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It was a very hot summer night in the Burrow, which meant that Ron’s room, sat at the very top, was still humid despite her mother’s attempts as cooling charms to help things. Hermes was sure that without them, all three of them would be cooked through come the morning.
Technically, it should have been the two of them—them being Ron and Hattie—instead of three, as Hermes was bunking with Percy instead. Percy went to bed very early, so it had been easy to sneak back up to Ron’s room so they could keep talking.
Hermes wasn’t even sure what Mrs. Weasley was so worried about happening if they slept in the same room together, and tried not to think too hard about it. He also resolved not to mention the several times that Ron and Hattie had just stayed over in the Boys’ Dorm after studying and talking into the later hours to her.
At first they played rounds of cards after Hermes snuck in, and then he got to watch and cheer on Hattie when the two girls played a couple heated rounds of chess; he did not cheer for Ron mostly because she certainly didn’t need it, but she complained about it anyway even after he told her that. Then Hattie, tired after a rousing game of flying chase that occurred in the afternoon, went to sleep.
That left Ron and Hermes to chat with hushed voices as they roasted on the floor of the bedroom, thoroughly kept awake by the heat. Somehow, they got on the topic of names.
“My mum and dad had this whole thing going about who was going to name each kid, we still don’t know how it really worked,” Ron said. “Point is, Dad named me, Ginny, and Percy, and Mum named the rest, and you can kind of tell.”
Hermes could tell. Now that he thought about it, “Percival”, as he had once heard Mrs. Weasley call him, did not quite fit with names like William, or Charles, or Fred and George, some of which he only knew because they were written on the location clock that way. Ginerva and Rhiannon didn’t either.
Ron must have been able to see this realization on his face, because she smiled. It formed strange shadows on her face in the darkness. “Yeah, it’s noticeable once you hear about it. Dad, he loves all of the stories of King Arthur and the Knights, I could probably tell you half of them right now with all the times he read them for bedtime stories. So he wanted to name all of us after Knights and stuff, but Mum didn’t let him.”
“What about you then?” he said.
Hermes was pretty sure Rhiannon wasn’t a part of Arthurian myth, unless the wizarding tales were different. They might have been.
“Well, the only important ladies in the tales outside of Guinevere were Morgan and Morgana,” said Ron. “Which would be a bit like naming some sorry bloke Merlin. Mum told Dad I’d be snapping my head around every time someone swore, so he picked a name from a different set of myths he liked.”
Hermes stifled a smile. That would be an ordeal. “I suppose that makes sense.”
Ron shrugged. “Turned out not to matter, really, since the only times anyone calls me Rhiannon anymore are Mum when she’s mad or whatever old aunt or uncle is mailing us this month.”
“Why does everyone call you that?” It was something he’d been wondering.
“Both Fred and George couldn’t say my name when they were younger, and ended up calling me 'Rha-non’ and when they figured out that’s just Ron with an extra letter they dropped it for Ron. Mum was really mad about that, apparently, because she didn’t think it was a good nickname for a girl. But once everyone else started calling me that she couldn’t get them to stop.”
“I’d have been annoyed in her place,” Hermes said, amused. “There’s this kid I’ve got with a pretty name and now everyone’s calling her Jim or something.”
Ron paused to giggle. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Anyway, Dad didn’t care and called me Ron from the start, too, and later he told me that if I was a boy I was gonna be named Ronald and probably called Ron anyway, so really we’d just gone full circle by accident,” she said.
Hermes tried to picture her as a boy. It wasn’t that much different—he couldn’t really imagine her being any taller or stronger than she already was, not to assume a male version would be stronger by default. Her hair might have been shorter, jaw a bit squarer, maybe.
She’d still have that wide, crooked grin.
“My mother said they’d have just called me Hermione if I turned out a girl,” he offered. “It’s the feminine form of Hermes, see, and my dad wanted me to have a Shakespearean name anyway, which it is.”
