Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“I think I need to get out of here,” Ron says, fiddling with his glass of Butterbeer.

It’s after dinner that he says this, at a time when his siblings (the ones that survived, he means) are distracted by other things. George and Ginny are playing Exploding Snap in front of the fireplace; Percy is awkwardly reading in an armchair, half-listening to a conversation Dad is having with Charlie about Muggle flight. Bill and Fleur are being smothered by Mum, their announcement of her first grandbaby the news of the evening. No one is looking at him.

“What do you mean?” Harry asks, taken aback by his sudden seriousness, while Hermione only blinks and tilts her head at him. “Get out of here like…?”

“I don’t know,” Ron replies, his long fingers still moving on the glass. “Just—get away, I suppose. From everything. The war…”

“The war is over,” Harry reminds him.

“It’s still…” Ron shrugs. The war is over—the Battle of Hogwarts is more than half a year ago. But the war is still everywhere. At the Auror Training Academy, the losses of the First and Second Wizarding War is shown in the battle scars of their teachers, in the sharpness of their voices as they lecture, in the grim dark amusement of their war stories; in Diagon Alley, there are still empty storefronts, the remnants of people who were driven out by Death Eaters. The Daily Prophet reports daily on the Death Eater trials, barely even started as Dad and dozens of other Ministry workers trawl through the evidence and work out what charges can be laid; in the Wizengamot, politicians are arguing over the money needed for rebuilding.

Even in this room, the absence of Fred screams louder than his brother ever did.

The war is over but at the same time, it isn’t.

“I just need to get away,” he says again. He needs time away—away from the haunting spectres, away from the debris of the war, away from the guilt.

Maybe the decision to go for the Auror Training Academy had just been guilt. Harry had wanted to go—of course, Harry had wanted to go—and Ron had followed because that was what he did. He followed, and the only times he hadn’t, he had been eaten up by the guilt afterwards. When Harry’s name had come out of the Goblet of Fire, he hadn’t stood by his best friend; when he, Harry, and Hermione were in the woods, he had abandoned them to go home. No one had ever said anything about it, but he still felt the impact. He wasn’t supposed to have done that. He shouldn’t have done that.

And now he has a spot in the Auror Training Academy, one that he knows full well that he’s lucky to have, but one that he’s not entirely sure he even wants and that he’s definitely sure he doesn’t deserve. Harry’s in his element there, but Ron…

Ron isn’t. And where Hermione is, back at Hogwarts helping to rebuild while finishing her seventh year, doesn’t appeal to him either.

“Do you mean, you want to go home?” Hermione asks, reaching over to touch his hand. He likes her—ever since his sixth year, he’s liked her, and he’s pretty sure she likes him too, though he doesn’t know why. But the time was never right. Harry and the war had come first, and then afterwards it was the Auror Training Academy while Hermione went back to school, and what time did they have for them?

“No, I mean…” Ron sighs, taking a swig of his Butterbeer. “I want to get away from here. From everything. Not—not forever, or anything like that. Just, I need some time away, to think.”

“Okay,” Hermione says, and her hand is warm on his. “I understand. Well—why not get away?”

Harry shoots her a wide-eyed look of surprise. “But the Auror Training Academy—we’re back on in a week…”

“He can defer it,” Hermione replies, glaring back at Harry. “They won’t say no, not after the war. Not after what we’ve all been through.”

Harry hesitates, and Ron can read his thoughts in his eyes. Spots at the Auror Training Academy, even with the inflated class sizes after the war, are few. He and Ron don’t even have the qualifications, special war dispensation for the Chosen One and his best friend exempting them from the usual NEWT requirements and application process. And that’s a good thing, because Ron knows full well that his grades had never been high enough to get in.

Hermione’s voice softens as she looks between them. “Look—we’ve just spent a year at war, and we’ve spent our entire lives, it seems, fighting one bad thing after another. What time have we had to ourselves? Just to explore, or find ourselves, or to remember who we are when we’re not fighting a war.”

“But the Auror Training Academy—” Harry looks back at Ron, a slightly bewildered expression on his face. “You said that being an Auror was the most interesting thing you could think of doing.”

Ron shrugs, looking back down at his glass. He did say that—it was in fifth year, around the time of their Career Counselling with Professor McGonagall, and it is still true. But the Auror Training Academy feels wrong to him now, in a way he can’t explain. Harry likes it, prattles on every night about all the cool stuff they’re learning in a way he never did at Hogwarts, but Ron…

Ron doesn’t. But it doesn’t matter.

“Ron’s not you, Harry,” Hermione is saying, keeping her voice down even if she’s starting to sound heated. “Ron doesn’t have to be on the same path as you. The war is over—why shouldn’t he take some time off and get away?”

“The money,” Ron says quietly, looking away. “Getting away—it takes money. A lot of it.”

“We all got the awards from the Ministry of Magic,” Hermione points out, and they had. Five hundred Galleons each, more money that Ron has ever personally had his entire life—but not exactly enough for him to go on a long trip.

“It’s not enough,” Ron mutters awkwardly. “Anyway, I spent a bit of it—a new broomstick, so Ginny could have my Cleansweep Seven, and some other things.”

“Well, how much would you need?” Hermione asks, and he looks up at her in surprise. Her dark brown eyes are entirely serious, and her lips are quirked in a small smile. “Harry and I can lend you the money. I don’t need anything since I’m at Hogwarts and already have a job lined up, and Harry has more than he needs. Isn’t that right, Harry?”

“That’s right,” Harry says, though the quick grimace on his face tells Ron that Hermione probably kicked him when Ron wasn’t looking. “Yeah. If Auror training isn’t for you, then it’s not for you. Whatever you need, Ron, you can count on us.”

“So?” Hermione is smiling now, her even white teeth flashing against her dark skin. “How much do you think you’d need?”

