Archive of Our Own ^beta

When Ron sees the black column of smoke rising above the early autumn trees, the first thing he thinks is: no, please, not again.

The second is: crash site one and a half miles away, should take nearly half an hour to reach it, but I’ll have to be quicker if I want to get there first.

He goes into his empty shell of a house and finds his rifle and the medical supplies Hermione had given him (“Just in case,” she’d said, though both of them had known he’d use them sooner rather than later) and a jacket to ward off the wind blowing from the east. If he’s lucky, that wind will dissipate the smoke from the crash site before it draws too much attention. If he isn’t, it will fan the flames of the burning plane and set the woods alight.

It’s October 7, 1941 as Ronald Weasley, British ex-pat and member of the French resistance, crosses the countryside of northern France to investigate the wreckage of a downed RAF fighter jet. It isn’t the first time he’s done this. And he doesn’t know it yet, but it will be his last.

The fighter plane is burning, but not dangerously. The fire is self-contained and already dying before the rain starts to fall. Fat, heavy raindrops splatter the plane’s painted hull and hiss reproachfully at the heat of the searing metal. Along the wounded side, Ron can barely make out the word Nimbus in jagged script. A gash beneath the letters shows the path of the bullets that must have jerked the plane off course—spinning, its left wing had no doubt been exposed to the German pilot’s guns. Ron looks but can’t see the missing wing anywhere in sight.

He thumbs the casing of his rifle as he stares at the downed plane (another Spitfire, he thinks, somewhat sadly), and then he looks for the pilot.

First he checks the cockpit, because—a man had still been in his, once. His body a bloody, unrecognizable ruin, the reek of burning flesh still lingering with the scent of gasoline and fire. Ron had turned, retched, and stumbled back home, practically insensible, unaware of his surroundings until Hermione had taken him by the shoulders and shaken him, hard (“Ron, damn you, listen to me, Ron, Ron—”).

But the cockpit’s empty this time, and so Ron searches the surrounding area as quickly and efficiently as he can. Every moment is essential when each could be the one in which the unknown pilot—possibly injured, probably shell-shocked—chooses to let go.

Ron finds the pilot lying face down in the muddy leaves. His parachute is crumpled around him like paper, fluttering in the wind, though the rain pelting against the canvas holds it down. The pilot’s dark hair is plastered to the side of his face by rain and blood, and through the slits of his half-open eyes, Ron sees a flash of bright green. Ron cuts the parachute away and after making sure the pilot is still breathing and not in immediate danger of dying, lifts him into a fireman’s cradle, his hands so steady that he almost can’t believe they’re his own.

The pilot moans, murmurs something.

“Don’t try to speak,” Ron said, suddenly afraid. He doesn’t want to hear the last words this man might ever say.

The pilot coughs, a bloodied, hoarse sound. “To Harry Potter,” he whispers, like he’s remembering it, “the boy who lived.” And then he passes out.

Hermione is waiting for Ron when he returns with the wounded pilot in his arms. Her bushy brown hair is pulled into a tight bun at the nape of her neck, and her mouth is tense, bloodless and brittle around the edges.

“Did anyone see you?” she asks, like she always does.

Ron doesn’t know either way, but he’s pretty sure that if a German had seen him, he’d be dead. “No,” he says.

She nods, tightly, and opens the door to his house so that he can bring the pilot in. She sweeps the clutter off the kitchen table—books and old dishes, maps and cigarette ashes—and Ron lays the pilot onto it.

Hermione works efficiently, focused only on the man before her. She wasn’t a nurse before the war (and isn’t one now, either, not really; when you’re working within a secret resistance organization, you don’t generally bother yourself with trivialities like titles), but she’s volunteered for the past year at the abandoned school that’s been serving as a hospital. She has grown accustomed to blood, and worse. More so than Ron, who usually leaves this part of the rescue to her. His stomach turns at the sight of the blood staining the right side of the pilot’s face—a bright red wash like watercolor paints from his forehead to his neck—and at the trembling in his left arm, which Hermione reveals when she pulls away the man’s uniform and sees the purple-dark bruising singular to dislocated bones.

Hermione curses in French under her breath. “At least he’s unconscious for this,” she says, her voice clipped and emotionless, which Ron knows is only because she doesn’t want him to see how shaken she is. “Hold him down for me anyway.” And she rolls her sleeves up to the elbows, her jaw clenching.

Hermione sets the pilot’s shoulder with steady, sure hands as sweat gathers on her forehead and her lips go white. The pilot wakes with a cry, and Ron has to throw himself atop him to prevent him from lunging at Hermione and strangling her with hands covered in rusty dry blood. The pilot writhes in Ron’s grip, but Ron is stronger. Eventually, panting, the pilot stops struggling, his bright eyes defiant but clouded by pain and fear.

