5,000 Ways to Die.
(For the First Time Bad Sex Project and beta'd by Aja.)
Contrition
Bludgers made a very distinct, clean whistle when they passed you too closely, and Harry had become very good at hearing that whistle so he could duck in time, especially when he was so close to the Snitch. As he heard the sound of a Bludger connecting with something solid behind him, he didn't stop to turn around, just kept heading for the Snitch. He felt the cool metal in his palm and pumped his fist into the air victoriously, but no one made a sound.
It was the first Quidditch-related death at Hogwarts, and the bloodiest seen in a long time. For a long while, Ron hung slack-jawed in the air, crooked on his broom and his splintered bat still gripped tightly in his hand. Bits of wood fell to the ground like confetti.
The Bludger, the one that had smashed Draco Malfoy's skull into an unrecognisable pulp, had taken off immediately after contact, and with it flew the blood and grey matter and gore that had previously been stuck inside Malfoy's head. The grin was still frozen on Harry's face.
Malfoy's father had bought him a new broomstick at the start of term, one that stayed in the air if the flyer lost their grip, so Malfoy could cheat and catch the Snitch easier. Consequently, after the instant Malfoy's skull had been smashed and he'd fallen forward onto the handle, the broom stayed in the air. Malfoy and his skull, which were really two separate entities now, floated languidly amidst the other players.
* * *
Beaters' bats rarely broke, and when they did, it was always during matches between Gryffindor and Slytherin. Fred and George had told him this when they'd passed on the name of Beater in a mock-tearful ceremony, which was really just Fred, George, and Ron sitting in the kitchen at the Burrow in their pyjamas with a crumpled napkin that read, “Go Ron”.
"How hard are the bats?" Ron had asked. Harry had only given him the news the night before. Quidditch trials had been held at the end of the previous term, and Harry had taken the whole summer before making Ron a Beater.
"Why, Ron, old bean, are you thinking of making ill-use of your instruments of good?" George said conversationally. He waggled his eyebrows.
"We could show you a few tricks that don't even require a bat, if that's the case," Fred chimed in. "Make some good use of them when you go up against the Slytherins, eh?"
Ron, on the other hand, had been too busy caught up in his fantasy of smashing his bat over Malfoy's head so hard it broke. "Something like that, yeah."
"Well, they're pretty hard, and durable to boot," said Fred thoughtfully. "Have to be, 'course. I've only broken one myself, and I wasted it on Marcus Flint." He looked wistful for a moment. "Too bad it wasn't his head." He sighed.
"Flint's broken more than one in his day," Fred had continued, looking positively bitter that Marcus Flint had broken more bats than he had.
"Which is funny, since Flint was a Chaser," said George. "Sort of a Beater's glory, you know? Ah, be still my heart. The glory days are through, aren't they?" He clasped a hand over his chest and winced.
"Oi, shut up, you great ponce," Fred said, and poked George in the ear with a fake wand. "But he's right, Ron. It's a real honour for a Beater, splitting your bat open. Something you'll always remember."
* * *
Wood had been the one to teach him to make sure the Snitch was his first priority, and Harry had always been thankful for it. In his first year, he'd been clumsy. He'd watched for the Snitch, but he'd let the Bludgers and Quaffle distract him when he caught them out of the corner of his eye. Wood had told him more than once that Fred and George were there to take care of that - that if a Bludger were going to get him, he might as well get the Snitch in the process. Harry had trained himself to get to the Snitch first and worry about his dislocated shoulders later.
Harry didn't realise there was blood on his ear until about the same time he realised he'd been brushing his teeth for fifteen minutes.
* * *
He was inspecting the broken pieces of his bat when Harry got out of the bathroom. The sound of the door clicking shut made Ron flinch, and the imaginary echo rattled in his head for a moment.
Harry looked at the bat in his lap quizzically.
Seems like there should be bloodstains.
Harry blinked at him and nodded. His feet made louder scuffles on the floor than Ron could bear, and he was thankful when Harry finally shut his bed curtains.
In the common room, Hermione had looked at them apologetically, the last to return, still adorned in their red and yellow Quidditch robes. Ron couldn't see it, but he could still feel the imprint Narcissa Malfoy had backhanded onto his face. Hermione noticed, she must have, but she didn't say much of anything.
In fact, now that Ron thought on it, Hermione hadn't said anything at all.
No one else had, either, and the silence meant that the Gryffindor common room sounded a lot like the Quidditch pitch.
He slept with wedges of wood from his bat at the foot of his bed, and dreamed of Malfoy's pure blood dripping from the Bludger. In the morning, he woke to find Harry in bed with him, but he didn't know who had moved.
* * *
Breakfast was eggs, scrambled, like so much of Malfoy's head on the Quidditch pitch. The longer he stared, the more pallid they became, and Harry didn't feel much like eating anyway.
The draperies and banners in the Great Hall were Slytherin colours today, instead of black, as they had been for Cedric. It was appropriate, Harry thought, and the Slytherins must have agreed because they were looking quite self-satisfied between gulping mouthfuls of eggs.
Hermione fixed him with a weak smile, one that looked very much like it had after the TriWizard Tournament, and Harry looked away from her.
He pushed his glasses up on his nose absently, and dropped the fork he had been clutching for no reason in particular to his plate with what he assumed to be a clatter. He'd seen rather than heard it, but judging by the way everyone in the Hall stopped to stare at him, it must have made a large one. Next to Harry, Ron's hands were clamped over his ears.
Sorry.
He lowered his gaze to his plate and when he felt Ron glance over at him, Harry inched closer to the table. Professor Dumbledore rose at the head table, speaking in low tones Harry couldn't hear. Trying to read Dumbledore's lips, though, was a distraction.
Across from Harry, Hermione was biting her lips hard, and since everyone else was looking at Dumbledore, too, Harry was the only one to notice when Professor McGonagall tapped him on the shoulder. Her lips were more drawn than usual, and in her eyes Harry saw a twinkle that was nothing at all like the twinkle he usually saw from Dumbledore.
She opened her mouth to speak in hushed tones, but instead knitted her brow and handed it over wordlessly.
Harry stared at it. His fingers outlined the deep grooves of the G, then the R, and the Y and the Fs were a lot more difficult to trace in one movement, and so he stopped. The handles were cold as a headstone. It was large and stupidly conspicuous, like a giant Golden Snitch, so he stuffed it under the table.
When he looked up again, he realised he was the only one not raising his glass to Draco Malfoy.
* * *
The crackling in the fireplace was so loud that it made it sound like Gryffindor Tower was on fire and that they were all sitting around waiting to be consumed. He found this very uncomfortable but no one else seemed to mind.
On one side of Ron sat Harry, and on the other side of Harry sat Parvati, and on the other side of Ron was Ginny, who was staring very hard at the common room floor and gripping the ends of her braids. The Falmouth Falcons were in Puddlemere along with Seamus and Dean, who hadn't wanted to miss the chance to see the most violent team in the British Quidditch League play.