He catches Hermione later outside. She’s sitting on the back stoop, staring up at the stars, with a blanket draped around her shoulders and a mug of hot chocolate in her hands.

“Hey,” he says, dropping one arm around her shoulders. This is what their relationship is right now—light and easy affection, and they don’t talk about it. Hermione isn’t Lavender. Ron cares about Hermione, and he’s too afraid of fucking it up to make a bigger move.

This is easy, and this is comfortable, and he’s content with it. Or so he tells himself.

“Hey,” she replies, somewhat listlessly.

“What’s up?”

“Oh, you know…” Hermione fiddles with the teaspoon sitting in her hot chocolate. “Just thinking. About my parents.”

Ron makes a gruff noise of some sort—he doesn’t know what to say about that. Part of Hermione’s summer project had been to go and find her parents in Australia where she’d sent them and restore their memories, and while she hadn’t said much about it to him or Harry, they both knew that her parents hadn’t come back. They’d chosen to stay in Australia with their new lives instead of returning.

“I knew that was a possibility,” Hermione says suddenly, a fire lighting in her eyes. “I knew—I knew it was possible they’d never forgive me for using magic against them. I’m lucky they even want to have a relationship with me, really, even if it’s an ocean away. But I had to do it. I was too close to Harry, see, and my parents…”

“They’re Muggles.” That comes out more dismissive than Ron intends. “I mean—”

“No, I know what you meant.” Hermione sighs. “Your family, they could protect themselves. I couldn’t even explain to mine why they needed to protect themselves. I did what I had to do, and I don’t regret it. But the holidays…”

“Yeah,” Ron says. He doesn’t understand—but he does understand that maybe he can’t understand. “You know, ‘Mione… if you needed me here…”

“No.” Hermione turns to him with a smile. “I’m at school, Ron—what would you do, hang around being unhappy about the Auror Training Academy?”

“I’m not unhappy,” Ron tries. He’s not. He’s really not unhappy. He’s just… he doesn’t know. He isn’t happy, but he isn’t unhappy. It just is, everything just is, and it all bleeds into a sort of sameness. It’s livable.

Hermione snorts.

“Mum would be happy if I stayed,” Ron adds, the thought having occurred to him since Harry and Hermione had suggested he go away. “She’s going to think I’m throwing it away. You know.”

Hermione shrugs. “You’re your own person,” she says. “I think it’s a good idea for you, Ron. Going away and seeing the world. Finding yourself. It’s a chance you never got before—you more than anyone else.”

She falls silent, looking out across the fields.

“What do you mean?” Ron can’t help asking, frowning at her. “Me more than anyone else?”

Hermione doesn’t answer for a little while, but she’s thinking over what to say. When she starts, her voice is low. “I love Harry—as a brother, I mean. But you and I… everything we did was for Harry. Harry and Voldemort, Harry and the next bad thing that was coming for us. Everything about us, even our relationship, it’s about how we’re the only two people in the world who can understand what we’ve gone through to support Harry. As a girl, as a know-it-all, I was always a little out of it and it was easier, I think, for me to do other things. But you—at home, with all your brothers, and with Harry as your best friend, when do you have a chance?”

It comes out all in a jumble, stuttered half-phrases which are unlike Hermione. “I don’t understand,” he says, after a moment of frowning. “I don’t get it.”

Hermione sighs. “Basically, your life—my life—everything about it until now has basically been about Harry. Even our relationship is about Harry. When we’re alone, we talk about Harry. I want to know who Ron is. What do you like to do when you’re alone? What do you think about when it’s not about Harry or Voldemort or the war or your family? What do you do for you?”

Ron blinks. “I…”

He doesn’t really know. Most of the time after classes, he and Harry go home to their shared flat. Harry talks about whatever they learned that day, and Ron teases him for turning into Hermione. Sometimes they play Exploding Snap or something, or they head out to Diagon Alley to see George at the Weasley Wizarding Wheezes. And if he’s not with Harry, he’s at home at the Burrow, where there is Mum, and there is Dad, and there are his siblings.

He’s never alone.

And that’s Hermione’s point, he realizes.

“But…” He hesitates. “What about… us?”

“Us?” Hermione gives him a tired smile.

“I mean, we’ve been dancing around it for a while…”

“And we can dance around it for a while longer.” Hermione leans her head on his shoulder. “Ron, we need to figure out who we are without Harry—not that he won’t always be our closest friend, but our lives can’t always revolve around him. I’ll just be at school anyway. We can figure things out when you’re back.”

“But—” Ron takes a deep breath. “You… I don’t want to come back and find you’ve moved on—”

“Who’s to say I’ll be the one who’s moved on by then?” Hermione shoves him playfully. “Do you know what Hogwarts is like this year? It’s not like when you were there—too much happened when we were in the woods. The second through fourth years travel in packs, half of them terrified to go around corners because of what the Carrows did last year. Everyone else is dealing with war trauma, on both sides. It’s not great, Ron. It’s quite awful, actually. And you’ll be off travelling, meeting new people, having new experiences—if anyone’s going to move on, it’ll be you.”

“Never.” Ron grins, though it’s a little shaky. He’s never thought of it that way—his fears have always been that Hermione will leave him, not the other way around. He thinks that would be most people’s fears, because Hermione is so much better than he is in every way. She’s smarter, she works harder, she’s Hermione, and he’s just Ron.

“You’ll write, won’t you?” Hermione’s asking.

“I’ve always been rubbish at writing,” Ron says with a small laugh. “But yeah. Yeah, of course I’ll write.”

Leaving is so much easier than he expected.

One word with the Auror Training Academy with Harry hovering over his shoulder, has a bunch of forms deferring his place in training signed and handed in. The Aurors had barely blinked—or rather, they had nodded in understanding, said something about the war taking its toll on everyone, and told him to enjoy his gap year. Even Harry had been stunned at how blasé the Academy had been, but Ron didn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Hermione had handed him almost the entirety of her Ministry award, which pooled with Ron’s still wasn’t anywhere near enough for a Grand Tour around the world. Harry, though, basically let him into his vault at Gringotts and told him to take what he needed.

