make a little birdhouse in your soul
The sight of Ron standing in his bedroom was extraordinarily disarming.
It shouldn’t have been. Hermes had watched Ron poke and prod her way through his house before they got to this point, to her grinning at his posters of old world maps and the mess of books scattered everywhere as he stood at the doorway. He had walked her here from the portkey point in a thirty minute ramble. The surreal feeling of a witch like her being in his home should’ve worn off by now.
It had, almost, when she had just been in the lower floor of the house. Her being in his bedroom stirred up the disarray of feelings again. Alongside several other more hormonal feelings.
Hermes found himself wishing he’d packed away some of the more embarrassing remnants of childhood away in his hasty spring cleaning when Ron had suggested a visit.
Such as the bird-shaped nightlight by the light switch Ron had already honed in on. She prodded it with a finger, clearly expecting it to do something.
“These plug socket things, they mean the thing attached does something, right?” she said. “This one looks like a dud. It isn’t doing jack.”
With a sigh, Hermes flipped the light switch, casting the room in as much darkness as one could manage at four in the afternoon. It was shady enough that the nightlight was obliged to light up. Ron grinned at it.
“Oh, a mini light. What’s it for?”
“A nightlight,” he corrected. “Keeps the room from being completely dark at night.”
Ron’s brows drew together for a moment, thoughtful. “Like how my mum would make us magic candles when we thought boggarts were in our closets. Aw, were you a scaredy-cat as a kid?”
“Oh, don’t laugh,” he said, but it was too late.
By the tight press of her lips, she was about to laugh. Her eyes danced. Hermes couldn’t bring himself to be put-out when her being pleased with herself made her look like that in the glow of the nightlight.
“Don’t worry,” Ron simpered, voice pitched with near-laughter. She plucked the nightlight from the plug socket and set it gently on his dresser. “You won’t need him tonight. I’ll protect you from the boggarts and ghoulies and beasties and whatnot.”
Hermes sniffed. “I don’t trust any protector whose taxonomy of magical creatures is so vague. Where are your credentials?”
This time she really did laugh.
Later, he would spend time with her in his bedroom thoroughly distracted from the imagined threat of boggarts, ghoulies, beasties, or the like. In the interest of his childhood nightlight’s innocence, it was perhaps for the best that its plastic indented eyes were turned away from the bed.