Boiling Point (NC-17, R/D)
Title: Boiling Point
Author: mad_maudlin
Team: Ron
Prompt: Cheating
Rating: R
Warnings: Violent imagery. And I think infidelity is kind of a given.
Length: 2,253 words
Summary: Ron Weasley has always had a problem with anger management.
Boiling Point
by Mad Maudlin
"I'm going out," Ron calls, and shoves on a pair of the boots that invariably pile up around the hearth despite Hermione's best efforts to enforce organization. She asks
"When are you going to be home this time?"
"Dunno," he says. "Late as the match goes."
She makes a noise from the kitchen. "I get worried when you're out late at that pub, Ron."
He ties on his cloak without looking through the yellow doorway to watch her shadow moving on the wall. "I know. I'll be careful."
"Just remember it's your turn to drop Hugo at your mum's tomorrow."
"Yeah."
And Ron is gone.
***
When Ron was a kid, he'd once asked his brothers why the kettle made such a horrible shrill noise when it boiled. Was there something wrong with the charms? Bill, once he'd realized what Ron was talking about, had laughed and explained that it wasn't a charm that made the kettle whistle like that; that when the water boiled, the kettle got so hot and full of steam, that there was just so much pressure trapped inside, that it just had to make a noise or it would burst.
Ron is like that, sometimes.
***
Six hours before he will leave for the pub, Ron is fighting with George. "It costs too much," he keeps trying to say, "We'll never recoup the overhead. Look, do you know how to count?"
"It's an untapped market," George breezes away, "and we can eat the losses for a quarter or two for marketing."
"This is the single stupidest product launch I've seen you make!"
"Then maybe you should've stayed with the Aurors, eh?"
Ron doesn't slam the doors or stomp his feet, because excessive vibrations around Weasley Wizard Wheezes are likely to set off more explosions than are worth anyone's time. He walks out and sits in his office, breathing heavy, fists clenched in his robes until the knuckles turn white.
***
Ron has always had a problem with anger management.
***
Ron will go to the pub, but not for the live broadcast of the Quidditch. He'll go to the pub and take an upstairs room, far from the noise of the cheerful sports fans and celebrating friends. He'll take off his cloak and his boots and sit on the bed, putting a screen in the fire to block out the Floo and closing all the curtains first. He will sit in a dark and cold room and he will wait, perfectly still, eyes on the door until the moment he sees the knob turning, wand in his hand.
***
When Ron was a kid, he'd had a short temper. Sometimes the whistling kettle was the only thing that got any attention, and if he didn't scream and throw things no one would see him at all. (Sometimes no one saw him when he did) People were always telling him to be calm, be cool like his brothers, like Hermione, but Ron was thin-skinned and moody and it felt good to let the steam out, sometimes. It felt good to give in.
And everybody knew that Ron could go off like a rocket, but they waved it away because he was ginger or Gryffindor or Molly's son. Most people just dealt with it. Most people didn't go looking for his fuse. Most people didn't like to watch him burn.
***
Ron has always had problems with impulse control.
***
He goes to the pub because it's small and quiet, in a rainy little town where the wizard population triples during every Quidditch match. The owner is half-blind and congenial and Ron pays her handsomely, pays her too much, for the room on the top floor with the screen in the grate. He pays her too much and then sheepishly tells Hermione that he had a little too much to drink during the match, that he bought a round for some mates and miscalculated the cost, that the pub owner raised prices again.
She is half-blind, yet sees enough to know what Ron's doing up there, but perhaps the gold in his hand keeps her from seeing the ring on his finger.
***
When he was a kid-or not a kid, fourteen and old enough-Ron blurted out every stupid angry thing in his head, and didn't speak to Harry for nearly a month. He should've learned his lesson. Instead he did roughly the same things when he was fifteen and sixteen and seventeen, to Harry and Hermione and Lavender and Dean, and everybody else in range, because when Ron was fourteen (and fifteen and sixteen and seventeen) he figured that if he was in a bad mood, everybody else deserved to be, too.
It almost cost him friendships. It almost got people killed.
When he followed Harry's footprints to a frigid lake, Ron wasn't a kid anymore. He couldn't afford to be.
***
He loves his family, his wife and kids, even (sometimes because of) when he also wants to strangle them. Hermione would not be Hermione if they didn't shout at each fifteen times a day, and the kids are only infuriating because they're as brilliant as her but as mature as he was at their age, and his brothers…well. Harry and Hermione have known him so well, known him better than he knew himself at times, and he doesn't know what he'd do without them. He has brothers and a sister and various in-laws, more nieces and nephews than he can comfortably list without making a chart, he has friends.