“You sure?” Ron had asked, flabbergasted once again at the sheer amount of money that Harry had in his vault. It was thousands upon thousands of Galleons—more Galleons than Ron could count in one small stone vault—but Harry simply shrugged and looked awkward. “This is…”

“Look, Ron, if your family would have let me, I’d have shared the whole thing with you all in second year,” he mutters, embarrassed. “I have more than enough. I won’t notice the difference.”

It’s on Ron’s lips to say something—anything—about the money, but then he remembers that this is Harry’s inheritance from his parents. Harry might have money, but he never had his Mum and Dad, and Ron’s heard Mum talking about Harry’s aunt and uncle in a less than complimentary tone enough times. Another look in the vault, and he realizes that he’d trade every Galleon in there to have Fred back, and whatever he was about to say dies on his lips.

He clears his throat. “Thanks,” he mutters in reply, carefully counting out enough Galleons to match the budget that Hermione helped him put together for a gap year abroad. “I appreciate it. I’ll pay you back, Harry, I swear.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Harry replies, with a sad smile and another look inside his vault. “As I said—I won’t notice the difference.”

At home, Dad’s confused by Ron’s decision, but finds himself easily distracted by the many, many things that Ron is going to see. Ticketing machines! Underground trains! Music machines, and ballpoint pens that click, and dozens of other mundane Muggle objects. Ginny thinks the whole Grand Tour thing is thrilling, and Bill agrees; Charlie invites him for a week in Romania. Percy admonishes him on paying Harry back later and taking care of himself while he’s away, while George only wishes him luck.

George is quieter now. Fred’s been gone less than a year, and they all work through it in their own ways.

It is, instead, Mum who argues the most with him about his plans. She stands in his doorway as he packs his old knapsack, newly charmed with an Undetectable Extension Charm, with all the things he’ll need for a year of travel, and she’s sighing. She’s had this conversation with him a dozen times.

“Ron,” Mum is saying, “Think this through. It’s hard to get into the Auror Training Academy. You have a good career, a good future, in the making—why leave?”

“I haven’t left it,” Ron replies, for the umpteenth time. “I’ve only deferred it for a year. If I decide I want to go back—”

“If you decide?” Mum asks sharply. “What do you mean, if you decide to go back?”

Ron isn’t going to lie. “I don’t know yet,” he says. “I don’t know what I want, Mum. I don’t know if I want to be an Auror at all.”

“You can decide that here,” she insists, crossing her arms over her chest. “You can even complete your training while you decide—and that would be prudent, would save you time and money if you do decide to be an Auror. No one says you have to be an Auror after finishing at the Academy—why, one of Bill’s friends—”

“I’m not one of Bill’s friends, either,” Ron cuts in. “Look, Mum—I need to get away. I need to find myself, and then I’ll see where things are at.”

“What a load of rubbish,” Mum says, but Ron’s heard it before. He’s heard it a dozen times by now because Mum has never been quiet about her opinions, but he’s already decided. Everything’s already been done.

“It can be rubbish, Mum,” Ron replies, sounding final. “But I’m still going. I’ll write.”

His Portkey leaves from London the next day.

He starts in the south of France. Hermione helped him plan this first part of his trip, telling him about the sights that she’d liked in both magical and non-magical areas, and walking him through so many of the basic skills that he didn’t have. Using foreign money; booking seats on coach buses, or trains, or even aeroplanes; finding good hostels to sleep in that have kitchens where he can make every Galleon stretch. Buying food and cooking it for himself to eat—he isn’t Mum, but he can throw together basic dried pasta as well as anyone else.

Sometimes, he does Portkey, or take his broomstick, or Apparate. But it depends on where his next destination is—he isn’t going to Apparate anywhere he hasn’t been, and over long distances his broomstick is just too cold and uncomfortable. He can sleep on buses, or on trains, leaning on his backpack that Hermione spelled for him—and that saves him a night of paying for a bed.

He wanders France for a while—it’s a touristy sort of place, a little too expensive for him, but the beaches are nice. Marseilles is gritty in a way that he thinks he likes, and he loves Eze, or at least the magical Eze that is still a multicultural, medieval city rather than a tourist trap. The mountains of the Alps are stunning, and he joins a group of Muggle students who are trekking a part of it; and then he meanders on through Italy.

It’s… nice, after the war. He’s bad at writing, but he writes more than he thought he ever would. He’s always picking up postcards for Hermione, for Harry, sometimes for Ginny and Mum and the rest of his family. Travelling is nice, but it’s also lonely. He sees something new, and he wants to tell Harry; he sees something that he knows Hermione would like, and he wishes she was there with him. He’s meeting people, with new dorm-mates every night in his hostel and people to talk to and spend time with, but it’s a very temporary sort of connection—they are fast friends, the best of friends, for one night, until they each and all move on.

He spends most of January in France and Italy, then he loiters for three weeks in Slovenia. It’s a beautiful country, filled with mountains and crystal-clear lakes that he finds peaceful, while Ljubljana is bustling and friendly. It’s late February when he swings north through Hungary, and then it’s March when he crashes with Charlie for a week and sees Romanian Longhorns in their natural habitat.

After Romania, he swings southwards, passing through Bulgaria, which just makes him think of Krum. He doesn’t linger, barely passing two days there, before heading on to Greece. In Greece, he joins another group of Muggle students touring the islands and tags along for a week, thinking about how Hermione would squeal over all the sights, and then he heads for Athens.

Athens is nice. It’s old, the feeling of history pressing in on him wherever he goes, and it doesn’t take long before he tires of it. Athens is Hermione’s sort of place, where she can dive into books and history and come out fully satisfied, but for Ron, he’s looking for something different. Athens—or Europe—are not different, or maybe it’s that they’re not different enough. He still has that feeling—that sense of things being fine, but not right, or maybe it’s a sense of being apart and disconnected from everything that he does. He’s supposed to find himself, but he’s as lost here as he was in Britain.