“Who are you?” he says in clipped English.

“Friends,” Ron says in the same accent. The pilot falls back against the table, boneless and exhausted.

“We have to stitch the cut above your eye.” Hermione does not waver under the look that the pilot gives her.

Ron looks down at the pilot’s face, slick with a sheen of blood. The pilot watches him, his gaze unbroken, his mouth twisting as blood clings to the corner, and Ron’s stomach stops churning, somehow.

“I’ll do it,” he says. “Give those here.”

Hermione gives him the needle and thread and a pointed look, which Ron ignores. Hermione knows how much he can’t stand the sight of blood, and she knows why (a smile through broken bloody teeth, a gurgling gasp as he struggles to breathe through the blood in his lungs—). Ron isn’t sure why he’s offered to do this, but he feels, in that moment, that he has to.

The pilot nods, stiffly, and his Adam’s apple surges in the slope of his neck. “Your name,” he breathes, hoarsely.

“Ron.”

“I’m Harry.” The pilot takes Hermione’s offered hand when she holds it out to him. Maybe he thinks she’s trying to shake hands.

“This will hurt,” Ron says, and carefully pours whiskey over the deep gash in the pilot’s—Harry’s—forehead.

Harry grunts and squeezes Hermione’s hand tight and shutters his eyes, but otherwise he remains motionless.

“Okay,” Ron says, more to steady himself than anything else. “Okay,” and he slides the needle into the pilot’s skin. Five quick strokes and it’s done, the wound sealed and clean. Hermione wipes down the pilot’s face with a wet washcloth to rinse away the blood.

“Well,” the pilot called Harry says, somewhat bitterly. “How do I look?”

Terrible, Ron wants to say, but he doesn’t. “Could be worse,” he says. “It’s shaped like a bolt of lightning.”

Harry stares at him, open-mouthed, and then he starts to laugh uncontrollably.

As it turns out, Harry has other injuries—including some bruised or fractured ribs and a concussion—which don’t appear life-threatening but prove exceedingly painful. Hermione helps maneuver Harry’s arm into a sling, which she then binds to his side to support his fractured ribs.

While Hermione is doing this, however, Harry’s head suddenly rolls back, his eyelids fluttering, and he does not respond when Hermione shakes him.

“Ron!” Hermione’s voice is pained, scared. “Ron, his head injury—we need to keep him with us, keep him alert.”

Ron moves to her side and touches Harry’s face. “Harry?” he asks, and when there’s no response he says the name again, more sharply. Harry lurches forward, his eyes wide but unfocused.

“Today’s date,” Ron says. “What’s today’s date, Harry?”

Harry shakes his head once, to the left, and doesn’t answer no matter how many times Ron asks.

Finally, fear rising rapidly in his chest, made worse only by the frantic look on Hermione’s face, Ron barks, “Tell me your name and rank, soldier!”

Harry goes rigid. His voice slurs as he whispers, “Harry James Potter, leading aircraftman—sir.”

“Today’s date?” Ron asks again.

“October 7, 1941, sir.”

“Do you remember how you got here?”

“You—carried me....”

“Keep him talking,” Hermione says. She’s finished binding Harry’s arm to his side. “Let’s get him to the bedroom.”

Ron slips Harry’s arm over his shoulder as Hermione does the same on his other side, and together they support his weight. “Tell me anything else you can think of,” Ron says.

“My name’s Harry Potter,” Harry says, his voice thick, and Ron and Hermione lead him to the bedroom. “Born July 31, 19...21. In London. I crashed my plane in German territory....”

“Yes, you did,” Hermione says, soothingly, “but don’t worry. They won’t find you.” She and Ron lower Harry onto the bed. “He’s relatively lucid, but I’m worried about what will happen if he goes to sleep. I have to get back to the hospital before McGonagall notices I’m gone, but—”

“You go,” Ron says. “Just tell me what to do.”

“Wake him every fifteen minutes if he falls asleep.” Hermione clenches her hands, her knuckles white. “For two hours, I think. Then every half hour for the next two hours, then every hour. That’s what Madame Pomfrey did for...for....” She doesn’t look at Ron.

“I understand,” Ron says, quietly.

Hermione hugs him. “I’ll check back tomorrow,” she promises, and then she is gone.

