Fic for tailoredshirt
For: tailoredshirt
From: ozma_katiebell
Title: Whatever Happens
Rating: R
Word Count: 9000
Summary: Life after the war didn’t turn out quite the way Ron expected. But perhaps that isn't such a bad thing after all.
Disclaimer: Not mine, never will be. *sigh*
Warnings: Harry/George, Harry/Ginny, Ron/Hermione, Ron/OFC mentioned
Author's Note: tailoredshirt , I loved your idea of throwing George into the mix. I hope this is what you had in mind. My apologies the appalling lack of filthy smut.
Well, this was certainly a fine pickle to be in, Ron Weasley thought grumpily, glaring at all the happy people in the pub. Of course, a lot of it could be blamed on himself and his tendency to overreact spectacularly, but he didn’t reckon he deserved all the blame for his current predicament. Unless it was karmic payback for abandoning them both when he had years before, but still, he didn’t think he deserved to be completely alone in the end.
Or perhaps it was his fault for daring to think so hopefully about the future. He’d marry Hermione, Harry would marry Ginny, they’d live practically next door to each other, have tons of sex (not with each other, obviously--with the girls) pop out a couple of kids, and live happily ever after. He’d still meet Harry at the pub every Friday night, the girls would meet up on Saturdays and they’d have Christmas at the Burrow.
So what went wrong? Well, Harry and Ginny, for one thing. They’d gone out for a few weeks after the battle, but then they’d quietly broken up. Well, perhaps not quietly--Harry had come away from the discussion looking more shell-shocked than he had when dealing with Voldemort himself--but they didn’t talk about it. At all. Ever.
After a while, Ron began to suspect that it had something to do with something Harry had done when they were apart. How, Ron hadn‘t known, unless it happened while he was gone for those weeks, but then who it could have been but Hermione, and he had to trust Harry that nothing happened there. Of course, now, he had a pretty good idea what it was, but at the time, it just hadn’t made sense to break up. Even Ron had been forced to admit that Harry and Ginny made perfect sense. They were James and Lily all over again, weren’t they? Still, maybe that should have clued him in. What sort of messed-up bastard goes after someone who looks like his mother?
Anyway, that was ancient history, and technically none of his business. Harder still to sort out was what happened to him and Hermione. Of course, the signs were all there now that he looked back, but at the time it had seemed to come out of nowhere.
It was mostly a matter of drifting apart, of life changing their individual directions. After the war, he’d been so torn up by Fred’s death that he hadn’t known what to do with himself. The obvious solution was to try and help George in some way, but he didn’t have any idea how to go about changing him back into the old George instead of the living ghost he’d become. The only thing he could think of was to convince him to open up the shop again. Easier said than done, of course, but no one ever said Ron wasn’t a stubborn, tenacious bastard. He enlisted Harry, too, who was more than happy to get out of his own head after all he’d been through.
It took nearly four months, but he finally found himself standing behind the cash register at Wheezes grand re-opening sale, helping George rake in the Galleons, and trying desperately to convince himself that the avaricious smiles George was giving him actually met his eyes.
It got better, of course, or at least George seemed to find his sense of purpose, (even if it was only to work himself ragged to ‘keep Fred’s legacy alive.’)
Around that time, Harry finally decided to take up Kingsley’s near-constant invitations to join the massively depleted Auror corps. Naturally, he passed the entrance exam with flying colours, and not just because Hermione became sort of an academic drill sergeant.
Ron had been invited, too, but he didn’t think George was quite ready to go alone. He decided not to apply until next year, even though it nearly killed him to hear Harry talking about all the exciting things he was learning in training, He’d known if he’d passed, it would have been too tempting. His time would come. Eventually. Hopefully. Still, he rather wished Harry hadn’t left the Burrow for Grimmauld Place. Not that Harry hadn’t invited him along but with Ginny gone back to school, Ron didn’t want to leave his mum alone. He still walked in to find her in tears on a weekly basis.
Harry wasn’t the only one full of exciting plans for the future. Though Ron sort of expected her to go for something like magical beast or being rights, or even the newly created Muggle Protection Agency, in the end she chose the Department of Mysteries. It made perfect sense, now that he thought about it. She’d always been fascinated by puzzles, and there in the middle of London was the biggest one he could think of. With all the things they’d seen there at the end of their fifth year, it had to drive her mad that she couldn’t know what they all meant.
The only t rouble with that was that even whilst in training to be an Unspeakable, she…well, she couldn’t speak about what she was learning, could she? At all. Not a blessed thing. And he could see her there, sitting next to him, her frighteningly brilliant mind just buzzing with new information--hell, even her hair seemed to be brimming with untold secrets. And she spent so much time there that what else did she have to talk about? Small wonder there were so few married Unspeakables.
Granted, the sex more than made up for it, but even then, something seemed to be missing. Ron wasn’t one for analyzing his feelings and shite, but it wasn’t hard to work out that he burned hot and fast and she sort of smoldered.
Of course, that meant that he got lots of second helpings of Hermione, and got to be pretty good with his tongue, but still, it would have been nice if they’d been on the same page at the same time, at least in the bedroom.
He’d been glad to know that she was making friends among her fellow trainees at first. However, he’d felt a little twinge of jealousy when she began bringing up Goldstein on a regular basis. He did his best to ignore it, reasoning that since they were study partners they were bound to get close. Anyway, Ron was no Cedric Diggory, but he felt fairly confident that he had a lot more going for him than Goldstein, who had little more than a big brain to recommend him.
Life went on that way for a while, and if both Harry and Hermione were slowly growing more distant with each passing week, it wasn’t something Ron could put his finger on. Christmas was awkward as arse, what with Ginny practically sitting on Coote’s lap throughout dinner and making their mum’s lips purse and their father blush. Harry was miserable, of course, and tried to pretend that she didn’t exist. Instead, he sat and drank the night away in a quiet corner. With George.
The following summer, Ron took the entrance test. He’d not passed with flying colours, but his marks were more than respectable, plus he‘d beaten Harry on the problem-solving section of the test by miles. Considerably heartened, he started working on getting George to hire an assistant. George was very reluctant--though he always seemed to be reluctant to make any big decisions without Fred’s input. Ron, however, was getting pretty good at manipulating his brother after a year working together.
What clinched the deal was Verity‘s return. She’d always been such a chipper, optimistic little thing, but now, she seemed to resemble a timid mouse after over a year in hiding. Ron knew well that George had trouble resisting t he hero role when it was presented to him, and he reckoned that George and Verity might get on well together. She might even be the very thing to get George to stop existing and start living. Stranger things had happened, right?
He still worked weekends and one night per week at the shop, and he thought perhaps it was time to think about getting his own place, too. Harry’s place was his first thought, but then it occurred to him that if he and Hermione moved in together, they might find more to talk about. Plus, there were the regular opportunities for sex, which was no small incentive.
Hermione, though, wouldn’t be convinced. He ought to have seen it coming then. But he couldn‘t fault her reasoning; she still hadn’t got her parents to completely forgive her for altering their memories and sending them to Australia. If she left now, the resentment could go on for years. At least living with them, she had more opportunities to mend fences.
At least that’s what she said at the time.
And Harry--well, he seemed oddly reluctant, too. He blamed it on problems with Kreacher, but Ron couldn’t really see what the problem was. How much worse could it be than being called a ‘nasty, filthy blood traitor’ for an entire summer and winter hols, too? He’d survived that with little more than Doxy scars, hadn’t he?
He thought about asking George for Fred’s old room, but any time he came even close to the subject, George simply shut down. Ron had to settle for kipping on his sofa on occasion.
The night it all came to a head, he’d had a rotten day at work already, and he was in a crap mood because Hermione had cancelled a date to work late on a term paper. It wouldn’t have mattered--Ron had got called in to help guard at a state dinner. Still, he might have been jumping to conclusions just a bit when he came upon Hermione and Goldstein later that night snuggled up in a corner booth at the Leaky.
Well, granted, they weren’t exactly snuggling, and the following day he remembered that he had seen piles of parchment spread out on the table before them, but still, he’d been somewhat justified in being suspicious. Possibly not justified in going into a rage and calling Anthony a thieving bastard and Hermione a lying slag, but definitely right to be jealous.
He might have been able to salvage the situation if he hadn’t run into Lavender at the third bar he went into and if he hadn’t had four Firewhiskys at the second. Or possibly if Aberforth hadn’t cut him off at four, but that wasn’t really his fault. The bar had been sliced in half, after all, and a nearly full barrel of aged mead was lost in between the cracks in the dusty floor.
At any rate, he was willing to take some responsibility, but fate apparently had it in for him pretty bad, because there was Lavender, batting her eyelashes and pressing her tits in his face. Granted, they were fantastic tits (as he’d learned firsthand during sixth year) and it proved to be damn difficult to turn down someone whose self-esteem had taken such a blow due to her war wounds, but even drunk off his arse, Ron hadn’t been able to go through with it.
Not that it mattered.
A whispered word to her best friend, who in turn whispered to her twin sister, who in turn whispered to her fellow Unspeakable trainees, and that was it, as far as Hermione was concerned. “Fool me once…” she’d said, glaring at him with hurt in her eyes, and there was no changing her mind.
And the odd thing about it was that it hadn’t done him in. Sure, he hurt, but not as much as he’d have thought. He hadn’t felt as though his still-beating heart had been ripped out of his chest, anyway.
No, that wasn’t until three weeks later. Or a week ago, to be specific.
It had been yet another crap day, and Ron was in the mood to get completely shit-faced. Harry was the obvious companion of choice, even though he was behaving very oddly since Ron and Hermione broke up. Ron supposed Harry had to feel torn, of course he did, but he seemed to be avoiding Ron as much as possible. Perhaps he blamed Ron. Ron blamed himself, but he might have liked a bit of unconditional loyalty from his best mate. Not a lot, just a little.
At any rate, he hadn’t been home.
George was the next choice, of course, and Ron made his way to the softly lit shop, using his key to get in when he noticed that the windows in George’s flat were dark.
He heard a noise in the basement, and called out, “Oi, Georgie! I’m coming down, so don’t blow anything up.” He heard a startled squeak from below as he took the stairs two at a time, but it never occurred to him that George wouldn’t be alone until it was way too late. Because the scene that he witnessed when he’d nearly reached the bottom was completely unfathomable.
The first thing he saw was George’s freckled arse, which wasn’t really an unexpected sight, given George’s penchant for mooning people. What he‘d never in a million years expected to see was his best mate’s arse spread open just in front of George’s and quite clearly filled with George’s freckled cock. Nor had he expected to see George looking back at him sheepishly but somehow defiantly at the same time, while Harry simply looked horrified.
