
Ron Weasley glanced over at the figure walking next to him. "Are you sure we couldn't Apparate any closer than this?"
"Yes."
They had been trodding over the ice-covered snow for an hour at least. Even with the warming charms, it was not a pleasant experience. Ron sighed heavily, watching his breath billow out in front of him like a cloud of cigarette smoke. It was cold, grey and even
“There it is, just ahead.” Ron’s partner pointed to a derelict stone cottage in the distance.
Ron wasn’t sure he would call that just ahead. It looked like a child’s toy from this distance. He grunted and kept walking.
His partner, Padma Patil, glanced at him sideways and wondered what she had ever done to deserve this. Ron Weasley as her partner. How was she ever going to advance at the Ministry with that bloody fool as her partner? Why did they even have to have partners? Mysteries had never had partners before. She frowned, knowing why - the war. Partners meant that no one was ever out alone. It wasn’t as if they were Aurors though….She gave him another quick look and thought grouchily that she would use him as a shield if they ran into trouble.
December 23rd, 2:50 p.m.
They finally reached the stone cottage. The cottage had been a source of mystery for years to the Muggles that lived in the area; there were regular reports of hauntings and disappearances. Wizards found it a mystery as well -- it was impossible to Apparate near the cottage. The Ministry had finally decided to send Mysteries to investigate it.
Ron stopped and leaned against it, not exhausted from the walk, yet quite willing to rest for a few minutes. Padma already had her wand out and was examining the cottage carefully. He watched her silently, not offering to help yet. She had been in a sulk ever since they had been assigned to be partners. He grumpily thought that she could, in the spirit of the holiday season, try to be a little less disdainful toward him. Or at least not refer to him as ‘the bloody fool’ under her breath all the time.
After a few minutes he pulled out his wand and tromped around the side of the cottage where he had last seen her. There was no sign of her though. “Padma,” he called softly.
He followed her footprints in the snow to the back of the cottage where they came to an abrupt end at a window. The window didn’t look as if it had been opened in years. He frowned. She wouldn’t have gone in without him, would she? He pointed his wand at the window, checking for spell energy. None. He checked the ground for the same, but again, there was nothing.
“This isn’t funny!” he called out, louder now. He was annoyed with himself for letting her out of his sight and annoyed with her too, because it was probably all just a trick she was playing on him.
He continued around the house, finding no other footprints or evidence that anyone had entered the cottage. He scanned the surrounding area, nothing but trees, snow, hills, rocks and more snow. “I hate Wales,” he muttered. He checked the front door of the cottage for spells and finding none, turned the doorknob, somehow not surprised to find it wasn’t locked. He entered the cottage, lighting an illumination spell as he entered.
Ron noticed a small object on the bare wood floor a few steps into the cottage. It looked like a small snowglobe. He reached down and picked it up. That was a mistake.
December 23rd, 2:56 p.m.
“What the bloody hell?” Ron exclaimed as he dropped into a very dark - well, he wasn’t sure where he was.
“Portkeys, I’d imagine,” Padma’s calm voice answered. “Unauthorised, obviously.”
Ron started and reached out his hand in the darkness. “Padma?”
“Yes, and would you please take your hand off my -- body?”
Ron jerked his hand back, glad the darkness would hide his rapidly reddening face. “Er, sorry, Padma.”
“Quite fine,” she said. “We appear to be in a broom cupboard or a small pantry. I’m not certain, but I think we’re in the same cottage. The temperature feels about the same and it has that same smell to it.”
“Did you try opening the door?” Ron asked, carefully, very carefully, extending his arm to find a wall.
“No, I didn’t think of that, Ronald. Nor did I think of trying to Disapparate. I was just going to wait here for you to rescue me, oh great one.”
“Sarcasm isn’t necessary,” Ron replied sulkily.
Padma rolled her eyes in the darkness. Perhaps I was a murderer in my last life. If I have to spend the rest of this life in a broom cupboard with him, I might become one in this life too. She sighed. “There is an anti-magic field as well.”
“We’re going to starve,” Ron said dramatically.
Padma sighed again, reaching into her satchel she pulled out a chocolate bar. “I have chocolate, a few crackers, plus fruit in my bag. And a carafe of tea.”
“In that case, I reckon we’ll just freeze to death,” Ron answered glumly.
Padma “accidentally” smacked the side of his head with the carafe of tea.
December 23rd, 10:03 p.m.
“You’re drooling on my shoulder.”
Padma lifted her head groggily. “What?”
”Drooling. On my cloak.” Ron repeated.
Padma wiped her mouth with her gloved hand. “Am not.”
He didn’t answer, but Padma thought she felt him shrug.
Then she realised just how close she was to him. She must have scooted over when she had dozed off. “Do you know how long we’ve been here? Mysteries is bound to send someone after us.”
“Great, then this cupboard’ll be even more crowded. You’ll have to sit on my lap then.”
