Ron and Hermione

‘OK, write that down,’ Hermione said to Ron, pushing his essay and a sheet covered in her own writing back to Ron, ‘then add this conclusion I’ve written for you.’
‘Hermione, you are honestly the most wonderful person I’ve ever met,’ said Ron weakly, ‘and if I’m ever rude to you again -’

‘- I’ll know you’re back to normal,’ said Hermione.

‘How was practice?’ asked Hermione rather coolly half an hour later, as Harry and Ron climbed through the portrait hole into the Gryffindor common room.
‘It was -’ Harry began.
‘Completely lousy,’ said Ron in a hollow voice, sinking into a chair beside Hermione. She looked up at Ron and her frostiness seemed to melt.

‘Well, it was only your first one,’ she said consolingly, ‘it’s bound to take time to -’ ‘Who said it was me who made it lousy?’ snapped Ron.
‘No one,’ said Hermione, looking taken aback, ‘I thought -’
‘You thought I was bound to be rubbish?’
‘No, of course I didn’t! Look, you said it was lousy so I just -’
‘I’m going to get started on some homework,’ said Ron angrily and stomped off to the staircase to the boys’ dormitories and vanished from sight.

‘Is that a Tornados badge?’ Ron demanded suddenly, pointing to the front of Cho’s robes, where a sky-blue badge emblazoned with a double gold ‘T’ was pinned. ‘You don’t support them, do you?’

‘Yeah, I do,’ said Cho.
‘Have you always supported them, or just since they started winning the league?’ said Ron, in what Harry considered an unnecessarily accusatory tone of voice.
‘I’ve supported them since I was six,’ said Cho coolly. ‘Anyway…see you, Harry.’
She walked away. Hermione waited until Cho was halfway across the courtyard before rounding on Ron.
‘You are so tactless!’
‘What? I only asked her if -’
‘Couldn’t you tell she wanted to talk to Harry on her own?’
‘So? She could’ve done, I wasn’t stopping -’
‘Why on earth were you attacking her about her Quidditch team?’
‘Attacking? I wasn’t attacking her, I was only -’

‘Who cares if she supports the Tornados?’
‘Oh, come on, half the people you see wearing those badges only bought them last season -’
‘But what does it matter?’
‘It means they’re not real fans, they’re just jumping on the bandwagon -’
‘That’s the bell,’ said Harry dully, because Ron and Hermione were bickering too loudly to hear it. They did not stop arguing all the way down to Snape’s dungeon, which gave Harry plenty of time to reflect that between Neville and Ron he would be lucky ever to have two minutes of conversation with Cho that he could look back on without wanting to leave the country.

‘No,’ said Harry quickly, pushing the badge back into Ron’s hand. ‘It’s Ron, not me.’

‘It - what?’
‘Ron’s prefect, not me,’ Harry said.
‘Ron?’ said Hermione, her jaw dropping. ‘But…are you sure? I mean -’
She turned red as Ron looked round at her with a defiant expression on his face.
‘It’s my name on the letter,’ he said.
‘I…’ said Hermione, looking thoroughly bewildered. ‘I…well…wow! Well done, Ron! That’s really -’

‘Unexpected,’ said George, nodding.
‘No,’ said Hermione, blushing harder than ever, ‘no it’s not…Ron’s done loads of…he’s really…’
The door behind her opened a little wider and Mrs. Weasley backed into the room carrying a pile of freshly laundered robes.

“There’s something funny, though,” said Hermione ten minutes later, holding her pestle suspended over a bowl of scarab beetles. “How could Rita Skeeter have known…?”
“Known what?” said Ron quickly. “You haven’t been mixing up Love Potions, have you?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Hermione snapped, starting to pound up her beetles again. “No, it’s just…how did she know Viktor asked me to visit him over the summer?”
Hermione blushed scarlet as she said this, and determinedly avoided Ron’s eyes.
“What?” said Ron, dropping his pestle with a loud clunk.
“He asked me right after he’d pulled me out of the lake,” Hermione muttered. “After he”d got rid of his shark’s head. Madam Pomfrey gave us both blankets and then he sort of pulled me away from the judges so they wouldn’t hear, and he said, if I wasn’t doing anything over the summer, would I like to -”
“And what did you say?” said Ron, who had picked up his pestle and was grinding it on the desk, a good six inches from his bowl, because he was looking at Hermione.
“And he did say he’d never felt the same way about anyone else,” Hermione went on, going so red now that Harry could almost feel the heat coming from her, “but how could Rita Skeeter have heard him? She wasn’t there…or was she? Maybe she has got an Invisibility Cloak, maybe she sneaked into the grounds to watch the second task…”

“And what did you say?” Ron repeated, pounding his pestle down so hard that it dented the desk.