So, just after his birthday, for which Mum and Dad send him a few more Galleons, he marches into the airport and buys himself a ticket to New York City.

When Ron steps off the plane, even the air smells different.

It smells stale, mostly. Mechanical. The airport is busy, bustling with hundreds of people crowding the terminal walking every which way with no regard for each other. Everyone has luggage, small rolling luggage cases that they’re pulling along behind them, and the air is thick with chatter. It takes a few minutes for Ron to begin understanding people when they speak—he’s heard American accents before, mostly in the south of France, but never this many conflicting voices at once. There’s happiness, annoyance, excitement everywhere he can see.

He’s tired, even after a nap on the plane, but it’s still bright afternoon in New York City. He stops a security officer, asks directions to the downtown, and after some minutes deciphering an accent that is vaguely American but entirely something else, manages to get himself on the right train.

Outside, the buildings taller than Ron has ever seen dominate the skyline. There are more towers than he’s ever seen in his life. Most of them are just residential, he thinks, judging by the variety of curtains hanging in the windows, but as he gets downtown, he sees more that he guesses might be office towers. These ones aren’t brick, but made of glass and steel, and they reflect sharp flashes of sunlight into his eyes.

The hostel here, run by the YMCA, has rooms that are a lot smaller than the ones that he’s used to in Britain. They also have fewer beds per room, and the rooms get hot and close at night. In some ways, the privacy is nice; in other ways, it’s awful, because he’s gotten used to meeting people through mutually shared housing arrangements. Without a roommate to introduce himself to, it suddenly becomes much harder to meet anyone.

He shrugs it off—a bit of privacy is nice, after months of being with strangers, and he makes his own plans. Central Park and Times Square are worth seeing, and while he skips the numerous museums that Hermione would have hit and he has no money to watch any of the famed Broadway shows, he spends hours just walking around the city.

He likes New York City. There’s a vibrant, almost frenetic energy to the city.  Lower Manhattan is full of business towers, businessmen striding every which way and clearly on business; Broadway is filled with actors and other performers hustling. Fifth Avenue has shoppers, and there are people everywhere talking fast and walking faster, and it’s all Ron can do sometimes to get out of the way.

Every neighbourhood has its own character. The Upper West Side is not the Lower East Side, let alone Midtown, or Chinatown. The other borough, though he doesn’t get out there much, are still different—Brooklyn natives speak with yet another accent, and in Queens they speak English mixed with a hundred other languages. He spends an afternoon there, eating food he’s never seen anywhere before, but it’s mostly too far out for him to want to go more than a few times.

He particularly likes Greenwich Village. There’s something that’s loose about Greenwich Village, loose and easygoing and free, which is at odds with the rest of New York City. New York City is big, booming, excited; Greenwich Village isn’t not those things, but there’s something different about it all the same.

There are a lot of artists in Greenwich Village, artists and musicians and other performers. There are also students, easily picked out by their age, their backpacks, their textbooks. Sometimes, there are political rallies, in a park dominated by a big, square arch that that Ron thinks is supposed to be reminiscent of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He likes the park, too—it’s always busy, but there’s a nice fountain and there are in-built outdoor chess tables in the southwest corner.

It’s spring, so the table are filling up with old men and boys. Old men during the day; boys and girls sometimes join them in the afternoons and evenings. The old men are always there, timer clocks sitting beside them, and Ron can’t help but stop and watch whenever he’s there.

The chess they play is so familiar to him—familiar and yet different. They move their pieces by hand, there is no argument with their pieces, but the strategies that they use and the games that they play look so familiar to him. There’s the classic opening, pawn to E4, and then any of a number of openings that Ron has played before. He knows the knight, he knows the bishop, and then sometimes a player does something that he doesn’t know and that he hasn’t seen. The clocks are new to him, but he can tell that they record how long someone takes to make their moves.

It’s mesmerizing. Wizarding chess, meant to mimic a general commanding his troops, has a quality of argument—Ron is always arguing with his pieces, having to justify why he’s making the moves he is, and his opponent necessarily hears everything. But muggle chess, played out on the tables of the park, is done in silence. Ron doesn’t know why someone makes the move that they do, doesn’t always see the connections right away, and he takes the games home in his head to think about in his tiny hostel bunk. He invests in a notebook, after a couple days, and takes notes on the games to think over later. It’s strange, but there’s no one here to tell him he’s being weird.

It’s about a week of showing up, notebook in hand, when an old man looks him in the eye.

“Boy,” he says, and his accent is thick with another language. Eastern Europe, maybe—something about his consonants sounds like Krum. “If you’re going to be there taking notes anyway, come give an old man some sport and play.”

Chapter Text

Ron looks around, thinking that the man might be talking to someone else, but no—he’s staring right at Ron, and there’s no one else around him that’s either holding a notebook and pen, or watching the chess games right now. Sometimes there are other people who come watch, which admittedly makes Ron feel a bit less weird, but he’s never spoken to them.

“Yes, you,” the man says gruffly, pointing at the seat opposite him. “If you’ve been watching, then you can play. Come sit, and play.”

Ron takes another unnerved look around, and then—he goes.

“Boris,” the man introduces himself, holding his hand out to shake. “You’ll take white?”

“Ron,” Ron replies, shaking the man’s hand and sitting down shakily across from him. “Sure. White is fine.”

He usually plays black. The pieces that his brother passed down to him are black—another difference between wizard chess and Muggle chess. He always plays black, but he’s seen that Muggle players swap sides almost interchangeably. He can play white, it isn’t that different.

“Thirty minutes per side?”

“Er—sorry?” Ron asks, looking at the timer. “I’m—I’ve never played with a clock before.”

