2 fics - Challenge #96, "Out of Time" & Challenge #101, "Wedding
Title: New Year's Eve
Rating/Warnings: PG
Characters/Pairing: Neville/Ginny
Summary: On Neville's first New Year's Eve, he gets a little swept up in tradition.
Word Count: 889
Author's Notes: I love countdown fics! Also, in my mind, Harry and Ginny aren't together when this fic takes place. Just go with it.
Registered purchases?: Both!
“Ten!”
Neville looks around him at the lights, the people all holding drinks and yelling in unison. The music has stopped and the large screens along the wall - Hermione called them telly-visions, he thinks - all show the same old man holding a black stick, confetti and a sparkling ball nearby as he helps the people in the bar count. He’s not quite sure what to make of this Muggle tradition, this New Year’s Eve. It seems like an awful lot of fuss for one stroke of midnight.
“Nine!” Everyone in the room is shouting, holding their drinks in the air and slinging their arms around their friends, and Neville has to force himself not to cover his ears.
He was honestly surprised to even be invited. Now that they’ve all left Hogwarts, are a year or two into their actual careers, he isn’t in touch with his school chums as much as he used to be. Not that any of them ever really wrote him letters over the holidays or anything - none except Ginny Weasley, actually. And it was Ginny who’d sent him an owl two weeks prior to this, with an invitation to go out with a group of the kids from Hogwarts that evening.
It’s something called New Year’s Eve, she’d written. It’s a Muggle thing, at midnight on 31 december. Hermione and Harry told us about it. Everyone goes out to a pub and has some drinks and celebrates when the clock strikes midnight. It’s a little bizarre, but that’s Muggles for you. Loads of us will be there. Will you come?
Neville had sent his owl back right away. Absolutely.
“Eight!” A girl somewhere to Neville’s left shrieks obscenely loudly.
He’d researched this New Year’s Eve at once, of course. Neville had always been good with books - they’d kept him company on many evenings by the Gryffindor fire when loads of others were out at Quidditch practice or running around the grounds. He’d never been a good student - his Gran called it performance anxiety - but he liked to read. He liked the feel of the pages, the warm covers, the way the words jumped off the page and remained in his mind. It wasn’t hard to find a book about Muggle customs, and New Year’s Eve had a three-page section.
It seemed to be just what Ginny had described - parties with alcohol and loads of people, and a loud countdown to midnight, when the clock would click over and signal the beginning of a new year. He’d been curious as to what happened once midnight arrived - did everyone simply cheer, pack up, and go home? All that hoopla for nothing?
But the third page provided him with the answer - At midnight, the book said, everyone cheers, drinks, and seals the New Year with a kiss from that special someone.
“Seven!”
Neville has no special someone, and, he figures, won’t be expected to kiss anyone. And it’s rather likely that no one will even think of trying to kiss him. And under normal circumstances, that would be just fine with him.
Except this isn’t normal circumstances. This is New Year’s Eve.
And this New Year’s Eve, Neville wants to kiss Ginny.
“Six!”
He casts a quick glance at her as the countdown gets louder. She’s holding a bottle of something in her left hand and her arm is linked with Hermione’s. She’s grinning and her cheeks are flushed, her hair a little mussed on the right side, and Neville thinks she looks beautiful.
Ginny always urged him, ever since early on in their Hogwarts years, to be bold. You’re so wonderful, Neville, she used to say to him as they studied together in the library, the night growing darker all around them. If you’d just man up and go after what you want every once in awhile, I bet you’d get it.
So Neville did. Neville manned up and invited her to the Yule Ball. The two had quite a good time, dancing until long after most people had left the Great Hall, and everything seemed promising. But then she started dating Michael Corner, and Dean Thomas, and Harry Potter, and somehow, Neville became a distant memory.
He wants to remind her.
“Five!” Ginny cries, and before Neville can think about it, before he can talk himself out of it, he grabs her arm and tugs.
“Neville!” she says, and she looks happy to see him. “What is it?”
“Come here,” he urges, and Hermione stops before she can yell “four!” to watch them.
“Neville, it’s New Years!” Ginny gestures at the room a little wildly, and Neville catches her hand.
“I know,” Neville says, “please come here.”
“Three!” The crowd is getting louder, the numbers getting closer to zero, and Neville starts to panic. Now or never, he thinks. Now or never.
“Two!”
“Neville, what -”
“One!”
And as the crowd counts down around them, Neville pulls her away from Hermione, wraps an arm around her waist, and kisses her.