Hermione was sitting in the chair opposite them, and now that Ron thought about it, they always sat in just this way: Ron and Harry next to each other, Hermione across from them. And now that Ron thought about it, this was just how they were sitting in the Great Hall before they were dismissed: Ginny on his left, Harry on his right.
Parvati was a new addition, because Lavender Brown was in bed, sick with the flu. The next day, when Lavender got better, Parvati would disappear; and the next day, when lessons resumed, Ginny would disappear, too, with the other sixth years, and seating arrangements would go back to normal.
Girls who weren't Hermione were mostly afraid of Harry anyway, and now they were afraid of Ron, too.
Harry overslept that morning, and like always when he overslept, his tie was knotted like a shoelace and the tag of his jumper was sticking out. Almost all of the tags in Harry's jumpers had Dudley's name written on them in ferocious violet ink, even though some of them were Hogwarts jumpers, and Ron thought that maybe Harry had come into the habit of writing it there himself. No one but Ron was noticing any of that, though, because Harry had been to see Dumbledore after breakfast and so everyone else was concentrating very hard at casually not looking at Harry.
Ron had never wished for classes on days off before, but then again, he'd never thought that any day was unfit to be a holiday before, either.
* * *
On the third day after Malfoy died, the heat pouring in through the open window of the dormitory became so thick that it kept him up, lying in bed beside Ron, motionless, hair slick to his scar with sweat. Neither one of them complained.
In the night, Ron hogged the covers, and Harry was more than willing to let him. Most often Harry spent the quiet hours--hours in which the silence was different than usual--with his fingertips on his stomach, feeling the rise and fall of his own breath in what would have been fascination, if not for the fact that he forgot that he was paying attention. His skin was warm beneath his fingers, damp, and in the same bed Ron shivered in his sleep under piles of blankets.
When he did fall asleep, Harry awoke over and over and found himself in different positions. Sometimes his feet were on the pillow and his head was centimetres from smashing against the footboard, and part of him wondered if he was doing it on purpose.
Like the messages Ginny had written about the Chamber of Secrets, Harry had seen Filch down at the Quidditch pitch trying to rid the blood from the grass. Like the messages Ginny had written about the Chamber of Secrets, the stains weren't coming out and Harry wasn't surprised at all.
Probably all it needed was one rainy day.
* * *
Lessons continued and he found himself going to them as though he'd put thought into it, but if he could have worked up the energy Ron would have been surprised to find himself sitting beside Harry in classrooms all over Hogwarts. Quills were strange and foreign between his fingers, the scratching sounds they made on parchment enough to make his ears bleed, and Ron had never liked writing essays in the first place.
If Harry noticed that Ron was carrying his broken bat in his rucksack, he didn't say.
* * *
On the fourth day, he stopped wondering when Ron was going to shower again.
Ensconced in curtains, at night, the bed wasn't a part of the dormitory and Harry, if he sat still long enough, could make believe he was in the cupboard under the stairs at Privet Drive. A box inside of a box; first a cupboard, which was a box, in a room, which was a box, in a house, which was a box. Now the box of the bed, which didn't quite fit with the circular dormitory, but then he supposed the odds of getting a square room in a tower were slim. Just the same the bed seemed far off from Seamus, Neville, and Dean, who hadn't said anything about Harry and Ron's new sleeping arrangements.
The stillness had a noise of its own. Once in school, Muggle school, Harry had heard that at night, your furniture moves just slightly as it settles. He had always pictured the furniture moving inches across the room, levitating in the middle of the night, coming to life. Having had no furniture of his own, he had not been able to test the theory, but he thought of it often now when he woke up with the footboard pressed against the top of his head.
Ron's hair was getting oily. It lay limp and flat on his head, which made it look longer, which made Ron look pretty stupid. But Ron slept at night.
* * *
In Potions the following Friday, someone dropped a tumbler full of gelatinous crimson liquid to the flagstone floor. Glass shattered in his head until dinner, where the sound of forks and knives against plates was loud enough to shut out the memory.
For one remarkable moment at dinner, Ron let Hermione hold his gaze. Her eyes were searching for something in his, he could tell, but when she didn't find it, she broke the stare. He wanted to ask her how clever she felt now, to fire off a shot at her about how she was still studying as hard as ever for her N.E.W.T.s, but he just looked away.
It hadn't rained in ages. The grass was going brittle, Hagrid's garden was shrivelling, and Pansy Parkinson had speculated in Care of Magical Creatures once that they were all being punished for the blood that was spilled on the Quidditch pitch. This had led to a brawl between Crabbe, Goyle, and Seamus, whose bloody nose had turned a few dry blades of grass brown. After class, packing his rucksack, Ron had seen Hagrid tearing the stained grass out of the ground with his hands.
The ceiling in the Great Hall remained clear all through dinner.
* * *
The other Beater was Walter Bluefall, a tall, slim, sixth year with a ruddy complexion and hair wilder than Hermione's in its curls. Bluefall approached him tentatively in the common room one night, holding a practice chart and looking nervous. Harry couldn't make himself feel surprised that someone had come to the corner of the common room he occupied every evening, staring at a Gryffindor tapestry.
Bluefall opened his mouth several times to speak, and Harry waited, but Bluefall only looked at him with concern.
It was only when Bluefall had walked back to his friends that Harry realised he had been talking, but Harry hadn't heard him.
* * *
It was slightly surprising to wake up to the movement of the mattress and the sight of Harry jerking off with his bare feet braced against the headboard.
He had never seen someone else jerk off, but Ron was sure the polite thing to do was to pretend you hadn't noticed. He sat up and watched curiously.
Harry stared back at him for a moment, and then shifted his eyes back to the ceiling. His pyjamas were only pulled to his knees, which Ron found interesting, because he usually preferred to be completely doffed. Harry's hips bucked into the air desperately, and he looked almost like he was going to cry if he didn't come. Like the top of his head would blow off at any minute.
Ron wondered if he looked the same when he did it.
He pulled the duvet up to his shoulders and went back to sleep.
* * *
It was when he was in Transfiguration that he realised he was hollow. That the only thing keeping him weighted down was actually his skin, and that if someone were to cut him open there would be nothing inside. Harry thought that if he had no skin, he would float away.
Professor McGonagall paused in her lesson then and glanced over at Harry, who wondered if she knew what he was thinking about. It brought him and his entrails back to their seat with a whoosh of what felt like hot air, but was, he knew, just the feeling of his blood circulating through his body again, washing up past his ears. It was the blood churning in his ears, he thought, that made everything muffled, and explained why, when Professor McGonagall handed out sheets of parchment to be filled out, he didn't know a single one of the answers.
Beside him, Ron was filling his parchment out in an automatic, dazed way: his hand scurried across the paper, but Ron was staring out the window and had been since class started. It was likely that Ron had never even glanced at the questions.