The man doesn’t smile at him, exactly, but the corners of his eyes crinkle. “The clock sets 30 minutes for each of us for the game. This means you have 30 minutes total to decide your moves throughout the game—it is to ensure that neither of us linger for hours on one move. When you finish your move, you hit the button on top, and it starts my clock ticking down. If either of us run out of time, it is an automatic loss.”

“Right,” Ron says, recovering quickly. “Thirty minutes is fine. Great.”

“Good.” Boris leans over and hits the clock. “Your move.”

Ron leans over, picking up one of the cool plastic pawns. His chess set, left at the Burrow, is smooth, spell-weathered wood, and the plastic feels cold in his hand. He can’t order this pawn to the square—but it’s so easy to pick it up and move it where he wants.

No arguments from the pawn.

He puts the pawn on E4, and he hits the clock.

Boris puts his pawn on E5, meeting Ron’s and blocking it, and he hits the clock.

Ron brings out his knight—the purpose of moving the pawn to E4 is partially dominating the centre, but mostly to free his back pieces. His knights, his bishops, his queen. The knight, he puts on F3, threatening the black pawn on E5.

Boris brings his own knight to C6, protecting his pawn. Ron hesitates—he can take the pawn, but then he loses his knight, and that’s not a trade that’s worth it at this point. His knights are valuable, the only piece that can threaten an enemy queen without being threatened, and he’s not going to give it up for a pawn.

Instead, he brings out his bishop to B5, and he hits the clock.

“The Ruy-Lopez,” Boris says, sounding very amused. “Not bad.”

“The—what?” Ron can’t help asking. He was just trying something, and this seemed like a good move. His bishop threatens the C6 knight but isn’t threatened in turn—he assumed that the man would pull the knight back.

The man shoots him an interested look. “The Ruy-Lopez opening. You played it, whether or not you knew it—but unfortunately for you, it is a very old opening sequence, and the appropriate response is… the Morphy defence.”

He brings his pawn to A6, hitting the clock, and Ron scowls. He hadn’t seen that coming—he can take the knight, but then he loses his bishop—but if he doesn’t move his bishop, he’ll lose it anyway to the pawn. It takes him a minute to decide, but he pulls back the bishop to A4, out of harm’s way, cursing himself as he does it.

Boris immediately moves his pawn to B5, which keeps pressing on Ron’s bishop, and Ron’s left running. He’s wasting moves—he knows he’s wasting valuable time defending his bishop that he should be using to attack with his other pieces, and he’s conceding most of the queenside to the Black advance. He takes his bishop back to B3, but that pins half his other pieces from getting out, and Boris knows it.

The rest of the game is messy and brutal. Ron finds a lucky opportunity to castle his king, which is probably the only reason why the rest of the game takes as long as it does. He loses his first bishop, judging that it’s too much effort to try to rescue it when it’s pinning down his second bishop, as well as his pawn and half the queenside. But his tempo—and turn advantage—is well and truly lost at that point, and even bringing out his queen and pinned-down bishop after a pawn to D3 aren’t enough to save him.

It’s around turn twenty-two, he thinks, when he stares at the board and sees no way out. Not that it’s obvious—but he can play through about eight scenarios in his head and in each and every one, he loses within four moves. He sighs, deep and heavy, and topples his king.

“Good game,” he says, and it feels like he’s waking up from a long sleep. It’s April, he knows that much—he sent a postcard to George not long ago—and the air is crystal clear and cold on his face. His fingers are cold, his fingerless mitts barely a guard against the chill, but he hadn’t noticed until now. “Thanks.”

“You as well.” Boris nods gruffly. “You should play more, instead of standing there and watching. Come, we’ll switch sides and go again. You take black, this time.”

“Sure, I guess,” Ron says after a moment, collecting the pieces and setting them up. He has nowhere better to be, and this is fun. This is more fun than he’s had in a very long time, and isn’t that what his gap year is about?

He pushes the fact that everyone he knows would laugh at him for this. This isn’t just chess—it’s muggle chess. There are no pieces fighting each other on the board—no cases where just because he manages to exhort his pieces enough, they win an exchange that they should have lost. This is less about the entertainment of watching spelled pieces fight on a board, more about the wits of matching himself against a human opponent. And the difference should make it more boring, make it too cerebral for someone like him, but it doesn’t.

“You should come back and play more,” Boris says approvingly, two games later. Ron’s lost another one, then squeezed a win out of the third. He has the sneaking suspicion that Boris took that game easy on him. “Tomorrow.”

Ron goes back the next day.

Then he goes back the day after that.

And then he goes back the day after that.

He has the vague thought that he should be moving on from New York City, actually—he’s been in this city for more than ten days at this point, drawing on two weeks. The city is expensive, and the budget he’d made with Hermione’s help counts on him splitting his time between expensive cities and cheaper ones. He doesn’t have the money for a long stay in New York City.

But at the same time, he’s drawn to Washington Square Park and the people playing chess there, so he lingers. He lingers, and he plays for a few hours every afternoon, and then he goes back to his hostel to think about what he played.

There are shops devoted to chess near the park. He had no idea that anyone would ever be fascinated enough by chess to devote a whole shop to it, but he’s endlessly grateful—aside from having a small travel set with his own clock that he buys, it also includes books about chess theory. Who ever thought that chess would have theory?

He hesitates for a good, long while before he gives up and buys it. He doesn’t have a lot of extra money for books, mainly because he never thought he’d want to buy books. Books are Hermione’s thing, while Ron was always—

Stupider, maybe. But that’s not right, either. He isn’t bookish—at home, Percy was the bookish one, and the twins were the pranksters, and Charlie obsessed over creatures, and Bill was the cool one, and Ginny was the girl. Ron is just the youngest, and there really wasn’t anything much to him other than being lucky enough to have Harry Potter as his best friend and Hermione Granger to pull him through his classes. He’s never had anything that he could really look at and say think, that—that is what’s mine, that is why I can stand out.

