The First
by Oni Jade and Jan Dark

The first time she realized she liked Ron was during a fourth year Transfiguration class. He'd reached over to lift her arm out of the way of her notes. She'd left it there after reaching for the quill with the green ink to write down the equation underpinning the footstool-tortoise transformation. The shock of the touch made her miss three lines, which scampered off the side of the blackboard before she recovered herself.

“You all right, Hermione?” he asked, as if the earth hadn't just tilted on its axis, after she'd stared at the way his jaw met his ear for too long.

“Fine, I'm fine. Sorry” she'd replied, before she turned her attention back to her notes and reconstructed the formula herself.

The first time she realized Ron liked her was when he began acting like a bear with a sore head over the Yule ball. At the same time she realized that while she still liked him, even when he was acting like a prat, this was in no way incompatible with hating his guts.

She was so angry that she went and asked out Viktor without a second thought. It just went to show the mind altering effects of adrenaline and a little healthy rage.

At the ball she decided that she was glad that Ron hadn't asked her. There was a deep – if not particularly nice – satisfaction in seeing his jaw drop. And Harry's eyes bug out. And everyone else look as if they'd suffered a severe blow to the head with a blunt object.

Even more gratifying was the fact that Viktor hadn't looked surprised at all. He'd just smiled at her and kissed her hand before offering his arm for her to walk in on. She liked Viktor, even if she didn't like him.

The distinction didn't prevent her maneuvering him out of the Great Hall for some discreet experimenting with kissing.

The first time they realized they liked each other was at 12 Grimmauld Place. It might have been the depressing surroundings and too cramped quarters that motivated their mutual decision to escape adult, and other, supervision, but in retrospect she prefered to think it was something else.

They ended up in the attic, poking in a desultory fashion through several centuries of magical junk. It was one of those times when she momentarily forgot that she liked him and just enjoyed his company. Until, reaching for what she suspected was a genuine flying carpet balanced precariously on top of a pile of trunks she lost her balance. Her foot slipped from its place on top of the bottom trunk, her arms pinwheeled dramatically and down she came. Ron, perhaps inevitably, tried to catch her.

In the sense that he got hold of her he was successful. In the sense that he totally failed to arrest her descent and got thumped in the head for his trouble he was not. They both hit the floor, her underneath, with his knee planted painfully on her leg.

Then the carpet, which she must have nudged at some stage of the proceedings, also fell and hit him the head. When he flinched away from the impact he ended up head butting her.

She lay there for a time, feeling his weight pressing on her. Too distracted by his smell (dust and sweat and Ron) coupled with his feel (heavy and solid and Ron) – and with the pain and discomfort – to do anything sensible.

“Hermione, are you alright?” he sounded worried, and his hands flitted up to touch her face then down her arms. It was too light a touch to be any use in checking her for injuries, and it made butterflies flutter in her stomach, so she caught his hands in hers before he started to panic.

“I'm fine, Ron.” her voice sounded very far away. “You're on my leg.”

“Bloody hell. I'm sorry.” But he didn't move.

“You were falling, and then...” “I know, I'm OK, but you're still on my leg. And you're kind of heavy, so...”

That got him to stand up. But not before she saw, from no more than a foot away, the look in his eyes. She saw it again when, after a clumsy pause, he reached back down to help her up. Dark, and heavy, and promising ... something she wanted. They stood there awkwardly, her hand still in his. Good sense told her that they were both thinking the same thing. And four years of friendship told her that it was highly unlikely she was reading him wrong now.

Before she could risk her hopes on this thin reed of logical induction they heard Molly shouting them for lunch. Ron flinched, and dropped her hand as if burnt. She had just enough objectivity left to grin at the back of his head as he hurried to the attic's trap door.

Then, to her surprise he stopped, turned, and held out his hand to her again. She held it until they reached the ground floor, when by mutual, unstated consent they separated before anyone would see them.

And there was no way she could be misinterpreting that.

Their first kiss happened one hour and twenty seven minutes after that. It took that long to gulp lunch and ditch Fred and George. The twins, seeing their almost involuntary grins and long looks over the kitchen table, had not unreasonably decided they'd found something interesting in the attic. Ron finally unearthed a wizarding model railway set, and bet them five knuts they couldn't have it working by dinner time.