“You…you….you fucking bastard!” he roared, running forward to pull George off Harry and throw him against the wall. “He’s my fucking brother, you sick fuck! Bad enough… my sister, but.. Fuck! This is the last fucking thing he needs, he’s already completely fucked in the head, and you, you-”
George coughed slightly from where he stood off to the side. Reluctantly, Ron pulled his eyes away from Harry‘s enormous ones to look over at his still naked and apparently irritated brother. “Hate to interrupt you, Ronnie, dear, but in all your homophobic indignation, you seem to have forgot one tiny thing. Just who was fucking who here?”
Ron closed his eyes as he tried to wrap his mind around that comment and all it entailed. “I’m not--I mean you…and he…and,” He turned back to Harry. “What the fuck, Harry?”
“I’m sorry,” Harry muttered, trying with limited success to hide behind a stack of Headless Hats, unable to meet Ron’s eyes.
“Don’t you dare fucking apologise, Harry,” George growled, walking over to stand between Ron and Harry, blocking Ron‘s view with his body. “It’s none of his goddamn business. If he’s got a problem with it, then he can leave.” He turned back to Ron, hands on his hips. “And don’t bother coming back until you can get over yourself.”
Ron shook his head. Something about George standing there, defiant, not even bothering to cover himself up, was making him see red. He wanted to punch the smile off his smug face. He was nauseous, but somehow he was afraid it had as much to do with shame as it did with disgust at the two of them.
Once more, Ron looked at Harry, willing him to meet his eyes but failing miserably. With a sigh, he turned and ran back up the stairs.
He was tempted to hit the nearest bar and drink himself into oblivion, but then he remembered the last time he’d felt this way. Had it really only been three weeks? He didn’t want to run into another Lavender and pour his rage and heartache out to the worst possible person. With his luck, he’d have run into Rita Skeeter. Still, he had to do something with the blinding rage he was feeling. Destroying George’s stupid shop was tempting, but in the end he made his way out into Muggle London, where he found a pub filled with noisy football fans. Before the night was out, he’d had half a dozen pints, two shots of tequila (vile stuff), he’d given somebody a black eye and in return had received a split lip. These blokes took their team’s losses personally, apparently.
It would have been brilliant if he hadn’t had the image of his brother and his best friend in front of his eyes the entire night.
For the next week or so, Ron felt as though he was walking around in a fog, It didn’t seem possible that the person he’d spent almost every hour of the day with for eight years could have hid something so monumental from him. Not only that, but his brother, too. Yeah, maybe he had suspected that George was a bit more flirtatious with boys than he was with girls--hell, he‘d accused Fred and George of being queer for each other on a regular basis. But Harry? Harry? Ron’s world had turned upside down twice in as many months, and he wondered if he’d ever recover his equilibrium.
And that didn’t even address the fact that he’d managed to lose both his best friends within months of each other. He didn’t even have anyone to talk to about it, though his mum would go on asking him why he was so glum. He couldn’t tell her--she’d have had apoplexy. And then probably gone off looking for babies for Harry and George to adopt together. It wasn’t that simple for Ron. He’d managed to deal with his odd feelings of jealousy and his natural protectiveness when Harry started seeing Ginny, but with George…
Fuck, what a mess.
He supposed that George’s parting remark sort of meant he was sacked, which was probably the only positive aspect of the whole thing. At least he was going to be able to focus on Auror training. But that was an issue in itself, because there was no way he was going to be able to avoid seeing Harry.
It turned out to be a lot easier to avoid Harry than he’d imagined. Harry wouldn’t come near him, wouldn’t look him in the eye, ate lunch somewhere outside of the Ministry, stopped coming to the Burrow, even left the room whenever Ron entered it. The only exception was classes they had to take together, but Harry made a point to sit on the other side of the room. Of course, all of their fellow trainees wanted to know what was happening, but a couple of times muttering ‘none of your fucking business,’ and the questions eventually trickled down to nothing.
Time went along in a sort of limbo until one day in late October when he and Harry got paired up for dueling practice. Ron knew it was bound to happen someday--after all, he did end up fighting each his classmates at least once every few weeks, but he’d been praying that he’d feel better about it all by then. Harry looked completely miserable about it. Their classmates, on the other hand, seemed to think it was going to be a jolly good show.
Feeling as if he was going to lose the greasy fish he’d consumed for lunch at any moment, Ron walked reluctantly to the mat. Harry arrived moments later, focusing determinedly on the laces on his shoes. Ron drew his wand, but Harry had to be reminded to draw his. When he finally looked up, he looked in the general direction of Ron’s left shoulder, his expression inscrutable.
At the signal, Ron raised his wand, knowing Harry would probably start with a stunner.
“Expelliamus!”
Harry flew backwards, landing hard o n his arse as the circle around them buzzed w ith whispered conversation. He hadn’t even tried, damn him.
“Try again, Potter,” Cavendish said.
Harry glared at his instructor and stood up, squaring his shoulders.
“Wands ready…”
This time, Harry actually did use his wand, but only to shield himself from Ron’s Disarming Charm. He still wouldn’t look at Ron, and Ron felt the hurt and the anger and feelings of isolation and betrayal of the last few weeks coming to a head.
He threw out a Reducto, and Harry chose to shield against it rather than go on the offensive. It seemed as if Ron didn’t matter, wasn’t good enough to fight, wasn’t good enough to confide in, didn’t deserve honesty, didn’t deserve a proper defense,
Before he even knew what he was doing, he’d thrown out three curses in rapid succession, all of which bounced easily off Harry’s shield, and Ron was barreling towards him, fists swinging. “Fight back, you fucking prick!”
Harry raised his fists in a defensive pose, and the look on his face was nearly enough to halt Ron in his tracks--he imagined later that it might be the very face Dudley had witnessed on a regular basis, just before he was about to deliver a black eye or a broken nose.
The fear in his eyes hit Ron like a punch in the gut, but it was no match for the rage of betrayal that sent Ron’s fists undeterred past Ron’s conscience and the rules of the exercise they were supposed to be performing and even past Harry’s crossed wrists, connecting with his nose with a crunch of bone Ron could feel down to his toes.
The shouts of those around them witnessing the event couldn’t penetrate the roaring in Ron’s ears. Nor could the whistle of the instructor. Ron could hear nothing. His conscience was screaming for him to stop, and Harry’s pain-filled eyes seemed to be pleading to him, but Harry’s fist was apparently also thinking independently, because it connected with a tender spot just under Ron’s ribs, knocking the wind out of him even as two of their classmates pulled them apart. They were clawing to get back to each other, shouting random words that probably only made sense to each other.
“You fucking-”
“I’m sorry!”
“Lied. Did you think I-”
“I couldn’t”
“Stupid!”
“I didn’t want”
“Me, your best”
“You.”
“My fucking”
“Hate”
“Brother.”
“Me.”
“How?”
And then suddenly everything went black. He woke up disoriented, discovering that he’d been tossed under a cold shower while he was Stunned, probably by his teacher.
He yelped as he stood up, shaking off his hair like a shaggy puppy.
Harry was doing the same thing in the next stall. He stopped in his tracks when he saw Ron approaching. It was as if Ron had never been interrupted. “Why?”
Harry’s shoulders dropped visibly. “I can’t help it, Ron.”
“But George. Harry, we were supposed to be helping him, not-”
“Not what? Letting him feel normal every now and again? Do you honestly think I seduced poor, ickle, innocent George? Who the fuck do you think started it?”
“I …I don’t even want to think about that.”
“Of course you don’t! And you wonder why I didn’t tell you--how many times have I heard you call someone a fucking poof, Ron? How many times?”
“I don’--I mean--you know I’m not really calling them a…well, I don’t mean that…Goddamn it, Harry, you know me! It doesn’t matter if you…it’s just…he’s my fucking brother! First my sister and now my brother! What the fuck are you trying to…do you even love him?”
“It’s just sex, Ron. Nobody‘s going to get hurt, it‘s just…”
Sex, Ron thought, and remembered having witnessed just that. He groaned, more loudly than he meant to.
Harry’s eyes narrowed and his lips tightened. “Well,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height, though he looked a lot less intimidating than he might have had his clothes not been sticking wetly to his body and his hair shooting droplets all over the place as he spoke. “Sorry to have offended your delicate sensibilities, but you did sort of come in without knocking, didn’t you? Really wasn’t any of your fucking business, was it?”
“None of my business? I thought I was your best mate! I’ve shared a bed with you, shared a shower with you, and you didn’t think I might like to know?”
Did I ever, ever do anything like make a pass at you, Ron Weasley?” Harry said, very nearly shouting. “Or were you under the mistaken impression that being gay was contagious?
Ron flinched at the word, and for a moment, it sat between them, such a tiny cheerful little syllable, but more than capable of dividing an unbridgeable chasm between them.
“No” Ron finally said. “I just…I wish you’d told me. I’m your best mate.”
“I couldn’t,” Harry whispered. “It had nothing to do with you.”
And that bothered Ron more than it should have. “I’m your best mate,” he repeated. “But not good enough to…”
“What?” Harry asked, his eyes narrowed.
“Good enough to know the truth, anyway,” Ron said, just before turning and walking out the door.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Life went on fairly uneventfully after that. Or rather, uneventfully if you didn’t count the fact that Ron was miserable and lonely and feeling completely betrayed. Wisely, his career counselor was willing to rearrange his schedule a bit so he had as few classes with Harry as possible. Still, he tried to make up for the lack of company by spending a lot of time in the pub. Of course, that only resulted in a lot of conversation with bartenders and barmaids, which was all well and good, but certainly no substitute for Harry and Hermione, and even George, for that matter. He thought about contacting all three of them any number of times, but as far as he was concerned, he was the one who’d been lied to, been shut out, so why should he have to approach them, tail between his legs?
Still, after too many late nights and hangovers (and lectures from his mother) he finally decided that what he was missing was mates (no, not Harry, it was the friendship that he missed. Really. Someone to talk to. Someone who knew you) So when Dean and Seamus approached him about moving into the room that Neville was going to have to give up, he decided to take them up on it. It was well past time he started growing up, he reckoned, and the first step was independence.
Dean and Seamus were all right. Not Harry, certainly, but it was entertaining to watch them bicker like an old married couple. Neville’s dad had finally died, and his Grandmother had begun to decline shortly after, but he still came around from time to time when he needed a break from caring for her. Those were the best times, where Ron felt less like an outsider.
