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Two years after the war, Harry decides the hell with all of this—to hell with waiting and seeing other people and unobtrusively longing from afar (in a very manly and not at all pathetic manner inappropriate to such a battle-hardened war hero such as himself)—and he finally breaks things off with Ginny so that he can focus his attention on another lanky redhead, although he doesn’t put it that way to her at the time. He says something about ‘seeing different people’ and ‘things just not being right,’ which even he can acknowledge is about the vaguest and shittiest way to break up with someone ever. But it’s not as if he’s ever been good with women, anyway, which should have tipped everyone off to the truth years ago.
That truth goes as follows: Harry is gay, and he doesn’t want Ginny; he wants her brother. (He doesn’t blame himself much for not telling Ginny this. She would have cursed his balls off.)
He moves out of their flat—Ginny’s flat now, he supposes—that night, completely of his own accord and in no way due to the fact that Ginny is practically spitting with rage. He’d prepared a new place for himself beforehand, having foreseen this probability, and so he packs his things as Ginny screams at him and he leaves. His new apartment is four-roomed, small, and completely empty.
That first night, he lies awake in his sleeping bag on the floor and stares at the ceiling. He’s free. Ginny’s furious, and the rest of the Weasleys will be by some time tomorrow if not already, and Hermione will give Harry that pitying little head shake of hers that she’s so fond of, but he’s free and life’s too short and Harry isn’t going to waste it with people he doesn’t belong with. Ginny is a good person, smart and beautiful and unyielding; it isn’t her fault that Harry doesn’t love her. And if it’s Harry’s fault, a little, maybe, possibly—then he’ll take the blame for it, gladly, so long as he has Ron to see him through it.
Because Harry’s plan had just begun with breaking up with Ginny, and it ends with him in Ron’s bed. It’s brilliant in its simplicity, because Harry doesn’t really know how to seduce someone, so he’s going to improvise as he goes along. He’s pretty sure it’ll work. Probably. How hard can it be?
+
Plan 1
1. Invite Ron over to the new flat.
2. ??? (Harry’s pretty sure this part will come to him eventually.)
3. And then sex happens.
Harry cleans his new place an hour before Ron comes over to see him. This doesn’t take long, as he’s only been there a week and doesn’t really have any furniture. Or carpets. Or a mattress. So actually the cleaning consists of dusting the floors and the kitchen counters and then staring at the place where the kitchen table should be and wondering how the hell this is going to work if he doesn’t even have a bed. He probably should have thought of this earlier.
He tries transfiguring one of his socks into a mattress, but he can’t remember the proper magic (Professor McGonagall would be ashamed with him if she ever found out), and it probably would have ended up argyle-patterned, anyway. He puts his sock back on and sits in the middle of his empty apartment and allows himself to fully appreciate the enormity of his situation for the first time.
He’s broken up with Ginny—Ron’s sister, who Ron has always been protective of. Ron, who had been about two centimeters from punching Dean in the nose when he’d dated Ginny. Ron, who Harry wants to fuck. Ron, who is going to be at Harry’s apartment any minute, and who has been working on his right hook (along with his left hook and some other hand-to-hand abilities that are impressive to watch from the sidelines but not so much when you’re the one getting pummeled).
Oh, fuck, Harry thinks as the door to his apartment opens. He gets to his feet, strangely calm, and holds up his hands to yield.
And then Ron punches him in the face.
Harry lands on his arse, hard, one hand clutching his nose. He probably deserved that. Definitely deserved that.
“Are out of your mind?” Ron is red-faced with fury, his ears practically glowing, his freckles dark and angry on his cheekbones. His right hand is cradled against his chest. “You think you can break my sister’s heart and then call me over as if nothing is wrong? You’re such a fucking—”
But Harry doesn’t quite hear what he is, exactly, because suddenly his ears start ringing and he moans and clutches at his nose and says through the blood, “You fugging broke by dose, you arsehole, whud duh hell,” and tries to pretend that he doesn’t sound pathetic at all.
“Really?” Ron sounds impressed with himself.
Harry scowls but that only makes his nose throb in pain. “Fug you,” he says instead, which makes Ron howl with laughter. Harry is too sulky to join in.
Ron helps him to his feet, still grinning. “Sorry about that. Well, not really, you’re a total git.”
“Danks,” Harry says thickly.
Ron grins again and Apparates them both to St. Mungo’s. The Healer sets Harry’s nose, and Ron laughs the entire time as the Healer prods Harry’s face with her wand and explains, in detail, the best way to absorb a punch to the face from every angle.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Harry says when the Healer has finished. His nose is still sore and he has a headache to rival the ones his scar had once given him, years ago, so he doesn’t manage to sound properly grateful.
When they leave the hospital, Ron says, “Look, I really am sorry. But you have to admit that you’re fucking mental.”
“Maybe,” Harry mutters, not really looking at him.
And Ron touches Harry’s face with two fingertips, gently testing the area around his newly-mended nose. Harry goes perfectly still, unable to breathe.
“You okay?” Ron asks.
“Yeah.” Harry exhales, trying to ignore the paralysis spreading through him. “Great.”
