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Ron stared at the goose. The goose stared at her.
"No," she said, pointing accusingly at the wretched bird. "No, absolutely not. I'm not having any of your mad bullshite."
The goose reclined its head to stare up at her at a better angle. It was the most goose a goose could look; the pure white body, the orange beak and legs, the long, slender neck, the beady black eyes. Nothing about it stood out as strange except for the fact that it was here in the girls' dorms, patiently waiting for Ron by her bed.
Still, despite its utter placidness and normalcy, she knew exactly what this stupid bleeding bird was. It wasn't a prank from one of the twins - it was a prank from fate itself.
The Soulmate Goose.
Poetry was written of it. Romances were written of it. The ones who seemed to get the closest to the reality of this goose were the madcap comedies written of it. Not all who fell in love had a goose come by, and Ron had dearly hoped to be one of the lucky souls who never met a magic goose.
There were, Ron knew, many parables and philosophical ruminations derived from the fact that the magic-blessed guides to true love arrived to their subjects as loud, angry, bitey arseholes with a honk that could shake the heavens and bills full of freaky sort-of-teeth they intended to use. There was much ink spilled about the righteousness of suffering for love, the symbology of geese and romance, the appeal of shared trauma to bring two souls together.
Ron was pretty sure it was just because Fate was a bastard that enjoyed laughing at her specifically.
The goose honked.
She squinted back, attempting to somehow point even harder and with more ferocity. "Don't. Do. Shite."
"Ron, who are you - ?"
Hattie paused as she emerged from the bathroom where the rest of Ron's dormmates were, still half-way through rubbing her hair into an even bigger mess than usual with a towel. She stared at the goose.
"Why is there...?"
"I don't know," Ron said, dropping her pointing finger. It certainly looked very stupid to be pointing at a goose from an outside view. "I'm not even in love with anyone!"
The trouble with declaring you weren't in love with someone was that it was impossible to say it in a way that didn't sound like you were desperately and undoubtedly lying. Hattie paused her goggling at the goose to shoot her a disbelieving look.
The goose quacked. There was something menacing about that quack.
"I'm not!" she insisted to the both of them.
"What's a goose have to do with you being in love?" Hattie asked. "Did Fred and George float that thing up here?"
"You don't know?" Ron said, perplexed.
"I don't know if don't know, Ron."
"It's the Soulmate Goose." She ignored the goose waddling a few inches closer for the sake of her sanity.
"Soulmate... goose..." Hattie repeated. A look of enlightenment crossed her face. "...that wasn't a joke Seamus was playing on me?"
“Why’d you think it was a joke?”
Hattie’s eyebrows rose, refusing to dignify that with any verbal response. Ron reflected that yes, perhaps a Soulmate Goose would sound stupid to someone not raised on stories of it appearing to encourage - read: menace - young yet-to-be-couples.
She was distracted from this rumination by the goose coming dangerously close to her feet. “I said don’t do anything, you blasted bastard! I’ll punt you!”
The goose jabbed her in the leg with its bright orange bill, drawing blood. Ron jumped back on one foot, cursed a storm, and promised herself she’d hex the damn thing once she dug her wand out from under her bed covers. In the meantime, she attempted to punt the stupid bird.
It easily hopped to the side with a honk, dodging her kick.
Hattie laughed at her misfortune. Ron was going to hex her too.
“What is that?” Hermes said, staring at the thing toddling after Ron’s footsteps.
After several more attempts to punt the bird, with the fourth one resulting in it starting to fly around the dorm room, Ron had then attempted to, in order: banish it with a banishment charm on the reasoning that it was a spirit and not a living thing, grab it by the slender neck and throw it out the window, and shove it into an old hat box and lock it away.
None of these plans succeeded in anything but inviting the rest of the girls to notice the new goose in their room and tease Ron endlessly. She also succeeded in being wounded again. A goose bill shouldn’t be sharp, Ron felt, but the Soulmate Goose obeyed no mere rules of reality, and scratched and bit her legs anyway. Escaping downstairs was her only option at that point.
“Y’ever seen a goose before, Hermes?” Ron snapped.
“I - yes , I’ve seen a goose before,” he said. “What’s it doing here?”