But he’s intrigued, and he buys it anyway, because Boris seems to know every opening by name. The King’s Pawn opening; the Queen’s Pawn opening. The Zukerfort opening, the one time that Ron went and brought his knight out to F3 as his first move; the Dunst opening, when Ron does the mirror of that move and takes his knight out to C3. None of these are familiar to him, and the book he buys of chess openings is so dense he has hardly gotten through a chapter the day he returns to Washington Square Park to see a crowd.

The park is always busy, and there are often people watching the chess tables. But not like this—there’s a mass of people surrounding one table in particular.

It’s the table Boris usually sits at, and Ron edges himself around to see what’s happening.

There’s a young man there, about Ron’s age. From this angle, all Ron can make out about him is that he has close-shaved brown hair, and he and Boris are exchanging laughing words in a harsh language that can only be Russian. He inches around the table to catch sight of the chessboard.

Boris is playing white, and he’s being demolished. Ron’s eyes go wide—the old man is good at chess, very good, and every victory Ron has pulled out of him to date has been, he suspects, charity. Ron puts up with it because he walks away from every win and every loss with something new.

But this man is better than Boris. Ron watches, the moves made before he can work out what he thinks would be the next best move, and he’s too fascinated even to take notes. The pieces clack down on the stone table, the snapping loud even against the taunts and laughter, before Boris pauses, stares at the board for a good three minutes with an expression that Ron is confident that Boris sees him wear regularly, and topples his king.

“Well played,” Boris says, shaking his head. He’s smiling, a rare expression for him, and he leans over the shake the young man’s hand. “And so, the student surpasses his teacher.”

“But you’ll always be my first teacher,” the man replies, sounding pleased anyway. “You let me have that win.”

“I didn’t,” Boris retorts with a shake of his head. He glances in Ron’s direction, Ron’s flaming-bright hair no doubt drawing his eye, and then he smiles. “Come, Maxim—meet my newest find. Unpolished, but good instincts. Ron, come meet Maxim Ivanov. He recently passed 2000 Elo points, making him a Candidate Master.”

The young man turns to him. He really isn’t much older than Ron himself, with a strong brow ridge and jawline. He also isn’t very tall—Ron is taller—but he’s built with broad shoulders like a Beater. “That’s only in the United States,” he says, sounding embarrassed. “Candidate Masters internationally have to be ranked higher than 2200, and that’s a long way from being a Grandmaster.”

“It will come in time,” Boris replies confidently. “Come play a game with Ron—you’ll see, Maxim.”

“Elo points?” Ron can’t help but ask, offering his hand out for Maxim to shake. “Grandmaster?”

“It’s really not that big of a deal,” Maxim replies with a laugh. “Just—you know, chess competitions. Ron, is it? Call me Max. You want to take white?”

“Yeah,” Ron replies, though he’s very sure he’s going to be trounced. If Boris can trounce him, then surely Max can. “Sure. Competitions?”

Max doesn’t answer, instead setting up the board again. Ron takes a seat, trying to remember the theory in the book. The opening was about developing his pieces—putting his pieces at the right place to control enough territory that he didn’t need to move them again soon, and therefore giving him tempo.

He understood the theory. Sort of. He just had to apply it.

He went with a King’s Pawn opening again, starting with pawn to E4. He expected a counter, pawn to E5, but instead Max brought out his knight to F6—threatening Ron’s pawn without a counter. Without thinking, Ron slid another pawn out to D3, only to curse himself for already losing the move.

He didn’t need to defend the E4 pawn, not really, and he wasn’t sure the development cost he’d put forward into the D3 pawn was worth it. But it was too late, the clock already flipped, and he couldn’t take it back.

Max’s knight didn’t take his pawn, but he used the time to take his pawns out of the way and get his bishops on the board. With his knights and bishops already in play, he dominated the centre of the board, and all that could be said about the rest of the game was that it was mercifully short. Ron was intensely glad that these pieces couldn’t yell at him.

In wizarding chess, his pieces probably would have won a few encounters they shouldn’t have, and they might have turned the tide. Ron wonders vaguely what it says about him that he prefers being soundly beaten in this new variation than watching his pieces actually fighting on the board.

“Good game,” Max says, offering his hand to shake. “I see what Boris means.”

“What do you mean?” Ron asks, taking the offered hand. It had been a good game. He hadn’t seen half of those moves coming. “That was absolute carnage, that was.”

“It wasn’t as bad as you think,” Max scoffs. “Pawn to D3 for the Alekhine defence isn’t played much, but it’s a solid move. It protects your pawn, and it doesn’t overextend your pieces in the centre, which is the real trap of the Alekhine defence. You compete much?”

“Compete?” Ron asks again. “In chess?”

Max raises an eyebrow. “It’s niche, I grant you, but if you play like that—”

“Like what?”

Max shrugs. “You’re good.”

Ron gives him a look. “After that?”

“Compared to most people,” Max clarifies. “Don’t compare yourself to me, I’m a Candidate Master.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“A natural,” Boris cuts in, waving a hand. “See?”

Ron wasn’t really a natural—he’d learned chess off his pieces themselves, plus games with Dad and Percy before he’d gotten better than them both sometime around when he was nine years old. Then, games with Dad and Percy had basically become boring, since there wasn’t much challenge to it, and any chess he played had been teaching others. Harry played chess with him, but he didn’t enjoy it—and he’d never tried playing with Hermione at all. She'd always declined matches with him, though he knew that she knew how to play.

“Well,” Max says, drawing the word out and tilting his head slightly. “People compete in chess tournaments. People who compete a lot are rated on the Elo rating scale, which calculates the statistical probability of who would win in any hypothetical match. Once a year, the rankings are published—a rough guide to who's the best chess player in the world, I suppose. Most people who just start playing are rated around 800.”

