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It starts on Halloween, it starts with a troll, it starts with a girl’s bathroom.
No.
Before that, it starts with a shared train compartment, it starts with leftover corned beef sandwiches and chocolate frogs. They are the hypotenuse; the original, the beginning.
Ron is eleven and too young to notice the violent shudder that sizzles through Harry when Ron touches him. He claps him on the shoulder when he gets into the Quidditch team and passes him the butter at breakfast, nudges him during class to look at the girl in the front with her hand in the air. He lives in a household full of physical contact. He doesn’t bother to ask whether Harry does, too.
He does, though, notice the nightmares.
They’ve all got their sleeping habits. Dean is the quietest; wouldn’t even know he’s there if he doesn’t wake up every three hours or so to get water or to go to the bathroom. Seamus tosses a lot, both before he falls asleep and during the night. Ron can hear the huffs of exasperation as he can’t get to sleep and the re-positioning of the pillows, the crinkle of the duvet. Neville snores, but they’re muffled because he sleeps on his stomach with his face in the pillow. Ron knows he himself snores, too; got a lot of crap from the twins for it. He likes the hangings open, usually, so he can make out the surroundings of the room like he’s worried everything’s going to disappear.
And then there’s Harry. Harry yells. The first night, it was just wordless shouts and gasps that could be attributed to any old nightmare. The second night, he yelled names, Petunia and Vernon and Dudley, interspersed with no and stop, please and please, please, please. The third night was the scariest. The third night, Harry cried. Ron knew he wasn’t awake because he started to thrash, something he’d already learned Harry didn’t do in the moments before sleep. It was discomforting, too, to see him the next morning and wake up with the biggest smile on his face Ron had ever seen, knowing he’d been weeping just hours before.
He’s eleven and doesn’t really know anything should be done about it, investigated for Harry’s own sake; he’s just curious, is all. And Ron comes from the sort of family where if you’re curious about something in particular, chances are someone’s going to know enough to help. So, he figures Harry’s the one, here, and addresses it at breakfast.
“You were yelling in your sleep,” he says, spooning more cinnamon and sugar onto his oatmeal than necessary. He doesn’t mention the crying; that feels far too strange to ask about.
Harry shoulders immediately hunch forward and his hair falls in his face like a curtain. “I’m sorry,” he says, quickly.
“I don’t care, nothing keeps me up. I have six siblings, remember?”
“Oh, yeah.” Harry looks at his plate. “Sorry, though.”
“Who’s Petunia and Vermin and Dudley?”
Ron doesn’t notice but Harry goes all white and small. He’s too busy grabbing another pitcher of pumpkin juice for the both of them.
“My Muggle family,” he says. “They… I guess they didn’t like me very much.”
“Oh,” Ron says. “Well, I like you loads!”
Harry grins. “Yeah?”
“Yeah!”
In class that afternoon, Ron leans over to scrawl some anti-Binns graffiti on Harry’s parchment. Their arms touch; shoulders. Harry closes his eyes and stays very still.
There are prison bars on Harry’s bedroom window, a cat flap inset in the door. Harry doesn’t take his jumpers off when they play Quidditch; Ron can see the sweat that sticks his hair over the scar. He doesn’t link these two things together, he just notices them.
Molly says not to ask him about anything, so Ron doesn’t. He is used to the nightmares, now, all the Gryffindor boys are. They don’t talk about it. Ron mentions it to Hermione and her lip quivers. The next day, she inexplicably gives him a hug in the corridor. Ron watches him seize and his eyes snap shut, his hands balling into fists at his side.
Just to try it, Ron gives him another hug, a couple of days later. Harry raises his arms, embraces him back.
Ron doesn’t know what it means, not really, but he knows he is special.