The goose locked eyes with Hermes and let out an outrageously loud honk, flapping its wings in his direction. Hermes took a step back, looking properly menaced. The goose was not pleased with this response, honking louder.
Several other Gryffindors, still struggling to stay awake this early on a weekend morning, glared in their general direction for the noise. Glad to see it already doing its job of being an arsehole, Ron thought glumly.
This was her life now.
“Is this Fred and George’s fault?” Hermes said, leveling a mistrustful look at the goose. “Do I need to find a way to yell at them?”
Ron felt a sudden and bewildering need to lie to Hermes about what it was. But what did it matter to him that she had a Soulmate Goose wandering around her? She didn’t know who she was supposed to go off and be soulmates with, but it wasn’t a bad thing.
Well, it was embarrassing, honestly. She couldn’t have quite said why, but it was. Ron had suffered a lot of embarrassments with Hermes right next to her, so that wasn’t new. As long as it menaced her into the arms of her soulmate when he wasn’t around to witness it, things would be fine.
(She didn’t want him to be around for it because it was an unfortunate image. That the idea of Hermes politely congratulating her on her soulmate as a friend - and nothing more - made her feel vaguely nauseous had nothing to do with anything.)
“Soulmate Goose,” Ron said, and started breaking for the portrait hole before he asked questions of her. She was not in the mood for one of his question barrages.
As she speedwalked, she did hear his incredulous “A what?” She sped up.
And then, when she heard the loudest honk yet, a pained yelp from Hermes, and the sound of webbed feet suddenly going fast on worn stone floors, she broke into an outright sprint for the portrait.
Was it cowardly? Yes.
Ron ran anyway.
“For God’s sake, Ron!” Hermes said, also starting to run by the sounds of it. “Argh! Dammit!”
They burst out of the Common Room and into the hallways together, the Fat Lady cursing at being flung open so violently to their retreating backs. The goose behind them let out another ear-busting honk that was much, much deeper than before.
Ron chanced a look, full of dread. It had gotten bigger, now the size of a pony. Why had it gotten bigger?
“Why the hell is this thing chasing us?” Hermes demanded between gasps.
This was really not the time for wasting breath, but Hermes could hardly help himself. Ron would’ve rolled her eyes if she wasn’t busy running, so instead she shouted back, “It’s chasing me, you idiot! You’re just also here!”
“Why you, then?”
“That’s what it does!”
She turned sharply on her heel as they reached a branching hallway to go left, ordering Hermes to go right. Without checking if he had listened - if he didn’t, the consequences were his problem, not hers - Ron hurtled off. Ideally, it’d calm down and she’d just have a normal sized goose following her around again.
Or maybe she’d just run full tilt into whoever she was meant to kiss in this hallway and the whole thing would be over.
Grateful that her many chores around the Burrow and Quidditch practice had toughened her up, Ron keep sprinting away from the huge goose as its feet smacked the ground behind her. There was no need to check if it was following with those sounds echoing against the floor - the idea to split had worked, at least.
The hallway was blessedly free from other students with no classes for the day, but that didn’t mean that the situation had no spectators. Paintings gasped and laughed from their frames on the walls as she went. A few shouted congratulations. If Ron weren’t so busy being terrorized by the goose she would’ve cursed them out in return.
She ended up wrenching open one of the first doors she came across and slamming it behind herself. The goose honked furiously on the other side. Ron locked the door with a charm and backed the hell away to catch her breath.
Right. She had no plan after this.
The room she had chosen in a panic turned out to be what once was probably an old classroom. The desks were gone, but an old podium and blackboard remained. More importantly, it was a room with windows. They were tall and skinny, unfortunately, designed to make it hard to shoot arrows or spelled through them from a distance.
Ron could maybe get out of them if she squeezed. It would be a bad idea, but if she used a floating charm or summoned a broom like Hattie had against the dragon, she could make such an escape work.
That was one plan. Plan two: open the door and start throwing curses at the damn goose.
That’d be more for her own sense of vengeance rather than doing anything meaningful to the goose; it was magic. It wouldn’t care about the hexes she threw at it for too long. They might affect it briefly, but she couldn’t do much permanent damage to it.
Plan three: Wait in here for Hermes to find some goose-banishing charm and rescue her. Or a professor, but Hermes was the one who knew there was a goose after her and the only one she trusted to be able to find such a spell. Her years at Hogwarts had long taught her that professors knowing how to handle issues was extremely unlikely.