“People who are very, very good at chess, like Maxim, are called Grandmasters,” Boris adds, clapping the young man on the shoulder.

“A Candidate Master, and only in the United States.” Max grins. He’s embarrassed again, a faint flush appearing on his cheeks. “It’s really not—”

“But it is!” Boris turns around to the crowd, half of whom have dispersed since, Ron assumes, he was bring trounced so badly. “Look, our homegrown Grandmaster! The next Bobby Fischer!”

“Except Russian-American, and not for years yet.” Max laughs. “I suppose it would tweak the motherland some, wouldn’t it, a Russian-American Grandmaster?”

“Er—chess tournaments?” Ron asks. He has no idea what they’re referring to, but he is intrigued. People competed in chess?

It’s not Quidditch. It sounds—well, it sounds extremely nerdy. It sounds like something he shouldn’t have an interest in. He wants to see it anyway.

“There’s one next week, if you want to play,” Max says, raising an eyebrow. “Prize isn’t much—two hundred and fifty dollars for the top prize, a hundred for second place and fifty for third. But it should be a good time. Though—Boris mentioned you’re backpacking the world on a gap year, so you might have moved on by then—”

“No,” Ron says quickly, probably too quickly. “No, I’ll—I’ll stick around for it. I haven’t got any plans anyway. I’ll probably move on afterwards, though.”

That night, he drops into Wizarding New York City, and posts an owl to Hermione.

Hey ‘Mione,

In New York City—I know I was here the last time I sent you a postcard, so you probably thought I’d have moved on by now, but I stuck around. I know I shouldn’t, but it’s different here. Everything’s so new and busy, and there are a million things to see. Everyone is always moving, walking fast and talking faster, it’s not like at home or anywhere else I’ve been so far.

I wish I could tell you about all the things I saw, but honestly, I haven’t seen much. Central Park and Times Square, but otherwise I spend a lot of time walking around and eating street food. The food is really cheap, you can get a slice of pizza or a sausage on a bun for only a dollar, and it’s good!

I should be here for another week if you want to write back. I know I should be moving on, but there’s a muggle chess tournament. I’m going to put my name in, see what happens.

Hope to hear from you soon. Sorry I’m a bad correspondent.

Ron

He spends a very long time staring at his letter. It seems so short, and it’s missing so much. He doesn’t know how to tell her about the park with the chess players, or the tournament, and he’s not sure he wants to tell her about how many of his last few afternoons have just been spent in Washington Square Park over a chessboard. It sounds dorky, and stupid, and he hasn’t even won any of the games. Why is he doing this to himself?

But it’s been a long time since anyone has challenged him over a chessboard—so long, in fact, that he’d forgotten how much he enjoyed the game. And a tournament…

He shakes his head, seals the letter, and pays for the owl to send it to Hogwarts. He doesn’t know what Hermione will make of it, but he hopes he’ll hear back.

The tournament is in a muggle public high school in Lower Manhattan, not far from Washington Square Park. Walking in, Ron can’t help but feel unsettled—the hallways are too broad, lined with metal cases that are obviously used for storage. Each one is locked, the rows of padlocks somehow eerie, while the floor is hard and bizarrely shiny.

He checks the directions that Max gave him again. He’s checked it probably four times in the last hour, but once more doesn’t hurt. The doors to the school were unlocked, though, so he’s fairly sure he’s in the right place. He just wishes he could see someone—anyone—else in this empty hallway.

Max said that the tournament was happening in the gymnasium at the back of the school. Ron doesn’t know where that is, but instead wanders the hallways until he can hear the sound of voices and clack of plastic pieces on a chessboard. He turns in that direction, down a set of stairs that he finds oddly precarious. The stairs feel solid under him—which is shocking when each stairs look to be little more than a flat board, two inches thick, held in place only by the walls and a metal rail in the middle.

Downstairs, Max is sitting at a wooden table set up outside what is evidently the gymnasium, counting the money that’s going into a cash box. The tournament, including the prize pool, is funded partially by the registration fees and partially by their regional chapter of the US Chess Federation.

Max gives him a grin, standing up. “Ron! Glad you could make it!”

Ron shrugs, a little awkward. “Yeah, I said I would, didn’t I?”

“You did,” Max says, reaching for a clipboard. “Registration fee is fifteen bucks—well, normally, it would be five but you need to join the US Chess Federation and that’s ten. You’ll need to fill this out, too.”

“Sure,” Ron says, taking the clipboard. A blue ballpoint pen is shoved underneath the clip, and he tugs it out and begins to fill it out. Name, address, age—he fudges the address, puts down the hostel even if he’s really not going to be there much longer. This is just one day, one tournament, and it doesn’t really matter what they have on record for him. Fifteen dollars changes hands, and Max waves him through two battered wooden doors into the gymnasium.

Small tables dominate the space, each one with two wooden chairs. A chess set is already set up on every table, along with a timer. Most people are crowded along the back, looking for their matchups, but there are more than a few sitting on the floor around the edges of the room, small chess boards between them. Some of them are playing, while it sounds like others are talking chess theory and strategy—a topic that Ron has only just begun to explore with a book in his hostel room.

He’s anxious, looking around at a roomful of muggles. He doesn’t know what to do, or if he should be talking to anyone, or how to talk to anyone. One wouldn’t think that Ron Weasley would be particularly anxious, but he is—he’s never needed to introduce himself anywhere, really. Most of the time in hostels, it isn’t Ron taking the first step, but one of his many dormmates who steps up and says hey, let’s go out somewhere, or hey, what’s your name? It’s easy to go with the flow, to be the one who responds and says yeah, my name is Ron, let’s go to a pub, and not the one who initiates.

The first and only time Ron ever really had to introduce himself to anyone was to Harry on the Hogwarts Express. And that was easy—there really had only been one carriage open, so he had to walk in and say, hi, is this seat taken, and things had just gone from there. And after that, he and Harry were always together, and someone always took note of the famous Harry Potter and came over to talk to them.