A Quidditch injury and missing bones and the hospital wing. Pomfrey sets Ron the task of helping Harry change into his pyjamas. Ron’s got so many brothers that he’s used to half-dressed boys running around, used to take baths with Fred and George when they were little. There’s this lake near The Burrow and sometimes they all go in, not bothering with swimming trunks on hot, summer days. Ron isn’t fussed.
But Harry raises his good hand and says, “the bludger. It. Did a clean job.”
“Yeah,” Ron says, impatiently, “I was there.”
Harry’s eyes are pleading, but Ron doesn’t know what to give him.
He undresses him. The bruises from the match are ink-flowers, blooming under his pale skin. God, Harry’s thin. Ron can see his ribs on the inhale; could probably count if he wanted to. There are more scars, less famous ones; on the inside of one of his forearms, on his shoulder. Ron’s got a fair few himself, though.
But Harry—closes up. Ron can see the tension in his muscles, jaw clenched and breath quick, and Ron literally has no clue why and feels so unmistakably guilty that he can’t look Harry in the eyes.
When he and Hermione leave the Hospital Wing, only ushered out by Pomfrey at the latest hour, Ron cries. He doesn’t know why. Hermione throws her arms around his neck, and it’s the first hug he thinks they’ve ever shared. Her hair smells like honeyed shampoo, and she lets him cry into her robes evern though he has to bend to do so and she stands on her tiptoes.
This is the first time they say to each other, he is so very hard to look after.
This is the first time they say to each other, I need you so I can help him.
This is the first time they say to each other, help me.
Hermione has never thought of herself as selfish. She used to save up all her loose change through the year and give to the Salvation Army at Christmas. In primary school, when they had to write down what they wanted most, she said world peace.
But when they find out Sirius is after Harry, her first thought is don’t die. I can’t be alone again. Not because of his own life, or even a less-selfish selfish reason like I’ll miss you if he catches you. No; she just can’t bear to be alone. She chalks this thought up to over-exhaustion. She has three essays due tomorrow and two chapters to still get through.
When they stop talking to her, because of the Firebolt, because of Scabbers, and she gets left alone anyway. She cries for two days straight. Hagrid makes her tea and rock cakes, but it isn’t the same, of course it isn’t. She watches them across the Hall as she bend her head in her books, and she is filled with a fury and terror so intense she fingers the chain around her neck. One night, she nearly turns it, enough to never hand in the Firebolt at all, maybe never to even buy Crookshanks. But she’s too prideful, too responsible, and she thoroughly hates herself for it. Instead, she brushes the tears out of her eyes and says to herself, next time, you will not get used to it.
But they take her back, and she does.
Ron grows over the summer. When she sees him at the World Cup, his shoulders are broad and his hands are big and clumsy. Under the fireworks, the green dappling his pale skin to grass, she thinks he might be beautiful. She likes the way his eyes light up as he watches the players. Even Harry looks at him in awe when he talks about the different plays and teammates and fouls. But then again, Harry’s always looked at Ron like he’s the sun; like he invented the very star, birthed it from his own hands and hung it in the sky just for him.
For the first time, she thinks about kissing him. Not for the first time, she feels jealous, though of what she isn’t sure.
When Ron doesn’t believe him, when Ron leaves him, he thinks he’s going to die. He lies awake and feels the exact line through his chest where his heart has broken, cracked like marble through his skin.
At the same time, he has never been more grateful for Hermione. These weeks are a lesson in her; he has never paid attention to the way she grazes her fingers over lips when tackling an assignment, or the way she rolls her quill, or, when she’s really inspired, she rocks a little, back and forth almost with the movement of the words, the syntax like a heartbeat or a spasm. The way she smiles all teeth, or the way her skin is so soft when he lets her squeeze his arm, just once, before the First Task. The way she stayed.
He thinks maybe she'll always be.
When Viktor Krum takes her to the Ball, he thinks perhaps not. It isn’t Viktor who tests this, but Ron.
He tries not to think about it.