Eventually, he started seeing Hannah Abbot from time to time. She was easy to talk to (the perfect bartender, actually) and the sex was certainly a bonus, but it was pretty clear to Ron that he wasn’t her first choice any more than she was his. Maybe he was selfish in not telling Neville that she was waiting on him to get up the nerve to ask her out, but Ron reckoned Neville would probably get on with it when he was good and ready and not a minute before.
So all in all, he was all right. Not great, not by any stretch of the imagination, but all right. He was beginning to have more sympathy for George, because the loss of Harry was still a physical ache that might have been something like what George was feeling without Fred. You’d have thought that Hermione would have been the bigger loss, but no, seeing her at the Ministry dancing with Goldstein hadn’t depressed him at all. It had seemed right, if anything. Seeing Harry there, however, completely alone, had depressed the shit out of him.
Not enough to send him over to talk to him, though, nor was it enough to keep him from sitting on the other side of the room in classes and stubbornly refusing to invite him to Christmas dinner as his mum requested. Let George invite him, he thought.
George, however, showed up alone, and was remarkably well behaved, all things considered. He’d even given Ron a gift--a basket with all sorts of WWW products. Ron wasn’t sure if it was a peace offering or if they were poisoned, but he thanked him politely and even half-hugged him goodnight.
The following week was miserable, however. Without work, he was bored out of his mind, and Seamus and Dean had gone off to Amsterdam for a few days of debauchery (or wooden shoes and Rembrandt--with those two, you never knew).
.
One night, Ron was home alone, and contemplating the merits of another night at the pub (with Hannah at the end) or a night at home with a good book. Eventually, he took another look at the gaudily wrapped gift on his nightstand.
The gag booze was tempting, but far better enjoyed with company. Instead, he thought he might try one of the Daydream charms. He’d had a few of them at school, but as an adult, it seemed that real life was much more fun than any escape George could come up with. Still, it seemed a good idea to get out of his own head, or rather to get his head in a more pleasant place. A game of Quidditch, a chance to get back to the place where he had both his best friends to lean on and the future looked hopeful. He smiled as his brothers’ images winked at him from the corner of the box, The packaging had changed a bit over the years, but the logo remained the same. Also, this one had child-proof charms on each end, which was a new feature, and probably a good idea.
He popped open a beer, broke the seal on the package, and settled back for a good Quidditch fantasy. Just the thing to get him smiling, he suspected.
He found himself in his familiar gear, headed toward the changing rooms. Oddly enough, the shoulder pads pinched him just as they used to, and the heel of his shoe rubbed the wrong way, just the way it had at school. Where the rest of the team was, he didn’t know, but he heard the ancient pipes going on the other side of the wall, and the idea of losing all his sweaty gear certainly had appeal.
He dropped his kit off at his locker and padded toward the showers, dropping clothes along the way. It was funny how the smell of the place was just as he remembered--he could even smell the victory they’d just had.
The sound of water running grew louder as he approached, and as he reached the doorway, the steam pouring from it was thick enough to obscure his view of the showers.
What shocked him more than anything was how expected the sight of Harry had been. Perhaps it was inevitable, that George might have known that running into Harry would have been his dearest wish.
Still, running into Harry whilst he was naked was a bit of a shock. And running into him mid-wank was odder still. But oddest of all was discovering that he couldn’t tear his eyes away, let alone walk away and leave him to it. Harry’s hand was braced on the tile, and Ron could see the muscles of his back and shoulders rippling under his skin, slick with water and sweat. It would be so easy to take a few steps forward, to reach out and touch him, but why would he want to do such a thing?
But when he heard his own name whispered out loud, he was compelled to do just that, placing a hand on Harry’s shoulder in a gesture that was all-too-familiar. Harry turned his head in response, but instead of the shock Ron expected to see on his face, there was only a widening smile as Harry leaned back against him.
What sort of alternate universe had he stepped into? Ron wrapped his arm around Harry’s waist in a gesture that seemed like second nature . “Thought you’d never turn up,” Harry said, and leaned his head back to kiss Ron’s cheek softly.
.
“Got started without me, did you?” Ron asked as he began fingering the damp hairs below Harry’s navel, making his stomach muscles contract in response.
“I’ll help you catch up,” Harry said with a low laugh that reverberated over Ron‘s spine. Turning in his arms, Harry tucked his head under Ron’s chin, and Ron’s arms automatically tightened against him in response. Why did this feel so familiar? It was like experiencing someone else’s life, someone else’s feelings. Or perhaps it was his feelings, just budged over, somehow. Or seen through a different filter. Because maybe Harry liked this sort of thing, but in real life, if Ron had felt an erection pressing up against his belly in an all-too-friendly manner, he certainly wouldn’t have thought it felt rather nice, would he? Nor would he be compelled to reach down and circle it with his fingers, which he found himself doing just moments later, for some unfathomable reason. And why was the little moan that Harry let out in response so unbelievably hot?
Ron moved his fist as if he’d done this sort of thing a thousand times before, and he felt Harry’s lips pressing against his chest, felt his tongue licking water droplets from his skin, making him shiver in response.
“Fuck, yeah,” he found himself saying as Harry’s mouth closed over his nipple. Harry moved lower, and Ron felt compelled to press his torso against Harry’s lips greedily even as he struggled to keep his hold on Harry’s cock. He was reluctantly obliged to give up by the time Harry’s tongue reached the middle of his stomach, but at that point, it was a simple matter to just bury his fingers in Harry’s hair, which, while nowhere near as good as his cock, was actually fairly brilliant because he could push Harry’s head down in an unspoken demand.
“Greedy, aren’t you?” Harry chuckled against Ron’s navel, teasing him by swirling his tongue and dipping it inside.
“Bloody hell, will you get on with it?” Ron muttered, reaching up to hold onto the shower head, because by the time Harry’s mouth closed around his cock, his knees were having trouble actually holding his body up.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Ron knew that this wasn’t really him, that he’d never consciously behave that way--but at the same time, this was achingly familiar. This Harry, whoever he was, clearly adored him, and this Ron, whoever he was, loved him just as much in return, and somehow, as strange and out of character as it felt, it felt sort of warm and familiar and very, very right. It was as though all love and shared history and camaraderie he’d always felt with Harry had been expanded, somehow, and he not only needed him, but he wanted him--he not only cared about Harry, but he adored him. Given his choice, this Ron would have been just as happy to be the one on his knees making Harry’s eyes roll back in his head.
And even more remarkable was the way that it felt to look down and see Harry l ooking back up at him, his familiar eyes shining with love, making Ron’s heart swell and his chest constrict. “I love you,” he found himself saying, touching Harry’s cheek affectionately as Harry smiled around his cock.
It was that smile that did it, and shortly afterwards, Ron found himself pulled back into reality. He was no longer in the shower, considering how best to return the favour (did he really fancy the idea of sticking his tongue up Harry‘s arse?), but he was lying alone in his own bed, his fist covered in his own come, his clothes in disarray. An empty Daydream Charm box was lying next to his pillow, looking deceptively innocent.
Twenty minutes later, for the first time in months, he found himself standing in front of the door to his brother’s shop, his body shaking with rage and confusion. He hesitated for a moment before opening the door, wondering if he wasn’t going to find himself walking into a scene similar to the one he’d just reluctantly participated in. (All right, maybe not reluctantly, but he hadn’t been himself, had he?)
Still, he had anger and leftover adrenaline propelling him as he brushed past a startled Verity and bounded down the stairs to George’s office.
“What the fuck?” he shouted once through the door, throwing the empty box at his wide-eyed brother, who was (thankfully) alone.
“Still haven’t learned to knock, have you?” George said, rising from his desk and reaching out for the box. “Still, no harm done, at least this time.” He turned the box over in his hand, looking back at Ron with one eyebrow raised. “So, what’s your problem this time?”
“Did you think it was a joke? No--stupid question, of course you did. Everything’sof course you did. Everything’s a joke to you. But this is pretty low, even for you. What, is it some sort of revenge for what I said?”
“Well, I’m always happy to own up to a good gag, but I’m afraid I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about, Ronnikins.”
“Oh fuck off,” Ron said, yanking the box from his hand. “I sure as hell hope you didn’t plan on marketing them. This’ll be the thing to get you sued for everything you’ve got, if not killed…”
George began to smile, realisation apparently dawning. “Well,” he said. “That may be, but I wasn’t planning on selling them to the kids, was I? You had to have noticed the Age Charms”
“What the fuck difference does that make? They’re fucking gay flavoured.”
“Excuse me?” George coughed. “Gay flavoured?”
“As if you didn’t know! Seriously, George, I don’t care what you do, or what Harry does, but I sure as hell don’t want to be dragged into it-”
“Now slow down, Ron,” George broke in, setting down the quill he was holding and taking a step toward his brother. “Are you trying to tell me that you used this charm and ended up with a…bloke?”
“As if you didn’t know-”
“Ron-”
“Something like that could really mess with someone’s head, you know?”
“Ron,” George said again, more loudly.
“Not everyone has your sick sense of humor!”
“Ron!”
“What?!”
“I’m good, but I’m not that good.”
“I don‘t understand-”
“I can’t put something in your head that isn’t there. That’s the difference between a charm, which just makes what’s there seem more real, and possession, which makes you see what another person wants you to see. For that, you need eye contact, or some other mental connection. This just…”
“What? What is it?”
George shook his head. “I didn’t…Ron, it was just a gift, not a joke. I didn’t make you see anything. I just thought-”
“You thought what?”
“Just thought you might like a bit of fun. Or maybe I thought you’d see Hermione and realise how miserable you were without her and get up the nerve to steal her back from that wanker. I never imagined…who did you see, Ron? What did you see, what did you do?”
“I saw…none of your bloody business! And for that matter, I don’t fucking believe you. You have to be able to put things in people’s heads. I remember the old version. I was a pirate, and there was a sea monster, and…I didn’t make that rubbish up!”
“Well, now, that was the picture on the box, wasn’t it? Most people sit down and look at the box while they’re waiting for the charm to work. So it’s already there in their heads, and usually they have a pretty good idea of who they’re going to see there, especially if they already fancy someone…”
“But I don’t fancy H…him. I can’t. I couldn’t, I just…”Ron sat down weakly. “I can’t. It‘s impossible.”
George moved his hand over his face. “Gods, Ronnie. I never meant…Are you…what did you see?”
Ron just shook his head. “I can’t…I can‘t, it‘s got to be…I mean, nothing‘s been right since I walked in here and…I just…I can‘t. There’s got to be a mix-up.” He looked at George pleadingly. “You could have made a mistake. Put something in there you didn’t mean to. Something from your own head, maybe? I mean, I don’t want to do those things, I never have, I never…”
“Who was it, Ronnie?” George asked quietly.
Ron turned away. “I don’t want to…it’s none of your business.”