Nothing explained why Harry suddenly forgot how to write with a quill and left a large stain of ink instead of an answer. Curious, he lifted the parchment up and watched the ink run off of it and into the wood of his desk. He turned it in that way, but he couldn't remember how to sign his name.
* * *
He wondered if, maybe, his mother was finally doing what she had threatened to do to Fred and George so many times and was really going to disown him. Ron knew Dumbledore had sent mail to all of the parents - his, the Malfoys, and the Dursleys, who probably wouldn't care one way or another except to maybe close up the vents in Harry's bedroom so he couldn't get out and kill his cousin in his sleep. The Malfoys probably would have sent him a Howler, but they didn't seem so much the Howler type as the Killing-Curse-in-your-sleep type. His mum hadn't even sent a letter.
Probably she didn't even know what to say. Or probably she wasn't even surprised; probably she expected this sort of thing from him. He never had become a prefect, had he?
He spent meals waiting for mail from his mother to come in the form of an unmistakable red envelope, but the Howler never came.
* * *
We've never done this before, said the look on Ron's face, and it had a point.
Nevertheless, it was Ron who climbed on top of him then in awkward movements, as though he were mounting a broomstick. His knees, in fact, squeezed Harry's ribs like he feared he would fall off. Harry lay stiff and blank on his back, nauseated at the way he could easily feel the thick curves of Ron's arse on his knee, the way Ron's balls were pushed against the place where his thigh and knee met.
Along with showering, Ron had evidently decided against wearing shorts beneath the trousers of his pyjamas.
He wasn't sure what had possessed him to do this, but he hadn't thought ahead about what Ron sitting in his lap would be like. Ron smelled of week-old cabbage and looked about the same, and his face was fixed into the same look it often wore while eating Bertie Bott's, like he was preparing to be disgusted. He was moving, grimacing; Harry didn't take it personally, though, because he could feel the head of Ron's cock pressing into his hip and it was disturbing.
It was some sick fascination, then, that made his cock twitch in response and drew a sigh from his lungs.
He moved, too, and when Ron's ass slid in thin pyjamas over Harry's thigh, Harry's leg buckled under the pressure. It was too much weight to be comfortable, and when Ron braced one dirty hand against Harry's stomach to move, it felt like the wind had been knocked out of him.
The dirt was especially noticeable on Ron's knuckles, buried in the crevices in a sickly shade of grey that made Harry want to dig it out with his fingernails. Most of all he didn't want Ron's hands anywhere on him, but in his attempts to find a good position, Ron was doing an awful lot of touching. Some of it was painful, like the ball of Ron's hand shoving Harry's cock against his stomach, hard, which made Harry dig his toes into the sheets and clench his thighs.
It was gross in the smothering heat to have Ron's smothering body all over his, but this restlessness was killing him, killing him like a Bludger to the skull, and he knew Ron felt it, too. His pyjamas stuck to the backs of his thighs, and when Ron finally settled himself curled up against Harry's side, he yanked them to his knees.
The smell that was Ron was overwhelming. It was overwhelming enough that even with his cock in his hand, it was all Harry could think about. He smelled of sweat and garbage and what Harry suspected was the distinct odour of a pair of pyjamas that had been worn for a week without underwear. If Ron had a problem with his own stench, he hadn't indicated it yet, and he didn't seem at all opposed to the fact that the smell was spreading onto Harry. Then again, maybe Harry didn't mind so much either, because he still felt like he might die if he didn't come right then.
And while Ron ground himself against the side of Harry's hips, Harry thought that it was very odd that he wasn't separated from himself, that everything moved in real time instead of the usual rushed pace he felt. Once, Harry had kissed Ron's little sister and felt his heart pounding in his stomach and thumbs, his throat and the backs of his knees. Here, in Ron's bed--because, after all, Harry had been the one to move--his heart didn't pound at all.
* * *
Tracing patterns on the roof of his own mouth with his tongue at dinner, he decided that his life had been full of patterns for as long as he had been friends with Harry Potter.
There were the near-death experiences, which were a real blast, Ron found. It was dependable, knowing you would risk your life at the end of summer term each year, but it was a pattern. Just like the way he was always the absolute fucking last one to get anything they learned in lessons. Hermione would learn immediately, of course, and Harry would follow, and Ron would bring up the rear. He didn’t really notice these things until later, but everything was the same.
Adding a new pattern to the mix wasn't such a big deal.
* * *
Somewhere between indifference and endless guilt, he thought there might still be a spark of anger in him. Somewhere. There just had to be. No, he thought, not anger, maybe, but still some of that same swoop of hatred, the way his ears started to ring.
Like when Snape took twenty points from Gryffindor at once because he misspelled hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, the fear of long words, which Snape had said that Harry had. That was in October, when Malfoy had had his birthday and received his new broomstick in the convenient location of the Potions classroom. Broomsticks generally weren't allowed in Potions as far as Harry knew, but Malfoy had made a grand show of showing up late to class and saying that he hadn't wanted his birthday present to be stolen. Levitating your broomstick around the dungeons in slow motion during lectures was probably forbidden, too, but Snape hadn't seemed to mind.
Or once, when Mr Weasley had come into trouble in the Ministry. That had been in their sixth year, when Lucius Malfoy's department had confiscated some of Fred and George's old things at the Burrow and Mr Weasley had come into questioning over it. And Draco Malfoy had laughed; told Ron that he would starve, that Ron should try eating his sister for protein; had pointed out the blood stains on the seat of Ginny's robes and said she'd have to wear them like that for the rest of her life because she'd never have a knut to fix them.
And then there was the time on the train after Cedric.
Badges that read "Potter Stinks", attempts to get Harry expelled, and the tears Hermione thought no one knew she cried over being called a Mudblood.
The only truly likeable thing about Malfoy was that he was dead.
* * *
Come was everywhere. A thick glob of it landed on his cheek, and though the very thought made him want to throw up, Ron found he couldn't be bothered to wipe it off. Later he would remember it, when it had dried like tears and made his cheek tight and sticky.
He had made the mistake of lifting his head from the mattress when he heard Harry's breath catch in his throat, loud like a sudden draught, and found Harry's feet spread shoulder-width apart against the wall above the headboard. He turned to Harry, watched his mouth form a silent groan. Then Harry had come on his face.
Ron had tried to touch Harry, but Harry was eminently untouchable. He acted like it was a courtyard brawl, shoving his limbs and joints into the soft parts of Ron's body; or worse, he lay stiff and unmoving like a non-magic broomstick while Ron accidentally poked him in the stomach with his cock over and over. And so, Ron had decided that it would be best for both of them if he tried to fuck the mattress instead of Harry.
What Harry didn't know was that he screamed when he came; shouted hoarsely at the top of his lungs, and just now he had hollered and Neville had hollered in sympathetic fright two beds over. Ron, the victim of Harry and Neville's screaming match, thought for a moment that his ear drums had burst, but in the stillness afterwards, he could hear Harry wiping the slick come from his thighs. Ron was jealous.