He tries to kill himself, after the graveyard, Hermione doesn’t sleep and stands outside the boy’s dormitory all night, ear to the door to listen for—for what, she doesn’t know. What does it sound like when someone slits their wrists?
After they carried him to the Hospital room, when Pomfrey lay him down on the bed and sutured his wounds shut like the two halves of his skin were embracing, Hermione held his hand. He’d never let her before. He’d gotten close to it, she knows: sometimes, they’ve been walking together to class and his hand twitched next to hers, his body bracing like she now knows it does before he reaches to touch. She feels guilty, she feels like she is committing a horrific act of violation, but she can’t help it. His fingers are limp but twitching with the spell. She looks at his palms and for the first and last time in her life, she wishes she were good at divination. What would be written there, she wonders. Abuse and worship in maddening cycles; all that's ever been done to him, everything he won't tell her. He is a storybook hero. Until he is not.
He’s a boy.
After Harry tries to kill himself, Ron promises that he will never let him out of his sight again.
Things go missing in his house all the time. His clothes accidentally end up in Fred and George’s wardrobe, his books in Percy’s, his knick-kacks in Ginny’s. Second hand is second nature. But here is something that is his. He can’t afford to lose it.
So that night, he thrusts apart the hanging of Harry’s four-poster and climbs into bed with him. Harry hasn’t spoken to him since it happened, has barely even looked at him, but Ron doesn’t care. He couldn’t care less if Harry never forgives him, Ron’ll be there anyway. Ron was the thing Harry would miss most but nobody ever asked about Ron’s.
He sees the muscles in Harry’s back tense up. “Go away, Ron.”
Ron ignores him, slipping under the covers and settling down.
A beat. “I’m serious.”
“Me, too.”
Harry turns over so he’s looking at Ron. “Please.” He’s got all these bones he never used to have, not even after summers, sharp under his cheeks. He looks a bit like a picture Ron once saw of an Inferi.
Ron scoots as far he can to the edge of the mattress, away from Harry. “You won’t even know I’m here,” he promises, though some part of him think Harry has lost the right to compromises like that. Harry glares at him, dark and green-eyed, and turns away again.
Ron’s exhausted, but he doesn’t let himself sleep, digging his nails into his thigh to keep awake, watching Harry all the while. He doesn’t touch him, though he’d like to, he’d like to wrap Harry in his arms and make him swear an Unbreakable Vow that he’ll never hurt himself again, ever ever ever, but he supposes he will just have to live with this.
Hermione gives Ron Muggle tours of London during their stay at Grimmauld Place. She takes him to the Tate Modern, which he pretends to like, and the Tate Classic, which he doesn’t.
“What is the point,” he asks, “if the pictures don’t even move.”
Maybe she should correct him, or chastise him, but she doesn’t.
She thinks about kissing him again.
A lot.
In the Tower of London, in one room with prisoner scratchings on the wall, he opens his mouth to point out that one of them is an actual incantation; she jumps up and presses her fingers over his mouth, biting down a giggle.
He reaches to pull her hand down, but instead trails along her wrist, breathing into the backs of her knuckles. His breath is hot but it makes her shiver. His touch is cool but it sends a blistering, soundless shriek through her veins.
That night, after Ginny has fallen asleep, she reaches down under the covers and touches herself. She makes herself come thinking about the way he says her name and thinks about how his red hair would look between her thighs.
Ginny asks her how to get Harry’s attention. Hermione’s heart breaks confusingly, in two awkward pieces. Ginny is so earnest, so beautiful, and it would make such a neat ending for her and Harry. And Ginny is nice, something Harry can never have enough of.
And besides, she thinks, uncharacteristically, sourly, he might not ever like her back.
She thinks of her dreams, where Ron pushes his hips into her over and over and over. She’s chosen. Hasn’t she?
The night of the Dementor attack, Hermione slips into Ron’s room and sits at the end of the bed.
“What if they really expel him?” she whispers.