The next few hours crawl by, clinging to the ones that come before as if they never want to let go. Ron checks his watch every five minutes and wakes Harry precisely the way Hermione told him to. Harry is annoyed at first—“Let me sleep, you sadistic fucker”—but eventually annoyance gives way to exhaustion. He never says it, but it clearly pains him to breathe, and Ron can tell that he has a terrible headache.

Ron doesn’t sleep at all that night, not until Hermione arrives the next morning to take over.

“Thank you,” Harry says, when he is capable of maintaining a lucid conversation. Ron sits curled in an old armchair by the windowsill as he watches the rain patter against the glass, wrapped in a torn blanket his mother knitted for him, forever ago. He curls his finger into the wool and says nothing.

“For saving my life,” Harry continues, as if his previous statement had needed clarification.

Ron shrugs. Harry is not the first pilot he’s saved, nor the first person to thank Ron for his life. (And if Harry had died, he wouldn’t have been the first person whom Ron had wanted to save and couldn’t, either.)

“You’re British,” Harry says, doesn’t ask. “Are you a soldier, or...?”

“Ex-pat. Came to Paris with my family before the war started. Bill wanted to get married, and I wanted to study. We all managed to get out of Paris before the Germans took it. Leaving the country turned out to be harder, though.”

“Bill?”

“My brother. Older.”

Harry nods. “I don’t have any brothers.”

“I’ve the five, and a sister.”

“Do they live here, too?”

“They....” Ron’s throat constricts, and he looks down at his mother’s blanket. He doesn’t answer Harry.

“My family is dead,” Harry says, and the unspoken too, like an accusation, lingers in the silence. Mine isn’t, Ron thinks, but—he doesn’t know. He hasn’t seen them in over a year, not since the last town he’d lived in was bombed and he’d fled with Hermione in the middle of the night.

“They didn’t die in the war, though,” Harry goes on. “Ages ago, when I was really young.”

“I’m sorry.” The words have never felt more meaningless in his life—except, perhaps, when Hermione had said them eleven months ago, her eyes glimmering with tears and her hands shining with blood: I’m sorry, Ron, I’m so sorry, we couldn’t save him.

“How are you feeling?” Ron asks, to change the subject.

“Better.” Harry touches his forehead with his good arm. “Less dizzy, at least.”

“I should probably change your bandage,” Ron says, remembering what Hermione had told him. It’d be better if she were here to do it, but she’s at the hospital, and Ron doesn’t want to bring Harry there to have her do it. He hasn’t been to the hospital in eleven months.

Harry lets his hand fall from his temple and watches as Ron gathers the things he will need: fresh bandages, scissors and tape, clean water. With careful fingertips, Ron brushes Harry’s dark hair off his forehead and slowly peels back the bandages that Hermione had so skillfully applied. He cleans and redresses the wound after inspecting the stitches. Harry doesn’t move or react at first, but when Ron’s hand smoothes his hair back and then cups his jaw to hold his head steady, his breath hitches, quietly.

“All right?” Ron asks.

Harry exhales, slowly, and nods. When Ron steps back, the injury redressed, Harry has trouble looking him in the eye.

Hermione is busy at the makeshift hospital for the next few days, and so Ron doesn’t see her. He watches over Harry and makes enough food for two at every meal and reads to Harry from the many books he owns (most of which are Hermione’s), because Harry’s headache still persists and it makes it worse to try and focus on the fine print. Ron reads children’s stories and novels and the works of famous philosophers, though Harry requests the children’s tales the most.

“Thomas used to quote Voltaire,” Harry says once, while Ron pauses for breath. “Something about—snowflakes in an avalanche, never feeling responsible for it.”

Ron looks at him.

“I could never figure out if he was talking nonsense or just trying to make trouble,” Harry says. “Guess I’ll never find out now.”

“Who’s Thomas?” Ron asks.

“Dean Thomas. My squadron leader. He and Seamus used to call me the boy who lived, because I was always walking away from dogfights that should have killed me. ‘To Harry Potter, the boy who lived—and lived and lived and lived,’ they used to say, and laugh.”

He looks down at his hands, as if not really seeing them.

“That’s what I’m good at,” he says. “Surviving. But only when everyone else dies.”

Ron remembers his family, and Fred, and he thinks: me too.

By the end of that week, Hermione removes the stitches from Harry’s forehead, leaving a red, newly-formed scar in their place.

Harry runs his fingertips over it, gently, and doesn’t say anything, not even when Hermione suggests that they take Harry to the hospital to see Madame Pomfrey and Ron refuses.

“You’re good at this, Hermione,” Ron says. “We don’t need Pomfrey.”

She consents, but only, Ron thinks, because she knows why Ron hasn’t been to the hospital in months and months.