Ron smiles and Disapparates. Harry goes back to his apartment, wondering whether his nose will heal straight or end up crooked like Dumbledore’s. He hopes for the former, because he’s funny-looking enough as it is and doesn’t need to add ‘crooked face’ to the glasses, scrawniness, and uncontrollable hair.
+
Plan 2
2. Avoid jumping Ron until you come up with a better fucking plan.
Harry takes some time after that incident to assess his motives. Does he just want rebound sex? A one-night stand? A fuck buddy? Or—something else? He carefully avoids that more serious and terrifying possibility—that he wants more, that he doesn’t just want sex.
That he might actually be in love with Ron.
The thought makes him break out in a cold sweat, either because his last relationship had ended so disastrously (and was so completely his fault) or because the prospect of being in love with his best friend makes him want to throw up.
It had taken him a long time to accept that he was gay. He didn’t just wake up one morning and decide that he wanted to fuck guys, though that would have been a much simpler and less painful process than the one he actually underwent. It had started in his fourth year, when he couldn’t figure out whether he wanted to kiss Cho Chang or Cedric Diggory, and continued in his fifth when he did kiss Cho and realized she was the wrong one.
Dating Ginny had been safe. Easy. She’d fancied him since they’d first met, she was attractive, and she was a part of the family that he loved more than anyone else in the world, and so technically, clinically, it should have been perfect. For a while he’d told himself that it had been. A few months ago, he’d been planning on asking Ginny to marry him. He’d even bought the ring, which he takes out now and just looks at, thinking of a three-bedroom house and a white picket fence and little red-haired children that he still wants but can’t figure out how to have.
He tucks the ring away in his pocket. He’d been so close to proposing to Ginny; that could only have ended horribly, painfully. Maybe if Ginny knew that she might not be so angry. He’ll talk to her about it someday, when the wound isn’t so raw and new.
It had been Ron and Hermione’s break-up that had snapped Harry out of his stupor. One day Hermione had shown up to cry on Ginny’s shoulder and Harry had touched the ring in his pocket and realized that this was never, ever going to work. Sometimes he can’t help but wonder how it had all gone so wrong. He and Ginny were supposed to be married, Ron and Hermione too, and yet somewhere along the way everything had fallen apart for all of them. Life was simultaneously simpler and so much more confusing now than it had been during the war.
Unlike Harry and Ginny’s break-up, however, Ron and Hermione’s had been cordial and clean, if still somewhat painful. They even still live together, mostly because neither of them has enough money for their own place but partly because they can still stand the sight of each other, which Harry and Ginny can’t. (Well, Ginny can’t.) So it doesn’t surprise Harry when he gets a Floo-call one morning three weeks after his break-up with Ginny and finds Hermione’s head in his fireplace as she shouts over her shoulder at Ron.
“—No, stay in bed, Ron, you’ll catch a chill—Harry! Oh, good, I was worried you might not be in.” She glances around the tiny living room. “New furniture?” The unspoken ‘finally’ is apparent in the tone of her voice.
“Yeah, I just got around to it,” Harry says, and he sits on his new couch. “How are you, Hermione?”
“Oh, fine,” she says, sounding flustered. Her hair is mussed and only one half of her make-up is done. “I’m sorry to bother you, Harry. I know you have work too, but I can’t take any more days off this month, and you said that you have all of yours left—”
“Get to the point, Hermione,” says Harry, who still has all his sick days because he’s been working tirelessly for the past several months—first because he hadn’t wanted to come home to Ginny, now because he doesn’t want to come home to an empty flat.
“Right.” She smoothes her hair. “Ron’s sick, and I think you should come over to look after him.”
“I do not need looking after!” a voice calls distantly. “Blimey, Hermione, you’d think I’ve never had a cold before, the way you’re acting—”
“You don’t have a cold!” Hermione shouts over her shoulder, which must be incredibly disconcerting with your head in someone else’s fireplace. “You have a 39° fever and you keep shaking all over!”
“So it’s a bad cold,” Ron says grumpily. “I don’t want Harry to babysit me.”
“Too bad.” Hermione turns back to Harry and looks at him plaintively.
He gets to his feet. “I’ll be right over. Let me just find my trousers.”
Hermione gives him a very familiar look, glares pointedly at the jeans draped over the couch, and pulls her head out of the fireplace, leaving Harry grinning at the emerald flames.
When he arrives at Ron and Hermione’s place, Hermione has already left for work, and Ron is in the kitchen muttering to himself as he tries to make a cup of tea. His hands are shaking too badly for him to hold the cup, and he spills hot tea over the counter.
“Buggering hell,” Ron says, and slams the cup down.
Harry reaches out and gently takes the kettle from him. “Need a hand?”
“Need a new bloody arm more like,” Ron grouses, holding the offensive limb to himself. “I hate being sick. Makes me feel useless.”
“Well, you just lie down and let me take care of you, you poor useless thing.” Harry smirks, and Ron glares at him but goes to do as he’s told, which means he must be feeling worse than he wants to admit.