Ron shakes his head. “Dumbledore’ll sort it out.” That’s what he’s been telling himself for the past few hours. Hogwarts without Harry. It doesn’t make sense in his brain, he can’t comprehend it; the thought of the dorm without Harry’s sleep-sounds at night makes him anxious. At least, he thinks stupidly, at least if he hears his nightmares, he’s doing something, he’s—he isn’t sure, but the thought of Harry somewhere else, on the run or in Azkaban having the same dreams, alone, to empty walls and lonely darkness, makes him sick.
“You know what I first thought,” she says, “when we heard?”
Ron shakes his head. “Don’t, Hermione.”
“I—I thought about telling them,” she says, “the Order or—or just Sirius, or something, so they could—”
“Don’t you dare,” Ron threatens. Uncharacteristically, she quells under his gaze.
“No, I wouldn’t, you’re right, I would never, but. I just want—”
He hasn’t realised he was crying until she crawled up to meet him at the head of the bed, hesitating before thumbing at his tears. She’s so close to him in the dark, he can smell her breath. In a good way. He’s been having these daydreams, lately, thinking about how even more fucked up her hair could look if he pulled at it, ran his fingers through it.
She moves back but he grabs her wrist, turns her arm over and kisses her pulse point. He feels her inhale, sharply.
She kisses him. Her mouth is dry and he can taste his own tears, salt and bitterness and he’s never kissed anyone, isn’t sure what to do. Their teeth catch, and she pulls away and laughs, quietly; his cheeks flush and he opens his mouth to say something but she whispers, “less tongue,” and they try again. They try again and again until Phineas Nigellus coughs loudly from his frame.
They don’t tell him. He’s upset enough as it is, and Ron doesn’t want anything to change. Can’t have anything change.
One night, at Grimmauld Place, Harry can’t sleep. It’s too hot, or something, and the sheets are annoying him, and there’s a mosquito in the room, and he tosses for at least an hour before he hears it.
Short, sharp breaths coming from Ron’s side of the room. The slight creak of the mattress. The particular sound of—that.
He’s heard it before. He lives in a dorm with four other boys, none of whom are exceptionally quiet. You just pull the covers over your head, lie back and think of England. It doesn’t usually last long, anyway.
But for some reason, this is different. More intimate. Usually, you can’t tell exactly who is still awake, especially when you explicitly try to ignore the sounds. But he knows it’s Ron, now. He can hear the cadence of the grunt; if he looks to the other side of the room he can see the shadow.
Harry slips his hand down his trousers. Ron is quick, already worked up; slow down, he wants to say. Wait for me.
Ron comes seconds before him, a low sound as he does and a loud exhale. Harry bites down on the heel of his left palm, but maybe it’s not enough because Ron stills, and Harry holds his breath for what feels like years until he hears the snores from other bed.
Nothing changes the next day. Hermione looks at them like she might know but she can’t, surely. Just to be safe, he locks himself in Buckbeak’s room for the rest of the day. So, he is a poof. Uncle Vernon was right.
After they find out about I must not tell lies, Ron and Hermione sit in the common room when he’s gone to bed.
They hold hands again.
They think, for the hundredth time, I do not know how to protect him.
When Cho Chang kisses him.
There is a protective layer atop his skin that hungers for more, that cowers from it; he thinks about how normal people kiss, how his hands could cup the nape of her neck and thread through her hair. They remain at his side. When her palms brace themselves against his chest, he trembles.
At first, they all think it’s a normal nightmare. Sometimes near Christmas Harry gets worse; they’ve learned these things and have no need to speak them aloud. Even Seamus, who has decided that Harry is a liar, understands.
The first clue is the hissing. Ron pokes his head up from under the covers to look across the room. Strangled sibilance and throttled thrashes; he sees Harry’s shadow jerk, limbs jolting like someone is pulling strings.