Harry watches the exchange in silence. He raises an eyebrow at Ron when it’s over, but he doesn’t ask. The new scar on his forehead shines red and crooked.

“So,” Harry says one night during dinner. It’s the first time he’s felt strong enough to eat at the table rather than in bed. “Hermione.”

“What about Hermione?” Ron asks.

“Is she your—” Harry gestures with his fork “—you know. The two of you.”

“No,” Ron says. “She isn’t my ‘you know.’”

Harry grins at him and just shovels more food into his mouth. He doesn’t break eye contact until Ron reddens suddenly and looks away.

“She was, once,” he says. “A long time ago. We’re just friends now, though.”

“Knew it.” Harry half-laughs. “And how many times have I heard that before—we’re just friends. Never true.”

“And what about you? I thought all you fighter pilots named your planes after the girls waiting for you back home, but you’d have to be mental to shag a girl named Nimbus.”

Harry is still grinning, but he doesn’t look like he wants to be.

“There’s no girl waiting for me back home,” he finally says. “Nobody’s waiting for me.”

Silence, then: “And yet I’m the one who keeps living, when I have no one to live for.”

Harry’s injuries necessitate that he use the bed. Ron has been sleeping in the armchair in the same room, wrapped in his mother’s hand-knit blanket.

It isn’t until the eighth night that he realizes he’s watching Harry sleep. The spill of moonlight on the bed makes Harry’s pale skin luminescent, otherworldly, and the dark bruises of his eyes sit smudged above his cheekbones like brushstrokes of ink. Harry sleeps on his good side, his chin tucked into his chest, curled in on himself like an open parenthesis. Ron wants in that moment to do nothing more than to close that parenthesis, to answer the question that Harry has never asked.

But.

The bed isn’t big enough for two.

“Someone you know died there,” Harry says one day, apropos of nothing. They’re sitting in the kitchen, playing chess. Ron is winning—he always wins at chess. “That’s why you won’t go to the hospital.”

It’s useless to deny it. “Yes,” Ron says.

And Harry, surprisingly, says nothing, merely moves his knight so that it threatens Ron’s rook and waits.

“My older brother,” Ron says. He takes Harry’s knight with his bishop and wonders whether he even wants to say anything more, whether he can talk about what happened. There’s so much pain in the world, and this is his piece of it, the memories that he cannot escape. “When my last village was bombed,” he finally says, his voice low and calmer than he would have thought possible, “Hermione and I went back to look for my family. We didn’t find anyone.” Not a sign of Bill or his beautiful young French wife, Fleur; no word of Charlie or Percy, Fred or George or Ginny; no news of his parents. All were gone as if they had never lived there, the house in which they had ate and slept and breathed reduced to rubble in the dirt. Ron is profoundly glad that Harry is looking at the chessboard as if he’s never seen anything more interesting in his life. He doesn’t think he could meet Harry’s eyes. “So Hermione and I fled here, alone, because a friend of ours mentioned that the French resistance here could help us. They did, and then we decided to help the resistance.” He slides his rescued rook forward, three squares. “A week after we got here—eleven months ago, now—my brother showed up. Fred. He was—sick.”

Sick was putting it mildly. Fred had been half-mad with fever, exhaustion, and infection by that point. He’d had a serious head injury that hadn’t healed, and the whole left side of his body had been mangled, as if a wall had exploded out and struck him.

“McGonagall—she runs the hospital—she said she couldn’t believe that he was still alive. We thought we could help him at first, but....” (Fred smiles through his broken bloody teeth, a gurgling gasp coming from his throat as he struggles to breathe through the blood and fluid pooling in his lungs like it belongs there. “Don’t worry about me, little brother,” he’d managed to say, flecks of blood spattering Ron’s face as he’d bent to listen. Don’t worry about me, as if Ron could stop if he wanted to, anytime he wanted. It was the last thing that Fred had been lucid enough to say.) “He didn’t make it.”

“Jesus.” Harry stares at him, and Ron wonders how much he’d said aloud. “I’m sorry.”

Ron takes Harry’s queen, somewhat viciously. “Everyone’s always sorry,” he says. “Doesn’t mean a fucking thing though, in the end. ‘Sorry’ is the weakest word there is.”

He corners Harry’s king a few minutes later, but Harry’s no longer watching the game. He looks at Ron, silent, his mouth parted around a half-formed question, his eyes glittering like stars in the firelight.

“Ron,” he finally says, weakly, after Ron has packed away the chessboard and the pieces and downed the rest of the whiskey in his glass, reveling in the slow burn as it slides down his throat—“Ron.”