“I’m not seeing him any more, you know. It was never going to go anywhere, I just…I hated seeing him so conflicted, and I could tell he just needed someone to talk to, and it was sort of nice to be the one fixing things for a change, you know?”
“Oh, yeah,” Ron said wryly. “You’re a saint, aren‘t you? Selfless Saint George.”
George laughed. “Well, there was that, too. The point is, I always sort of knew he was yours, even if…”
Ron shook his head vehemently. “Not mine. It’s not like that. It’s just…this has got to be just one of those things. Maybe because I miss being with him mixed up with what I saw here-” Not that what he saw George and Harry doing was anything like what he saw in his daydream, but still…
George gave him a long look, and finally clapped his hand on Ron’s shoulder. “Maybe it is, but I think you need to talk to Harry either way.”
Talking to Harry was the very last thing Ron wanted to do at that moment, but then again, the idea of seeing him--of ending their estrangement--filled him with such hope that he knew he was going to take his brother’s advice.
He stood up, rubbing his hands over his face. “I don’t know. Maybe. I meant to apologise, anyway. I’m still…I still feel like I was lied to, but-” He turned back to George. “What I said, that night--I didn’t really mean it. I was just….shocked, you know? But I…you’re all right, George. I mean, you’re still the reason I’m afraid of spiders and you nearly got me killed a hundred times before I was ten, and I wanted to kill you about a million times, but you’re all right. And I want you to be happy, even if it’s blokes you want. Dunno why I’m surprised, anyway; we always reckoned you and Fred were in love with each other…”
George laughed softly, shrugging his shoulders.
“Or else you and Lee…”
“Completely straight, I’m afraid. You don’t know how lucky you are to have your best friend completely mad for you. But I’m still hopeful-” At Ron’s look of panic, George reached over to mess Ron’s hair affectionately. “You really need to talk to Harry. Go on, before he takes up with someone else, someone who doesn’t love him like you do.”
“I’m not…I don’t..”
“Someone like Malfoy,” George added, and winked as Ron’s mouth dropped open in horror. “Go on, then.”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
The son of a bitch had warded against him. He couldn’t even see the bloody place, though he’d spent an entire summer there. Ron was furious. Possibly it was more of that karmic payback for having waited so long to start speaking to his best mate again, or possibly for some of the horrid things he’d said, but Ron reckoned he’d paid more than enough in all his months of miserable solitude.
He waited outside for a while, but he decided that probably was a waste of time. He could be waiting all night, and he’d see Harry at work the next day. The pub didn’t sound appealing, though, and Ron found himself thinking of the next best place to go when your life was a mess of your own creation.
Perhaps it was a premonition, but his heart seemed to feel lighter as he made his way through the Burrow’s back gate. Or maybe it was the familiar sound of the chickens out back and the smell of bread that came from the kitchen window. Sometimes he wondered why he ever thought he needed to move out, but the sound of a crash and his mother’s following shriek of alarm soon reminded him of why he’d left. Oh, well. She could nag him all she liked, it couldn’t be any worse than being inside his own head at the moment.
What he wasn’t prepared for, however, was finding Harry sitting at the kitchen table, bouncing Teddy on his knee. He turned as the door slammed shut behind Ron, and his face went completely white. Ron smiled hesitantly. “Hullo, Harry,” he said.
“Oh,” Harry replied, and got up in a hurry, banging Teddy’s knee against the table in the process and causing him to howl.
That was when Ron noticed his mother was also in the room, for she rushed forward to grab the toddler from Harry‘s arms. “Oh, Teddy, you poor thing--let me have him, Harry. Ronnie dear, have a seat, you’re just in time for supper,”
“I, uh…” Ron couldn’t tear his eyes away from Harry, who gave up Teddy without much of a fuss, but looked like he was ready to bolt through the door.
“I just…I needed help, you see, with Teddy, and your mum offered…”
“Nonsense, Harry, you’re always welcome to drop by, especially when you bring this darling boy,” Molly interrupted.
“I, uh,” Ron said again, wondering why Harry had felt the need to defend his presence there and feeling rotten when he remembered their last two conversations. “I was looking for you,” he said.
Harry looked wary, but he didn’t say anything.
“I just…oh, for fuck’s sake, just sit down and stop looking at me like I’m going to hit you.”
“Ronald!” Molly said, covering up Teddy’s ears.
“I...er, right.” Harry shut his mouth deliberately and sat in his chair.
Ron shifted on his feet, looking over at his glaring mother and then back at Harry. Why he had to do this with an audience, he didn’t know. But it had to be done. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly, willing Harry to look up at him. “I was an arse.”
Harry finally looked up at Ron, biting at his lip as the silence stretched on.
“Oh, goodness,” Molly said suddenly. “I completely forgot! I meant to lend Fleur my large roasting pan! Why don’t I just bring Teddy along and he can play with Victoire. You‘ll be all right, won‘t you, Harry dear? And Ron?”
Reluctantly tearing his eyes away from Harry, Ron smiled at his mother. “Thanks, Mum.”
Looking back at Harry, Ron waited patiently as his mother banged around, trying to find the pot in question, Teddy protesting the entire time. When the dust of the Floo finally settled, the silence was deafening. Ron pulled up a chair and straddled it. “I miss you,” he finally said.
“Yeah,” Harry muttered, looking down at his hands. “Me too.”
Ron sighed. “When did you know?” he asked.
“For a while now,” Harry answered. “I just…didn’t want it to be true. I thought…I suppose I was hoping it was Voldemort in my head, and that when I finally got him out of there, it would go away.”
Ron frowned. “What, was Voldemort a…was he into blokes, too?”
“No, that’s not what I meant,” Harry said, running his hands through his hair. “I thought. I hoped it was him messing with me. You know, like how the locket messed with you about me and Hermione?”
Ron grimaced as he remembered it. It had ferreted out all his deepest insecurities, even ones he hadn’t known he had. What Harry had witnessed was only the tip of the iceberg. “But…I mean, what sort of things did he say?”
“That’s the thing,” Harry said. “I still don’t know what was him and what was me, you know?”
“But-” At this point, surely Harry had to know the difference between someone whispering evil suggestions and someone inferring that you fancied blokes.
Harry looked sideways at him, waiting for him to continue..
“You never said anything. I could have…I mean, I know I was an arse, but it was the shock more than anything. If you’d have just told me, maybe I’d have taken the mickey out on you, but…why George? Why lie to me and tell George the truth?”
Harry shrugged. “He knew. Don’t ask me how, but he saw. And then he just sort of hinted around, kept saying more and more until finally-”
“Yeah?” Ron prodded.
“You don’t want to know,” Harry said, looking away.
“Harry,” Ron said, exasperated. “Best mate, remember?”
“Yeah,” Harry said taking a deep breath. “Right. So he kissed me.”
“And?”
“I mean, I suppose it was pretty clear that I didn’t mind.”
“And then?”
“Really, you don’t want to hear about this.”
“After everything we’ve been through…” Ron said, rising to his feet and moving to the sink. He could see it, damn it. He could see all of it, even with his eyes closed.
“All right, he gave me a blow job.”
Harry was right, he didn’t really want to hear about this. “And…?”
“And it was the best fucking thing I ever felt.”
Ron frowned. If he was going to name the best thing he ever felt he might have mentioned the moment that he pulled Harry out of that frozen pool and realised he was going to be forgiven. Or the moment that he realised that Harry was only pretending to be dead. Or the time he realised that he was the thing that Harry would miss the most--that he, Ron Weasley, loser extraordinaire--was the most important person in the world to another individual. It certainly wouldn’t have been Hermione’s first attempts to suck his cock, as brilliant as that had been. And he was the one who’d been accused of being an insensitive clod…
And furthermore, if he’d been forced to come up with a memory for a Patronus that featured solely Hermione, his soul would have been completely fucked. All his best memories had Harry in them. And that was sort of telling, wasn’t it?
And then it hit him--why he was here and what he’d been trying to say. Only he didn’t have the words, and Harry was bright red, unable to look at him. He held out his hand, pulling Harry to his feet. He’d meant merely to hug him, to let him know that nothing was going to change the way that he felt, but knew deep down that something had changed. He knew it when Harry finally met his eyes, knew it as their mouths moved closer together, knew it when his fingers tightened on Harry’s shoulders, pulling him closer still.
They’d been headed in this direction ever since Ron had come across his best friend and his brother and been consumed with writhing, soul-eating jealousy. Hell, George had seen it even before he had, hadn’t he?
Still, those last few millimeters remaining between their lips seemed an unbridgeable chasm. He hovered there, his head bent low as Harry licked his lips, terrified that he was about to completely bugger things up. Shutting his eyes, he closed the gap, pressing his lips to Harry’s as Harry’s opened beneath his.
Yes, he thought. This. This was what’s been missing all along, and his hands were shaking and he wondered if Harry was going to be able to hear his heart pounding in his chest. “It should have been me,” he said. “I should have been the one to notice. We could have sorted it out together.”
“But you wanted Hermione,” Harry said, stepping away from Ron, visibly shaken. “Remember her? Bit swotty, mad hair, nice tits, always has her hand up in the air? The one whose name you used to call out in your sleep?”
“Did I? I’m having trouble remembering why at the moment.”
“Yeah, a lot,” Harry said. “I didn’t mind, though, because I wanted you two to be happy. I loved…I love you both so much, and it just seemed inevitable. And for a while, I thought maybe I could have that kind of life, and Ginny seemed perfect. I’d have a family, and we’d be almost like brothers-”
“You didn’t need to be with Ginny for that, we already are.”
“Yeah, well, you know what I meant. I wanted a normal life, and I really cared about her a lot, but when it came down to it, I couldn’t go through with it. It wouldn’t have been fair use her like that. N ot that she saw it that way-”
“Yeah. I suppose I know now why she suddenly seems to hate your guts.”
“It was bad,” he said, grimacing as he remembered. “She accused me of using her as a substitute for-”
Ron’s heart soared, but Harry didn’t finish. He could very well have meant George, but Ron doubted it.
“Well,” he said, taking a step toward Harry and looking down into his eyes. “She’s just going to have to deal with it, isn’t she? You were mine first, right?”
“Ron,” he protested, but Ron stopped him with another kiss, quick and possessive.
“I saw us,” he explained. “It was yo u and me, only not like we are, but like we could be. It was as if we‘d been together all along, and it was brilliant.”
“Where did you see us?”
“Daydream Charm. I thought it was George playing a trick on me, or revenge for what I said, but it turns out maybe I was too thick to see what was there all along.”
“What was there?”
“This,” Ron said, enfolding Harry in his arms. “I’m with you, whatever happens, remember?”