And it lasts longer than other dreams. Ron pads over to the bed and has to choke back a scream. Harry is slick with sweat, the sheets beneath him drenched, and his mouth is starting to foam. The veins in his neck are bulging, twitching.
“It’s a seizure,” Neville whispers, from the foot of the bed. Ron looks up; the boys have all crowded around, white and terrified. “I’ve—I’ve seen them before—you have to turn him on his side, he might—he might vomit—“
Ron climbs up, grabs Harry’s shoulders. His skin is so searingly hot that its freezing. At once, Harry’s eyes snap open and he shoves Ron away so hard his chest burns. It doesn’t matter, because at first, Ron thinks it’s woken him up, but he’s still spasming, sometimes so hard his head and shoulders lift off the mattress. He screams: raw and disgusting; Ron is on his knees next to the bed like he’s about to pray.
And then he wakes.
Of course, it only gets worse. A condition of loving Harry Potter: it always gets worse.
In a DA session, Harry fixes her wandwork—the first and last time he will ever correct her; the first and last time she has gotten something wrong—and as his fingers touch her skin, he absently wonders when he allowed this. When touching her felt like touching Ron, like touching himself: as simple as clasping his own hands together.
When he holds her, in the Ministry, unconscious in his arms, her mouth open and her bones heavy. This is the punishment. When Ron spits blood. When Sirius falls through the veil. This is why he can’t choose anyone. Nobody has ever been his.
In Ron’s bedroom, the summer after, Harry lets Ron slip into his bed, lets him wrap his arms around him from behind. His breath on Harry’s neck makes him hard.
But Ron and Hermione barrel toward each other all year; have always, with the force of comets, of something cosmic and understandable and right.
One night, they kiss. Ron’s stubble scratches his jaw, and the planes of his chest are strong and lean and so boyish.
He thinks about cutting himself again, but he can’t find a private moment in the Burrow to do so. Eventually, he forgets.
On the night Ron kisses Lavender, Hermione and Harry sit in the Astronomy Tower, a bottle of Firewhisky between them. She sits against his chest, his legs bent to bracket her, her forehead on her knees and tears staining her robes. He draws shaky circles on her back with the tips of his fingers. She’s drunk. She’s stupid. She’s jealous. She says, “you never used to touch me. You never used to touch anyone.”
The patterns stop, and she feels his body tense. She mutters, “sorry,” but the suspects the damage is done.
He doesn’t answer; he shouldn’t have to, anyway, she shouldn’t have made him think about this. It’s just. Her body feels wrong and foul, like her organs have been swapped around and she is fighting to stay alive. She sees him kiss her, over and over again, Lavender with the pretty hair and small waist. She thinks about how Harry likes Ginny, how Ginny likes Harry.
Both her boys are leaving her. Hasn’t she said, for years, not to get used to this?
“Don’t think about it,” Harry whispers.
“Like you’re not,” she says, again without meaning to. For years she’s seen how they’ve looked at one another. She isn’t stupid. She knows that Ron’s stupidity about Viktor Krum wasn’t all protectiveness over her or a small crush on the only girl in close proximity. She knows that Harry’s eyes following Cedric, the grief after the graveyard, the way he spoke about his former rival champion was not all… clear cut.
Ron and Lavender, Harry and Ginny. These things she could understand, handle, maybe even live through. But the thought of Harry and Ron, together, without her, makes her want to die. It was only two months, she wants to scream. Only two months you were together before I came along. How could you have cemented something like that in two months? How could I not have any effect on the both of you?
It is too late before she realises she has said these things aloud. She is lying on the floor, the ceiling spinning, and Harry leans over her and brushes her hair out of her mouth.
“We’ll never be without you,” he says.
You already have,” she counters.
“So have you and him.”
She sits up and kisses him. “Now,” she says, against his mouth, “we all have.”
They sit at his bedside. Ron’s eyes are open but he’s white with the poison. Harry understands. He knows he is being punished, that people like him will always be punished.