Wrinkling his nose some, he added, “And she said she would’ve liked to call me Mimi, even though it’s Her-mio-ne, not Her-mi-one or something.”
“Mimi?” Ron repeated, delighted. “Merlin, I don’t know if you’d have ever been a Mimi, even if you were a girl.”
Hermes laughed. “Yeah, Mimi sounds like someone who’s much more… girlish than I think I'd have ended up being. Probably for the best, then.”
“Hermione still would have fit.”
“Well, I’d hope so,” Hermes said. “Considering I think my actual name fits me well.”
“Ehhh,” Ron went, and Hermes jabbed her lightly in the side, which made her let out a choked laugh.
“Don’t be rude,” he told her.
Ron shoved his elbow away. “Don’t you know? It’s part of my charm. That’d be like telling Fred and George to stop smirking all the time.”
“All that’d mean is that they were planning something huge.”
“Oh, don’t remind me,” she said. Fred and George had not been smirking much the past two days.
There was a lapse in conversation, and Hermes found himself staring up at the ceiling. It was still so hot—he was very glad he had brought shorts for sleepwear, because wearing trousers in this temperature would have been tortuous.
There was a shuffling sound to his left. He looked over at Ron.
Ron had twisted herself and propped up onto an elbow, looking up at the bed where Hattie lay, asleep. There had been a protracted, perfectly friendly argument about her taking the bed instead of Ron earlier in the night. Her face took on an odd slant in the darkness of the room.
“Why d’you think Hattie’s parents named her that?” she asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” Hermes said.
A strange, heavy sadness settled into his chest as he thought about it. Was there anyone left in the world who could tell Hattie why she had been given that name? There were the old friends who sent photos for the photo album, but none of them had made any efforts to contact Hattie herself. Would they even know if she could ask them?
“Maybe…” he started. “Maybe…there was a girl in one of my years named Heather, one of her friends called her Hattie. If her mother’s name is Lily, and her aunt is Petunia, they could have thought about naming her Heather, but liked Hattie better?”
“Or maybe there’s some relative in her family tree named Hattie, or Heather, or Henrietta or something,” Ron suggested.
“They could have just liked Hattie, I suppose.” Hermes thought about those names. James, Lily, and Hattie. They all fit together. “Saw it in a book, or heard it on the street, and thought that it was a grand name for a girl.”
“Maybe,” said Ron. She couldn’t seem to find anything else to say.
He pictured the couple he had seen in the photo album tucked in Hattie’s trunk, bright and happy and so, so much younger than his parents were right now, for all they seemed much older than Hermes himself. He pictured them sitting at a table and pouring over books of names, pointing at one or two and saying how about this? or you can’t do that to our kid! He pictured them out somewhere for a day trip, someone else shouting “Hattie!” to get their friend’s attention and one of them turning to the other and going write that down, doesn’t it sound lovely? He pictured them speaking to friends with no faces who said, isn’t Hattie a pretty name?
He pictured Lily Potter saying, well, all the girls in my family are named after flowers, but Heather won’t do—!
The Lily Potter in his head sounded sort of like his own mother, because he didn’t know Lily Potter’s voice. He never would.
Hermes wanted to cry, a bit. He could feel his eyes watering.
Hattie should have been able to turn to her mother and ask why her name was Hattie. She should have lived a life where she wouldn’t even have to ask, where Ron would wake her up right now and she’d say, still bleary, oh, Dad told me once, it’s because—
But she didn't, and she couldn't, and she never would.
When he looked at Ron, he found her blinking quickly, face scrunched.
Her voice was thick when she spoke. “I wish You-Know-Who had gone for someone else.”
“That’s an awful thing to wish on strangers,” Hermes said. He understood it completely.
“Fine,” said Ron. “I wish he had offed himself, then, or one of his followers was a turncoat and killed him. Anything but what actually happened.”
“I do too.”
He reached out and took her hand; she let him.
There was silence. What else could they say?