From: ozma_katiebell
Title: Whatever Happens
Rating: R
Word Count: 9000
Summary: Life after the war didn’t turn out quite the way Ron expected. But perhaps that isn't such a bad thing after all.
Disclaimer: Not mine, never will be. *sigh*
Warnings: Harry/George, Harry/Ginny, Ron/Hermione, Ron/OFC mentioned
Author's Note: tailoredshirt , I loved your idea of throwing George into the mix. I hope this is what you had in mind. My apologies the appalling lack of filthy smut.
Well, this was certainly a fine pickle to be in, Ron Weasley thought grumpily, glaring at all the happy people in the pub. Of course, a lot of it could be blamed on himself and his tendency to overreact spectacularly, but he didn’t reckon he deserved all the blame for his current predicament. Unless it was karmic payback for abandoning them both when he had years before, but still, he didn’t think he deserved to be completely alone in the end.
Or perhaps it was his fault for daring to think so hopefully about the future. He’d marry Hermione, Harry would marry Ginny, they’d live practically next door to each other, have tons of sex (not with each other, obviously--with the girls) pop out a couple of kids, and live happily ever after. He’d still meet Harry at the pub every Friday night, the girls would meet up on Saturdays and they’d have Christmas at the Burrow.
So what went wrong? Well, Harry and Ginny, for one thing. They’d gone out for a few weeks after the battle, but then they’d quietly broken up. Well, perhaps not quietly--Harry had come away from the discussion looking more shell-shocked than he had when dealing with Voldemort himself--but they didn’t talk about it. At all. Ever.
After a while, Ron began to suspect that it had something to do with something Harry had done when they were apart. How, Ron hadn‘t known, unless it happened while he was gone for those weeks, but then who it could have been but Hermione, and he had to trust Harry that nothing happened there. Of course, now, he had a pretty good idea what it was, but at the time, it just hadn’t made sense to break up. Even Ron had been forced to admit that Harry and Ginny made perfect sense. They were James and Lily all over again, weren’t they? Still, maybe that should have clued him in. What sort of messed-up bastard goes after someone who looks like his mother?
Anyway, that was ancient history, and technically none of his business. Harder still to sort out was what happened to him and Hermione. Of course, the signs were all there now that he looked back, but at the time it had seemed to come out of nowhere.
It was mostly a matter of drifting apart, of life changing their individual directions. After the war, he’d been so torn up by Fred’s death that he hadn’t known what to do with himself. The obvious solution was to try and help George in some way, but he didn’t have any idea how to go about changing him back into the old George instead of the living ghost he’d become. The only thing he could think of was to convince him to open up the shop again. Easier said than done, of course, but no one ever said Ron wasn’t a stubborn, tenacious bastard. He enlisted Harry, too, who was more than happy to get out of his own head after all he’d been through.
It took nearly four months, but he finally found himself standing behind the cash register at Wheezes grand re-opening sale, helping George rake in the Galleons, and trying desperately to convince himself that the avaricious smiles George was giving him actually met his eyes.
It got better, of course, or at least George seemed to find his sense of purpose, (even if it was only to work himself ragged to ‘keep Fred’s legacy alive.’)
Around that time, Harry finally decided to take up Kingsley’s near-constant invitations to join the massively depleted Auror corps. Naturally, he passed the entrance exam with flying colours, and not just because Hermione became sort of an academic drill sergeant.
Ron had been invited, too, but he didn’t think George was quite ready to go alone. He decided not to apply until next year, even though it nearly killed him to hear Harry talking about all the exciting things he was learning in training, He’d known if he’d passed, it would have been too tempting. His time would come. Eventually. Hopefully. Still, he rather wished Harry hadn’t left the Burrow for Grimmauld Place. Not that Harry hadn’t invited him along but with Ginny gone back to school, Ron didn’t want to leave his mum alone. He still walked in to find her in tears on a weekly basis.
Harry wasn’t the only one full of exciting plans for the future. Though Ron sort of expected her to go for something like magical beast or being rights, or even the newly created Muggle Protection Agency, in the end she chose the Department of Mysteries. It made perfect sense, now that he thought about it. She’d always been fascinated by puzzles, and there in the middle of London was the biggest one he could think of. With all the things they’d seen there at the end of their fifth year, it had to drive her mad that she couldn’t know what they all meant.
The only t rouble with that was that even whilst in training to be an Unspeakable, she…well, she couldn’t speak about what she was learning, could she? At all. Not a blessed thing. And he could see her there, sitting next to him, her frighteningly brilliant mind just buzzing with new information--hell, even her hair seemed to be brimming with untold secrets. And she spent so much time there that what else did she have to talk about? Small wonder there were so few married Unspeakables.
Granted, the sex more than made up for it, but even then, something seemed to be missing. Ron wasn’t one for analyzing his feelings and shite, but it wasn’t hard to work out that he burned hot and fast and she sort of smoldered.
Of course, that meant that he got lots of second helpings of Hermione, and got to be pretty good with his tongue, but still, it would have been nice if they’d been on the same page at the same time, at least in the bedroom.
He’d been glad to know that she was making friends among her fellow trainees at first. However, he’d felt a little twinge of jealousy when she began bringing up Goldstein on a regular basis. He did his best to ignore it, reasoning that since they were study partners they were bound to get close. Anyway, Ron was no Cedric Diggory, but he felt fairly confident that he had a lot more going for him than Goldstein, who had little more than a big brain to recommend him.
Life went on that way for a while, and if both Harry and Hermione were slowly growing more distant with each passing week, it wasn’t something Ron could put his finger on. Christmas was awkward as arse, what with Ginny practically sitting on Coote’s lap throughout dinner and making their mum’s lips purse and their father blush. Harry was miserable, of course, and tried to pretend that she didn’t exist. Instead, he sat and drank the night away in a quiet corner. With George.
The following summer, Ron took the entrance test. He’d not passed with flying colours, but his marks were more than respectable, plus he‘d beaten Harry on the problem-solving section of the test by miles. Considerably heartened, he started working on getting George to hire an assistant. George was very reluctant--though he always seemed to be reluctant to make any big decisions without Fred’s input. Ron, however, was getting pretty good at manipulating his brother after a year working together.
What clinched the deal was Verity‘s return. She’d always been such a chipper, optimistic little thing, but now, she seemed to resemble a timid mouse after over a year in hiding. Ron knew well that George had trouble resisting t he hero role when it was presented to him, and he reckoned that George and Verity might get on well together. She might even be the very thing to get George to stop existing and start living. Stranger things had happened, right?
He still worked weekends and one night per week at the shop, and he thought perhaps it was time to think about getting his own place, too. Harry’s place was his first thought, but then it occurred to him that if he and Hermione moved in together, they might find more to talk about. Plus, there were the regular opportunities for sex, which was no small incentive.
Hermione, though, wouldn’t be convinced. He ought to have seen it coming then. But he couldn‘t fault her reasoning; she still hadn’t got her parents to completely forgive her for altering their memories and sending them to Australia. If she left now, the resentment could go on for years. At least living with them, she had more opportunities to mend fences.
At least that’s what she said at the time.
And Harry--well, he seemed oddly reluctant, too. He blamed it on problems with Kreacher, but Ron couldn’t really see what the problem was. How much worse could it be than being called a ‘nasty, filthy blood traitor’ for an entire summer and winter hols, too? He’d survived that with little more than Doxy scars, hadn’t he?
He thought about asking George for Fred’s old room, but any time he came even close to the subject, George simply shut down. Ron had to settle for kipping on his sofa on occasion.
The night it all came to a head, he’d had a rotten day at work already, and he was in a crap mood because Hermione had cancelled a date to work late on a term paper. It wouldn’t have mattered--Ron had got called in to help guard at a state dinner. Still, he might have been jumping to conclusions just a bit when he came upon Hermione and Goldstein later that night snuggled up in a corner booth at the Leaky.
Well, granted, they weren’t exactly snuggling, and the following day he remembered that he had seen piles of parchment spread out on the table before them, but still, he’d been somewhat justified in being suspicious. Possibly not justified in going into a rage and calling Anthony a thieving bastard and Hermione a lying slag, but definitely right to be jealous.
He might have been able to salvage the situation if he hadn’t run into Lavender at the third bar he went into and if he hadn’t had four Firewhiskys at the second. Or possibly if Aberforth hadn’t cut him off at four, but that wasn’t really his fault. The bar had been sliced in half, after all, and a nearly full barrel of aged mead was lost in between the cracks in the dusty floor.
At any rate, he was willing to take some responsibility, but fate apparently had it in for him pretty bad, because there was Lavender, batting her eyelashes and pressing her tits in his face. Granted, they were fantastic tits (as he’d learned firsthand during sixth year) and it proved to be damn difficult to turn down someone whose self-esteem had taken such a blow due to her war wounds, but even drunk off his arse, Ron hadn’t been able to go through with it.
Not that it mattered.
A whispered word to her best friend, who in turn whispered to her twin sister, who in turn whispered to her fellow Unspeakable trainees, and that was it, as far as Hermione was concerned. “Fool me once…” she’d said, glaring at him with hurt in her eyes, and there was no changing her mind.
And the odd thing about it was that it hadn’t done him in. Sure, he hurt, but not as much as he’d have thought. He hadn’t felt as though his still-beating heart had been ripped out of his chest, anyway.
No, that wasn’t until three weeks later. Or a week ago, to be specific.
It had been yet another crap day, and Ron was in the mood to get completely shit-faced. Harry was the obvious companion of choice, even though he was behaving very oddly since Ron and Hermione broke up. Ron supposed Harry had to feel torn, of course he did, but he seemed to be avoiding Ron as much as possible. Perhaps he blamed Ron. Ron blamed himself, but he might have liked a bit of unconditional loyalty from his best mate. Not a lot, just a little.
At any rate, he hadn’t been home.
George was the next choice, of course, and Ron made his way to the softly lit shop, using his key to get in when he noticed that the windows in George’s flat were dark.
He heard a noise in the basement, and called out, “Oi, Georgie! I’m coming down, so don’t blow anything up.” He heard a startled squeak from below as he took the stairs two at a time, but it never occurred to him that George wouldn’t be alone until it was way too late. Because the scene that he witnessed when he’d nearly reached the bottom was completely unfathomable.
The first thing he saw was George’s freckled arse, which wasn’t really an unexpected sight, given George’s penchant for mooning people. What he‘d never in a million years expected to see was his best mate’s arse spread open just in front of George’s and quite clearly filled with George’s freckled cock. Nor had he expected to see George looking back at him sheepishly but somehow defiantly at the same time, while Harry simply looked horrified.