He likes Ginny. He does. He likes her fire, her jokes, her laugh, on good days he likes her kisses and he likes touching her.
But sometimes, he catches the red of her hair in the light and thinks of other redheads. When he lingers on her hips, he thinks of other girls.
One other redhead. One other girl.
The summer before Harry arrives at the Burrow, before they rescue him, they never spend a moment apart.
She sleeps in his bed and dreams of undressing him; she thinks he does the same because she wakes up with a firm pressure against her leg. On the last night, he touches her through her underwear, hand locked between her thighs, stroking until she shudders. She drags her hand down the planes of his stomach, tracing the line of hair that snakes into his boxers, dipping her fingers under the band.
He wakes up to their interlocked fingers at Grimmauld Place.
He knew this was coming.
He just wishes he didn’t feel so much like the world was ending because of it. The world is ending, sure, but for different reasons.
Ron leaves.
He leaves.
He holds her while she cries. She strokes his hair through another nightmare, in which Ron calls him a faggot and leaves to get away from him.
They steal bottles of wine from Muggle shops and drink with their dinner.
They don’t let each other out of their sight after Nagini.
It’s stupid, they know; more than that, it’s unsafe. She takes the watch and he falls asleep in the cold against her shoulder. He takes the watch and she has the forethought to bring blankets from inside and curl herself up against him, head on his thigh, specks of drool inking themselves on his jeans like he could try to piece her dreams together if he read them properly. He thinks he could. He gets distracted while he’s supposed to be on guard, listening to hitches in her breath, feeling the echoes in her shoulders as her legs shift against each other under the blankets. She says his name, sometimes, softly but so thick he can’t disentangle the syllables until a second later. She says Ron’s name, too, and he shuts his eyes tight and swallows his sobs.
They do this for two days, moving only for occasional showers and trips to the bathroom. They don’t talk much. They touch, always. They hold hands, staring into nothingness, listening to twigs crack and estimating how many heartbeats they have left between the both of them. His fingertips stroke down her wrist to feel her pulse jump; he savours it, sometimes imagines he can feel it reverberate through her body against him. He’s never been possessive, but one of the things he loves most has managed to slip from his grasp and he knows, selfishly, he won’t survive if it happens again. So, he is like a child, tucking his favourite bear under his arm when he leaves the house, dragging it through the mud with him.
The locket passes between them. He wears it to sleep and wakes himself up screaming, her fingers pressed to his mouth to stifle the sounds regardless of the layers of thick silencing charms, a hand in his hair, tears sticking her eyelashes together like triangles. She wears it for the watch and he feels her body struggle with shallow breaths for hours, breaths not for function but for a show of liveliness. They are so attuned to the feel of each other that he knows the beginning of a cough from a tense in her stomach, or sneeze from the twitch of her eyebrows.
She says, “what are we protecting?”
He isn’t sure. The locket, perhaps. Not the tent, effectively abandoned for their set-up at its mouth. “I don’t know.”
She picks herself up with the blankets, takes his hand and leads him inside. His muscles ache; he feels fossilized, almost gangly with the amount of space he now has.
Hermione takes the locket off, holds it in her hand for a moment and drops it in her bag. “I’m so tired,” she says. “I’m so—“
It doesn't matter what she was going to say; he probably is, too. “I know,” he says.
He kisses her. Her mouth is cold, soft, the taste of lemon with her tea. They stumble to the bottom bunk, where she has not slept in days, and he presses her down with his hips, with his mouth on her neck; he says don’t leave with his foot hooked around her ankle and she says you don’t either with her heel pressed to the small of his back.
He’s vaguely surprised how different she is, has always been, to Ginny. He has not realised how far she has progressed in getting close to him, not consciously. He had to fight himself to allow Ginny to touch him, even when he wanted it so badly; with Hermione, he feels each touch attempt to fill a never-ending goblet. He remembers the first time he took his clothes off in front of Ginny, feeling twice-over the scars and bruises he’s been left with by other, less gentle fingers, but now he presses them into Hermione like she can swallow them up.
