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"He got dumped," Dean mumbled, when the dorm door slammed.
"Ah," said Ron appreciatively, though he hadn't needed an explanation. Seamus was always getting dumped, and he tended to have the same reaction every time: flouncing into the common room, sighing dramatically when no one paid him any attention, stomping upstairs, and slamming as many doors as he could find. It got tired fairly quickly. "Who was it this time?"
"Don't know," Dean said absently, not looking up from his homework. It was fruitless to try to keep up with Seamus' various flings. "Some Ravenclaw girl, maybe. Or that could have been last week's."
"Ah," Ron repeated, and Dean merely grunted. For a best friend, Dean certainly held a large amount of contempt for Seamus, though that wasn't exactly surprising. Dean had been infatuated with him for most of first year (and second and third and fourth), and when he finally got the nerve to tell Seamus, Seamus stuttered and blushed and said things like, "it's just, your mouth," and, "we're just supposed to be friends," and, "I can't." Seamus could be a right shallow bastard some of the time. Most of the time.
Ron rested his chin in his palm, leaning heavily on his elbow as he tried to read his Divination text sideways. It was boring and stupid, and even in the diagrams, he couldn't see anything in the tea leaves, though they were supposed to be especially clear--
"What?" Dean said impatiently. His quill had skittered across the parchment, leaving a long line of black ink across his writing.
"What?" Ron asked.
"You kicked me," Dean said.
"Oh. Sorry." Ron dropped his eyes back to the text, reading and rereading the same sentence. The common room had gone quiet, silence punctuated only by the scratch of quills and the occasional sigh of frustration from one of the younger students. "Do you think I should go talk to him?" Ron asked suddenly.
Dean looked up. "Who?" he asked carefully.
"Seamus."
"I -- yes. No." Dean quirked an eyebrow at him. "I don't know. If you want." Which was, of course, the wrong thing to say, because Ron *did* want, and that was sort of the problem. "I'm sure he'll be fine," Dean continued, "since he's already gotten dumped three times this month alone."
"Oh," said Ron quietly, as if he'd forgotten. "Right." He hadn't; that would have been too difficult. He futilely resumed trying to understand the tea leaves.
*Seamus sulked and glared sullenly across the table at breakfast the next morning, but cheered up fairly quickly once Dean elbowed him sharply and said, "look you, you're scaring the first years," who did indeed look rather wary of him. Much as he liked to draw out his various break-ups, Seamus was surprisingly complacent towards the first years.
"Hermione, love," he said, cornering her in the hallway after Potions, "if you aren't busy tonight --"
"No, Seamus," she said quickly, "that's really okay," and took off after Ron.
"Why doesn't he ever ask me," Ron muttered disconsolately, and Hermione stared at him.
"You aren't serious," she said disbelievingly, and reluctantly hugged him when he nodded.
Seamus didn't really seem to have a mourning period.
*Ron felt a little foolish, because it wasn't as if he had any right to feel as if he were being denied something. Just because Seamus had been through the vast majority of age-appropriate inhabitants of Gryffindor tower, some more than once, it didn't mean that Ron was somehow entitled to have a go. Admittedly, it was something of a relief, because he didn't just want to be a fling, but he still wanted *something*.
Harry leaned over and whispered, "You do realise how pathetic this is, right?" during a particularly stupefying magical history lesson.
Ron blinked at him, snapping his mouth shut. "Wha?" he said.
Harry pointed at Ron's scroll with the end of his quill, on which Ron had distractedly scrawled Seamus' name, highlighted by the odd lopsided heart. Ron hurriedly snatched the paper off his desk and flushed furiously. Binns was apparently too enamoured in lecturing, largely to himself, about the trouncing of various magical creatures to notice that anyone had actually woken up. "No one else saw, did they?" Ron hissed.
Harry shrugged. "I doubt it," he said. "But really, Ron, that's --"
"I know," Ron said, and spent the rest of the lesson pretending he wasn't staring at the back of Seamus' head.
*Ron ended up stuttering and blushing and looking like an idiot when Seamus suggested they blow off homework for wizard chess, because apparently Ron had been, "ig*nor*ing me, and we haven't played for a while, and, so, yeah." Ron was pretty sure whatever he'd been doing to Seamus, it wasn't ignoring him.
And he thought it was fairly low that he'd take such pleasure in something as trivial as chess just to be near Seamus. In fact, that was, quite as Harry had said, pathetic. After all, he slept in the same *room* as Seamus, so it wasn't as if they were ever particularly far from one another.
Seamus wasn't even any good at chess.
"Hey, hey, come on," he whined, "you can't keep putting me in check. That's not fair."
Ron thought that what was really unfair was that Seamus could pull faces and act like a spoiled four-year-old and Ron would still find him attractive. "That's -- that's sort of the point. To win, I mean. I'm supposed to put you -- your king in. Check."
Seamus grinned. "Nervous?" he said, and moved his king out of harm's way.
Ron swiped a palm across his face; his cheeks were burning, but he didn't think he was blushing. "No," he said, and sighed. He'd probably end up having to chase Seamus' king all over the bloody board until either Seamus gave in or Ron gave up. It seemed as good an analogy as any for Ron's current pursuit, though he wasn't too sure that it really counted if Seamus didn't know he was being chased.