Harry finishes making the tea, roots around in the cabinet looking for a Pepperup potion (and finds one only just barely past its expiration date; he sniffs it experimentally and decides it’ll do), and brings both out to Ron a few minutes later. Ron is sitting on the couch, wrapped in a blanket and staring moodily at nothing. His hair is standing on end, his eyes are bright and glassy, and his cheeks are flushed with fever. Harry stills thinks he looks absolutely, heart-stoppingly gorgeous.
Well, fuck, Harry thinks as he looks at him, tea in one hand, Pepperup potion in the other. This is bad.
Ron finally looks up. “Don’t just stand there,” he says. “Bring me my tea before I have to hurt you.”
“I’d like to see you try,” Harry says, but he brings the tea over anyway. “Can you even hold your arm steady long enough to punch me this time?”
“Ha bloody ha,” Ron says, and sips the tea. He nods at the Pepperup potion. “Hermione says not to drink expired potions. Could have interesting side effects.”
“Well, there goes that plan, then.” Harry puts the potion down on the coffee table. His hands now empty, he feels suddenly useless and awkward, and he shifts his weight on his feet, hoping that Ron doesn’t notice. He looks anywhere but at Ron, as if avoiding a bright light that’d burn his eyes.
Ron finishes his tea. “I’m going to bed, mate,” he says. “I guess Hermione wants you to stay here to be sure I don’t choke on my own vomit in my sleep or something.”
It’s truly unfair that even while saying something that disgusting, Ron can look so effortlessly gorgeous. “Um,” Harry says intelligently.
“You can come up and read a book or something,” Ron says, “I dunno. Unless you don’t want to catch my germs.”
“I don’t get sick,” Harry says, which is a total lie but he doesn’t care. “Okay.”
They go upstairs. Ron slips into the bed with a little sigh of relief, and then pats the space next to him.
Harry just stares. “Do you and Hermione still sleep in the same bed?”
“God, no, Harry,” Ron says. “Broke up ages ago, you git. Usually I sleep on the couch ‘cause I’m such a gentleman, but I’m sick and I want the bed, and now I want you to lie down next to me with a book or something so that I don’t die in my sleep, so I’d appreciate it if you’d get on that.”
Oh, Harry thinks, would I ever like to get on that. He swallows his voice and gets on the bed next to Ron, atop the blankets, and picks up the book on Hermione’s bedside table (titled A Definitive History of Magical Law and Its Effects on Wizarding Society).
Ron falls asleep quickly, and Harry stares at the words on the page without seeing them. This is so wrong, so completely and utterly wrong in so many ways. He puts down the book and looks at Ron, whose lashes feather against his cheeks and whose breath comes slow and steady and deep.
Something at the back of Harry’s mind whispers don’t, for the love of God, man, he’s sick as a dog, but Harry ignores it and reaches out and brushes the hair from Ron’s burning forehead, his fingertips lingering at Ron’s temple.
Ron mutters something in his sleep, the sound broken and wordless, and Harry snatches his hand away, his heart pounding.
The plan. He has to remember the plan. Avoid jumping Ron until you come up with a better fucking plan.
He opens Hermione’s book and forces himself to read it. He’s gotten through several mind-numbingly boring chapters by the time Hermione comes home early from work.
“Aw, look at you two,” Hermione says when she walks in, her cloak draped over her arm. “Cozy?”
“Yeah,” Harry says, “sure. Uh—I’ve got someplace to be, Hermione—see you tomorrow? Call again if you need me.”
And he flees the apartment, leaving a bemused Hermione and a still slumbering Ron in his wake.
+
Plan 3
1. Try to gauge Ron’s interest in a new relationship.
2. Subtly suggest my interest in a new relationship.
Ron moves into Harry’s apartment two months after Harry’s break-up with Ginny, for completely innocent and not at all romantic reasons, which is a shame. Harry can’t find it in himself to complain too much, though, after he wakes up that first morning and finds Ron standing half dressed (half-naked) in the kitchen, leaning one hip against the counter as he scratches his bare stomach in a way that really should not be as sexy as it is. (Harry studiously does not look at the coppery hair trailing beneath Ron’s belly button. He does not.)
There are two reasons for the move: 1. Hermione finally decided to get her own place, and 2. Ron can’t afford the rent on an apartment by himself unless he moves into somewhere the size of a closet, and so Harry had offered up his own flat. And now here Harry is, standing in the kitchen, staring at the smooth curve of Ron’s back, and wanting.
“Something wrong?” Ron asks without turning around.
Harry clears his throat, a little too loudly, and can’t say anything else. When he finally finds his voice, he manages, “Nothing.”
Ron hums under his breath in response.
“So,” Harry says, valiantly keeping his gaze above Ron’s stomach, though that isn’t much better because there are freckles all over Ron’s shoulders and Harry can’t look away, fucking hell—“How do you want to celebrate?”
“Celebrate what?”
“You moving in.”
Ron snorts and slides the eggs out of the pan and onto two plates. “That’s hardly celebration-worthy.”
Harry bites his tongue on the words you are, though, and thinks rather dismally that inviting Ron to move in may have been the worst idea he’s ever had, ever. “Why not?”