He’s imagined her before. There was a period in fifth year when he thought about it a lot. And recently, hearing her soft, long noises across the tent throughout the months the three of them shared, in between sleep and waking absently grinding against the mattress himself in tandem. Hearing the thin, staccato moans that let him imagine, briefly, and throw a glance over to Hermione’s side of the room, swallowed in darkness, and try to make out the shape of her; whether she was pressed against the bed as he was or with her head thrown back and fingers slid through cotton trousers. The same as when he heard Ron years back, trying to match him stroke for stroke.
But she’s the one who’s here.
Harry tucks his head between her legs, licks at her and feels something in his gut come loose when she mews, softly. The locket has fucked with the both of them; coming is harder, takes longer, but he doesn’t mind. Hermione tastes sweet and he likes when her thighs clamp around his ears when he does something good, and eventually she whispers to him “there” and “yes” and “softer, there” and “harder, here” until he feels her come against his mouth. When they’re naked, she drags her mouth over Harry, and he can feel, can see her thinking about his noises, the way his body shakes when her fingers trails over the slight of his waist or thumb at the bone of his hip. Her eyes are dark, mouth open, and it’s the same, the exact same look she gets when tackling an assignment. She scratches her name into his skin the same way she does quill on parchment.
Harry’s taps on her shoulder mean stop, I want to be inside you, and she lets him. His hips stutter on the inside of her legs, cradling his body. His hands swipe across her, every single place he can reach, and he can feel her mimicking him in his greediness to mark her so that she won’t be able to leave and her desperation to tether him to her so that he will not die like they both suspect he is supposed to.
When he comes, she wraps herself more firmly around him so that he stays, his body pulsing, his breathing fraught and Hermione’s hair slick to her forehead from the sweat. For a second, just one, just maybe two, he thinks about a baby, and running away, and never facing the prophecy but living like nomads and teaching a tiny thing to wield a wand they’d steal from somewhere. Growing old.
But he knows—they both know—it isn’t possible, not just because they are both fugitives and he is a marked man but because this is not the whole of them. And he knows, he knows how gluttonous he is to want two, to need the both of them in whatever ways they will let him but he can’t help it, and he doesn’t let himself dwell on it anyway because Ron’s gone, which means he doesn’t want Harry to need him at all.
Afterwards, Hermione traces fingers over his body, just like Ginny used to. Her eyes rest on the scars she’s just licked but she asks about them, now, and he owes her too much to deny her. Some part of him, that same possessive part, thinks ah, yes, now, I am yours, and you cannot desert what belongs to you and also some part of him just fucking wants to share this information with another human being for the first time in his life. This is perhaps the longest Hermione has ever dealt with an unanswered question, and she handles the information like she does her history. Interesting, important to learn from, but altogether nothing to be done about it, and he thanks her for it. He doesn’t need coddling, and it isn’t like her, anyway.
It’s not like things become weird after they fuck; they become un-weird from the past in which they hadn’t. They become reckless; leave the tent unguarded for him to fall on his knees before her propped on the counter or for her to pin him to the armchair with her body, her teeth on his earlobe as she rolls against him. Some nights, they curl into each other and let themselves both fall asleep, leaving the tent unguarded; he dreams of sharing these things he’s learned about her with Ron, wonders if he’d known them already. Harry’s never asked.
They start hearing things, outside the tent, outside their bubble. Where they should become more cautious, they become more and more rash. For one hour, while they wrap themselves like vines, the tent’s charms wear off and they are left to the world; they exist for this one hour, without knowing it. Her name in his mouth scares the wildlife away, familiar and velvet and so loaded it feels like an incantation.
In that hour, Ron finds them again.
Ron comes home.