There was tension building up behind his eyes, beneath his toenails in their beds, under the damp skin of his fingertips. Despite it, and despite how hard his cock was and how much his balls ached, Ron didn't come. He hadn't come in ages, and he had already seen Harry come more times than Ron usually came in a month. He supposed it was jealousy that made him watch, but he wasn't even sure that he was jealous anymore. It was strange and alien, and he wondered what life had been like when he had been able to have a bloody orgasm. He couldn't even tell the difference.
* * *
He took lunch at Hagrid's. Hagrid understood that he wanted to be alone, and usually busied himself off in the garden, or would occasionally be seen running past the window, followed by a weird sort of creature. Sometimes Ron joined him, but usually Harry was alone. It was the only time he was ever alone, even though he felt like he was all the time.
He'd received a letter from Sirius, which Ron had looked at so longingly that Harry had given it to him instead. Sirius had heard about Malfoy, as Sirius usually heard about everything, from Dumbledore. Harry was wondering if he should write back to Sirius--if he even could make the quill work again--or if he wanted to do nothing. It was a small, dirty part of him that wanted to let Sirius worry. For when Sirius worried, Sirius usually showed up. He wondered what Malfoy would have done if he were in Harry's shoes.
He had tried to give Harry advice on Sirius before, Malfoy had. He'd told Harry that if it were him, he would have gone and murdered Sirius. Presently Harry wondered if that were true; if Malfoy really would have done so. As it turned out, Harry knew nothing about Malfoy at all.
In the end, he dug up an old letter that he had never sent to Sirius and sent that back instead.
* * *
Beaters had one major priority after trying to take out the other team's players, and that was protecting the Seeker. Which was all he was doing; making sure that his Seeker got to the Snitch before the other Seeker. Malfoy was so close, right on Harry's heels, and Harry didn't see him; that much was obvious. A Bludger shot by and he swung his bat.
This was what Ron dreamt of at night, when he wasn't dreaming about something ridiculous like a blowjob from Hermione. On those nights, he expected to be stuck to the sheets when he awoke, but of course that never happened. On the evenings he dreamt of Malfoy, he usually slept through the night.
* * *
The sheets were stiff and crusty in some places, and they smelled. He thought about the rancid sheets during History of Magic, in Transfiguration, but it usually slipped his mind by the time he was between them again. He thought more about what he and Ron did during the day than when they were actually doing it. There were things about Ron he had noticed, but hadn't realised he'd noticed until Professor Binns glided through the classroom.
When damp with sweat, the layer of dirt on Ron's skin rubbed off in tiny balls--of skin or dirt, Harry couldn't tell--and stuck to the linens and Harry's clothes like grey clay. It was as though Ron had become so dirty that the dirt was actually repelling from his body to make room for him to get dirtier. Ron didn't come, either, and it made Harry feel guilty, but usually he forgot about the guilt by the next time he ended up waking in the middle of the night with an enjoyably painful erection.
There were other things he thought about, too. Like Professor Binns, who had apparently died and not realised it. He wondered if that happened often, and if he might be in danger of letting that happen to himself.
Parvati Patil and Lavender Brown had taken to looking at him fearfully in lessons, probably because Professor Trelawney had made a prediction that Harry hadn't heard. It made things feel a bit more normal, to think of Trelawney and her death predictions. That was part of every day living, of the world he didn't hear anymore.
A bee was caught in the History of Magic classroom, and most of the witches were panicked, and quite a few of the boys, too. It landed on Harry's desk, and he slammed his hand down on it without even thinking about it. He couldn't tell if the looks on everyone else's faces were ones of relief or alarm.
* * *
When he quit the Quidditch team, Madam Hooch only blinked yellow eyes at him and nodded before waving him out of her office, the one that was set just off of the Hufflepuff changing rooms on the far left of the Quidditch pitch. Ron stood in the doorway, hands balled loosely at his sides, and wondered what he was waiting for.
* * *
Harry and Ron were in bed before dinner, and the curtains opened.
Harry, curled in a ball with a pillow between his knees, had the decency to pull his hand from his trousers. He lifted his messy head and blinked blankly. Ron, face down in the mattress with his pyjama bottoms pulled down to his thighs, stopped humping the bed and looked up sleepily. He flushed, but didn't pull his trousers up. Hermione, hands on her hips with an unfazed look, pursed her lips and pulled Ron's pyjamas back up to his waist.
She smiled and took one of their hands in each of her own. Harry's was sticky and Ron's was cold, but she held on tightly. Ron was confused, but stumbled out of bed behind Harry, adjusting his trousers.
Hermione had a look on her face not unlike the one she got when she figured out the answer to a tough riddle. Her forehead was smooth, in that way that only came when it had been full of creases and wrinkles a few moments before. She was excited, but more peaceful, happy. Harry and Ron let her lead them out of Hogwarts.
She stopped on the steps, and for a moment, neither knew what they were doing out of doors. Ron blinked slowly, and Harry turned his face up to the grey sky. A raindrop hit his cheek, fat and cold. It was followed by a second, and a third, which splashed against his scar and ran down the bridge of his nose to cling to his glasses.
Hermione turned to him and grinned and then started down the steps, dragging Ron and Harry after her.
Ron's bare feet made loud slaps in puddles of water, and the rain hammered down even harder. Harry shivered; he had been dressed in only his white dress shirt and trousers when Hermione grabbed them, and now, in the rain without a cloak, it was cold.
Hermione stopped at the Quidditch pitch. Harry and Ron's bare feet sank in the mud. It squished between their toes, inaudible over the clap of thunder overhead.
Malfoy's blood, the blood that stained the grass, was running in red rivers out of the pitch.
Hermione squeezed Ron and Harry's hands and watched the blood wash away silently. Mixed with rain, it wasn't quite so vibrant, or even pure. Blood and mud were running out of the pitch together. Somehow, it didn’t seem so threatening anymore.
They stayed until all of the blood was gone.
When the rain started to let up, Harry looked at Ron and smiled a half sort of smile, one without teeth that made Harry look sheepish. The dirt had all been washed away, and it was Ron standing on the pitch in just a pair of pyjama bottoms.
Ron wiped water from his eyes and pushed his hair away from his forehead. The sound of the rain against the Quidditch stands was soft and nearly soothing. He tugged Hermione's hand to lead the three of them back to the castle. And without a look back at the bloody mud, Harry and Ron nestled closer to the warmth of Hermione's cloak as they walked across the Hogwarts grounds.
In the common room, three steaming cups of marshmallow soup were waiting for them by the fire, along with three comfortable chairs. Hermione had rightly thought in advance that Ron and Harry would have a lot of catching up to do. The two of them hadn't spoken to each other in almost a month.
With a sideways glance as they stepped into Hogwarts, Ron thought that maybe a blowjob from Hermione wouldn't be so ridiculous after all.