Ron just hands him a plate of eggs, smiling, and says, “If you say so. I was thinking of meeting Dean at that bar downtown tonight, though.”
“Dean?” Harry says, when he means to say “what bar?” or “what’s the occasion?”
Ron gives Harry a funny look. “Yeah? He and Seamus invited all of us out ages ago.”
‘All of us’ no doubt means most of their old Gryffindor classmates. “Oh,” Harry says, now recovered from the completely reasonable and definitely not in any way possessive panic he’d felt when Ron had first mentioned Dean, who has been dating Seamus for two years now, anyway.
“Yeah.” Ron has started in on his eggs, prompting Harry to take a seat and stop gaping at him. “Y’know, seems to me like Seamus and Dean are better at this whole couple thing than you and I are.”
Harry’s stomach plummets somewhere below his feet. “What do you mean?” He experiences a thrill of pride for how steady his voice is.
Ron shrugs, vaguely waving his fork. “Well, they’ve been together for years now with barely a hitch that we’ve heard about, and here you and I are—” another lurch of Harry’s stomach “—single and recently broken up with the supposed girls of our dreams.” He smiles somewhat crookedly, and all Harry can think is how much he wants to lick Ron’s face (and also how lucky Seamus and Dean are, the bastards).
“I take it you’ve been thinking about that a lot, then,” Harry says.
“What, Seamus and Dean?”
“You and Hermione.” He says the words slowly, carefully—just a brief test of Ron’s feelings about his break-up with Hermione, about relationships in general, and Harry will count his day successful if he manages not to make a fool out of himself.
Ron shrugs. “Hard not to, when I still saw her every day. At least now I’ll be able to get some space.”
“But I thought you were the one who ended it.”
“So? You ended things with Ginny months ago and haven’t talked to her since. You obviously wanted space.”
Yeah, Harry thinks, that or because as soon as she found out what inappropriate things I want to do to you she’d castrate me.
“What happened with you and Ginny, anyway?” Ron asks. “You never said.”
“It just wasn’t right,” Harry says automatically, and winces at how bad it sounds.
“Fine,” Ron says, his eyebrows raised. “You don’t have to tell me the truth. But no wonder Ginny can’t stop talking about what a massive git you are.”
“I deserve it.” Harry drops his head to the table next to his untouched plate of eggs. “God, I’m such an arsehole.”
“Cheer up,” Ron says. “You had to realize that fact sooner or later.”
Harry just groans and doesn’t lift his head. His glasses are digging into the side of his face, but he still doesn’t move. He had tried to Floo-call Ginny last week to see if she were willing to talk—Harry didn’t even know what he’d have said, but anything had to be better than nothing—and she had thrown water over the fire, leaving Harry crouching in his damp fireplace, drenched and sputtering.
“Hey.” Ron sounds suddenly serious. “You aren’t really worried about Ginny, are you? You aren’t actually an areshole, just....”
“Stupid? Tactless? An insensitive prat?”
“Well, you don’t exactly...think the same way as most people, do you? I mean...you grew up in a closet.”
“A cupboard,” Harry says, his face burning. “And thanks for reminding me, I’d forgotten.”
“Sorry.”
There’s silence for a little while, slightly strained, before Ron speaks again. “Are you thinking about dating again any time soon?”
“Ugh,” Harry says in response, and again when Ron lifts an eyebrow at him. “Ugh. You?”
“Maybe,” Ron says. Harry lifts his head and sees that Ron’s ears have turned pink, and he isn’t looking at Harry.
Goddammit. Harry’s heart sinks to join his stomach, leaving him feeling strangely empty and hollow. He should have known. He never had a chance.
“So do you want to go out tonight?” Ron says, before adding, “with Seamus and Dean, I mean.”
“I’d rather stay in,” Harry says.
“Oh.”
Harry tells himself that isn’t disappointment in Ron’s voice, he just wants it to be.
Sure enough: “You gonna eat that?” Ron asks, and Harry pushes over his untouched plate of eggs.
+
Plan 4
1. Get him a gift.
After that conversation, Harry almost gives up on his plan to seduce Ron. But he hadn’t become hero of the wizarding world by giving up, and he decides that he isn’t going to start now. It’s not as if it’s completely unreasonable to think that Ron would ever want to be with him, right? Harry isn’t hideous, he doesn’t smell, and he and Ron have been friends long enough that if Ron truly didn’t like him, he could’ve left at any time. But he agreed to move in, and that means something, doesn’t it?
Harry stares moodily at his reflection in the mirror and huffs a breath. What the hell is wrong with his hair, seriously.
“Girl problems, love?” the mirror asks, and Harry scowls at it.
“No,” he says, far too viciously. The mirror frowns slightly at him, the corners drooping down and a tangible air of disapproval emanating from the reflective surface. Harry mutters an apology, though he doesn’t really mean it because he doesn’t fucking need to be reminded by his own mirror that according to most of the world, he should be chasing girls, not guys.
He has to go to Diagon Alley that day, because he’s been meaning to do some errands for ages. Ron is still at work at Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes, so Harry decides he might be able to catch him before he goes home.