Happy New Year.
Title: Dress Robes
Rating/Warnings: PG
Characters/Pairing: Ron/Hermione
Summary: Ron would rather hide out and miss his brother's wedding than show his face wearing those dress robes again.
Word Count: 820
Author's Notes: Idk. I love them.
Registered purchases?: Both!
Hermione has never been to a wedding before. Not unless she counts her Aunt Lucy’s when she was six, and she doesn’t. She’s seen photos of herself in a pale blue dress, far poofier than any dress should be, gingerly holding the hands of her cousin Albert as they were forced to dance together for their parents’ amusement. She’s heard stories of how her Uncle Richard’s friend Gary spent three hours downing red wine and then knocked a full glass over the bride’s dress, heard all about how Aunt Lucy screamed at him and dissolved into tears right there by the bar. She knows the wedding happened, but she doesn’t remember it. It all sounds like a big disaster, anyway.
She hurries up to the top floor of the Burrow, Fleur’s yells from the main floor following her up, and cringes. So far, this wedding’s shaping up to be a big disaster as well.
Hermione raps on the door. “Ron?”
There’s no answer, and she shifts impatiently. “Ron, I know you’re there! The wedding’s in ten minutes and Fleur’s simply having a conniption that one of the groomsmen isn’t down in the garden with Bill yet.” She pauses for a moment, and then calls again, “Ron?”
When he still doesn’t answer, she pushes the door open.
Ron is there, just as she knew he would be, and she’s immediately miffed that he’d ignored her. All his family wanted was to get through this happy occasion without any problems, and here he is, hiding up in his bedroom like a selfish prat. Hermione opens her mouth, prepared to give him a piece of her mind.
But she pauses. Ron’s in front of a full-length mirror that she didn’t realize he owned, twisting this way and that. She follows his eyeline, watching as he scrutinizes his dress robes. He’s picking at the lace cuffs and has his nose wrinkled at the smell of mould coming from the fabric. He looks, she realizes, absolutely miserable.
“Ron?” she says, her tone softer this time. She takes a tentative step towards him. “Your mum’s looking for you.”
“Bloody dress robes,” he curses, muttering angrily as he shakes out the sleeves. “Mum spends dozens of Galleon’s on Bill’s outfit and on all the food and on this whole party, but she can’t even bother getting her son an outfit that doesn’t make him look like an ancient sofa.”
Hermione remembers their fourth year, remembers Ron’s mortified expression as he had to enter the Great Hall in those very same dress robes. Ron doesn’t have a lot, she knows this, and it seems a little unfair that he’s saddled with ugly clothes on top of everything else.
“It’s not so bad…” she hedges, and even as the words leave her mouth, she knows they can both hear the lie within them. They’re horrible, and they both know it.
“I look like a troll,” Ron grumps.
“You don’t!” Hermione says quickly, taking another step forward and laying a comforting hand on his shoulder, careful not to actually touch the wilted lace collar. “You don’t at all, you - you look -”
“Like a mountain troll?” Ron supplies helpfully.
Hermione pauses, taking in Ron’s expression again. He’s miserable, and it breaks her heart. For all of Ron’s hot-headedness and insensitive chatter, he’s also good. He’s good, and it upsets her to see him this disheartened. She wonders if he was like this the first time he ever put the robes on, back in fourth year, and remembers that she doesn’t know how he was back then because they weren’t speaking. They were fighting over Viktor Krum, over something so stupid and childish that it no longer mattered, and she hadn’t been there three years ago to tell him that it would be okay.
Well, she’s here now.
“You look wonderful,” Hermione says with a smile. “Very handsome.”
She can see the pink spots that blossom on Ron’s cheeks, and there’s a hint of a smile there that she’s pretty sure he’s trying to hide from her. He rolls his eyes, but she can already tell that she’s said the right thing. “You’re mad, you realize that?”
She smiles again. “Barking. Now can we get down to the wedding? You’ll miss the whole thing if we don’t hurry up, and then you’ll never get another kiss on the cheek from Fleur again. And wouldn’t that be a tragedy?”
“Completely,” Ron agrees. He’s smiling outright now, and when Hermione tentatively slips her hand into his, he holds on tight. “Let’s go to the wedding.”
Fic 1: 889/30 = 29.6 30
Fic 2: 820/30 = 27.6 28
= 58 points for fic
+ 10 bonus per fic
= 78 POINTS FOR HUFFLEPUFF!