And he has a little room over a wizard pub in a town where it seems like the rain never stops. A little room where he waits with his wand drawn until the doorknob turns, until the hinges creak, and then he has to look away even though the drawn curtains give him nothing to look at. He looks at his hands until the lock clicks shut, until the silence presses in, until the man at the door says
"Weasley."
And that is all it takes.
***
When he was a kid-
But Ron sometimes thinks he was never really a kid. Or at least, he shouldn't have been, not when he was also Harry's friend.
***
He got hurt, on the job. Hugo was just a baby, Rose just walking, and Hermione brought them round to the hospital every day with a strained smile and a diaper bag. Ron was in hospital for almost a month, and the Auror's division paid a handsome hazardous duty bonus, but the day he got back Hermione helped him up the stairs and said,
"I thought it would stop."
And he looked at her, because he didn't understand. She wouldn't look at him. "Since the end of the war I've been waiting for it all to stop," she said. "For happily ever after. I don't know how much longer I can do this, Ron."
And Ron loved his wife, he loved his kids even when Rose took flying leaps onto the bed and landed on bruised ribs and bad legs. Ron loved being an Auror, too, but sometimes you had to make sacrifices.
***
"Weasley," he says, the patrician drawl, and once upon a time Ron tried to pretend. He'd bring chess boards, cards. He'd wait down in the pub with one ear on the match. He'd try to make conversation.
It never worked, not when that crushed-velvet voice slithered around his name. It only made a bigger mess for later. Ron stands, and with a twist of the wrist he shuts and seals the door, trapping them both.
"What, no greeting for me? Have you reverted to your native language of grunts and gestures?"
Ron lowers his wand. "Get over here. Now."
Malfoy tilts his head to one side, a gesture almost inhuman. "Make me."
***
When he was a kid, he'd hated Draco Malfoy more than he thought humanly possible; hated him so much that he shook and went weak, that it got hard to breathe, that his vision went red and white and there was nobody else in the room.
They weren't kids anymore.
***
Ron loves his family, his friends, his life. That's why he does this in the room in the rain. That's why he can't let them see.
***
It takes about three seconds to disarm Malfoy, and Ron drops both the wands because that's not what he's here for. He catches Malfoy by the wrist and flings him in the direction of the bed, but Malfoy catches himself on one of the posts and doesn't fall. "You're in an even more brutish mood that usual today," he says, a little breathlessly. "Perhaps I shouldn't have come."
"Shut up," Ron says. He's nearly shaking from the anticipation.
Malfoy straightens, neatly, smooths out the pinstripe robes that make his face so shockingly white. "Now, now, Weasley, that's not very polite to your guest. I realize your type find it difficult to comprehend good manners, but that hardly excuses-"
He's quick enough to dodge the first punch, but Ron was an Auror and knows how to feint; the second punch gets him under the ribs, winding him, and he collapses backwards on the bed. A lock of hair had fallen into his eyes.
He grins when he can speak again. "Is that really the best you can do?"
Ron wrestles him down, to the bed, to the floor, and Malfoy is laughing through the wheezes and yelps, laughing until Ron gets hands around his throat and squeezes him silent. For a moment there's no sound but Malfoy's gagging, no movement but his frantic scrabbles at Ron's hands, tearing skin with polished nails; and Ron would've stopped-he promises himself that one day he will stop-except he's straddling Malfoy's waist and under those fine robes, he can feel him getting hard.
***
Draco Malfoy has always had a habit of playing with fire.
***
They fuck. It's not friendly and it's not nice. Ron forces Malfoy down out of the principal of the matter, not because he wouldn't enjoy begin the one on his knees (he knows he has, and he will, though he will chew his lips bloody rather than betray it when Malfoy is over him and inside him and laughing;) but because he has pride. Malfoy does, too, and so he fights back, throwing punches when he isn't spitting venom. "Fucking pathetic, you fucking pathetic son of a Muggle-lover, with your fucking Mudblood wife and Mudblood brats--"
Ron wrestles him down and hitches up his robes, slapping that pale arse hard when Malfoy tries to buck him. Malfoy laughs. "God, Weasley, you hit like a girl! Is that how Granger likes it?"
"Shut the fuck up!"