Harry is walking down the cobblestone street, idly looking at the shop windows, when the idea hits him: he’ll get something for Ron while he’s out. Guys buy gifts for their girlfriends all the time, and Harry doesn’t see why it should be any different with boyfriends. Not that he has a boyfriend or anything. But still.
Of course, now that the idea is in his head, it won’t go away, and so he spends the next two hours flitting in and out of shop after shop, the anxiety mounting in his chest until it reaches a level that can only be described as truly stupid. What if he gets the wrong thing? What if Ron doesn’t like it?
“Potter,” Harry mutters to himself, “man the fuck up.”
It isn’t long before he’s standing in front of his favorite shop, Quality Quidditch Supplies, and he allows himself a moment to think mournfully of his old Firebolt. He hasn’t had a broomstick since he left Hogwarts, as he doesn’t fly regularly, but he still misses it.
And so it happens that he’s standing in front of the shop window looking at the newest racing broomsticks when he sees it: a full set of Chudley Cannon robes, signed by the whole team.
It’s expensive almost beyond belief. He shouldn’t buy it. He really shouldn’t—
Ten minutes later, he’s walking out of the shop with the robes in a bag in his arms, several dozen Galleons poorer and with a funny, tight feeling in the pit of his chest. He hides the robes under his bed and spends the rest of the night freaking out and doing his best to ignore the fact that he’s doing so. He cleans the entire apartment without magic, just for something to do with his hands.
He’s on his hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor when Ron gets home from the shop, looking exhausted and strained and somewhat sad, which is how he always looks after he gets home from work. It hasn’t been easy for him, working with George in a position that should have been someone else’s.
“What’s for dinner?” Ron asks when he walks in, but he stops short at the sight of Harry on his knees with his sleeves rolled up to the elbows, covered in soap. “Uh...what exactly are you doing?”
“Cleaning,” Harry says, because it should be obvious.
“What are you doing cleaning without a wand?” Ron clarifies.
“Wands don’t clean things properly,” Harry says grumpily. “I’ve told you hundreds of times, if you want things to be really clean, you have to do it by hand—”
Ron holds up his hands in defeat. “All right, all right, you nutter.” He steps gingerly across the wet floor to stick his head in the fridge. “I swear, you and Hermione would get along perfectly under the same roof. She’s the same way about cleaning. Must be a Muggle thing.”
“Must be,” Harry says, feeling disgruntled and sour and inexplicably pissed off. Maybe because he’s been kneeling for twenty minutes and his knees are protesting, harshly, or maybe because Ron has just walked across a wet floor that still needed time to dry. “And there’s nothing in there, otherwise I would’ve had it ready for you when you got home.”
Ron closes the fridge and grins. “Just like a proper housewife.”
“Don’t let Hermione hear you saying that,” Harry says, annoyed.
Ron grimaces. “I shudder at the thought,” he says. “Why’s the fridge empty? I thought you were going to run to the grocery today.”
“Oh,” Harry says. “Right. Fuck.” And suddenly this whole thing seems like a terrible idea, but he can’t make himself stop talking now that he’s started. “Actually, I did get you something today, but I guess I forgot about the groceries....”
“Got me something?” Ron looks bemused. “What for?”
“Dunno,” Harry says, and he gets to his feet before he remembers the soap all over his hands. “Um, it’s under my bed. You go on up, I’ll finish here.”
Ron gives him a look but goes down the hall into Harry’s bedroom while Harry dispels the soap suds and dries the floor with a wave of his wand. He can finish this later, unless things go well and Ron is in his bed later, which he isn’t supposed to be letting himself think about, goddammit.
He’s washing his hands in the sink when he hears slow footsteps behind him, and he turns around to see Ron, holding the robes in his hands and staring.
“Um,” Harry says.
For a minute, Ron just looks at him, and Harry allows himself a moment’s triumph. Fuck, I can’t believe this actually worked.
“What,” Ron finally says, in a flat voice, “are these.”
Harry frowns at him. “Quidditch robes. Signed by the Cannons, look—”
“I know what they fucking are, Harry, I meant—” Ron exhales unhappily “—why the fuck are they under your bed?”
“I got them for you,” Harry says, stupidly, and later he’ll look back and realize that this is the point where he should’ve started running, but at present he’s so confused by Ron’s reaction that he stays exactly where he is.
“Just because I’m poor doesn’t mean that I need people to buy things for me,” Ron says, and he’s looking at his feet, and now Harry thinks, oh shit.
“That’s not—I didn’t mean it that way, Ron. They’re just a gift.”
“Just a gift that I can never repay you for! Just a gift that I don’t even fucking need—just because I talk about these robes all the time doesn’t mean—just because you have all that money doesn’t mean you get to—to—I don’t know, prove how rich you are by buying me robes that are worth more than a month’s rent! Fuck, Harry.”
Harry stares at him. Ron’s face is flushed and dark, his gaze heavy-lidded, and he looks so much more tired than he had just a few minutes ago.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Harry says. “I wanted to surprise you.”