Contrition
Bludgers made a very distinct, clean whistle when they passed you too closely, and Harry had become very good at hearing that whistle so he could duck in time, especially when he was so close to the Snitch. As he heard the sound of a Bludger connecting with something solid behind him, he didn't stop to turn around, just kept heading for the Snitch. He felt the cool metal in his palm and pumped his fist into the air victoriously, but no one made a sound.
It was the first Quidditch-related death at Hogwarts, and the bloodiest seen in a long time. For a long while, Ron hung slack-jawed in the air, crooked on his broom and his splintered bat still gripped tightly in his hand. Bits of wood fell to the ground like confetti.
The Bludger, the one that had smashed Draco Malfoy's skull into an unrecognisable pulp, had taken off immediately after contact, and with it flew the blood and grey matter and gore that had previously been stuck inside Malfoy's head. The grin was still frozen on Harry's face.
Malfoy's father had bought him a new broomstick at the start of term, one that stayed in the air if the flyer lost their grip, so Malfoy could cheat and catch the Snitch easier. Consequently, after the instant Malfoy's skull had been smashed and he'd fallen forward onto the handle, the broom stayed in the air. Malfoy and his skull, which were really two separate entities now, floated languidly amidst the other players.
* * *
Beaters' bats rarely broke, and when they did, it was always during matches between Gryffindor and Slytherin. Fred and George had told him this when they'd passed on the name of Beater in a mock-tearful ceremony, which was really just Fred, George, and Ron sitting in the kitchen at the Burrow in their pyjamas with a crumpled napkin that read, “Go Ron”.
"How hard are the bats?" Ron had asked. Harry had only given him the news the night before. Quidditch trials had been held at the end of the previous term, and Harry had taken the whole summer before making Ron a Beater.
"Why, Ron, old bean, are you thinking of making ill-use of your instruments of good?" George said conversationally. He waggled his eyebrows.
"We could show you a few tricks that don't even require a bat, if that's the case," Fred chimed in. "Make some good use of them when you go up against the Slytherins, eh?"
Ron, on the other hand, had been too busy caught up in his fantasy of smashing his bat over Malfoy's head so hard it broke. "Something like that, yeah."
"Well, they're pretty hard, and durable to boot," said Fred thoughtfully. "Have to be, 'course. I've only broken one myself, and I wasted it on Marcus Flint." He looked wistful for a moment. "Too bad it wasn't his head." He sighed.
"Flint's broken more than one in his day," Fred had continued, looking positively bitter that Marcus Flint had broken more bats than he had.
"Which is funny, since Flint was a Chaser," said George. "Sort of a Beater's glory, you know? Ah, be still my heart. The glory days are through, aren't they?" He clasped a hand over his chest and winced.
"Oi, shut up, you great ponce," Fred said, and poked George in the ear with a fake wand. "But he's right, Ron. It's a real honour for a Beater, splitting your bat open. Something you'll always remember."
* * *
Wood had been the one to teach him to make sure the Snitch was his first priority, and Harry had always been thankful for it. In his first year, he'd been clumsy. He'd watched for the Snitch, but he'd let the Bludgers and Quaffle distract him when he caught them out of the corner of his eye. Wood had told him more than once that Fred and George were there to take care of that - that if a Bludger were going to get him, he might as well get the Snitch in the process. Harry had trained himself to get to the Snitch first and worry about his dislocated shoulders later.
Harry didn't realise there was blood on his ear until about the same time he realised he'd been brushing his teeth for fifteen minutes.
* * *
He was inspecting the broken pieces of his bat when Harry got out of the bathroom. The sound of the door clicking shut made Ron flinch, and the imaginary echo rattled in his head for a moment.
Harry looked at the bat in his lap quizzically.
Seems like there should be bloodstains.
Harry blinked at him and nodded. His feet made louder scuffles on the floor than Ron could bear, and he was thankful when Harry finally shut his bed curtains.
In the common room, Hermione had looked at them apologetically, the last to return, still adorned in their red and yellow Quidditch robes. Ron couldn't see it, but he could still feel the imprint Narcissa Malfoy had backhanded onto his face. Hermione noticed, she must have, but she didn't say much of anything.
In fact, now that Ron thought on it, Hermione hadn't said anything at all.
No one else had, either, and the silence meant that the Gryffindor common room sounded a lot like the Quidditch pitch.
He slept with wedges of wood from his bat at the foot of his bed, and dreamed of Malfoy's pure blood dripping from the Bludger. In the morning, he woke to find Harry in bed with him, but he didn't know who had moved.
* * *
Breakfast was eggs, scrambled, like so much of Malfoy's head on the Quidditch pitch. The longer he stared, the more pallid they became, and Harry didn't feel much like eating anyway.
The draperies and banners in the Great Hall were Slytherin colours today, instead of black, as they had been for Cedric. It was appropriate, Harry thought, and the Slytherins must have agreed because they were looking quite self-satisfied between gulping mouthfuls of eggs.
Hermione fixed him with a weak smile, one that looked very much like it had after the TriWizard Tournament, and Harry looked away from her.
He pushed his glasses up on his nose absently, and dropped the fork he had been clutching for no reason in particular to his plate with what he assumed to be a clatter. He'd seen rather than heard it, but judging by the way everyone in the Hall stopped to stare at him, it must have made a large one. Next to Harry, Ron's hands were clamped over his ears.
Sorry.
He lowered his gaze to his plate and when he felt Ron glance over at him, Harry inched closer to the table. Professor Dumbledore rose at the head table, speaking in low tones Harry couldn't hear. Trying to read Dumbledore's lips, though, was a distraction.
Across from Harry, Hermione was biting her lips hard, and since everyone else was looking at Dumbledore, too, Harry was the only one to notice when Professor McGonagall tapped him on the shoulder. Her lips were more drawn than usual, and in her eyes Harry saw a twinkle that was nothing at all like the twinkle he usually saw from Dumbledore.
She opened her mouth to speak in hushed tones, but instead knitted her brow and handed it over wordlessly.
Harry stared at it. His fingers outlined the deep grooves of the G, then the R, and the Y and the Fs were a lot more difficult to trace in one movement, and so he stopped. The handles were cold as a headstone. It was large and stupidly conspicuous, like a giant Golden Snitch, so he stuffed it under the table.
When he looked up again, he realised he was the only one not raising his glass to Draco Malfoy.
* * *
The crackling in the fireplace was so loud that it made it sound like Gryffindor Tower was on fire and that they were all sitting around waiting to be consumed. He found this very uncomfortable but no one else seemed to mind.
On one side of Ron sat Harry, and on the other side of Harry sat Parvati, and on the other side of Ron was Ginny, who was staring very hard at the common room floor and gripping the ends of her braids. The Falmouth Falcons were in Puddlemere along with Seamus and Dean, who hadn't wanted to miss the chance to see the most violent team in the British Quidditch League play.