Malfoy hisses as Ron stick a finger inside him, nothing more than spit for lube; it's not for Malfoy's benefit, anyway. "Is this how you think you won the war?" he asked. "You and you miserable confederacy of traitors and cowards, hiding behind Harry fucking Potter because you were too weak to stand on your own--"
"Shut. Up."
He bucks again, and Ron wrenches his arm back, so Malfoy's face slams into the carpet with a heavy crack. Malfoy roars. "I'm going to fucking kill you," he snarls. "One day. I'll kill you all. I'll tear your whole ginger family limb from limb and I will dance--"
Ron fucks him, one hand on his slim hip and one hand on the back-bent wrist, and Malfoy's tirade dissolves into growls and whimpers, animal sounds, writhing-though whether he's trying to get away push back harder, it's hard to say. His cock is hard, and Ron grabs it, twists it, just to make him give up more of those helpless cries. To make him want it, the way Ron wants it, the way Ron wants to take him apart. This is freedom, the hard thrusts and the bleeding knuckles and white shoulder his teeth sink into; this is what it feels like to surrender.
There's a word taking shape in Malfoy's throat, vowel sounds in search of a consonant. "Ah...ah..."
"Say it," he hisses into Malfoy's ear. He growls. "Say it!"
"Ron-!"
***
Ron will go home, Apparating onto the hearth and kicking off his boots into the pile. He will check himself downstairs for any bruises, any scrapes that he may have missed at the inn, before he climbs the stairs in the dark and still. Hugo will be asleep with an arm around a one-eyed plush rabbit. Hermione will be asleep with a book in her lap, the candle having long since charmed itself out.
In the morning, he will see pictures of the Malfoys in the papers, the infamous recluses, the staunch supporters of Ministry reform. He will read buttery quotes about a new age of wizardom that say nothing at all. He will turn the page.
But before all that, he will take Hermione's book away, careful to mark her page. She will stir, blink at him in the dimness. "Ron?"
"Yeah. Sorry."
"It's fine." She'll yawn. "I hope the match was worth it."
"Oh, yeah. Great."
He will change into his pajamas while she rolls over under the blankets. She will curl into his shoulder when he gets into bed. "Glad to have you home safe," she will say sleepily.
And he will stroke her hair and say, "Yeah. Safe." And he will be. And he will sleep.
Author: mad_maudlin
Team: Ron
Prompt: Cheating
Rating: R
Warnings: Violent imagery. And I think infidelity is kind of a given.
Length: 2,253 words
Summary: Ron Weasley has always had a problem with anger management.
Boiling Point
by Mad Maudlin
"I'm going out," Ron calls, and shoves on a pair of the boots that invariably pile up around the hearth despite Hermione's best efforts to enforce organization. She asks
"When are you going to be home this time?"
"Dunno," he says. "Late as the match goes."
She makes a noise from the kitchen. "I get worried when you're out late at that pub, Ron."
He ties on his cloak without looking through the yellow doorway to watch her shadow moving on the wall. "I know. I'll be careful."
"Just remember it's your turn to drop Hugo at your mum's tomorrow."
"Yeah."
And Ron is gone.
***
When Ron was a kid, he'd once asked his brothers why the kettle made such a horrible shrill noise when it boiled. Was there something wrong with the charms? Bill, once he'd realized what Ron was talking about, had laughed and explained that it wasn't a charm that made the kettle whistle like that; that when the water boiled, the kettle got so hot and full of steam, that there was just so much pressure trapped inside, that it just had to make a noise or it would burst.
Ron is like that, sometimes.
***
Six hours before he will leave for the pub, Ron is fighting with George. "It costs too much," he keeps trying to say, "We'll never recoup the overhead. Look, do you know how to count?"
"It's an untapped market," George breezes away, "and we can eat the losses for a quarter or two for marketing."
"This is the single stupidest product launch I've seen you make!"
"Then maybe you should've stayed with the Aurors, eh?"
Ron doesn't slam the doors or stomp his feet, because excessive vibrations around Weasley Wizard Wheezes are likely to set off more explosions than are worth anyone's time. He walks out and sits in his office, breathing heavy, fists clenched in his robes until the knuckles turn white.
***
Ron has always had a problem with anger management.
***
Ron will go to the pub, but not for the live broadcast of the Quidditch. He'll go to the pub and take an upstairs room, far from the noise of the cheerful sports fans and celebrating friends. He'll take off his cloak and his boots and sit on the bed, putting a screen in the fire to block out the Floo and closing all the curtains first. He will sit in a dark and cold room and he will wait, perfectly still, eyes on the door until the moment he sees the knob turning, wand in his hand.