That, Ron figured, was the ideal plan. She did not have to fight a deranged Soulmate Goose today, Hermes got to learn something, and hopefully the goose would simply stay gone and she could ignore all her romantic troubles like she’d been planning to.
There was also perhaps an appealing element to the idea of Hermes specifically rescuing her. Ron did not examine that at all.
As if sensing her desire to get rid of it, the goose let out another sharp honk, and there was a heavy thud of something hitting the wooden door. Ron grimaced and attempted to reinforce the door with a spell. So maybe waiting for Hermes wouldn’t work.
She inched away from the door and to the windows, sticking a hand into it to better gauge their width compared to her body’s. Too skinny to fit through.
“Bastard,” she said aloud, half to the goose and half to Fate. Then, to the goose specifically, “I’m gonna find a way to baste and roast your sorry arse.”
Right. So. Ron tried to think through what she remembered of other stories about Soulmate Geese and how the hell they actually went about the shepherding of lovers to each other, and came up short. Romance like that had always been more of Ginny’s thing. Ron had never paid that much attention.
As far as she could recall, the goose appeared, menaced someone, and then suddenly two people started kissing. But how did those two events fit together? There had to be a third part in between that led to the kissing, right? The kissing of the right person, that was.
The only person around right now for the goose to lead her to was Hermes, who’d been forced to run away with her. And, well -
Ron felt her face go red. Was the goose supposed to make her kiss Hermes? Or was it going to run her ragged through the halls for someone else who probably wasn’t even out of bed at this point?
She found herself sort of wanting it to be Hermes. For a variety of reasons. But a big one at that very moment was that she didn’t want to sprint through half of Hogwarts to get a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend, she supposed.
Another loud thump at the door made Ron jump. She had sort of hoped the damn bird had wandered off for the moment.
With the third thump, she started to worry that the thing was actually going to get in. It probably wasn’t supposed to really try and kill her. Probably. Her, Hattie, and Hermes’s luck with things in the castle doing their best to kill them did not make her optimistic.
But then she heard shouting on the other side of the door. Shouting that she was pretty sure was coming from Hermes. Oh, damn, was her vague fantasy of Hermes coming and rescuing her actually going to come true?
Ron found herself smoothing her hair down in anticipation, which was an objectively absurd thing to do.
There was a lot more shouting, more honking, several strange sounds that were probably from spellfire, and then suddenly the door burst open. Ron instinctively whipped her wand up, so many potential curses warring to get out of her mouth that it gave her enough time to realize the thing rushing through the door was Hermes, not an angry goose.
Very glad she hadn’t hit him with a curse, she hit the door with another locking spell. It slammed shut just as the giant goose tried to jam its head through.
Hermes took a second to hunch over, hands on his knees. He gasped for breath.
He looked extraordinarily harried, his hair a wild mess of curls, his tie completely gone. As he stood back up, Ron noticed that his uniform was ruffled and several buttons on his shirt had been popped off, showing his chest. Going off the bite mark on the edge of the shirt, it was due to the goose tugging him around.
Hm. Maybe the goose was good for something.
Now with his breath back, Hermes marched up to Ron. He stopped inches away from her, raising his chin to glare right at her. His hair fell in his face. His eyelashes, Ron suddenly noticed, were quite long. They gave him a doe-like look even as he scowled.
“You were supposed to run away,” she told him, because that had been her plan.
“I wasn’t going to leave it alone with you!” he said. “What. Is. That. Thing?”
“A goose,” she reminded him.
“Don’t play stupid, Captain Obvious!” he snapped, wild-eyed. “I’m going to kill your brothers.”
Ron found herself in the extremely strange position of defending Fred and George. She did not enjoy it. “It’s not their fault. Soulmate Geese just sort of…happen.”
“Explain.”
“It’s a goose. It leads you to your soulmate.”
Hermes glared harder. Ron threw her hands up. “I dunno what to tell you! That’s the truth!”
There was a loud honk from behind the door. They both winced.
He brought his hands up to rub at his temples with a sigh. Ron noticed a few bite marks on his arms as he did so. Never mind what she had thought about the damn thing a minute ago - the bird could go to hell.
