Work Text:
Ron lies awake at night, while the others sleep and the trees creak outside in the wind that howls through them. He lies awake, and listens.
He spends most of his time listening lately, for the names of his brothers or sister or parents on the radio, for the words that Harry speaks only to Hermione and the ones she speaks only to him when they think Ron cannot hear them. They’re always wrong. Like the thudding of his own heartbeat in the hollow of his throat, Ron can hear them.
We can get through this, Harry, Hermione says, when Ron knows she means, I will help you get through this, any way I can.
I’m sorry I don’t know what I’m doing, Harry says, when he means, At least I have you here to help me figure it out.
It’s not your fault, Hermione says, and means, I will always be here with you.
I’m glad you’re with me, and for once Harry means exactly what he says.
Ron turns the locket over in his hands, and it whispers against his flesh—crawls down his spine like a spider, eight legs touching here, then there as the piece of Voldemort’s soul between his fingertips speaks to him and laughs, a dark laugh whose spaces are filled with something like lies and almost like truths.
He tries not to listen to the locket—he does. But in the end, its voice rings and thrums loud in his ears as he stares at Harry, who (his chest rising and falling, the color high in his cheeks and his green eyes sparkling like water in the sun) tells him, coldly, to leave.
Ron does, casting down the locket at Harry's feet and wondering why he doesn’t feel free of it.
- — — -
He runs the Deluminator through his fingers, its surface glowing in the darkness, sheen and cold to the touch. Click, the lights go on. Click, the lights go out. And again. And again.
He wishes he’d never left—he wishes he’d left sooner. He can’t tell whether the voice in his head is his or Voldemort’s, not anymore. Somewhere along the way the locket had whispered into his soul and lodged itself there, immovable, impossible to banish no matter how many times Ron tells himself that all it says are lies. Even lies have their origins in the truths they are designed to conceal.
Least loved by the girl who prefers your best friend, the locket says to him (he says to himself). He wonders where the truth ends and the lie begins.
He should love her. He knows he should, knows it like he knows the quickening of his blood when he looks at—
Not him. Never him.
Least loved by the girl who prefers your best friend, he thinks to himself, and wonders—if that’s the lie, then what’s the truth?
The next night, the Deluminator whispers his own name back to him, as if in answer to the name he’s been saying over and over to it, like a prayer. The voice doesn’t match that name, but—almost, he can hear the other voice, in the echoing silence that follows Hermione’s words.
He Disapparates.
- — — -
Harry whispers a word to the Horcrux in Parseltongue, and its golden hinges swivel as the doors of the locket open. But Ron isn’t watching the locket—he’s staring at the movement of Harry’s lips, at the way his mouth molds the sibilant syllables, at the flick of his tongue against his teeth.
Funny, Ron thinks as the empty faces of the locket blaze red and Lord Voldemort’s soul pours from the confines of the tarnish-free gold, where have I heard him say that before?
Voldemort speaks with the same voice that Ron uses to speak to himself, and he voices the same thoughts, the same half-truths and almost-lies. Ron holds the sword of Gryffindor like a child clutching a toy replica, his grip all wrong, his hands slick with sweat, his arms burning from the weight of it in his hands. Two people bloom from the locket’s doors, rooted in the Horcrux’s heart. Their eyes flash scarlet and Riddle-Hermione kisses Riddle-Harry, and in that moment, Ron is lost.
“Ron—?”
And Harry—the real Harry, not the one trapped in the locket and Hermione's embrace—looks up at Ron, green-eyed and open-mouthed as he watches the sword fall. Ron just manages to wrench the blade away (the silver reflecting, just briefly, in the green of Harry's eyes) to embed it in the depths of the locket and destroy it.
It’s always been you, Harry says, afterwards: the exact words Ron has been waiting to hear, but Harry says them the wrong way, so terribly wrong.
- — — -
Ron tries not to listen now, because he cannot bear it. He holds his pillow over his head and hums himself to sleep. Harry and Hermione don’t notice, because they fall asleep long before Ron does and he lies with his eyes open, staring at the roof of the tent and listening, damn it, because he cannot stop. The rise and fall of their breath, the wind sighing outside the tent, the snow slowly melting, hissing the way ice cubes do in a warm glass.
Ron bolts upright the first time Harry mutters something in his sleep. He has his wand in hand and his heart is pounding as he thinks Death Eaters, oh please not here, and then Ron realizes that the voice had come from the bunk below him. He falls back against his pillow, his hand clutched to his chest over the place where the locket once lay, and listens.
Nothing, at first. Random murmurings and soft noises and fitful little sighs, as if Harry is a child tossing and turning in bed before his mother comes in to flick on the light and rock Harry to a restful slumber. It's all right for you two, isn't it, with your parents safely out of the way, Ron remembers shouting, and he regrets it now just as much as he had then.
The shush-ing noises stop, and Ron wonders if it’s over, if Harry’s restlessness has passed, if he’ll sleep easily now. And that’s when the hissing starts, the sounds curling like a snake around Ron’s chest and coiling, tightly, tightly.