Hermione was sitting in the chair opposite them, and now that Ron thought about it, they always sat in just this way: Ron and Harry next to each other, Hermione across from them. And now that Ron thought about it, this was just how they were sitting in the Great Hall before they were dismissed: Ginny on his left, Harry on his right.
Parvati was a new addition, because Lavender Brown was in bed, sick with the flu. The next day, when Lavender got better, Parvati would disappear; and the next day, when lessons resumed, Ginny would disappear, too, with the other sixth years, and seating arrangements would go back to normal.
Girls who weren't Hermione were mostly afraid of Harry anyway, and now they were afraid of Ron, too.
Harry overslept that morning, and like always when he overslept, his tie was knotted like a shoelace and the tag of his jumper was sticking out. Almost all of the tags in Harry's jumpers had Dudley's name written on them in ferocious violet ink, even though some of them were Hogwarts jumpers, and Ron thought that maybe Harry had come into the habit of writing it there himself. No one but Ron was noticing any of that, though, because Harry had been to see Dumbledore after breakfast and so everyone else was concentrating very hard at casually not looking at Harry.
Ron had never wished for classes on days off before, but then again, he'd never thought that any day was unfit to be a holiday before, either.
* * *
On the third day after Malfoy died, the heat pouring in through the open window of the dormitory became so thick that it kept him up, lying in bed beside Ron, motionless, hair slick to his scar with sweat. Neither one of them complained.
In the night, Ron hogged the covers, and Harry was more than willing to let him. Most often Harry spent the quiet hours--hours in which the silence was different than usual--with his fingertips on his stomach, feeling the rise and fall of his own breath in what would have been fascination, if not for the fact that he forgot that he was paying attention. His skin was warm beneath his fingers, damp, and in the same bed Ron shivered in his sleep under piles of blankets.
When he did fall asleep, Harry awoke over and over and found himself in different positions. Sometimes his feet were on the pillow and his head was centimetres from smashing against the footboard, and part of him wondered if he was doing it on purpose.
Like the messages Ginny had written about the Chamber of Secrets, Harry had seen Filch down at the Quidditch pitch trying to rid the blood from the grass. Like the messages Ginny had written about the Chamber of Secrets, the stains weren't coming out and Harry wasn't surprised at all.
Probably all it needed was one rainy day.
* * *
Lessons continued and he found himself going to them as though he'd put thought into it, but if he could have worked up the energy Ron would have been surprised to find himself sitting beside Harry in classrooms all over Hogwarts. Quills were strange and foreign between his fingers, the scratching sounds they made on parchment enough to make his ears bleed, and Ron had never liked writing essays in the first place.
If Harry noticed that Ron was carrying his broken bat in his rucksack, he didn't say.
* * *
On the fourth day, he stopped wondering when Ron was going to shower again.
Ensconced in curtains, at night, the bed wasn't a part of the dormitory and Harry, if he sat still long enough, could make believe he was in the cupboard under the stairs at Privet Drive. A box inside of a box; first a cupboard, which was a box, in a room, which was a box, in a house, which was a box. Now the box of the bed, which didn't quite fit with the circular dormitory, but then he supposed the odds of getting a square room in a tower were slim. Just the same the bed seemed far off from Seamus, Neville, and Dean, who hadn't said anything about Harry and Ron's new sleeping arrangements.
The stillness had a noise of its own. Once in school, Muggle school, Harry had heard that at night, your furniture moves just slightly as it settles. He had always pictured the furniture moving inches across the room, levitating in the middle of the night, coming to life. Having had no furniture of his own, he had not been able to test the theory, but he thought of it often now when he woke up with the footboard pressed against the top of his head.
Ron's hair was getting oily. It lay limp and flat on his head, which made it look longer, which made Ron look pretty stupid. But Ron slept at night.
* * *
In Potions the following Friday, someone dropped a tumbler full of gelatinous crimson liquid to the flagstone floor. Glass shattered in his head until dinner, where the sound of forks and knives against plates was loud enough to shut out the memory.
For one remarkable moment at dinner, Ron let Hermione hold his gaze. Her eyes were searching for something in his, he could tell, but when she didn't find it, she broke the stare. He wanted to ask her how clever she felt now, to fire off a shot at her about how she was still studying as hard as ever for her N.E.W.T.s, but he just looked away.
It hadn't rained in ages. The grass was going brittle, Hagrid's garden was shrivelling, and Pansy Parkinson had speculated in Care of Magical Creatures once that they were all being punished for the blood that was spilled on the Quidditch pitch. This had led to a brawl between Crabbe, Goyle, and Seamus, whose bloody nose had turned a few dry blades of grass brown. After class, packing his rucksack, Ron had seen Hagrid tearing the stained grass out of the ground with his hands.
The ceiling in the Great Hall remained clear all through dinner.
* * *
The other Beater was Walter Bluefall, a tall, slim, sixth year with a ruddy complexion and hair wilder than Hermione's in its curls. Bluefall approached him tentatively in the common room one night, holding a practice chart and looking nervous. Harry couldn't make himself feel surprised that someone had come to the corner of the common room he occupied every evening, staring at a Gryffindor tapestry.
Bluefall opened his mouth several times to speak, and Harry waited, but Bluefall only looked at him with concern.
It was only when Bluefall had walked back to his friends that Harry realised he had been talking, but Harry hadn't heard him.
* * *
It was slightly surprising to wake up to the movement of the mattress and the sight of Harry jerking off with his bare feet braced against the headboard.
He had never seen someone else jerk off, but Ron was sure the polite thing to do was to pretend you hadn't noticed. He sat up and watched curiously.
Harry stared back at him for a moment, and then shifted his eyes back to the ceiling. His pyjamas were only pulled to his knees, which Ron found interesting, because he usually preferred to be completely doffed. Harry's hips bucked into the air desperately, and he looked almost like he was going to cry if he didn't come. Like the top of his head would blow off at any minute.
Ron wondered if he looked the same when he did it.
He pulled the duvet up to his shoulders and went back to sleep.
* * *
It was when he was in Transfiguration that he realised he was hollow. That the only thing keeping him weighted down was actually his skin, and that if someone were to cut him open there would be nothing inside. Harry thought that if he had no skin, he would float away.
Professor McGonagall paused in her lesson then and glanced over at Harry, who wondered if she knew what he was thinking about. It brought him and his entrails back to their seat with a whoosh of what felt like hot air, but was, he knew, just the feeling of his blood circulating through his body again, washing up past his ears. It was the blood churning in his ears, he thought, that made everything muffled, and explained why, when Professor McGonagall handed out sheets of parchment to be filled out, he didn't know a single one of the answers.
Beside him, Ron was filling his parchment out in an automatic, dazed way: his hand scurried across the paper, but Ron was staring out the window and had been since class started. It was likely that Ron had never even glanced at the questions.