She wakes up moments after the first blackout, still on the floor of the Manor. Her limbs are strikingly hot, the very bones still fizzling with the Cruciatus and tendons, muscles jumping so fast it looks like her skin is bubbling. She can’t see straight; her vision tips and wears and she doesn’t trust the sensation that nobody is touching her anymore, that they have moved on because she knows they wouldn’t unless she’s dead. Which is a possibility, and not a bad one; a relief, really, but for the boys downstairs.
Before she goes again, she pleads with nobody in particular. Please, she says, to Harry, to Ron, to god, three thoughts she thinks might all be one in the same.
She opens her eyes to Ron; his face, his smell, his arms, and she smiles before falling once more.
A bathroom—a real bathroom, the likes of which she hasn’t seen since Grimmauld Place, before the Ministry—and the feeling of someone removing her clothes. She doesn’t think; she kicks before she takes in the smell of lavender and honey, the blond hair and pale skin.
Fleur doesn’t seem fazed at all, but kneels down to where Hermione is crouched on the tiles, and smooths her hair. “You want to wash, yes?” she says, and Hermione nods. She thinks about saying, no, I can do it, but knows she can’t, and feels ashamed for when Fleur will see she’s pissed herself because of the Curse. When she will see the blood on the inside of her thighs from Greyback, his long, dirty nails, tugging at her pubic hair and telling her how her Mudblood cunt smelled.
But Fleur doesn’t say anything, and Hermione curls into herself in the warm water, dropping her head on her knees and letting Fleur wash her. It feels so motherly she wants to cry, to scream, to be kissed goodnight by her own mother, who does not even know who she is.
“Where’s Harry?” she mumbles.
“Digging the grave,” Fleur says.
Hermione screams and her vision blacks.
Finally, she wakes to a bed. Warm, heavy with blankets; so much so that she wishes she could fall asleep again, that she could die here.
It takes her a couple tries to sit up. Spots dance in front of her eyes and somebody says, “hey, it’s alright,” and eases her to sitting.
It’s Ron. He’s cleaned up, too; the candlelight falls on his skin, liming his cheeks and jaw and nose, she thinks, I love you but she says, “I thought you were dead.”
He shakes his head.
“The grave,” she presses.
“Dobby,” he replies, which makes her heart retch but there is a bad part of her, a ravenous, insatiable slice of her soul that says, yes, I have what’s mine.
She sleeps that night in Bill and Fleur’s bed, moving to a room with Luna the next day. The boys sleep downstairs, but the door creaks open at night and they slip beside her. The bed is small, but if Harry sleeps on his side and Hermione over Ron, they fit, with some legs dangling off and elbows jutting into abdomens. She isn’t sure why this has taken so long, what’s right or what’s broken now to set this in motion but she knows if she speaks to it she’ll ruin it. During the days, they plan for Gringotts, but sometimes they walk to the sea and sit in the water, letting the salt coat and twist their clothes that they now have the luxury of washing properly. She knows that the members of the house look strangely on them, not only for consorting with goblins but for touching like they do. Ron’s arms around her and his chin on her head as she ponders over which mug to use. Hermione’s kiss over the lightning scar when it starts to burn again, not bothering to chastise anymore about things like Occlumency but letting her fingers brush his jaw as he bends to let her lips to his forehead. Harry’s fingers intertwined with Ron’s on the nights they forget to venture upstairs to her bed, Harry thrown over him like she’s done so many times before, and Ron’s fingers stroking the slight of Harry’s waist like she’s also wont to do.
The world is ending and they are three; a holy set amidst the thunder that still rolls through. Hermione does want to end this war, she does, but perhaps she only wants it for them.
When she kisses Ron during the Battle, she sees the look in Harry’s eyes.
She prays; let us make it through. Let us have the chance to make this work.
Hours later, in Gryffindor tower, she hovers over Ron’s mouth as Harry pushes into him. She learns Ron’s touch is rougher, more desperate; perhaps that will fade, perhaps not. They have all the time in the world to find out.