Janna/Hufflepuff
Rating/Warnings: PG
Characters/Pairing: Neville/Ginny
Summary: On Neville's first New Year's Eve, he gets a little swept up in tradition.
Word Count: 889
Author's Notes: I love countdown fics! Also, in my mind, Harry and Ginny aren't together when this fic takes place. Just go with it.
Registered purchases?: Both!
“Ten!”
Neville looks around him at the lights, the people all holding drinks and yelling in unison. The music has stopped and the large screens along the wall - Hermione called them telly-visions, he thinks - all show the same old man holding a black stick, confetti and a sparkling ball nearby as he helps the people in the bar count. He’s not quite sure what to make of this Muggle tradition, this New Year’s Eve. It seems like an awful lot of fuss for one stroke of midnight.
“Nine!” Everyone in the room is shouting, holding their drinks in the air and slinging their arms around their friends, and Neville has to force himself not to cover his ears.
He was honestly surprised to even be invited. Now that they’ve all left Hogwarts, are a year or two into their actual careers, he isn’t in touch with his school chums as much as he used to be. Not that any of them ever really wrote him letters over the holidays or anything - none except Ginny Weasley, actually. And it was Ginny who’d sent him an owl two weeks prior to this, with an invitation to go out with a group of the kids from Hogwarts that evening.
It’s something called New Year’s Eve, she’d written. It’s a Muggle thing, at midnight on 31 december. Hermione and Harry told us about it. Everyone goes out to a pub and has some drinks and celebrates when the clock strikes midnight. It’s a little bizarre, but that’s Muggles for you. Loads of us will be there. Will you come?
Neville had sent his owl back right away. Absolutely.
“Eight!” A girl somewhere to Neville’s left shrieks obscenely loudly.
He’d researched this New Year’s Eve at once, of course. Neville had always been good with books - they’d kept him company on many evenings by the Gryffindor fire when loads of others were out at Quidditch practice or running around the grounds. He’d never been a good student - his Gran called it performance anxiety - but he liked to read. He liked the feel of the pages, the warm covers, the way the words jumped off the page and remained in his mind. It wasn’t hard to find a book about Muggle customs, and New Year’s Eve had a three-page section.
It seemed to be just what Ginny had described - parties with alcohol and loads of people, and a loud countdown to midnight, when the clock would click over and signal the beginning of a new year. He’d been curious as to what happened once midnight arrived - did everyone simply cheer, pack up, and go home? All that hoopla for nothing?
But the third page provided him with the answer - At midnight, the book said, everyone cheers, drinks, and seals the New Year with a kiss from that special someone.
“Seven!”
Neville has no special someone, and, he figures, won’t be expected to kiss anyone. And it’s rather likely that no one will even think of trying to kiss him. And under normal circumstances, that would be just fine with him.
Except this isn’t normal circumstances. This is New Year’s Eve.
And this New Year’s Eve, Neville wants to kiss Ginny.
“Six!”
He casts a quick glance at her as the countdown gets louder. She’s holding a bottle of something in her left hand and her arm is linked with Hermione’s. She’s grinning and her cheeks are flushed, her hair a little mussed on the right side, and Neville thinks she looks beautiful.
Ginny always urged him, ever since early on in their Hogwarts years, to be bold. You’re so wonderful, Neville, she used to say to him as they studied together in the library, the night growing darker all around them. If you’d just man up and go after what you want every once in awhile, I bet you’d get it.
So Neville did. Neville manned up and invited her to the Yule Ball. The two had quite a good time, dancing until long after most people had left the Great Hall, and everything seemed promising. But then she started dating Michael Corner, and Dean Thomas, and Harry Potter, and somehow, Neville became a distant memory.
He wants to remind her.
“Five!” Ginny cries, and before Neville can think about it, before he can talk himself out of it, he grabs her arm and tugs.
“Neville!” she says, and she looks happy to see him. “What is it?”
“Come here,” he urges, and Hermione stops before she can yell “four!” to watch them.
“Neville, it’s New Years!” Ginny gestures at the room a little wildly, and Neville catches her hand.
“I know,” Neville says, “please come here.”
“Three!” The crowd is getting louder, the numbers getting closer to zero, and Neville starts to panic. Now or never, he thinks. Now or never.
“Two!”
“Neville, what -”
“One!”
And as the crowd counts down around them, Neville pulls her away from Hermione, wraps an arm around her waist, and kisses her.