Then they wasted another fifteen minutes while she told him that he was a genius, which he liked very much; and that she'd pay half of the bet when he lost, which he took great exception to. She found herself explaining that in the late twentieth century women were equal partners, even in the wizarding world, and in any case paying off a bet made to distract your elder brothers from your canoodling was hardly in the same bracket as paying for dinner – which while anachronistic, outdated and based on an obsolete code of chivalry could be a nice romantic gesture if made with the understanding that what one was buying was dinner (and a nice romantic gesture), but not exclusive rights to a woman's person.

It was at that point that Ron – who had started to look distinctly shell shocked – took her clumsily by the shoulders and leaned in. The kiss was almost as clumsy, too tentative, and then too hard; with neither of them sure where to put their arms, in her mind Hermione's had grown to a gargantuan size and she was nearly as aware of them as she was what their lips were doing.

They spent the rest of that afternoon getting it right.

Part Two
by Jan Dark

The first time he understood, really understood, that the way his father hated the Malfoys went far, far deeper than the matter of money was the disastrous day in his second year when he tried to hit Draco Malfoy with the Ventrolatix curse and his crippled wand backfired. Even as he sat there belching slugs and enduring the Slytherin Quidditch team's hysterical derision, he was regretting that he hadn't tried something more painful, and even more humiliating - something that would have wiped out the shame he felt right then for being as pure-blooded as that vicious little snot rag and shown Hermione that he wasn't ever going to stand by and let anyone treat one of his own with that sort of contempt.

Not that she seemed to realise the magnitude of the insult when Draco called her "Mudblood". Ignoring Malfoy completely, she stepped right into the slug spatter zone and pulled him to his feet. He was still clutching his wand, now definitely proven to be dangerous, and he felt a spike of dread as she hauled his right arm across her shoulders then led him out of the stadium whilst Harry tried to get rid of that idiot with the camera. He opened his mouth to tell her that he could manage fine on his own, that she should leave him and go back and give Malfoy what he had coming, but the effort unleashed a fresh welter of slugs and all he could manage was to lean against her and let her lead him to Hagrid's.

*

The first time he understood that even if Hermione was the cleverest witch of her generation, this was in no way incompatible with her being dangerously stupid was the night of the Yule Ball when she walked into the Great Hall on the arm of Viktor Krum. He'd half expected her not to turn up at all. The mysterious someone she'd claimed she was going with was clearly nothing more than a handy fiction that she'd dreamed up to let Neville down gently. It was obvious that she'd only stuck with it because she'd been in a snit with him when he came up with his brilliant plan. His scheme to get Harry, Ginny, Hermione and himself paired up for the ball was so free of fuss that it made the way Fred had invited Angelina seem as laborious as if he'd had to give her the full troubadour treatment.

Every sour thing he'd ever heard anyone say about how you couldn't have beauty and brains must be true, he thought angrily, as he sat in the body of the hall and glared at the top table. There she sat, gazingly raptly at Krum, listening to him spout who knew what perilously seductive story to gain her confidence. To look at her, you'd think that someone had hit her with an Obliviate so powerful that her memories of exactly whose table the Bulgarian had been sitting at as recently as breakfast time had been sluiced clean away.

In the end, though, after Cedric was killed, he found he couldn't despise Krum any more. It was something to do with the way it was obvious that Harry respected his fellow Seeker, and something to do with the way that Krum's opinion of his former headmaster was painfully clear. But mostly, it was because it dawned on him, as the Durmstrang and Beauxbatons delegations were saying goodbye on the last day of term, that maybe he and Hermione had both dealt with not being chosen as a Triwizard Tournament champion by trying to go out with one instead. It was nobody's fault that she'd obviously succeeded with Viktor whilst he'd been failing to make any impression whatsoever on the dazzling Miss Fleur Delacour.

*

The first time he understood, well started to understand, that where Hermione, himself and affairs of the heart were concerned, he probably hadn't ever understood a single bloody thing was the morning of their fifth day in 12 Grimmauld Place. The weather was unusually overcast, dark and depressing, and as they left the kitchen after breakfast, he started to tell her that he remembered seeing that the roof had big skylight windows just as she started to express concern that nobody had done even the most cursory check of the contents of the attic. Without another word, they stopped just long enough to check that Fred and George were safely ensconced in the scullery (supposedly washing up but really working on their latest, disturbingly organic-looking prototype) before hurrying up to the top of the house together.