She grabbed his arm before he could ask another question, turning it over and brushing her fingers along the skin of the wounds. She could not help but notice the smoothness of that skin outside of the wounds. Hermes had opened his mouth, but at her touch he abruptly closed it, his shoulders inching up slightly.
“Bastard,” she muttered again, rubbing a bruise she found lightly with her thumb.
Hermes continued to hold himself stiffly, then cleared his throat. “Er - back to the point. How is that… thing …supposed to make you meet your soulmate?”
He sounded deeply dubious of the whole affair. Ron couldn’t blame him.
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “Best I remember, it’s that it shows up, chases people, and then two of ‘em kiss? I can’t say how it gets to the last part.”
“Seriously?” he said.
Ron shrugged. “I never paid attention to love stories.”
“Right. Well.” He frowned. “So do we just let it chase you straight to someone else? Who’s your soulmate, anyway?”
His voice became almost accusing by the end. Ron leaned back, eyes narrowing.
“Well, I don’t know, do I?” She was getting tired of repeating this point. “I wouldn’t need the goose if I did!”
Hermes groaned in frustration. Ron felt that if anyone had the right to groan, it was her.
“...maybe,” he said slowly. “Maybe we should let it lead you wherever you need to go?”
“No,” she said.
He crossed his arms, yanking one away from her hold to do so. “Don’t just say no! It’s not like we can do anything else, can we? Have you ever heard of someone getting rid of the goose?”
Ron thought long and hard. “...no.”
“There you have it. You’ve got to let it send you off to your soulmate.” Even as he spoke, he sounded supremely unhappy with the idea.
Ron was also unhappy about it, to be fair. She felt more entitled to that, considering she’d be the one chased all about by a goose in this plan. Hermes got to just wander back to bed if he liked. Ron wanted to go to bed and pretend this was all a bizarre dream.
“Do I have to?”
Hermes snorted, pushing past her to examine the windows. She turned to watch him come to the same conclusion about the dimensions of the windows as she had.
“Unless you want to be stuck here for the rest of time, yes,” he said.
There was more rattling and thumping at the door. A loud creak, too. Both of them ignored it to continue arguing.
“Who do you think could be your soulmate?” he asked snippily, squinting down towards the grounds like there would miraculously be someone he could signal to have them. “Which house would they even be in?”
“Well, if they were in Gryffindor, you’d think we’d’ve stayed there,” she said. “To hell with it, I hope they're a Hufflepuff so I can drag the damn thing into the kitchens and get them to make a pie out of it.”
“Do not make the House Elves deal with that thing - ” Hermes started severely, like Ron was serious somehow. He turned to look at her as he spoke.
He stopped, eyes wide.
Ron couldn’t help the embarrassing shriek that burst out of her as a huge goose bill jabbed itself into her back. The force of it pushed her forward, and she fell onto Hermes. He let out his own shout as her face slammed into his face and they both crashed to the ground.
Hermes had instinctively thrown his arms around her in panic as they started to fall, and he squeezed her with a sort of shock. She had grabbed his head during the fall, alarmed at him hitting it, so she was cradling the nape of his neck. Her hair was probably covering most of his face and getting in his eyes.
Their lips pressed together. Ron was suddenly and acutely aware that a lot of their bodies were pressed together, but their lips were the most important point.
It was the least romantic thing possible, despite the posing.
If Ron had been asked to imagine kissing her soulmate due to the goose, this was not what she would’ve pictured. But. Well. It had made them kiss.
There was a loud, triumphant honk from somewhere above them. Then an odd popping sound, and suddenly white feathers were covering everything.
Ron’s brain took to the slow, arduous task of getting up and running again. Once it did, she rocketed up, dragging a startled and dazed Hermes with her.
“That’s IT?” she shouted to the empty space where the goose had been. “A fucking bludger could’ve done the same thing, you bastard! What the hell was the point of you!”
“Uh,” said Hermes. "Could we..."
“We’ll get back to that,” she said, too furious to be embarrassed yet.
Then she started cursing the goose out in full. Every condemnation and filthy indictment she could dream up. Turning the air absolutely cerulean blue. Hermes stared at her for a long pause, then started offering up creative jinxes and curses to her rant.
So perhaps the goose had the right idea.