Dunderhead - A Harry Potter story: Snape becomes Harry's mentor

RON

Ron Weasley was not feeling very well. 

Pressing concerns at this moment in time for him included an enormous pile of homework, a fair amount of unfinished classwork, and some general exhaustion. Ron's crankiness from a lack of sleep had made him snappy with the boys in his dormitory and, hence, had resulted in their avoidance of him and his subsequent loneliness. He had made up his mind to apologise at the next given opportunity but, in the state of mind he was in, he was rather worried that he might say something else to worsen the current tenuous relationship between himself and his dorm mates. And, to further bring home to Ron the feelings of isolation further, his twin brothers seemed to have adopted him. While once upon a time, Ron would have been delighted to be included in Fred and George's antics, he was older now. He had his own friends. The fact that only people related to him would interact with him currently made him question his popularity on an entirely new scale. He didn't need or want his brothers to excessively involve him in things to... what was it? Oh yeah, to distract him from his overwhelming aura of misery.

Ron aimed a kick at the foot of his bed. It wasn't that satisfying though because the solid structure of the bedframe didn't even wobble, and now his toe hurt a bit from the contact. Being in the boy's dormitories didn't help Ron's mood when he was constantly reminded of the absence of his best friend.

Harry's predicament was a painful topic of thought for Ron. He was aware of how acute his friend's embarrassment would be if they were returned to their true ages, and he knew that he would put a lot of effort into defending them in the future from people's comments. 

When, not if. Ron told himself angrily. Because the teachers and adults around him would find a way to reverse the effects of the de-ageing potion. They had to. Ron wasn't going to go through the rest of his education alone while Harry and Hermione slowly learned to feed and dress themselves.

The lack of Hermione's presence was playing heavily on Ron's mind too, although Hermione's absence admittedly came with the more presently pressing problem of a pile of assignments that he was unable to complete. It wasn't for lack of intelligence. Ron just wasn't... in the right state of mind to be doing homework at the moment. That was what he had been saying to his professors and they had accepted his words with sympathy. They had even allowed him some extensions. All of the Hogwarts teachers knew how inseparable Ron, Harry, and Hermione were. Ron felt like he'd lost pieces of himself in their absence. Not that his personality revolved around the presence of his friends, of course. But his interests, like Quidditch and chess, or his enthusiasms, like discussing the finer points of recent matches with others, or looking up new spells (just for the fun of trying to find something unusual to share with his friends, because old habits formed in the making of the DA died hard) had lost their appeal and their point.

Ron let out a breath of frustration and moved to sit down on Harry's bed instead of his own. And then he got up because it was Harry's bed, and he should really ask for permission to sit on it - except he couldn't because his permission came from a little boy who didn't recognise him. It was all very depressing. 

The fact that Harry was in the care of Snape with only Malfoy to keep him company was a very sore thought as well. Ron sat back down on his friend's bed and looked down at his feet, feeling despondent and gloomy. It crossed his mind that it was wholly unfair for both of his friends to have been taken from him. In their first year, Ron and Hermione had made the journey back up the third floor corridor to contact Dumbledore about the Philosopher Stone's endangerment together. In second year, it had been him and Harry against the Chamber of Secrets debacle. Ron had taken it for granted that, if one of the two of his friends was in trouble, he would have the support of the other for company. But both of his friends were incapacitated and Ron did not have any answers, or power, or great intellect, in order to help them. Ron wondered if this was the universe's way of making him aware of his weakness in their group of three. What did he, Ron Weasley, really bring to the group? Hermione was so clever, she was the brains of them all... and Harry was the human embodiment of courage, of course. But what did Ron have that he had ever brought to the group?

He drew a blank there and subsided into his feelings of misery again, looking back down at his feet in defeat. If Dumbledore couldn't return his friends back to their former selves... well, it didn't bear thinking about. Ron stood up abruptly, fuelled with frustration-

-and promptly slipped on something lying half in, half out the underside of Harry's bed.

Ron rubbed the back of his leg where he had crashed into one of the nightstands at the side of Harry's bed. He saw that he had skidded on a thin grey book. It looked like a diary and he quickly recognised it as belonging to the girl that Harry had been trying to return it to.

Feeling surprisingly angry at this reminder of his friend's past intents, of which Ron wondered if Harry would ever be able to take up again, Ron plucked the book from the floor and opened it. He skimmed through the same pages that Harry had shown to him and Hermione. He was not all that interested in the contents anymore, honestly. The girl had some personal photographs of the Potters that she, if she had any decency, would not have. Didn't she have any respect for Harry? Or did she just see Harry as The-Boy-Who-Lived-to-have-his-history-gawked-into? It aggravated Ron on Harry's behalf that they hadn't yet got to the bottom of her yet.

Well, it was a mystery of sorts. And he and his friends had so often had a bewildering set of things to work out, hadn't they? If Hermione... okay, maybe using Hermione as a comparison to himself wasn't that realistic. So, if Harry could come to conclusions about things like the dead girl from the Chamber of Secret's; identity being Moaning Myrtle as historically the first victim, or have taken the initiative to learn all of those new spells for the Triwizard Tournament, then he, Ron, could surely have a go at trying to find this girl and return her property to her. He could ask her some questions about it too, Harry must surely have had quite a few things to confront her about!

With his mind made up, and with a feeling bordering on determination, Ron left the boy's dormitories. He walked down the winding staircase to the portrait hole, glad to see that the common room was as noisy as it always was just before lunch. He had no problem going unnoticed by Fred and George as he climbed out of the Fat Lady's portrait entrance and made his way to the Great Hall on the ground floor of the school.