***
When Ron was a kid, he'd had a short temper. Sometimes the whistling kettle was the only thing that got any attention, and if he didn't scream and throw things no one would see him at all. (Sometimes no one saw him when he did) People were always telling him to be calm, be cool like his brothers, like Hermione, but Ron was thin-skinned and moody and it felt good to let the steam out, sometimes. It felt good to give in.
And everybody knew that Ron could go off like a rocket, but they waved it away because he was ginger or Gryffindor or Molly's son. Most people just dealt with it. Most people didn't go looking for his fuse. Most people didn't like to watch him burn.
***
Ron has always had problems with impulse control.
***
He goes to the pub because it's small and quiet, in a rainy little town where the wizard population triples during every Quidditch match. The owner is half-blind and congenial and Ron pays her handsomely, pays her too much, for the room on the top floor with the screen in the grate. He pays her too much and then sheepishly tells Hermione that he had a little too much to drink during the match, that he bought a round for some mates and miscalculated the cost, that the pub owner raised prices again.
She is half-blind, yet sees enough to know what Ron's doing up there, but perhaps the gold in his hand keeps her from seeing the ring on his finger.
***
When he was a kid-or not a kid, fourteen and old enough-Ron blurted out every stupid angry thing in his head, and didn't speak to Harry for nearly a month. He should've learned his lesson. Instead he did roughly the same things when he was fifteen and sixteen and seventeen, to Harry and Hermione and Lavender and Dean, and everybody else in range, because when Ron was fourteen (and fifteen and sixteen and seventeen) he figured that if he was in a bad mood, everybody else deserved to be, too.
It almost cost him friendships. It almost got people killed.
When he followed Harry's footprints to a frigid lake, Ron wasn't a kid anymore. He couldn't afford to be.
***
He loves his family, his wife and kids, even (sometimes because of) when he also wants to strangle them. Hermione would not be Hermione if they didn't shout at each fifteen times a day, and the kids are only infuriating because they're as brilliant as her but as mature as he was at their age, and his brothers…well. Harry and Hermione have known him so well, known him better than he knew himself at times, and he doesn't know what he'd do without them. He has brothers and a sister and various in-laws, more nieces and nephews than he can comfortably list without making a chart, he has friends.
And he has a little room over a wizard pub in a town where it seems like the rain never stops. A little room where he waits with his wand drawn until the doorknob turns, until the hinges creak, and then he has to look away even though the drawn curtains give him nothing to look at. He looks at his hands until the lock clicks shut, until the silence presses in, until the man at the door says
"Weasley."
And that is all it takes.
***
When he was a kid-
But Ron sometimes thinks he was never really a kid. Or at least, he shouldn't have been, not when he was also Harry's friend.
***
He got hurt, on the job. Hugo was just a baby, Rose just walking, and Hermione brought them round to the hospital every day with a strained smile and a diaper bag. Ron was in hospital for almost a month, and the Auror's division paid a handsome hazardous duty bonus, but the day he got back Hermione helped him up the stairs and said,
"I thought it would stop."
And he looked at her, because he didn't understand. She wouldn't look at him. "Since the end of the war I've been waiting for it all to stop," she said. "For happily ever after. I don't know how much longer I can do this, Ron."
And Ron loved his wife, he loved his kids even when Rose took flying leaps onto the bed and landed on bruised ribs and bad legs. Ron loved being an Auror, too, but sometimes you had to make sacrifices.
***
"Weasley," he says, the patrician drawl, and once upon a time Ron tried to pretend. He'd bring chess boards, cards. He'd wait down in the pub with one ear on the match. He'd try to make conversation.
It never worked, not when that crushed-velvet voice slithered around his name. It only made a bigger mess for later. Ron stands, and with a twist of the wrist he shuts and seals the door, trapping them both.
"What, no greeting for me? Have you reverted to your native language of grunts and gestures?"
Ron lowers his wand. "Get over here. Now."
Malfoy tilts his head to one side, a gesture almost inhuman. "Make me."
***
When he was a kid, he'd hated Draco Malfoy more than he thought humanly possible; hated him so much that he shook and went weak, that it got hard to breathe, that his vision went red and white and there was nobody else in the room.
They weren't kids anymore.
***
Ron loves his family, his friends, his life. That's why he does this in the room in the rain. That's why he can't let them see.