Ron throws the robes onto the table. “I don’t want your charity,” he says, his voice constricted. “I know I can’t pay my own rent and that you hate having me living here with you, I get it, I know—I bet it’s a huge fucking pain—but I don’t want your expensive gifts, Harry, so take those the fuck back.”
He leaves the room. Harry stares at the bright orange Quidditch robes, hating them and himself in that moment. He forgets sometimes—most of the time, really—what it’s like for people who don’t have as much money as he does. He knows exactly how shitty that is, and he’s pretty sure that he deserves every bit of guilt he’s feeling.
+
Plan 5
1. Go out for drinks. A lot of drinks.
2. Who the bloody fuck knows.
He doesn’t know why he thinks this plan will work, seeing how well all the others have turned out so far. Or, rather, how badly. This plan doesn’t even have a goal, just drinks and not offending Ron any more than Harry has already. In fact, this time Harry just might want to spend time with his friend without trying to make it something it’s not. He’s mentally exhausted and he just wants a goddamn drink, when you come down to it. So that Friday night, a week after the robes incident, he drags Ron out of their flat once he gets home from Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes and takes him to a bar.
It’s the one that Seamus and Dean had invited them to a few weeks ago, although Harry hadn’t gone at the time. But Ron had said he’d liked it well enough when he’d come home, and Harry hasn’t been out in ages, so why not?
“Harry,” Ron says when they leave the flat. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
“About what?” Harry is locking the door and fumbling with his robes, only half-listening to Ron. “Here, grab my arm and let’s go.”
“About the bar,” Ron says. He takes hold of Harry’s arm, even though he hasn’t liked Apparition—especially Side-Along—since the time he splinched himself after he, Harry, and Hermione had fled from the Ministry of Magic. “Listen, it’s—”
But Harry twists into darkness, and Ron’s words are lost as the two of them disappear and reappear in front of the bar and the music from inside starts to reverberate in the hollow of Harry’s throat.
It takes him a moment to get his bearings, but when he does, he drags Ron inside the bar, ignoring his protests and thinking only of how drunk he wants to be. Only when he steps inside and looks around does he realize what Ron had wanted to tell him. About three feet away, a man with gleaming pectorals (and abs. And everything else) is dancing on an upraised platform, wearing only tiny, glittery underwear and shaking his arse practically in Harry’s face.
Holy shit, it’s a gay bar, Harry thinks, and then Ron says it, and Harry hates Seamus and Dean a little, in that moment, for being so effortlessly gay and couple-y, goddamn them.
“I don’t care,” Harry finally says, when he can look away from the dancer’s arse. (It’s a fantastic arse, he has to admit.) “Let’s go in anyway. Looks like a party.” The dance floor is packed with people, all grinding and shaking as the music drums against the walls and the lights flash.
“You sure?” Ron sounds suddenly uncertain.
“You said you had a good time with Seamus and Dean,” Harry says. “Come on, let’s go get some drinks.” And he drags Ron over to the bar and orders the most inappropriately named drink that he can say without turning red (‘Fuck me slow’) and downs it in three swallows.
“Blimey, Harry,” Ron says. “You feeling all right?”
“‘Course,” he says. “Come on, order something.”
The alcohol works like liquid courage. (It reminds Harry a lot of Felix Felicis, actually, in the way that it lifts his spirits. It’s been a long few months.) Soon enough, Harry is relaxed and smiling and probably making a complete fool out of himself, but he doesn’t have the sense to care. Several people try to buy him a drink—probably just so they can say they fucked the Boy Who Lived—but Harry waves them off genially enough and watches the people on the dance floor writhe and grind.
That is, until someone comes over and sidles up next to him and Ron, this time not looking at Harry, but at Ron, who has spent the night alternating between watching Harry with a funny smile on his face and laughing and joking.
“I’ll have the red-headed slut,” the man tells the bartender, and looks directly at Ron again. Ron turns absolutely scarlet as the bartender sets about mixing the drink.
It takes Harry a few seconds (the alcohol having slowed his ability to think straight—ha ha, think straight) before he gets abruptly to his feet and glares at the man now lounging against the bar counter.
Ron, still red-faced and pointedly not looking at the man beside him, looks up at Harry, who holds out his hand to him.
“Let’s dance,” Harry says.
Ron’s eyes widen. The man next to him receives his red-headed slut and scowls at Harry. Harry gestures impatiently with his hand until Ron takes it and follows him onto the dance floor.
“You’re welcome,” Harry says when they’re standing together beneath the flashing lights. Ron just stares.
“For what?”
“Rescuing you from that guy,” Harry says, and he tries to smile wickedly but is aware enough of himself to realize that he’s probably failing. Not that he could even do smile that way if he were sober.
“Oh,” Ron says. “Yeah.” He flushes some more. “So are we gonna go then, or—”
“We’re going to dance,” Harry says, who is too far gone now to back out. He’s buzzed and heady with something like adrenaline and the music is pouring through his veins beneath his skin, and he holds out his hand to Ron for the second time.
The fact that Harry doesn’t know how to dance doesn’t even occur to him. He’s watched everyone else doing it for the past hour, and he’s sure that he can manage it well enough. How hard can it be? He walks backwards into the throng of people, who accommodate to let him pass, and Ron follows, clearly unnerved. He’s tall, blatantly so among so many people, and Harry has to look up and up at him when they stand so close. He rather likes it.