What are you saying, Harry? This is worse than the unintelligible murmuring, worse than the sighing; these are words Harry is speaking, Ron is sure of it, but he can’t understand them. Ron will never understand them.
But he whispers back, in the darkness, pressing the sounds against his teeth. They come out harsher than Harry’s, and Harry stops suddenly. The rest of the night is silent but for the wind outside.
But the next night, and the night after, and the night after that—Harry talks into the silent darkness, and Ron listens to his words and thinks, talk to me, Harry, talk to me.
- — — -
When Ron thinks of that night, later, he remembers the screams.
Oh, he remembers everything else just as well—the shadows of Death Eaters in the line of the forest; Voldemort’s pale face, and eyes so red; the tears falling from Hagrid’s eyes onto the chest of the body clutched in his arms, onto Harry’s corpse; Harry, still and pliant and slack-jawed, his glasses askew and his face scratched and scraped and streaked with dirt and dead.
But it’s the screams that still haunt him. McGonagall first, then Hermione and Ginny and the others, all screaming Harry’s name as if they can bring him back to life and then falling silent as suddenly as if they had. But Ron had stood still, immobile, in the center of all that sound; the screams had pressed against his eardrums and tears had come, hot and unbearable, to his eyes.
He’s dead, he’d thought as everyone around him had cried out and he hadn’t been able to make a sound, his voice stuck somewhere in his throat. He’s gone.
That Harry had come back—that he hadn’t been dead, after all—doesn’t change the fact that the nightmares still come, night after night after night, and always Ron stands there, voiceless, while a terrible ache takes root within him, in his bones.
- — — -
“Do you still talk in your sleep?” Ron asks Harry one day, after the war. (Which is so strange, so hard to say—after the war, as if it will ever truly end for any of them.)
And Harry gives him a funny look. “I never talk in my sleep,” he says, which is either a lie or he truly doesn’t know.
“Have you been dreaming?”
Harry brushes his hand over his scar, unconsciously.
“No,” he says.
I have, Ron wants to tell him, but just like in every nightmare he’s ever had, the words won’t come out.
- — — -
Harry comes to live in the Burrow a few months after the war once he’s sold Grimmauld Place to Andromeda Tonks. (“Terribly drafty,” he says when Ron asks why, but Ron listens and hears too many memories.)
He tosses his things onto the spare bed in Ron’s room and gives his surroundings a small, pained smile. “Just like old times,” he says, as if those times are long in the past, unrecoverable.
Ron fights down the longing that overwhelms him and clicks the Deluminator to turn off the lights, remembering, as he has done many times, that it was Hermione who he heard calling him back all those months ago; Hermione, and not Harry.
Harry, who is a liar and a terrible one at that. He does still talk in his sleep, though not in Parseltongue anymore with the piece of Voldemort’s soul inside him gone. He still dreams and speaks and thrashes in his bed as if he’s fighting with the sheets and losing—no, that’s new, he never did that before.
Ron listens closer, his heart pounding in the hollow of his throat, and Harry twists in his bed and whimpers something, sounding so tired, so young, so broken that Ron gets to his feet and pads across the floor to the extra bed and looks down at Harry in the darkness, at the hair clinging to the sweat on his forehead and the sheets tangled around his arms and legs.
You lied to me. And he would be angry if he hadn’t lied to Harry hundreds of times before. It feels as if he lies to Harry more than he tells him the truth—as if his whole life is wrapped up in concealing that truth—and suddenly Ron is so, bone-achingly tired that the breath goes out of him all at once, in a gasp.
He can’t help himself— “Fuck, Harry,” he breathes, and then he reaches out a hand and brushes the hair from Harry’s forehead, revealing the lightning bolt scar that hasn’t pained Harry since the day Voldemort fell.
And Harry stops twisting in his sleep at Ron's touch, murmurs something plaintive, something wordless. Ron’s heart goes into his throat—how can this be so easy, so damn easy after it all?—and he does what he should have done months ago when he first noticed the dreams that Harry could not keep away.
He slides into the bed besides Harry, lying on his side to face him, studying the curvature of Harry’s face and the old pimple marks on his nose and the fluttering insistence of his eyes, closed.
Then they’re open, staring at Ron, bright green and wide in the moonlight filtering in through the window.
“You were having a nightmare,” Ron says, as if that explains this, explains any of this. “I wanted to help.”
And Harry just looks at him, his lips parted, his eyes wide, for a long, silent moment.
“Okay,” he finally whispers, like he can’t believe what he’s saying, and he smiles so beautifully that Ron’s heart breaks. Ron kisses Harry in the dark, free for once by the whispering in his head, reveling in the silence as his heart drums against his ribs and Harry kisses him back, open-mouthed and hungry and his.
And then Ron wakes up in a cold sweat, trembling from head to foot as the dream flees in the early morning light and Harry punches him on the arm and smiles a smile that will never be the same as the one in the dream. Ron stares at Harry and he can’t look away, his heart tugging at his throat like a fistful of lead.
“Something wrong?” Harry asks, and shifts beneath Ron’s unbroken gaze.
Ron looks away. Yes.
He doesn’t say it.