***
It takes about three seconds to disarm Malfoy, and Ron drops both the wands because that's not what he's here for. He catches Malfoy by the wrist and flings him in the direction of the bed, but Malfoy catches himself on one of the posts and doesn't fall. "You're in an even more brutish mood that usual today," he says, a little breathlessly. "Perhaps I shouldn't have come."
"Shut up," Ron says. He's nearly shaking from the anticipation.
Malfoy straightens, neatly, smooths out the pinstripe robes that make his face so shockingly white. "Now, now, Weasley, that's not very polite to your guest. I realize your type find it difficult to comprehend good manners, but that hardly excuses-"
He's quick enough to dodge the first punch, but Ron was an Auror and knows how to feint; the second punch gets him under the ribs, winding him, and he collapses backwards on the bed. A lock of hair had fallen into his eyes.
He grins when he can speak again. "Is that really the best you can do?"
Ron wrestles him down, to the bed, to the floor, and Malfoy is laughing through the wheezes and yelps, laughing until Ron gets hands around his throat and squeezes him silent. For a moment there's no sound but Malfoy's gagging, no movement but his frantic scrabbles at Ron's hands, tearing skin with polished nails; and Ron would've stopped-he promises himself that one day he will stop-except he's straddling Malfoy's waist and under those fine robes, he can feel him getting hard.
***
Draco Malfoy has always had a habit of playing with fire.
***
They fuck. It's not friendly and it's not nice. Ron forces Malfoy down out of the principal of the matter, not because he wouldn't enjoy begin the one on his knees (he knows he has, and he will, though he will chew his lips bloody rather than betray it when Malfoy is over him and inside him and laughing;) but because he has pride. Malfoy does, too, and so he fights back, throwing punches when he isn't spitting venom. "Fucking pathetic, you fucking pathetic son of a Muggle-lover, with your fucking Mudblood wife and Mudblood brats--"
Ron wrestles him down and hitches up his robes, slapping that pale arse hard when Malfoy tries to buck him. Malfoy laughs. "God, Weasley, you hit like a girl! Is that how Granger likes it?"
"Shut the fuck up!"
Malfoy hisses as Ron stick a finger inside him, nothing more than spit for lube; it's not for Malfoy's benefit, anyway. "Is this how you think you won the war?" he asked. "You and you miserable confederacy of traitors and cowards, hiding behind Harry fucking Potter because you were too weak to stand on your own--"
"Shut. Up."
He bucks again, and Ron wrenches his arm back, so Malfoy's face slams into the carpet with a heavy crack. Malfoy roars. "I'm going to fucking kill you," he snarls. "One day. I'll kill you all. I'll tear your whole ginger family limb from limb and I will dance--"
Ron fucks him, one hand on his slim hip and one hand on the back-bent wrist, and Malfoy's tirade dissolves into growls and whimpers, animal sounds, writhing-though whether he's trying to get away push back harder, it's hard to say. His cock is hard, and Ron grabs it, twists it, just to make him give up more of those helpless cries. To make him want it, the way Ron wants it, the way Ron wants to take him apart. This is freedom, the hard thrusts and the bleeding knuckles and white shoulder his teeth sink into; this is what it feels like to surrender.
There's a word taking shape in Malfoy's throat, vowel sounds in search of a consonant. "Ah...ah..."
"Say it," he hisses into Malfoy's ear. He growls. "Say it!"
"Ron-!"
***
Ron will go home, Apparating onto the hearth and kicking off his boots into the pile. He will check himself downstairs for any bruises, any scrapes that he may have missed at the inn, before he climbs the stairs in the dark and still. Hugo will be asleep with an arm around a one-eyed plush rabbit. Hermione will be asleep with a book in her lap, the candle having long since charmed itself out.
In the morning, he will see pictures of the Malfoys in the papers, the infamous recluses, the staunch supporters of Ministry reform. He will read buttery quotes about a new age of wizardom that say nothing at all. He will turn the page.
But before all that, he will take Hermione's book away, careful to mark her page. She will stir, blink at him in the dimness. "Ron?"
"Yeah. Sorry."
"It's fine." She'll yawn. "I hope the match was worth it."
"Oh, yeah. Great."
He will change into his pajamas while she rolls over under the blankets. She will curl into his shoulder when he gets into bed. "Glad to have you home safe," she will say sleepily.
And he will stroke her hair and say, "Yeah. Safe." And he will be. And he will sleep.