“You…you….you fucking bastard!” he roared, running forward to pull George off Harry and throw him against the wall. “He’s my fucking brother, you sick fuck! Bad enough… my sister, but.. Fuck! This is the last fucking thing he needs, he’s already completely fucked in the head, and you, you-”
George coughed slightly from where he stood off to the side. Reluctantly, Ron pulled his eyes away from Harry‘s enormous ones to look over at his still naked and apparently irritated brother. “Hate to interrupt you, Ronnie, dear, but in all your homophobic indignation, you seem to have forgot one tiny thing. Just who was fucking who here?”
Ron closed his eyes as he tried to wrap his mind around that comment and all it entailed. “I’m not--I mean you…and he…and,” He turned back to Harry. “What the fuck, Harry?”
“I’m sorry,” Harry muttered, trying with limited success to hide behind a stack of Headless Hats, unable to meet Ron’s eyes.
“Don’t you dare fucking apologise, Harry,” George growled, walking over to stand between Ron and Harry, blocking Ron‘s view with his body. “It’s none of his goddamn business. If he’s got a problem with it, then he can leave.” He turned back to Ron, hands on his hips. “And don’t bother coming back until you can get over yourself.”
Ron shook his head. Something about George standing there, defiant, not even bothering to cover himself up, was making him see red. He wanted to punch the smile off his smug face. He was nauseous, but somehow he was afraid it had as much to do with shame as it did with disgust at the two of them.
Once more, Ron looked at Harry, willing him to meet his eyes but failing miserably. With a sigh, he turned and ran back up the stairs.
He was tempted to hit the nearest bar and drink himself into oblivion, but then he remembered the last time he’d felt this way. Had it really only been three weeks? He didn’t want to run into another Lavender and pour his rage and heartache out to the worst possible person. With his luck, he’d have run into Rita Skeeter. Still, he had to do something with the blinding rage he was feeling. Destroying George’s stupid shop was tempting, but in the end he made his way out into Muggle London, where he found a pub filled with noisy football fans. Before the night was out, he’d had half a dozen pints, two shots of tequila (vile stuff), he’d given somebody a black eye and in return had received a split lip. These blokes took their team’s losses personally, apparently.
It would have been brilliant if he hadn’t had the image of his brother and his best friend in front of his eyes the entire night.
For the next week or so, Ron felt as though he was walking around in a fog, It didn’t seem possible that the person he’d spent almost every hour of the day with for eight years could have hid something so monumental from him. Not only that, but his brother, too. Yeah, maybe he had suspected that George was a bit more flirtatious with boys than he was with girls--hell, he‘d accused Fred and George of being queer for each other on a regular basis. But Harry? Harry? Ron’s world had turned upside down twice in as many months, and he wondered if he’d ever recover his equilibrium.
And that didn’t even address the fact that he’d managed to lose both his best friends within months of each other. He didn’t even have anyone to talk to about it, though his mum would go on asking him why he was so glum. He couldn’t tell her--she’d have had apoplexy. And then probably gone off looking for babies for Harry and George to adopt together. It wasn’t that simple for Ron. He’d managed to deal with his odd feelings of jealousy and his natural protectiveness when Harry started seeing Ginny, but with George…
Fuck, what a mess.
He supposed that George’s parting remark sort of meant he was sacked, which was probably the only positive aspect of the whole thing. At least he was going to be able to focus on Auror training. But that was an issue in itself, because there was no way he was going to be able to avoid seeing Harry.
It turned out to be a lot easier to avoid Harry than he’d imagined. Harry wouldn’t come near him, wouldn’t look him in the eye, ate lunch somewhere outside of the Ministry, stopped coming to the Burrow, even left the room whenever Ron entered it. The only exception was classes they had to take together, but Harry made a point to sit on the other side of the room. Of course, all of their fellow trainees wanted to know what was happening, but a couple of times muttering ‘none of your fucking business,’ and the questions eventually trickled down to nothing.
Time went along in a sort of limbo until one day in late October when he and Harry got paired up for dueling practice. Ron knew it was bound to happen someday--after all, he did end up fighting each his classmates at least once every few weeks, but he’d been praying that he’d feel better about it all by then. Harry looked completely miserable about it. Their classmates, on the other hand, seemed to think it was going to be a jolly good show.
Feeling as if he was going to lose the greasy fish he’d consumed for lunch at any moment, Ron walked reluctantly to the mat. Harry arrived moments later, focusing determinedly on the laces on his shoes. Ron drew his wand, but Harry had to be reminded to draw his. When he finally looked up, he looked in the general direction of Ron’s left shoulder, his expression inscrutable.
At the signal, Ron raised his wand, knowing Harry would probably start with a stunner.
“Expelliamus!”
Harry flew backwards, landing hard o n his arse as the circle around them buzzed w ith whispered conversation. He hadn’t even tried, damn him.
“Try again, Potter,” Cavendish said.
Harry glared at his instructor and stood up, squaring his shoulders.
“Wands ready…”
This time, Harry actually did use his wand, but only to shield himself from Ron’s Disarming Charm. He still wouldn’t look at Ron, and Ron felt the hurt and the anger and feelings of isolation and betrayal of the last few weeks coming to a head.
He threw out a Reducto, and Harry chose to shield against it rather than go on the offensive. It seemed as if Ron didn’t matter, wasn’t good enough to fight, wasn’t good enough to confide in, didn’t deserve honesty, didn’t deserve a proper defense,
Before he even knew what he was doing, he’d thrown out three curses in rapid succession, all of which bounced easily off Harry’s shield, and Ron was barreling towards him, fists swinging. “Fight back, you fucking prick!”
Harry raised his fists in a defensive pose, and the look on his face was nearly enough to halt Ron in his tracks--he imagined later that it might be the very face Dudley had witnessed on a regular basis, just before he was about to deliver a black eye or a broken nose.
The fear in his eyes hit Ron like a punch in the gut, but it was no match for the rage of betrayal that sent Ron’s fists undeterred past Ron’s conscience and the rules of the exercise they were supposed to be performing and even past Harry’s crossed wrists, connecting with his nose with a crunch of bone Ron could feel down to his toes.
The shouts of those around them witnessing the event couldn’t penetrate the roaring in Ron’s ears. Nor could the whistle of the instructor. Ron could hear nothing. His conscience was screaming for him to stop, and Harry’s pain-filled eyes seemed to be pleading to him, but Harry’s fist was apparently also thinking independently, because it connected with a tender spot just under Ron’s ribs, knocking the wind out of him even as two of their classmates pulled them apart. They were clawing to get back to each other, shouting random words that probably only made sense to each other.
“You fucking-”
“I’m sorry!”
“Lied. Did you think I-”
“I couldn’t”
“Stupid!”
“I didn’t want”
“Me, your best”
“You.”
“My fucking”
“Hate”
“Brother.”
“Me.”
“How?”
And then suddenly everything went black. He woke up disoriented, discovering that he’d been tossed under a cold shower while he was Stunned, probably by his teacher.
He yelped as he stood up, shaking off his hair like a shaggy puppy.
Harry was doing the same thing in the next stall. He stopped in his tracks when he saw Ron approaching. It was as if Ron had never been interrupted. “Why?”
Harry’s shoulders dropped visibly. “I can’t help it, Ron.”
“But George. Harry, we were supposed to be helping him, not-”
“Not what? Letting him feel normal every now and again? Do you honestly think I seduced poor, ickle, innocent George? Who the fuck do you think started it?”
“I …I don’t even want to think about that.”
“Of course you don’t! And you wonder why I didn’t tell you--how many times have I heard you call someone a fucking poof, Ron? How many times?”
“I don’--I mean--you know I’m not really calling them a…well, I don’t mean that…Goddamn it, Harry, you know me! It doesn’t matter if you…it’s just…he’s my fucking brother! First my sister and now my brother! What the fuck are you trying to…do you even love him?”
“It’s just sex, Ron. Nobody‘s going to get hurt, it‘s just…”
Sex, Ron thought, and remembered having witnessed just that. He groaned, more loudly than he meant to.
Harry’s eyes narrowed and his lips tightened. “Well,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height, though he looked a lot less intimidating than he might have had his clothes not been sticking wetly to his body and his hair shooting droplets all over the place as he spoke. “Sorry to have offended your delicate sensibilities, but you did sort of come in without knocking, didn’t you? Really wasn’t any of your fucking business, was it?”
“None of my business? I thought I was your best mate! I’ve shared a bed with you, shared a shower with you, and you didn’t think I might like to know?”
Did I ever, ever do anything like make a pass at you, Ron Weasley?” Harry said, very nearly shouting. “Or were you under the mistaken impression that being gay was contagious?
Ron flinched at the word, and for a moment, it sat between them, such a tiny cheerful little syllable, but more than capable of dividing an unbridgeable chasm between them.
“No” Ron finally said. “I just…I wish you’d told me. I’m your best mate.”
“I couldn’t,” Harry whispered. “It had nothing to do with you.”
And that bothered Ron more than it should have. “I’m your best mate,” he repeated. “But not good enough to…”
“What?” Harry asked, his eyes narrowed.
“Good enough to know the truth, anyway,” Ron said, just before turning and walking out the door.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Life went on fairly uneventfully after that. Or rather, uneventfully if you didn’t count the fact that Ron was miserable and lonely and feeling completely betrayed. Wisely, his career counselor was willing to rearrange his schedule a bit so he had as few classes with Harry as possible. Still, he tried to make up for the lack of company by spending a lot of time in the pub. Of course, that only resulted in a lot of conversation with bartenders and barmaids, which was all well and good, but certainly no substitute for Harry and Hermione, and even George, for that matter. He thought about contacting all three of them any number of times, but as far as he was concerned, he was the one who’d been lied to, been shut out, so why should he have to approach them, tail between his legs?
Still, after too many late nights and hangovers (and lectures from his mother) he finally decided that what he was missing was mates (no, not Harry, it was the friendship that he missed. Really. Someone to talk to. Someone who knew you) So when Dean and Seamus approached him about moving into the room that Neville was going to have to give up, he decided to take them up on it. It was well past time he started growing up, he reckoned, and the first step was independence.
Dean and Seamus were all right. Not Harry, certainly, but it was entertaining to watch them bicker like an old married couple. Neville’s dad had finally died, and his Grandmother had begun to decline shortly after, but he still came around from time to time when he needed a break from caring for her. Those were the best times, where Ron felt less like an outsider.
Eventually, he started seeing Hannah Abbot from time to time. She was easy to talk to (the perfect bartender, actually) and the sex was certainly a bonus, but it was pretty clear to Ron that he wasn’t her first choice any more than she was his. Maybe he was selfish in not telling Neville that she was waiting on him to get up the nerve to ask her out, but Ron reckoned Neville would probably get on with it when he was good and ready and not a minute before.