“Harry, what—” Ron begins, but Harry starts to dance then, and does not hear the rest of what Ron has to say.
Harry moves like water, dancing around the music and through the notes as they guide his movements. It’s almost as if he doesn’t think at all—he just listens the beat of the music, the thrumming in his blood, and follows it, does as it says. His hips move in a way he’d never even thought possible before.
Fuck it, he thinks, fuck it all, and then he pulls Ron close, Ron’s thigh between his, their bodies close at the hips. He looks up into Ron’s blue, blue eyes, and wonders, for the briefest of moments, whether this is a bad idea.
But then he swivels his hips against Ron’s—once, twice—and decides that he doesn’t care.
He remembers the way the dancer near the entrance had moved and tries to imitate it. Swing the hips, grind, music pulsing on all sides, inside him, everywhere. Ron’s shoulders are strong and muscled beneath Harry’s hands, and he just moves, moves, moves, completely oblivious to anything but the music and his hips and the feeling of Ron’s body against his.
Then Ron grabs his hands and pulls them away. “Harry,” he says, his voice barely audible over the music, “what the bloody fuck are you doing?”
Harry stops dancing, looks around. The people around him have all stopped dancing and are staring at him, unabashedly. Some are smirking. One person seems to be imitating him by clutching another person by the neck and stuttering her hips like a little kid who has to pee. It is not in any way sexy.
…He might not be as good a dancer as he thought, now that he thinks about it.
Deflated, his face burning with embarrassment, Harry drops his head to Ron’s shoulder. “I think ‘m drunk,” he says, quietly.
“Yes,” Ron says, with a heavy sigh. “That sounds about right.”
He leads Harry out of the bar, past the sniggering people watching him, and oh God, is this going to be in the Prophet tomorrow? The thought makes Harry throw up right after they’ve Disapparated.
Well, it was that or all the drinks he had. One of the two.
+
Plan 6
1. Stop making plans.
Ron doesn’t talk about what happened at the bar, and it doesn’t turn up in the Prophet after all, so Harry feels no need to bring it up. Let Ron blame it on the alcohol Harry had consumed. Let him brush it off as an isolated incident that does not need to be discussed, ever.
Harry has run out of ideas. By this point, he honestly does not know what to do, and all he can manage to think about is how completely unfair it is that not only is he terrible with women, he’s apparently terrible with men, too. Which, considering his life, feels like some sort of cosmic joke, and he’s eternally the punch line. Oh, your parents are dead and you spent the first half of your life in a cupboard under the stairs, and the second half fighting a war against the most terrible Dark Wizard the world has ever seen? the cosmic powers must be saying. Well, let’s throw eternally single into the mix as well, ha ha ha!
It’s really the only explanation.
Harry sleeps in that weekend, waking up slowly under warm blankets and the hot sunlight that spills in from the open window. He’s been working with the Auror Department for the past year now, and he loves his job, but it isn’t often that he gets time away. These stolen moments of the past few months where he’d fumblingly attempted to...something with Ron have been some of the only times when he hasn’t been working. At this point, he’s exhausted. Exhausted by the stony silence from Ginny, the stiff demeanor of the rest of her family (except for Ron), his inability to get anywhere with Ron, his loneliness. Because he is lonely, which comes as a sort of surprise to him. He’s used to loneliness—he’d experienced ten long years of it before he went to Hogwarts, and then again every summer—but never when he’s been around his friends. He’s been talking to Hermione regularly, if sparingly (she’s more devoted to her job than he is), he still sees Neville from time to time, as well as most of the other old Gryffindors and other former students like Ernie and Hannah, and he’s been living with Ron. But still—lonely.
Sometimes he doesn’t know how to live in a world that isn’t war-torn, that isn’t depending on him and his friends to save it, that isn’t in crisis. And it’s the strangest feeling, to realize that he doesn’t truly know how to live.
A bird twitters aggressively outside his window. Harry pulls his arm away from his eyes to glare at it.
“Fucking bird,” he mutters, and rolls over in bed, pulling his blankets over his eyes. The pale early morning sunlight has changed to the insistent, bright glare of mid and late morning, meaning he won’t be able to stay in bed much longer unless he closes the curtains, but he can’t find the energy to do it just yet. Just five more minutes.
Before he has the chance to close the curtains, however, someone else does it for him. A shadow falls atop Harry’s bed, and he extricates himself from the blankets, looking around. “Ron?”
He’s standing by the window, holding something in his hands, though Harry can’t make out what it is without his glasses. “Morning, sunshine,” Ron says, sounding extremely sardonic. “Don’t you look well-rested.”
Harry’s hand flies to his head, where he feels that his hair is sticking out even worse than usual, and he’s pretty sure he has drool on the corner of his mouth. “Shut up,” he says, and he’s pretty sure that Ron smirks at him.
“I made breakfast,” Ron says. “Except it’s cold now, because, you know, you’ve been laying about all morning.”
