He had spent the past ten minutes trying to work out the best way to describe her. Well, really it had been the past ten years, but who was keeping count?
Just when he thought that he knew Hermione better than he ever could, when he knew her bad habits, bedtime routine and favourite brand of toothpaste, she just had to up the ante. It was like walking into a lake, knowing her. Every time you took a step forward, you thought that this would be the part that levelled out, but it never was and soon you found yourself up to your armpits in water and still wading.
He was beginning to think that he drowned years ago, but he just had to find out just how deep this girl went.
"What are you smirking about?" she asked suddenly, pausing in her task of rearranging the new sofa cushions again.
"Just remembering something funny," he replied as innocently as possible. She eyed him suspiciously before going back to making their horrible, cheap sofa look like a piece of furniture and not something they found in a skip.
Where was he before he was so rudely interrupted?
Oh yes - ways to describe her.
They had lived together before with Harry, but for the past two weeks, they had been living in their own shit hole of a flat above a laundrette and it had been his biggest learning curve yet.
For one, her cheery face denying that anything about their horrible flat was horrible seemed to be infallible. Even though the light in the bedroom didn't work half the time, the kitchen had a funny smell for no discernible reason and there wasn't enough space to swing a cat (or a half-cat, half-kneazel as he had found out the first night), Hermione just said they had to make it their own.
What he hadn't realised is that to 'make it their own', they had to buy a lot of cushions. And throws. And more cushions.
Even now as he watched her, trying in vain for the fifth time this week to cover the ugly pattern on the sofa, she didn't look as frustrated as he knew that she was. Any day now, she was going to explode and use magic and even then she would explain why she did it in such a way that no one would be able to accuse her of 'giving up' or any other crimes as heinous as that.
She wasn't the bookworm he had dismissed her as, or the near-perfect Goddess from his fifteen year old wanking fantasies. She was… something else. She was just real.
And not just real as in 'not a by-product of a nasty blow to the head' or some beautiful, two year-long dream - both of which he still had trouble believing sometimes - but real, as in flawed and weird and mental.
At the end of the day, she wasn't the perfect girl that he put on a podium so far out of his reach that he could barely see her; she was just a girl.
A girl who hated her hair and spent hours thinking about whether it was worth risking having it down because there was apparently a thirty per-cent chance of precipitation. A girl who had accepted it as a cold, hard, undeniable fact of nature that her legs were too short and nothing was ever going to convince her otherwise. A girl who was convinced her left eyebrow was far superior to the right and would always wear her fringe to cover up this glaringly obvious anomaly.
That was only the beginning.
Every time she picked up that book, he knew that in about six hours, he was going to have to console her as she cried hysterically because these people, who didn't exist, had died and their families, who also didn't really exist, were going to be devastated and their fictional lives were never going to be right again. Once, he had made the mistake of suggesting that she didn't read this book if it made her so upset every time she read it. She had given him a look that suggested that he had simultaneously slapped her around the face and announced he was moving to Uzbekistan to teach ducks to ballet dance.
Then there was the way that she had organised the fridge. The handle on the milk had to be facing out. There couldn't be more than three things stacked on top of each other. Things that went out of date first had to be closer to the front. Then there were the cupboards…
She physically couldn't take an odd number of biscuits out of the pack at a time. Last week, they had to have a serious discussion that lasted nearly fifteen minutes about how she wasn't hungry enough to eat four biscuits, but wanted more than two. His suggestion of just maybe, this one time, she should perhaps have three was also met with the ballet-dancing-Uzbekistani-ducks look.
"Seriously, Ron," her angelic voice snapped, invading his musings, "why are you staring at me like that?"
He shrugged because he knew it would annoy her and one of his favourite past times was watching the Queen of Propriety slowly crumble and become a frizzy-haired banshee over tiny things that didn't matter. Sure enough, she frowned, tensed her jaw and flexed her fingers before making a noise like Crookshanks, whipping out her wand and transfiguring the sofa so that it was chocolate brown and had dumpier cushions to sit on.
She threw herself onto the sofa and snuggled up to him, still looking moody.
And he waited.
And waited.
And wai-
"It just makes more sense to transfigure them," she said matter-of-factly. "This way we can use these cushions for the spare room. I mean, this takes up most of the space in this room and it's the first thing people see. We'll be sitting on it every day. It's important that it looks nice. Plus I'm sure we'd end up with back problems if I hadn't added the extra padding."
"Of course, love."
He kissed her on top of her head and smiled because not only was she flawed, weird and mental; she was real and she was his and he really couldn't have asked for more.