So all in all, he was all right. Not great, not by any stretch of the imagination, but all right. He was beginning to have more sympathy for George, because the loss of Harry was still a physical ache that might have been something like what George was feeling without Fred. You’d have thought that Hermione would have been the bigger loss, but no, seeing her at the Ministry dancing with Goldstein hadn’t depressed him at all. It had seemed right, if anything. Seeing Harry there, however, completely alone, had depressed the shit out of him.
Not enough to send him over to talk to him, though, nor was it enough to keep him from sitting on the other side of the room in classes and stubbornly refusing to invite him to Christmas dinner as his mum requested. Let George invite him, he thought.
George, however, showed up alone, and was remarkably well behaved, all things considered. He’d even given Ron a gift--a basket with all sorts of WWW products. Ron wasn’t sure if it was a peace offering or if they were poisoned, but he thanked him politely and even half-hugged him goodnight.
The following week was miserable, however. Without work, he was bored out of his mind, and Seamus and Dean had gone off to Amsterdam for a few days of debauchery (or wooden shoes and Rembrandt--with those two, you never knew).
.
One night, Ron was home alone, and contemplating the merits of another night at the pub (with Hannah at the end) or a night at home with a good book. Eventually, he took another look at the gaudily wrapped gift on his nightstand.
The gag booze was tempting, but far better enjoyed with company. Instead, he thought he might try one of the Daydream charms. He’d had a few of them at school, but as an adult, it seemed that real life was much more fun than any escape George could come up with. Still, it seemed a good idea to get out of his own head, or rather to get his head in a more pleasant place. A game of Quidditch, a chance to get back to the place where he had both his best friends to lean on and the future looked hopeful. He smiled as his brothers’ images winked at him from the corner of the box, The packaging had changed a bit over the years, but the logo remained the same. Also, this one had child-proof charms on each end, which was a new feature, and probably a good idea.
He popped open a beer, broke the seal on the package, and settled back for a good Quidditch fantasy. Just the thing to get him smiling, he suspected.
He found himself in his familiar gear, headed toward the changing rooms. Oddly enough, the shoulder pads pinched him just as they used to, and the heel of his shoe rubbed the wrong way, just the way it had at school. Where the rest of the team was, he didn’t know, but he heard the ancient pipes going on the other side of the wall, and the idea of losing all his sweaty gear certainly had appeal.
He dropped his kit off at his locker and padded toward the showers, dropping clothes along the way. It was funny how the smell of the place was just as he remembered--he could even smell the victory they’d just had.
The sound of water running grew louder as he approached, and as he reached the doorway, the steam pouring from it was thick enough to obscure his view of the showers.
What shocked him more than anything was how expected the sight of Harry had been. Perhaps it was inevitable, that George might have known that running into Harry would have been his dearest wish.
Still, running into Harry whilst he was naked was a bit of a shock. And running into him mid-wank was odder still. But oddest of all was discovering that he couldn’t tear his eyes away, let alone walk away and leave him to it. Harry’s hand was braced on the tile, and Ron could see the muscles of his back and shoulders rippling under his skin, slick with water and sweat. It would be so easy to take a few steps forward, to reach out and touch him, but why would he want to do such a thing?
But when he heard his own name whispered out loud, he was compelled to do just that, placing a hand on Harry’s shoulder in a gesture that was all-too-familiar. Harry turned his head in response, but instead of the shock Ron expected to see on his face, there was only a widening smile as Harry leaned back against him.
What sort of alternate universe had he stepped into? Ron wrapped his arm around Harry’s waist in a gesture that seemed like second nature . “Thought you’d never turn up,” Harry said, and leaned his head back to kiss Ron’s cheek softly.
.
“Got started without me, did you?” Ron asked as he began fingering the damp hairs below Harry’s navel, making his stomach muscles contract in response.
“I’ll help you catch up,” Harry said with a low laugh that reverberated over Ron‘s spine. Turning in his arms, Harry tucked his head under Ron’s chin, and Ron’s arms automatically tightened against him in response. Why did this feel so familiar? It was like experiencing someone else’s life, someone else’s feelings. Or perhaps it was his feelings, just budged over, somehow. Or seen through a different filter. Because maybe Harry liked this sort of thing, but in real life, if Ron had felt an erection pressing up against his belly in an all-too-friendly manner, he certainly wouldn’t have thought it felt rather nice, would he? Nor would he be compelled to reach down and circle it with his fingers, which he found himself doing just moments later, for some unfathomable reason. And why was the little moan that Harry let out in response so unbelievably hot?
Ron moved his fist as if he’d done this sort of thing a thousand times before, and he felt Harry’s lips pressing against his chest, felt his tongue licking water droplets from his skin, making him shiver in response.
“Fuck, yeah,” he found himself saying as Harry’s mouth closed over his nipple. Harry moved lower, and Ron felt compelled to press his torso against Harry’s lips greedily even as he struggled to keep his hold on Harry’s cock. He was reluctantly obliged to give up by the time Harry’s tongue reached the middle of his stomach, but at that point, it was a simple matter to just bury his fingers in Harry’s hair, which, while nowhere near as good as his cock, was actually fairly brilliant because he could push Harry’s head down in an unspoken demand.
“Greedy, aren’t you?” Harry chuckled against Ron’s navel, teasing him by swirling his tongue and dipping it inside.
“Bloody hell, will you get on with it?” Ron muttered, reaching up to hold onto the shower head, because by the time Harry’s mouth closed around his cock, his knees were having trouble actually holding his body up.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Ron knew that this wasn’t really him, that he’d never consciously behave that way--but at the same time, this was achingly familiar. This Harry, whoever he was, clearly adored him, and this Ron, whoever he was, loved him just as much in return, and somehow, as strange and out of character as it felt, it felt sort of warm and familiar and very, very right. It was as though all love and shared history and camaraderie he’d always felt with Harry had been expanded, somehow, and he not only needed him, but he wanted him--he not only cared about Harry, but he adored him. Given his choice, this Ron would have been just as happy to be the one on his knees making Harry’s eyes roll back in his head.
And even more remarkable was the way that it felt to look down and see Harry l ooking back up at him, his familiar eyes shining with love, making Ron’s heart swell and his chest constrict. “I love you,” he found himself saying, touching Harry’s cheek affectionately as Harry smiled around his cock.
It was that smile that did it, and shortly afterwards, Ron found himself pulled back into reality. He was no longer in the shower, considering how best to return the favour (did he really fancy the idea of sticking his tongue up Harry‘s arse?), but he was lying alone in his own bed, his fist covered in his own come, his clothes in disarray. An empty Daydream Charm box was lying next to his pillow, looking deceptively innocent.
Twenty minutes later, for the first time in months, he found himself standing in front of the door to his brother’s shop, his body shaking with rage and confusion. He hesitated for a moment before opening the door, wondering if he wasn’t going to find himself walking into a scene similar to the one he’d just reluctantly participated in. (All right, maybe not reluctantly, but he hadn’t been himself, had he?)
Still, he had anger and leftover adrenaline propelling him as he brushed past a startled Verity and bounded down the stairs to George’s office.
“What the fuck?” he shouted once through the door, throwing the empty box at his wide-eyed brother, who was (thankfully) alone.
“Still haven’t learned to knock, have you?” George said, rising from his desk and reaching out for the box. “Still, no harm done, at least this time.” He turned the box over in his hand, looking back at Ron with one eyebrow raised. “So, what’s your problem this time?”
“Did you think it was a joke? No--stupid question, of course you did. Everything’sof course you did. Everything’s a joke to you. But this is pretty low, even for you. What, is it some sort of revenge for what I said?”
“Well, I’m always happy to own up to a good gag, but I’m afraid I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about, Ronnikins.”
“Oh fuck off,” Ron said, yanking the box from his hand. “I sure as hell hope you didn’t plan on marketing them. This’ll be the thing to get you sued for everything you’ve got, if not killed…”
George began to smile, realisation apparently dawning. “Well,” he said. “That may be, but I wasn’t planning on selling them to the kids, was I? You had to have noticed the Age Charms”
“What the fuck difference does that make? They’re fucking gay flavoured.”
“Excuse me?” George coughed. “Gay flavoured?”
“As if you didn’t know! Seriously, George, I don’t care what you do, or what Harry does, but I sure as hell don’t want to be dragged into it-”
“Now slow down, Ron,” George broke in, setting down the quill he was holding and taking a step toward his brother. “Are you trying to tell me that you used this charm and ended up with a…bloke?”
“As if you didn’t know-”
“Ron-”
“Something like that could really mess with someone’s head, you know?”
“Ron,” George said again, more loudly.
“Not everyone has your sick sense of humor!”
“Ron!”
“What?!”
“I’m good, but I’m not that good.”
“I don‘t understand-”
“I can’t put something in your head that isn’t there. That’s the difference between a charm, which just makes what’s there seem more real, and possession, which makes you see what another person wants you to see. For that, you need eye contact, or some other mental connection. This just…”
“What? What is it?”
George shook his head. “I didn’t…Ron, it was just a gift, not a joke. I didn’t make you see anything. I just thought-”
“You thought what?”
“Just thought you might like a bit of fun. Or maybe I thought you’d see Hermione and realise how miserable you were without her and get up the nerve to steal her back from that wanker. I never imagined…who did you see, Ron? What did you see, what did you do?”
“I saw…none of your bloody business! And for that matter, I don’t fucking believe you. You have to be able to put things in people’s heads. I remember the old version. I was a pirate, and there was a sea monster, and…I didn’t make that rubbish up!”
“Well, now, that was the picture on the box, wasn’t it? Most people sit down and look at the box while they’re waiting for the charm to work. So it’s already there in their heads, and usually they have a pretty good idea of who they’re going to see there, especially if they already fancy someone…”
“But I don’t fancy H…him. I can’t. I couldn’t, I just…”Ron sat down weakly. “I can’t. It‘s impossible.”
George moved his hand over his face. “Gods, Ronnie. I never meant…Are you…what did you see?”
Ron just shook his head. “I can’t…I can‘t, it‘s got to be…I mean, nothing‘s been right since I walked in here and…I just…I can‘t. There’s got to be a mix-up.” He looked at George pleadingly. “You could have made a mistake. Put something in there you didn’t mean to. Something from your own head, maybe? I mean, I don’t want to do those things, I never have, I never…”
“Who was it, Ronnie?” George asked quietly.
Ron turned away. “I don’t want to…it’s none of your business.”