“Funny,” Harry says, and finally manages to fumble his glasses off his nightstand. He puts them on and surreptitiously rubs at his mouth with the hem of his blanket. Then he looks up at Ron and freezes.
“Wait.” He stares. “Back up. You made me breakfast?”
“Yeah, you lazy arse.” Ron’s holding a tray of food in his hands, Harry now sees—a tray laden with orange juice and French toast. (Ron, as it turns out, is actually an excellent cook, though he hadn’t seen fit to make that known during the Horcrux hunt. Arsehole.) He sounds slightly uncomfortable now.
“I,” Harry says, and stops. He stares at Ron, who stares back at him.
“I can’t do this when my mouth tastes like cat litter,” Harry says, and he gets up from his bed and goes into the bathroom and brushes his teeth for at least five full minutes, his heart thudding as he thinks, oh God, oh God, he made me breakfast, does that mean anything?
He forgoes brushing his hair (because, let’s be honest, it never does any good) and throws on a pair of pajama pants over his boxers and goes into the tiny kitchen, which still smells like French toast. Ron has brought the tray of breakfast back in there and set it on the counter, and he’s leaning with his arms braced against it, staring at nothing.
Harry doesn’t give himself time to turn back. “I’ll tell you why I really broke up with Ginny,” he says.
Ron turns and looks at him, frowning. Clearly he hadn’t expected this.
“I wanted somebody else,” Harry hears himself say, though he never remembers saying it.
Ron’s frown deepens. “So you cheated on her?”
“What? No! God, Ron.” Harry drags his hand over his eyes. “Clearly I suck at this,” he says, trying to ignore the heady feeling building behind his forehead, “so you’re going to have to help me out here.”
Ron just looks bemused.
“I dumped Ginny because I wanted to date somebody else,” Harry says.
“We’ve established that,” Ron says.
“Yes,” Harry says. “Um, you’re right. Well—it’s because I wanted to date—you. And so I dumped your sister. Because of you.” He nods, as if reaffirming this for himself, but he can’t stop talking now that he’s started. “And then I tried inviting you over to my flat so I could have sex with you, but you punched me in the face, and I kind of deserved it, and then you were sick and I could barely keep my hands off you so I tried to stay away, but then you moved in and I bought those goddamn Quidditch robes to try and—to try—fuck, I don’t know why, because I thought you would like them and then you would like me or something. And then of course that didn’t work and I embarrassed you in a bar by practically humping your leg, and I should have just said this in the beginning instead of going through all that, but now you can see what a total idiot I am, so I’ll just—take my breakfast and go now, I guess. Because that looks excellent and I’d rather eat it than have you throw it in my face.”
His voice dies. Ron stares at him. Harry feels vaguely embarrassed for himself, but mostly he just wants to take his French toast and run far, far away and never come back.
“You,” Ron says, slowly, as if unable to believe what he’s saying, never mind what he’s just heard, “dumped Ginny for me?”
“Yeah,” Harry whispers.
“And you tried to...dirty dance to get me to like you?” Ron sounds completely baffled.
“Well, I was drunk at the time, so I don’t really know what my thought process was,” Harry says. “But that was probably it. I told you I was terrible at this.”
“You are,” Ron says, “you really fucking are,” but then he crosses the tiny kitchen in two strides and puts his hands on Harry’s shoulders and leans down and kisses him.
What the fuck, Harry thinks, several times. But he kisses Ron back.
“So let me tell you what I’ve done,” Ron says after a few moments. “I’ve taken out my anger with myself for celebrating Ginny’s break-up with you by punching you in the face—I’m still sorry about your nose, by the way—and I accidentally told Hermione why, leading her to try and get you to babysit me all the time. Then she moved out on purpose so I would move in here, which I still haven’t forgiven her for because you are the most annoying person I have ever lived with, and every time you clean the Muggle way I want to laugh at you and then kiss you. And then I tried to take you to a gay bar with Seamus and Dean, who were in on it and were going to try and hook us up.”
“What,” Harry says, because he’s just woken up and he cannot process this right now, he can’t. “What,” he repeats.
“I know,” Ron says, and kisses him again, hard.
When Harry pulls away this time, he says, “So that means we’re both terrible at this sort of thing?”
“No, you’re terrible,” Ron says. “I’m just slightly below average at it.”
“Be that as it may,” Harry begins, but he forgoes saying anything else in favor of kissing Ron again. They go back to bed, and they don’t leave it until late, late in the afternoon, when the sun is red on the trees and the French toast is lying cold and forgotten on the kitchen counter.
“I can’t believe I worried so much about this,” Harry says.
“Mm,” Ron hums, his eyes closed and his cheeks still flushed. “Well, that’s because you’re you.”
And Harry doesn’t even care what Ron means by that. Harry may be awkward and frustrating to live with and weird about wasted food because the Dursleys had enjoyed not feeding him, but right now, he doesn’t feel lonely for the first time in months—maybe years—and that is more than enough for him.
“I’m going to take that as a compliment and let you fuck me again,” Harry says, because he wants to.
Ron laughs, deep in the back of his throat, and happily obliges him.