Nothing explained why Harry suddenly forgot how to write with a quill and left a large stain of ink instead of an answer. Curious, he lifted the parchment up and watched the ink run off of it and into the wood of his desk. He turned it in that way, but he couldn't remember how to sign his name.
* * *
He wondered if, maybe, his mother was finally doing what she had threatened to do to Fred and George so many times and was really going to disown him. Ron knew Dumbledore had sent mail to all of the parents - his, the Malfoys, and the Dursleys, who probably wouldn't care one way or another except to maybe close up the vents in Harry's bedroom so he couldn't get out and kill his cousin in his sleep. The Malfoys probably would have sent him a Howler, but they didn't seem so much the Howler type as the Killing-Curse-in-your-sleep type. His mum hadn't even sent a letter.
Probably she didn't even know what to say. Or probably she wasn't even surprised; probably she expected this sort of thing from him. He never had become a prefect, had he?
He spent meals waiting for mail from his mother to come in the form of an unmistakable red envelope, but the Howler never came.
* * *
We've never done this before, said the look on Ron's face, and it had a point.
Nevertheless, it was Ron who climbed on top of him then in awkward movements, as though he were mounting a broomstick. His knees, in fact, squeezed Harry's ribs like he feared he would fall off. Harry lay stiff and blank on his back, nauseated at the way he could easily feel the thick curves of Ron's arse on his knee, the way Ron's balls were pushed against the place where his thigh and knee met.
Along with showering, Ron had evidently decided against wearing shorts beneath the trousers of his pyjamas.
He wasn't sure what had possessed him to do this, but he hadn't thought ahead about what Ron sitting in his lap would be like. Ron smelled of week-old cabbage and looked about the same, and his face was fixed into the same look it often wore while eating Bertie Bott's, like he was preparing to be disgusted. He was moving, grimacing; Harry didn't take it personally, though, because he could feel the head of Ron's cock pressing into his hip and it was disturbing.
It was some sick fascination, then, that made his cock twitch in response and drew a sigh from his lungs.
He moved, too, and when Ron's ass slid in thin pyjamas over Harry's thigh, Harry's leg buckled under the pressure. It was too much weight to be comfortable, and when Ron braced one dirty hand against Harry's stomach to move, it felt like the wind had been knocked out of him.
The dirt was especially noticeable on Ron's knuckles, buried in the crevices in a sickly shade of grey that made Harry want to dig it out with his fingernails. Most of all he didn't want Ron's hands anywhere on him, but in his attempts to find a good position, Ron was doing an awful lot of touching. Some of it was painful, like the ball of Ron's hand shoving Harry's cock against his stomach, hard, which made Harry dig his toes into the sheets and clench his thighs.
It was gross in the smothering heat to have Ron's smothering body all over his, but this restlessness was killing him, killing him like a Bludger to the skull, and he knew Ron felt it, too. His pyjamas stuck to the backs of his thighs, and when Ron finally settled himself curled up against Harry's side, he yanked them to his knees.
The smell that was Ron was overwhelming. It was overwhelming enough that even with his cock in his hand, it was all Harry could think about. He smelled of sweat and garbage and what Harry suspected was the distinct odour of a pair of pyjamas that had been worn for a week without underwear. If Ron had a problem with his own stench, he hadn't indicated it yet, and he didn't seem at all opposed to the fact that the smell was spreading onto Harry. Then again, maybe Harry didn't mind so much either, because he still felt like he might die if he didn't come right then.
And while Ron ground himself against the side of Harry's hips, Harry thought that it was very odd that he wasn't separated from himself, that everything moved in real time instead of the usual rushed pace he felt. Once, Harry had kissed Ron's little sister and felt his heart pounding in his stomach and thumbs, his throat and the backs of his knees. Here, in Ron's bed--because, after all, Harry had been the one to move--his heart didn't pound at all.
* * *
Tracing patterns on the roof of his own mouth with his tongue at dinner, he decided that his life had been full of patterns for as long as he had been friends with Harry Potter.
There were the near-death experiences, which were a real blast, Ron found. It was dependable, knowing you would risk your life at the end of summer term each year, but it was a pattern. Just like the way he was always the absolute fucking last one to get anything they learned in lessons. Hermione would learn immediately, of course, and Harry would follow, and Ron would bring up the rear. He didn’t really notice these things until later, but everything was the same.
Adding a new pattern to the mix wasn't such a big deal.
* * *
Somewhere between indifference and endless guilt, he thought there might still be a spark of anger in him. Somewhere. There just had to be. No, he thought, not anger, maybe, but still some of that same swoop of hatred, the way his ears started to ring.
Like when Snape took twenty points from Gryffindor at once because he misspelled hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, the fear of long words, which Snape had said that Harry had. That was in October, when Malfoy had had his birthday and received his new broomstick in the convenient location of the Potions classroom. Broomsticks generally weren't allowed in Potions as far as Harry knew, but Malfoy had made a grand show of showing up late to class and saying that he hadn't wanted his birthday present to be stolen. Levitating your broomstick around the dungeons in slow motion during lectures was probably forbidden, too, but Snape hadn't seemed to mind.
Or once, when Mr Weasley had come into trouble in the Ministry. That had been in their sixth year, when Lucius Malfoy's department had confiscated some of Fred and George's old things at the Burrow and Mr Weasley had come into questioning over it. And Draco Malfoy had laughed; told Ron that he would starve, that Ron should try eating his sister for protein; had pointed out the blood stains on the seat of Ginny's robes and said she'd have to wear them like that for the rest of her life because she'd never have a knut to fix them.
And then there was the time on the train after Cedric.
Badges that read "Potter Stinks", attempts to get Harry expelled, and the tears Hermione thought no one knew she cried over being called a Mudblood.
The only truly likeable thing about Malfoy was that he was dead.
* * *
Come was everywhere. A thick glob of it landed on his cheek, and though the very thought made him want to throw up, Ron found he couldn't be bothered to wipe it off. Later he would remember it, when it had dried like tears and made his cheek tight and sticky.
He had made the mistake of lifting his head from the mattress when he heard Harry's breath catch in his throat, loud like a sudden draught, and found Harry's feet spread shoulder-width apart against the wall above the headboard. He turned to Harry, watched his mouth form a silent groan. Then Harry had come on his face.
Ron had tried to touch Harry, but Harry was eminently untouchable. He acted like it was a courtyard brawl, shoving his limbs and joints into the soft parts of Ron's body; or worse, he lay stiff and unmoving like a non-magic broomstick while Ron accidentally poked him in the stomach with his cock over and over. And so, Ron had decided that it would be best for both of them if he tried to fuck the mattress instead of Harry.
What Harry didn't know was that he screamed when he came; shouted hoarsely at the top of his lungs, and just now he had hollered and Neville had hollered in sympathetic fright two beds over. Ron, the victim of Harry and Neville's screaming match, thought for a moment that his ear drums had burst, but in the stillness afterwards, he could hear Harry wiping the slick come from his thighs. Ron was jealous.