“I’m not seeing him any more, you know. It was never going to go anywhere, I just…I hated seeing him so conflicted, and I could tell he just needed someone to talk to, and it was sort of nice to be the one fixing things for a change, you know?”
“Oh, yeah,” Ron said wryly. “You’re a saint, aren‘t you? Selfless Saint George.”
George laughed. “Well, there was that, too. The point is, I always sort of knew he was yours, even if…”
Ron shook his head vehemently. “Not mine. It’s not like that. It’s just…this has got to be just one of those things. Maybe because I miss being with him mixed up with what I saw here-” Not that what he saw George and Harry doing was anything like what he saw in his daydream, but still…
George gave him a long look, and finally clapped his hand on Ron’s shoulder. “Maybe it is, but I think you need to talk to Harry either way.”
Talking to Harry was the very last thing Ron wanted to do at that moment, but then again, the idea of seeing him--of ending their estrangement--filled him with such hope that he knew he was going to take his brother’s advice.
He stood up, rubbing his hands over his face. “I don’t know. Maybe. I meant to apologise, anyway. I’m still…I still feel like I was lied to, but-” He turned back to George. “What I said, that night--I didn’t really mean it. I was just….shocked, you know? But I…you’re all right, George. I mean, you’re still the reason I’m afraid of spiders and you nearly got me killed a hundred times before I was ten, and I wanted to kill you about a million times, but you’re all right. And I want you to be happy, even if it’s blokes you want. Dunno why I’m surprised, anyway; we always reckoned you and Fred were in love with each other…”
George laughed softly, shrugging his shoulders.
“Or else you and Lee…”
“Completely straight, I’m afraid. You don’t know how lucky you are to have your best friend completely mad for you. But I’m still hopeful-” At Ron’s look of panic, George reached over to mess Ron’s hair affectionately. “You really need to talk to Harry. Go on, before he takes up with someone else, someone who doesn’t love him like you do.”
“I’m not…I don’t..”
“Someone like Malfoy,” George added, and winked as Ron’s mouth dropped open in horror. “Go on, then.”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
The son of a bitch had warded against him. He couldn’t even see the bloody place, though he’d spent an entire summer there. Ron was furious. Possibly it was more of that karmic payback for having waited so long to start speaking to his best mate again, or possibly for some of the horrid things he’d said, but Ron reckoned he’d paid more than enough in all his months of miserable solitude.
He waited outside for a while, but he decided that probably was a waste of time. He could be waiting all night, and he’d see Harry at work the next day. The pub didn’t sound appealing, though, and Ron found himself thinking of the next best place to go when your life was a mess of your own creation.
Perhaps it was a premonition, but his heart seemed to feel lighter as he made his way through the Burrow’s back gate. Or maybe it was the familiar sound of the chickens out back and the smell of bread that came from the kitchen window. Sometimes he wondered why he ever thought he needed to move out, but the sound of a crash and his mother’s following shriek of alarm soon reminded him of why he’d left. Oh, well. She could nag him all she liked, it couldn’t be any worse than being inside his own head at the moment.
What he wasn’t prepared for, however, was finding Harry sitting at the kitchen table, bouncing Teddy on his knee. He turned as the door slammed shut behind Ron, and his face went completely white. Ron smiled hesitantly. “Hullo, Harry,” he said.
“Oh,” Harry replied, and got up in a hurry, banging Teddy’s knee against the table in the process and causing him to howl.
That was when Ron noticed his mother was also in the room, for she rushed forward to grab the toddler from Harry‘s arms. “Oh, Teddy, you poor thing--let me have him, Harry. Ronnie dear, have a seat, you’re just in time for supper,”
“I, uh…” Ron couldn’t tear his eyes away from Harry, who gave up Teddy without much of a fuss, but looked like he was ready to bolt through the door.
“I just…I needed help, you see, with Teddy, and your mum offered…”
“Nonsense, Harry, you’re always welcome to drop by, especially when you bring this darling boy,” Molly interrupted.
“I, uh,” Ron said again, wondering why Harry had felt the need to defend his presence there and feeling rotten when he remembered their last two conversations. “I was looking for you,” he said.
Harry looked wary, but he didn’t say anything.
“I just…oh, for fuck’s sake, just sit down and stop looking at me like I’m going to hit you.”
“Ronald!” Molly said, covering up Teddy’s ears.
“I...er, right.” Harry shut his mouth deliberately and sat in his chair.
Ron shifted on his feet, looking over at his glaring mother and then back at Harry. Why he had to do this with an audience, he didn’t know. But it had to be done. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly, willing Harry to look up at him. “I was an arse.”
Harry finally looked up at Ron, biting at his lip as the silence stretched on.
“Oh, goodness,” Molly said suddenly. “I completely forgot! I meant to lend Fleur my large roasting pan! Why don’t I just bring Teddy along and he can play with Victoire. You‘ll be all right, won‘t you, Harry dear? And Ron?”
Reluctantly tearing his eyes away from Harry, Ron smiled at his mother. “Thanks, Mum.”
Looking back at Harry, Ron waited patiently as his mother banged around, trying to find the pot in question, Teddy protesting the entire time. When the dust of the Floo finally settled, the silence was deafening. Ron pulled up a chair and straddled it. “I miss you,” he finally said.
“Yeah,” Harry muttered, looking down at his hands. “Me too.”
Ron sighed. “When did you know?” he asked.
“For a while now,” Harry answered. “I just…didn’t want it to be true. I thought…I suppose I was hoping it was Voldemort in my head, and that when I finally got him out of there, it would go away.”
Ron frowned. “What, was Voldemort a…was he into blokes, too?”
“No, that’s not what I meant,” Harry said, running his hands through his hair. “I thought. I hoped it was him messing with me. You know, like how the locket messed with you about me and Hermione?”
Ron grimaced as he remembered it. It had ferreted out all his deepest insecurities, even ones he hadn’t known he had. What Harry had witnessed was only the tip of the iceberg. “But…I mean, what sort of things did he say?”
“That’s the thing,” Harry said. “I still don’t know what was him and what was me, you know?”
“But-” At this point, surely Harry had to know the difference between someone whispering evil suggestions and someone inferring that you fancied blokes.
Harry looked sideways at him, waiting for him to continue..
“You never said anything. I could have…I mean, I know I was an arse, but it was the shock more than anything. If you’d have just told me, maybe I’d have taken the mickey out on you, but…why George? Why lie to me and tell George the truth?”
Harry shrugged. “He knew. Don’t ask me how, but he saw. And then he just sort of hinted around, kept saying more and more until finally-”
“Yeah?” Ron prodded.
“You don’t want to know,” Harry said, looking away.
“Harry,” Ron said, exasperated. “Best mate, remember?”
“Yeah,” Harry said taking a deep breath. “Right. So he kissed me.”
“And?”
“I mean, I suppose it was pretty clear that I didn’t mind.”
“And then?”
“Really, you don’t want to hear about this.”
“After everything we’ve been through…” Ron said, rising to his feet and moving to the sink. He could see it, damn it. He could see all of it, even with his eyes closed.
“All right, he gave me a blow job.”
Harry was right, he didn’t really want to hear about this. “And…?”
“And it was the best fucking thing I ever felt.”
Ron frowned. If he was going to name the best thing he ever felt he might have mentioned the moment that he pulled Harry out of that frozen pool and realised he was going to be forgiven. Or the moment that he realised that Harry was only pretending to be dead. Or the time he realised that he was the thing that Harry would miss the most--that he, Ron Weasley, loser extraordinaire--was the most important person in the world to another individual. It certainly wouldn’t have been Hermione’s first attempts to suck his cock, as brilliant as that had been. And he was the one who’d been accused of being an insensitive clod…
And furthermore, if he’d been forced to come up with a memory for a Patronus that featured solely Hermione, his soul would have been completely fucked. All his best memories had Harry in them. And that was sort of telling, wasn’t it?
And then it hit him--why he was here and what he’d been trying to say. Only he didn’t have the words, and Harry was bright red, unable to look at him. He held out his hand, pulling Harry to his feet. He’d meant merely to hug him, to let him know that nothing was going to change the way that he felt, but knew deep down that something had changed. He knew it when Harry finally met his eyes, knew it as their mouths moved closer together, knew it when his fingers tightened on Harry’s shoulders, pulling him closer still.
They’d been headed in this direction ever since Ron had come across his best friend and his brother and been consumed with writhing, soul-eating jealousy. Hell, George had seen it even before he had, hadn’t he?
Still, those last few millimeters remaining between their lips seemed an unbridgeable chasm. He hovered there, his head bent low as Harry licked his lips, terrified that he was about to completely bugger things up. Shutting his eyes, he closed the gap, pressing his lips to Harry’s as Harry’s opened beneath his.
Yes, he thought. This. This was what’s been missing all along, and his hands were shaking and he wondered if Harry was going to be able to hear his heart pounding in his chest. “It should have been me,” he said. “I should have been the one to notice. We could have sorted it out together.”
“But you wanted Hermione,” Harry said, stepping away from Ron, visibly shaken. “Remember her? Bit swotty, mad hair, nice tits, always has her hand up in the air? The one whose name you used to call out in your sleep?”
“Did I? I’m having trouble remembering why at the moment.”
“Yeah, a lot,” Harry said. “I didn’t mind, though, because I wanted you two to be happy. I loved…I love you both so much, and it just seemed inevitable. And for a while, I thought maybe I could have that kind of life, and Ginny seemed perfect. I’d have a family, and we’d be almost like brothers-”
“You didn’t need to be with Ginny for that, we already are.”
“Yeah, well, you know what I meant. I wanted a normal life, and I really cared about her a lot, but when it came down to it, I couldn’t go through with it. It wouldn’t have been fair use her like that. N ot that she saw it that way-”
“Yeah. I suppose I know now why she suddenly seems to hate your guts.”
“It was bad,” he said, grimacing as he remembered. “She accused me of using her as a substitute for-”
Ron’s heart soared, but Harry didn’t finish. He could very well have meant George, but Ron doubted it.
“Well,” he said, taking a step toward Harry and looking down into his eyes. “She’s just going to have to deal with it, isn’t she? You were mine first, right?”
“Ron,” he protested, but Ron stopped him with another kiss, quick and possessive.
“I saw us,” he explained. “It was yo u and me, only not like we are, but like we could be. It was as if we‘d been together all along, and it was brilliant.”
“Where did you see us?”
“Daydream Charm. I thought it was George playing a trick on me, or revenge for what I said, but it turns out maybe I was too thick to see what was there all along.”
“What was there?”
“This,” Ron said, enfolding Harry in his arms. “I’m with you, whatever happens, remember?”