Ron looks at him. He looks at Harry, the orphaned RAF fighter pilot from London with no one waiting for him at home, who loves it best when Ron reads the children’s stories and not the novels, who is an abysmal chess player, who smiles too easily to hide the things that he really feels.

When Harry kisses him, Ron can taste the whiskey on his tongue, like poison.

A month later, and all of Harry’s injuries have healed to Hermione’s satisfaction. He doesn’t leave.

“I love you,” he whispers into the hollow of Ron’s throat, and then where his jaw meets his neck. “I love you, Ron, I love you.”

Ron arches under his touch as he stares up at the dark room and thinks, though he tries not to: do you truly, or do you wish you did because we might be dead tomorrow?

He doesn’t ask, though, because he’s not sure which is true for him, either.

They lie side-by-side in the moonlight, whispering secrets. Ron watches Harry’s chest rise and fall, the fluttering of the sheets when he breathes, the way his dark hair feathers against the pillow and Ron’s arm where Harry has laid his head. The moonlight makes shadows cold and sharp, jagged splinters of night that pierce the soul and whisper as they claw their way in.

“I ran away from home when I was eleven,” Harry says.

“Home?”

“My aunt and uncle took me in when my mum and dad died.” Harry’s lips quirk a small smile at the corners, though he is anything but amused. “Against their will.”

“I’m terrified of spiders,” Ron admits, because everyone who knows him should know that.

Harry grins and skitters his fingertips up Ron’s bare back like two spiders dancing on his skin. “Good thing you have me here, then. Of all the things I fear, spiders aren’t included.”

Ron catches one of Harry’s hands with his free arm and covers it with his own on the blankets between them. They lie in silence for a long time, and Ron wonders if they are finished sharing secrets. His own are painted across his face and body, up and down his arms and legs, twining around his ankles and wrists, curling around his heart. He wonders how it is that Harry can’t see them, luminescent in the light spilling through the window, glowing white and soft like stars. He carries them with him wherever he goes.

Finally, Harry speaks again, long minutes later. Ron’s eyes are closed, and perhaps Harry thinks he is asleep, because he whispers so softly that Ron can barely hear, “I’m glad my plane was shot down.”

A pause, and: “I’m glad you found me.”

It’s December 17, 1941 when another plane crashes nearby and smoke rises above the line of trees.

“Two or three miles away this time,” Ron says, as Harry wraps a scarf around Ron’s neck, his fingers gentle, hesitant. “I’ll need to move fast.”

“I can go with you,” Harry says, but Ron shakes his head.

“I know what I’m doing. I’ll be faster and less noticeable if I go alone.”

Harry frowns but doesn’t answer. He watches, his eyes bright and green and strained around the corners, as Ron pulls on his boots and checks that his rifle is loaded. He looks as if he wants to say something. Ron can tell from the way he holds his hands at his side, motionless, and the way he doesn’t say anything at all.

“I’ll come back,” Ron says, a promise and a reassurance both. “I’ll come back, Harry.”

Harry just stands in the doorway and looks at him, wordless, before reaching out and taking Ron’s hand and squeezing it tightly.

“You’d better,” he whispers. Ron wonders if he should kiss him.

He doesn’t, because he doesn’t know if they’re really in love or what love should feel like, whether it makes you feel boundless and free or chained to the earth by worry and something that wants to be despair. He doesn’t know if people can fall in love in situations like this, in times like these. He doesn’t know if he loves Harry or if he just wants something in his life that’s good.

“I will,” Ron promises for a third time, and he shoulders his rifle and doesn’t look back.

He realizes something is wrong when he hears the click of a cocked pistol and the thud of army boots in the dirt.

Harry, he thinks and doesn’t know why—no, I promised Harry, please.

(If he’d had the time to realize, he would have known that this is what love feels like, sometimes.)

Voices laughing in the night air. The cool touch of a pistol to the back of his neck.

Click, again. Bang.

Blood, cooling on the muddy ground.

After that first night that he and Harry had kissed, Hermione had known. She’d seen it in Ron’s eyes. In the way he’d watched Harry, perhaps. More likely in the ways that he didn’t watch him.

She had taken him aside, her hand small and warm on his shoulder, her eyes tired and old and pained.

“Do you love him?” she’d asked, because Hermione always asked.

And Ron had looked at Harry, who was whistling as he took the teapot off the stove, the steam curling up and turning his face pink, his eyes bright. Harry had glanced up to see Ron looking at him, and he’d grinned.

Ron thought about uncertainty and he thought about death and he thought about war, but most of all he thought about love.

“I think I could have,” he told Hermione, an ache in his chest that sang like a plucked string of longing and grief. “But not in this life.”