She scooted away, frowning, even as she felt her cheeks burning. She considered the situation. If they just sat here and waited to be rescued, it wouldn’t look good on her record. It was bad enough having the bloody fool as a partner, having to be rescued from a broom cupboard would make her look like a bloody fool. They had to find a way out. She was smart, she was a Ravenclaw. She could figure this out. “We have to find a way out, Ronald.”
Ron let out a long breath. “After you, m’lady.”
She stood up. “Bloody fool,” she muttered.
He stood up too, groaning. “I’m so frozen; I can’t even feel my hands.”
Padma, paused, straining to see in the darkness, then reached over and grabbed his hands, causing him to yelp in surprise. She squeezed them tightly. “They’re still there.”
“Oh, that was helpful, thanks.”
She smiled cheekily even though she knew he couldn’t see her in the darkness. “You’re welcome.”
She started feeling the wall again. There had to be a way out. She pulled out her wand and rapped. “Maybe we can find a weak place….if we could break through…”
”We could get outside the boundary of the magical void!” he finished for her.
“Maybe you’re not as dumb and useless as I thought,” she replied.
“What?”
”Oh, did I say that aloud?”
December 24th, just after midnight
“We’ll just have to use your head,” Padma finally said, exhausted from their efforts to break through the very solid walls and door of the cupboard.
“What?”
“It’s the thickest, hardest and most expendable object we have.”
“That’s an insult, isn’t it?” Ron asked.
“How very cunning of you to figure that out.”
Ron huffed and put his hands on his hips. “I’ve had it with your insults, Padma Patil!” he yelled, deciding at least his righteous anger might warm him a bit. “You’ve never given me any respect. You’ve treated me like garden gnome from the very beginning of our partnership and it is going to STOP now!”
He waited for her angry retort, but nothing came. He felt a twinge of panic rising - was she gone? “Padma?” Nothing. “Padma!”
He heard a sniffle from the corner of cupboard. He took the step necessary to reach the corner and slid down the wall to sit next to Padma, whose slumped figure he could just make out.
Padma had pulled her knees up and buried her head in them. “We are going to die here.”
Ron considered that statement. “Yes, but do you reckon you could stop insulting me? I don’t really want the last words I hear to be ‘Ron, you’re a bloody fool!’”
Padma sniffled and chuckled at the same time. She lifted her head, glad for the darkness that hid her wet cheeks. “I guess you’re not going to let me use your head as a battering ram either, eh?”
“Not for at least another hour,” he replied, smiling.
December 24th, 2:10 a.m.
“You should’ve danced with me. At least once.”
Ron was only half-awake and mostly frozen, so it took him in a minute to puzzle out what she was talking about. “At the Yule Ball?”
“Yes,” she answered.
Ron stood up and reached for Padma’s hand, tugging her up. “You’re right, I should’ve.”
If he could’ve seen her face more clearly, he would’ve seen a slightly quizzical, yet not displeased expression on it. “You want to dance now? Here? In a broom cupboard in Wales as we freeze to death?”
Ron grinned, still holding her hand. “Yes.”
Padma rolled her eyes a bit, but closed the small distance between them, putting a hand on one of his shoulders, and letting her head fall against the other.
There wasn’t much room, so they mostly just swayed; Padma humming a tune softly and Ron rather relieved there wasn’t much room, because he didn’t know how to dance.
December 24th, 2:15 a.m.
“Thank you for the dance, Ron,” Padma said softly as she stopped humming and they stopped swaying.
“You’re welcome,” he answered, his arms still around her. He reckoned he should let go of her, but he found he didn’t want to and he didn’t think it was just because she was the warmest thing in the cupboard. Well, it might be partly because she was warm, but there were other reasons as well, involving how she smelled of spices he didn’t know the names of and the softness of her body pressed against his.
So they just stood, neither of them attempting to disentangle from the other. Padma lifted her head and found her nose nuzzling Ron’s jaw. “Ron,” she said in a whisper, not moving away from him, “I want to kiss you.”
Ron opened his mouth to answer, but it hadn’t been a question and she was already kissing him.
December 24th, 3:33 a.m.
“You realise that this - um, new-found attraction we have for each other is probably just the result of being in a deadly situation, don’t you?” Padma asked even as she didn’t move from his lap.
Ron muttered a response, but she couldn’t understand him as his mouth was rather buried in her neck.
She tilted her head back a bit to give him better access and actually hoped that any possible rescuers would not show up for a while.
December 24th, 6:42 a.m.
Ron woke up and started to stretch a bit, but found it difficult to move and he couldn’t quite remember where he was. He opened an eye, but that didn’t help very much because there wasn’t much light wherever he was. Slowly, he became aware that he was not alone and that his hand was resting on something very soft. And it was under Padma’s jumper. A smile spread across his face as the memories moved through the grogginess. He did assume when she woke up she’d probably demand he remove the aforementioned hand, but for the moment, he decided to just enjoy the swell of her breast and the hint of lace that was beneath his fingers.