The attic and its contents were surprisingly pleasant. By the time he'd come across a model train, the scarlet livery still fresh even though its inbuilt Locomotor charm had discharged, and Hermione had found an old banner which read Go Go Gryffindor, they'd agreed that the Black family must have only ever opened the trap door to the attic to shove in any belongings left behind by the ones whose names had been blasted from that horrible tapestry downstairs. He'd just found the box holding the rails that went with the train when Hermione fell from the teetering pile of trunks that she'd been climbing.

Lengths of track spanged into the furthest corners of the attic as he rushed to catch her. Exactly what happened next he was never sure about, but somehow they ended up stretched full length on the floor together. The shock he felt across the entire surface of his skin when he realised that he was lying on top of her was as abrupt as waking from a dream about falling; it knocked his senses back into him as surely as if he'd received a bucket of cold water in the face. And once they were back, they reeled. Something in his head did backflips at the way she smelled (green and herbal with a light vinegary tang of Hermione) and his flesh felt as yielding as water wherever it touched hers. His skin's consciousness seemed to be flowing down from his arms and torso and up from his legs, and ... he got an urgent override message from his brain that said unless he did something quick, there was one bit of him wasn't going to stay yielding for long.

Quidditch statistics, that was supposed to work, he thought frantically. Oldest Keepers, no, too obscure, fastest Seekers then - Plumpton, Murray, Griffiths, Wronski, Krum ...

Oh!

Krum!

Well at least that had done the trick, he thought dully as he gathered his wits to work out where best to put his hands so he could lift himself off her. All he was hearing from his body now was that his stomach seemed to have been filled with lead. It was only then that he realised that Hermione wasn't moving at all. He was vaguely aware of bleating out something anxious, and reaching out to check her for head injuries and broken bones only to find that he didn't quite trust himself with touching her, when to his incredible relief she reached up and stopped his hands with hers and told him that she was fine.

It took him a while to realise that she was asking him to get off her, so intent was he on fixing in his mind the way she looked and felt as she lay underneath him, all the while reflecting bitterly that if there was such a thing as a spell that let you go back and do a year of your life again, it was bound to be as Dark as they come. He obliged, then stood over her wondering what he should do now. Then surprised himself by reaching down to help her up before he was anywhere near reaching a conclusion about whether this was an honourable thing to do.

They stood there awkwardly. He waited for her to let go of his hand, and when she didn't, he twice tried to let go of hers instead, only to find that he was somehow incapable of this simplest of tasks. Until his mother called them for lunch, that was, and he flinched at the thought of everything she'd have to say about all this if she knew. He was over by the trap door before he realised that, dammit, the headquarters of the Order no more belonged to Molly than they did to him, and he didn't have to live as though he was still back in The Burrow.

Incredibly, Hermione took his hand again when he reached out to her, held it even as they negotiated the ladder from the attic and then all the way down to the ground floor. The way she let go, unhurriedly and not until he needed his hand back to open the door down to the kitchen left him wondering whether he might in fact have got the wrong end of the broomstick where Krum was concerned.

*

He tried to tamp down his excitement in the face of Fred and George's obvious curiosity about what it was they'd discovered in the loft, and it took him a while to realise that, given that the twins weren't leering and elbowing each other in the ribs, they were convinced that it was a what and not a who. In a burst of inspiration, he rushed back up there and grabbed the broken locomotive, passing up the chance of pudding in favour of hunting down as many of the scattered track sections as possible, before presenting Fred and George with the entire set, and making a sucker bet concerning their mechanical prowess, that he knew they wouldn't be able to resist.

The way that Hermione told him that his ruse was a stroke of genius made him instantly forget his vestigal sense of regret about the missed dessert. But then she offered to pay half the bet, which he didn't want to talk about because he was trying to frame the questions that he felt he ought to ask about Krum before he went any further with this. And this apparently made her think that he was objecting to her paying half, because she started to expound at some length a complicated code-of-conduct involving bets and brothers and Muggles and dinner and he found himself leaning towards her and thinking this ought to shut her up as he grasped her by the shoulders and covered her lips with his own. He almost froze at the last moment as he remembered that he still hadn't asked his questions, but then the feel of it all made him realise that he didn't care and he pressed harder; even though he still didn't quite trust himself to touch her with his hands, and some corner of his mind (probably his inner Fred and George) remained detatched and was laughing sardonically at the way he was being so careful to keep a clear 18 inches of fresh air between Hermione's hips and his own.

They spent the rest of that afternoon getting it right, and as far as he was concerned (and as far as she was concerned too, he was pretty sure), it left all the previous study sessions they'd spent together languishing in the dust.