CANDY! ✯ RON WEASLEY

ix. Detention With Ronnie

"...Oh," Madame Pomfrey replied, almost looking (pleasantly, Maddie would call it) surprised. "So... Mr Weasley, you too?"

"Yeah," Ron said with a much more gloomier tone than his detention partner. "We have to scrub the bedpans without magic,"

"Right," Madame Pomfrey. "I expect Professor Snape will be asking to make sure you both turned up - the equipment is over there in that cupboard." she nodded to a cabinet in the corner of the room. " Although, you should probably know that by now, shouldn't you, Miss Jordan?"

Maddie grinned.

"I s'pose I should leave you two troublemakers to it, I'll do my best to stay out of the way,"

"Thanks, Miss," Maddie nodded with a smile. Ron seemed to wait for her to move first, as if needing the girl to give him a sense of direction.

"Okay," she said, striding forward to the cupboard. "I've done this detention... twice, before, I think."

She handed Ron a sponge.

"Although, I had to do it myself, and I'll tell you, it's a hell of a lot of work to do alone. How about we do - left to right? I'll do one half of the room, you do the other?"

"Uh... sure," Ron shrugged. "But... can we be quick? I don't wanna be here all night boring myself to death,"

"Alright, Ron," Maddie smirked. "Just because I get a lot of detentions doesn't mean I enjoy them - I'm just used to them. I'm not gonna spend hours here for the fun of it,"

"Er..." Ron said, before blinking. "Right. Yeah,"

"But," the young Jordan grinned, pulling out two bottles with nozzles on the end. "Who said this'll be boring?"

Ron raised an eyebrow, unconvinced, and the two teenagers got to work.

"How come Madame Pomfrey thought you were injured?" Ron asked, after a short silence. "Do you actually come here that often?"

"Yeah," Maddie replied, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. "All the time - and St. Mungos. I'm a bit accident-prone,"

"A bit," said Ron, with a snort. "Yeah alright then. List all your 'accidents' and we'll decide whether they're just a little bit clumsy or you're actually cursed - or an idiot,"

"Okay," Maddie grinned, spraying a bedpan, before pausing in thought. Ron sprayed twice, before he began to scrub. "Lee challenged me to a race down a hill once - it was a lot steeper than it looked, I'm surprised I only broke my collarbone, really... especially after all those cartwheels..."

"Well, that's not so bad," said Ron. "Just sounds like an accident, you know, when you have a fall,"

"And then one time when I was younger, I was hanging upside down by my feet from the banisters on the top of my stairs," Maddie continued.

"Let me guess," said Ron. "You fell?"

"Mhm," she nodded, turning around and grinning at the boy, who was shaking his head. "I was about... seven? I was playing a vampire-bat game. Cracked my head open,"

"Fred and George tried to make me do an unbreakable vow with them, when I was little," Ron said, after a couple minutes of thinking through his own stories. Maddie cackled.

"Really?!" she said.

"Yeah," Ron said, his lips curving upwards at the sight of Maddie's amusement. "Dad only found me when my arm was wrapped around Fred's, he went ballistic,"

"That's hilarious, Ron," Maddie snorted, picking up her equipment and moving onto the next bed. "Perhaps it's an older brother thing. I made Lee swing me around by my ankles once in circles, round and round. It was actually really fun - until we ended up being closer to the table than we thought..."