Padma woke up at that moment, but the idea of Ron removing his hand was not the first thought to pop into her head. “RON!” she exclaimed, causing him to jump and almost rip her jumper. “Look at the door!”
Ron, whose thoughts were still primarily focused on where his hand was and Padma’s warm figure nestled in his lap, glanced at the door. “Yeah, it’s still there and we probably still can’t open it.”
Padma gave an exasperated sigh and elbowed him in the chest. “The light, coming in from under the door! There’s a crack!”
“Yes, I can see you a bit better now,” Ron said, turning his face to peer at hers. He smiled. “Your makeup is a bit smudged, but -“
“We could try putting our wands under the door and seeing if we could do a spell that way!” she snapped. She twisted away from him, pushing his hand away from its comfortable resting spot and pulled out her wand. “I take back every nice thing I said about you last night.”
He shrugged. “You really didn’t say anything nice. Your tongue was actually rather occupied with other tasks,” he pointed out.
Padma wondered if she could leave him to freeze to death alone. Surely, she could come up with a story Mysteries would believe.
December 24th, 7:13 a.m
They trudged through the snow silently. They had deactivated all the other portkeys at the cottage and had been able to remove the magical null from the cupboard once they were outside of it (Padma’s idea about the wands under the door had worked, one spell later, the lock had clicked open and they had been able to walk right out). Unfortunately, they hadn’t been able to remove the Anti-Apparation field that surrounded the cottage. Nor had they found anything in the cottage that explained who had the set up the cottage to trap unsuspecting visitors, or why, but since illegal activity had been discovered, Aurors would take over the investigation now.
“Tomorrow is Christmas,” Ron said as his stomach rumbled slightly. “Mum is making roast turkey, ham, potatoes, gravy, stuffing --”
“I don’t celebrate Christmas,” Padma said, interrupting his food fantasy recitation.
He glanced at her. “Right, but if you don’t have plans, you could come to the Burrow.”
Padma wrinkled her brow. “Why would I do that?”
Ron glanced down at his feet for a moment. “Because I don’t think it was just the near-death experience that - ” he paused, searching for the right words. “That led to what happened between us.”
Padma didn’t answer, she felt distinctly confused and wanted to sort it out in her head before she just started talking about it. They were partners, he drove her mad most of the time, yet….she didn’t regret snogging him. In fact, the thought of doing it again kept popping up uninvited in her head.
Ron sighed and kept trudging through the snow. Maybe he should just let it drop, he thought to himself. No, he decided, I’m not going to give up this easily.
He stopped walking. “Padma, I’m quite willing to see that we get every dangerous, deadly assignment, just so that you’ll kiss me again.”
“You’re quite mad, Weasley,” she answered. She considered him for a moment, the determined expression on his face, the way his red hair stood out so brightly against the backdrop of the snow that surrounded them and she wasn’t sure what the reason for the feelings were, but she knew she couldn’t deny that they were there. Perhaps Ravenclaw logic was just no match for love, or in this case, the beginnings of love. Perhaps he wasn’t just a bloody fool. Or perhaps she was a bloody fool too.
“Am I?” he asked.
She nodded. “Yes, because your attempts to send us to an early grave won’t be necessary.” To prove her point, she threw her arms around him and kissed him, deeply and for quite a long while as neither of them noticed the cold, the crisp wind nor the snowflakes falling on them.
December 25th, 2:05 p.m.
Padma sat next to Ron on the floor next the fireplace at the Burrow, their legs just touching, both of them smiling. Laughter erupted from her mouth as Ron’s niece (Fleur and Bill’s eldest daughter), pulled a loose thread she had discovered on Ron’s jumper and took off with it, and in just a moment, unravelling most of the sleeve, gleefully shrieking as she ran through the house with it.
Padma couldn’t remember when she had felt so comfortable, so warm. She couldn’t remember when her feelings had ever changed so drastically in just twenty-four hours. She had always questioned everything, but this, she decided, was not to be questioned, it was just to be enjoyed. Her hand dropped to rest on Ron’s leg and she leaned over and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “Thank you for inviting me, you bloody fool,” she whispered into his ear.
Ron grinned and tilted his head to whisper in her ear, “There’s a broom cupboard just down the hall.”
Padma quirked a brow, but her eyes were observing Ron warmly. She stood up, taking Ron’s hand and heaved him up as well. She pulled out her wand and severed the loose yarn on Ron’s jumper to prevent further unravelling. “So we won’t be followed,” she whispered.
“You’re so clever,” he replied, tugging her toward the broom cupboard.
She tucked her wand away snugly as they weaved their way to the broom cupboard. “And you’re rather clever for a bloody fool.”
Ron’s only reply to that was to pull her into the broom cupboard, secure the door behind them and kiss her soundly.
The End