There was tension building up behind his eyes, beneath his toenails in their beds, under the damp skin of his fingertips. Despite it, and despite how hard his cock was and how much his balls ached, Ron didn't come. He hadn't come in ages, and he had already seen Harry come more times than Ron usually came in a month. He supposed it was jealousy that made him watch, but he wasn't even sure that he was jealous anymore. It was strange and alien, and he wondered what life had been like when he had been able to have a bloody orgasm. He couldn't even tell the difference.
* * *
He took lunch at Hagrid's. Hagrid understood that he wanted to be alone, and usually busied himself off in the garden, or would occasionally be seen running past the window, followed by a weird sort of creature. Sometimes Ron joined him, but usually Harry was alone. It was the only time he was ever alone, even though he felt like he was all the time.
He'd received a letter from Sirius, which Ron had looked at so longingly that Harry had given it to him instead. Sirius had heard about Malfoy, as Sirius usually heard about everything, from Dumbledore. Harry was wondering if he should write back to Sirius--if he even could make the quill work again--or if he wanted to do nothing. It was a small, dirty part of him that wanted to let Sirius worry. For when Sirius worried, Sirius usually showed up. He wondered what Malfoy would have done if he were in Harry's shoes.
He had tried to give Harry advice on Sirius before, Malfoy had. He'd told Harry that if it were him, he would have gone and murdered Sirius. Presently Harry wondered if that were true; if Malfoy really would have done so. As it turned out, Harry knew nothing about Malfoy at all.
In the end, he dug up an old letter that he had never sent to Sirius and sent that back instead.
* * *
Beaters had one major priority after trying to take out the other team's players, and that was protecting the Seeker. Which was all he was doing; making sure that his Seeker got to the Snitch before the other Seeker. Malfoy was so close, right on Harry's heels, and Harry didn't see him; that much was obvious. A Bludger shot by and he swung his bat.
This was what Ron dreamt of at night, when he wasn't dreaming about something ridiculous like a blowjob from Hermione. On those nights, he expected to be stuck to the sheets when he awoke, but of course that never happened. On the evenings he dreamt of Malfoy, he usually slept through the night.
* * *
The sheets were stiff and crusty in some places, and they smelled. He thought about the rancid sheets during History of Magic, in Transfiguration, but it usually slipped his mind by the time he was between them again. He thought more about what he and Ron did during the day than when they were actually doing it. There were things about Ron he had noticed, but hadn't realised he'd noticed until Professor Binns glided through the classroom.
When damp with sweat, the layer of dirt on Ron's skin rubbed off in tiny balls--of skin or dirt, Harry couldn't tell--and stuck to the linens and Harry's clothes like grey clay. It was as though Ron had become so dirty that the dirt was actually repelling from his body to make room for him to get dirtier. Ron didn't come, either, and it made Harry feel guilty, but usually he forgot about the guilt by the next time he ended up waking in the middle of the night with an enjoyably painful erection.
There were other things he thought about, too. Like Professor Binns, who had apparently died and not realised it. He wondered if that happened often, and if he might be in danger of letting that happen to himself.
Parvati Patil and Lavender Brown had taken to looking at him fearfully in lessons, probably because Professor Trelawney had made a prediction that Harry hadn't heard. It made things feel a bit more normal, to think of Trelawney and her death predictions. That was part of every day living, of the world he didn't hear anymore.
A bee was caught in the History of Magic classroom, and most of the witches were panicked, and quite a few of the boys, too. It landed on Harry's desk, and he slammed his hand down on it without even thinking about it. He couldn't tell if the looks on everyone else's faces were ones of relief or alarm.
* * *
When he quit the Quidditch team, Madam Hooch only blinked yellow eyes at him and nodded before waving him out of her office, the one that was set just off of the Hufflepuff changing rooms on the far left of the Quidditch pitch. Ron stood in the doorway, hands balled loosely at his sides, and wondered what he was waiting for.
* * *
Harry and Ron were in bed before dinner, and the curtains opened.
Harry, curled in a ball with a pillow between his knees, had the decency to pull his hand from his trousers. He lifted his messy head and blinked blankly. Ron, face down in the mattress with his pyjama bottoms pulled down to his thighs, stopped humping the bed and looked up sleepily. He flushed, but didn't pull his trousers up. Hermione, hands on her hips with an unfazed look, pursed her lips and pulled Ron's pyjamas back up to his waist.
She smiled and took one of their hands in each of her own. Harry's was sticky and Ron's was cold, but she held on tightly. Ron was confused, but stumbled out of bed behind Harry, adjusting his trousers.
Hermione had a look on her face not unlike the one she got when she figured out the answer to a tough riddle. Her forehead was smooth, in that way that only came when it had been full of creases and wrinkles a few moments before. She was excited, but more peaceful, happy. Harry and Ron let her lead them out of Hogwarts.
She stopped on the steps, and for a moment, neither knew what they were doing out of doors. Ron blinked slowly, and Harry turned his face up to the grey sky. A raindrop hit his cheek, fat and cold. It was followed by a second, and a third, which splashed against his scar and ran down the bridge of his nose to cling to his glasses.
Hermione turned to him and grinned and then started down the steps, dragging Ron and Harry after her.
Ron's bare feet made loud slaps in puddles of water, and the rain hammered down even harder. Harry shivered; he had been dressed in only his white dress shirt and trousers when Hermione grabbed them, and now, in the rain without a cloak, it was cold.
Hermione stopped at the Quidditch pitch. Harry and Ron's bare feet sank in the mud. It squished between their toes, inaudible over the clap of thunder overhead.
Malfoy's blood, the blood that stained the grass, was running in red rivers out of the pitch.
Hermione squeezed Ron and Harry's hands and watched the blood wash away silently. Mixed with rain, it wasn't quite so vibrant, or even pure. Blood and mud were running out of the pitch together. Somehow, it didn’t seem so threatening anymore.
They stayed until all of the blood was gone.
When the rain started to let up, Harry looked at Ron and smiled a half sort of smile, one without teeth that made Harry look sheepish. The dirt had all been washed away, and it was Ron standing on the pitch in just a pair of pyjama bottoms.
Ron wiped water from his eyes and pushed his hair away from his forehead. The sound of the rain against the Quidditch stands was soft and nearly soothing. He tugged Hermione's hand to lead the three of them back to the castle. And without a look back at the bloody mud, Harry and Ron nestled closer to the warmth of Hermione's cloak as they walked across the Hogwarts grounds.
In the common room, three steaming cups of marshmallow soup were waiting for them by the fire, along with three comfortable chairs. Hermione had rightly thought in advance that Ron and Harry would have a lot of catching up to do. The two of them hadn't spoken to each other in almost a month.
With a sideways glance as they stepped into Hogwarts, Ron thought that maybe a blowjob from Hermione wouldn't be so ridiculous after all.