He checked Seamus again with a different piece. Seamus' grin had faded, and he was resting his chin on his knuckles, drumming his other hand arrhythmically on the tabletop. "This sucks," he announced, at the same time as Ron said,
"That's really annoying," by force of habit. It wasn't, though (he figured this was a sign of severe whipped-ness); it was actually sort of nice, because Seamus' hands were prettier than they necessarily had to be, and this way, Ron had an excuse to look at them.
"-- Hermione?"
"What?" Ron said, startled, but Seamus didn't seem to acknowledge that he'd even said anything. He was staring blandly at his remaining pawns -- all three -- who were squabbling around the board and had decided they were going to mutiny, because Seamus' inferior chess-playing skill was going to get them killed.
"I give up," Seamus muttered.
"What?" Ron repeated.
"I give up," Seamus said, louder this time. He flicked over one of the pawns with a knuckle, and then the king, and glanced up at Ron with a look of amusement.
"No, what'd you say before that?"
"Oh." Seamus paused and sucked his lower lip between his teeth, apparently having a poor short-term memory. Ron forced himself to stare at Seamus' remaining two pawns, who were now shrieking at their departed brother. "Oh, um, I think I said, you and Hermione?"
Ron blinked. "Um, what?"
"I said --"
"I know what you said," Ron said hurriedly. "I -- no."
"Oh, okay," Seamus said, "I was just wondering because --"
"I know," Ron said, even though he didn't. He really didn't want Seamus to finish that thought. "No."
*Very early Saturday morning, just before dawn, Ron heard Seamus flounce into the common room, make an emphatic noise at the absence of anyone there, stomp upstairs, fling open the door with a bang, and proceed to slam it very noisily. Ron peeked out from behind his curtains blearily; Seamus wasn't wearing his robe, his shirt was entirely unbuttoned down the front, and his face was a very uncomely shade of red.
"You get dumped?" asked Dean, his voice muffled. Ron hadn't even known Seamus was going around with anybody.
"Fuck off," Seamus said.
"Who was it this time?" Harry asked.
"Can we go back to sleep?" groaned Neville.
"Yes, Neville," Seamus said, and flung himself onto his bed, fully clothed. Ron pulled his curtain shut and rolled over, burying his face in his pillow.
*Seamus ended up not going into Hogsmeade that weekend, even though he was among the few seventh year Gryffindors for whom the novelty still hadn't worn off. He spent the better part of the afternoon writing an essay for Defense Against the Dark Arts, which Ron supposed was a good indication that something was really wrong. Seamus rarely did his homework until late Sunday night, at which point he usually ended up wheedling Dean into helping, which meant Dean would do most of it for him. And Dean wasn't anywhere in sight.
Harry left Ron alone some time mid-afternoon, because he was sick of watching Ron gaze soulfully at Seamus across the room. ("I wasn't!" Ron protested. "Nobody 'gazes soulfully'; that's just garbage they make up for cheesy Muggle romance novels!" Then he thought maybe he had protested too much.)
But there was something vaguely comforting and pleasing and, okay, really bloody hot about Seamus actually concentrating on something instead of half-assing it, and he wrote with his quill straddled between his two first fingers, which really brought out how delicate his knuckles were, and he was biting his lower lip pretty hard, which made it redder than usual, and there was an endearing sort of furrow between his eyebrows, and there was a really nice line along his throat, from the way his head was tilted--
"Ron."
Ron jumped, startled out of his unfortunate reverie. Seamus was looking at him oddly, expression sort of worried, and sort of not. "C'mere," he said.
Ron got up carefully, because his knees were a little weak ('you're really pathetic, Weasley,' he thought) and slid in next to Seamus, very pointedly not looking at him. "Wh-what?" he asked, voice pitched higher than usual, a little strangled. He could have kicked himself.
He chanced a look, and Seamus was smiling very slightly. "Do you know if anyone's upstairs now? In the dorm," he added.
Ron swallowed thickly, and thought that it went far beyond pathetic -- it wasn't like Seamus never talked to him before. "Er, no. I don't think so," he said.
"Good," Seamus said, and abandoned his work. He circled his fingers around Ron's wrist and tugged him up, "Come on." He all but dragged Ron out of the common room and up the stairs to the dorm, and before Ron could formulate some semblance of a sensical response, Seamus kicked the door shut and kissed him, hard.
Ron thought 'oh,' and 'fuck,' and 'fuck, Seamus is kissing me,' and 'holy shit,' and "stop, Seamus, don't," and pushed him away, his hand on Seamus' chest.
Seamus' eyes widened and he actually looked fairly apologetic and reproached. "Shit, sorry, I thought you wanted," he started, and then stopped.
Ron looked down, trying to regulate his erratic breathing. "I did, I do, I. Just. Not like this." He really hated that his fair skin made him particularly susceptible to blushing.
"Like th-- oh." Seamus touched Ron's chin, forcing him to look up. "Hey, hey. Ron, hey. It wouldn't be like, um, yeah. Because we're, ah, friends." He paused, then added uncertainly, "Right?"
"Yeah," Ron said quietly.
"Give me a chance, then," Seamus said. Giving Seamus a chance would be a really stupid idea, Ron thought, because it probably meant that he would be pulling another one of his post-break-up fits in a few days time, but. Oh. That would require Ron to do the dumping, and.
Ron curled one arm around Seamus' waist and kissed him.
"About bloody time," Seamus mumbled, and Ron didn't bother to ask.