Happy New Year.
Title: Dress Robes
Rating/Warnings: PG
Characters/Pairing: Ron/Hermione
Summary: Ron would rather hide out and miss his brother's wedding than show his face wearing those dress robes again.
Word Count: 820
Author's Notes: Idk. I love them.
Registered purchases?: Both!
Hermione has never been to a wedding before. Not unless she counts her Aunt Lucy’s when she was six, and she doesn’t. She’s seen photos of herself in a pale blue dress, far poofier than any dress should be, gingerly holding the hands of her cousin Albert as they were forced to dance together for their parents’ amusement. She’s heard stories of how her Uncle Richard’s friend Gary spent three hours downing red wine and then knocked a full glass over the bride’s dress, heard all about how Aunt Lucy screamed at him and dissolved into tears right there by the bar. She knows the wedding happened, but she doesn’t remember it. It all sounds like a big disaster, anyway.
She hurries up to the top floor of the Burrow, Fleur’s yells from the main floor following her up, and cringes. So far, this wedding’s shaping up to be a big disaster as well.
Hermione raps on the door. “Ron?”
There’s no answer, and she shifts impatiently. “Ron, I know you’re there! The wedding’s in ten minutes and Fleur’s simply having a conniption that one of the groomsmen isn’t down in the garden with Bill yet.” She pauses for a moment, and then calls again, “Ron?”
When he still doesn’t answer, she pushes the door open.
Ron is there, just as she knew he would be, and she’s immediately miffed that he’d ignored her. All his family wanted was to get through this happy occasion without any problems, and here he is, hiding up in his bedroom like a selfish prat. Hermione opens her mouth, prepared to give him a piece of her mind.
But she pauses. Ron’s in front of a full-length mirror that she didn’t realize he owned, twisting this way and that. She follows his eyeline, watching as he scrutinizes his dress robes. He’s picking at the lace cuffs and has his nose wrinkled at the smell of mould coming from the fabric. He looks, she realizes, absolutely miserable.
“Ron?” she says, her tone softer this time. She takes a tentative step towards him. “Your mum’s looking for you.”
“Bloody dress robes,” he curses, muttering angrily as he shakes out the sleeves. “Mum spends dozens of Galleon’s on Bill’s outfit and on all the food and on this whole party, but she can’t even bother getting her son an outfit that doesn’t make him look like an ancient sofa.”
Hermione remembers their fourth year, remembers Ron’s mortified expression as he had to enter the Great Hall in those very same dress robes. Ron doesn’t have a lot, she knows this, and it seems a little unfair that he’s saddled with ugly clothes on top of everything else.
“It’s not so bad…” she hedges, and even as the words leave her mouth, she knows they can both hear the lie within them. They’re horrible, and they both know it.
“I look like a troll,” Ron grumps.
“You don’t!” Hermione says quickly, taking another step forward and laying a comforting hand on his shoulder, careful not to actually touch the wilted lace collar. “You don’t at all, you - you look -”
“Like a mountain troll?” Ron supplies helpfully.
Hermione pauses, taking in Ron’s expression again. He’s miserable, and it breaks her heart. For all of Ron’s hot-headedness and insensitive chatter, he’s also good. He’s good, and it upsets her to see him this disheartened. She wonders if he was like this the first time he ever put the robes on, back in fourth year, and remembers that she doesn’t know how he was back then because they weren’t speaking. They were fighting over Viktor Krum, over something so stupid and childish that it no longer mattered, and she hadn’t been there three years ago to tell him that it would be okay.
Well, she’s here now.
“You look wonderful,” Hermione says with a smile. “Very handsome.”
She can see the pink spots that blossom on Ron’s cheeks, and there’s a hint of a smile there that she’s pretty sure he’s trying to hide from her. He rolls his eyes, but she can already tell that she’s said the right thing. “You’re mad, you realize that?”
She smiles again. “Barking. Now can we get down to the wedding? You’ll miss the whole thing if we don’t hurry up, and then you’ll never get another kiss on the cheek from Fleur again. And wouldn’t that be a tragedy?”
“Completely,” Ron agrees. He’s smiling outright now, and when Hermione tentatively slips her hand into his, he holds on tight. “Let’s go to the wedding.”
Fic 1: 889/30 = 29.6 30
Fic 2: 820/30 = 27.6 28
= 58 points for fic
+ 10 bonus per fic
= 78 POINTS FOR HUFFLEPUFF!
Janna/Hufflepuff