For lack of anything better to do, Ron heads for the crowd of people in front of the lists at the back. He’s tall—some six foot two, but gangly.

“Elo rating of 1900—” he catches someone saying. “Highest ranked player here.”

“Ambrose is?” Someone else is saying.

“Yeah—I feel sorry for his first match,” a third person finishes, before Ron worms his way close enough to see the names.

Chess tournaments always start by pitting players against people who are similarly ranked—as an unranked player, Ron would be starting off at the end of the list and probably matched against someone considered to be average for the competition. If he lost, he’d end up in a game against someone who had also lost, presumably of a lower rating, and if he won, he’d be playing someone with more wins, presumably of a higher rating. He’d be given a score for each game he played, and at the end through some arithmancy magic that Ron had never studied, the scores would be calculated and ranked to determine the tournament winners.  

Unsurprisingly, Ron doesn’t recognize the name that his is listed as for his first opponent. He doesn’t know what he expected. A part of him wants to turn tail and leave, but the feeling of excitement clouding the air keeps him from seriously considering it.

The people around him are smiling and laughing. Some of them are arguing over chess and chess theory, many of them with chessboards out showing difficult positions, but they’re having fun. They like this—they like chess the way that Ron does, the way that no one he knows does. Dad, who had taught him to play, had always said he was no great shakes at chess; Bill liked playing, but he’d moved out from home when Ron was still young. Percy played, but Ron had never wanted to be like Percy, and Harry simply never got the knack. Hermione knew how to play, Ron knew that much, but she’d never wanted to and by then, Ron had put away the chessboard.

The energy of the gymnasium is palpable. A deep breath in, and Ron takes note of the number of the table he’s supposed to be at when the competition starts, and heads in that direction. Some people are already sitting at their tables, though they’re not allowed to start until the tournament opens.

His opponent is already at their table.

“Hi,” he says, offering a hand and a smile. “You must be Ron. Nice to meet you.”

His accent is strong, something that Ron has heard people refer to as the Brooklyn accent. He’s older than Ron, but not that much older—maybe in his late twenties compared to Ron’s late teenager. A mop of brown hair falls into his eyes, and he has a big, beaked nose that dominates his face.  

“Yeah,” Ron says, taking the hand and shaking before he slides into the seat across from him. Aside from the chessboard and its pieces, there’s a small notepad with a grid on it and a pile of pens. He picks it up, examining it—there’s bold black text that says US Chess Federation on it, and there are pre-printed numbers in four neat columns with two empty columns beside each one.

“I’m Jim,” the man says cheerfully. “You British? First tournament?”

“Yeah,” Ron replies, holding up the pad of paper. “Just taking a gap year before uni, seeing the world. What’s this?”

“That’s for recording your moves,” Jim replies, leaning over to point at the columns. “See, here? First move, second move, and so on—a column for white, and a column for black. At bigger tournaments, sometimes they ask you to hand these in, but here, it’s just for us. In case we want to take our games back and study them.”

“Cool,” Ron says, examining the pad again. It really is very well organized—much like the notes that Hermione, rolling her eyes, used to let him and Harry copy. “Can we… take these with us?”

“Well, probably not that one.” Jim laughs. “Just because it’s your first game, you’ll move tables, it’s nice to leave it here for the next player. But no one minds if you take one at the end of the tournament, the Chess Federation prints a million of them anyway. I have half a dozen of them at home.”

“Awesome,” Ron says, setting the notebook down and reminding himself to swipe one at the end. “Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me, we all start somewhere,” Jim replies, tilting his head to the front of the room, where Max is clambering onto a table. “Looks like we’re getting started. Good luck!”

“Yeah, you too,” Ron replies, settling down to listen as Max gives a short speech on the rules and scoring, and declares the tournament open.

Jim is good, but he isn’t as good as Boris is, or Max. He’s playing white, and he opens with a King’s Pawn opening. Ron responds with a knight to F6, the way that Max did against him only a week ago, and he responds, like Ron did, by defending his pawn. Ron takes the opportunity to advance his own king’s pawn to E5, countering the pawn advance to E4, and give him a good out for his bishop. From there, the match stretches out, before Ron pins him around move 26 and Jim topples his king.

“Good game,” he says, offering his hand for another shake.

“Thanks, you too.” Ron grins in reply. “Good luck on the rest of your games.”

The next game begins on the hour, and the whole thing repeats. His next opponent is better than Jim was, though Ron still pulls out a win after 31 moves, and his next opponent is still better, which Ron draws on. There are no easy games here—no one like Dad who usually stops playing and gives up within ten moves, saying it’s not my game, chess, no one like Harry who is fun to teach but never had a passion for the game. Everyone here is better than Ron’s ever had a chance to play before, and the tournament is fun.

He keeps track of his moves, but he doesn’t keep track of whether he wins or he loses. It’s always just the next game, the next game, and the next one. He doesn’t even notice when he runs up against the top-ranked player in the tournament, the one ranked just above 1900—he notices when he loses in 18 turns, but it’s one loss, and he’s off to the next game. And then the next, and then the next.

It’s eight rounds of chess throughout the day, with a break for lunch after the first four rounds—a break that Ron spends mowing down on a sandwich from the bodega around the corner while studying the records of his first four matches. By now, out of the one chess book he’s splurged and bought, he knows that there are names attached to most of the common openings, but he hasn’t really worked out which name goes with which one. He just thinks about it in terms of strategy: which moves are best for taking dominance in the centre, which ones are best for developing other pieces, which ones are best for gaining tempos and making his opponent waste time.

He’s played good games this morning. He needs to play better games to learn more. He needs to see more sets of moves in action.

The afternoon goes much the same, move after move after move. Pawn to E4. Pawn to E5. Knight to C3. Knight to F6. Pawn to F4, pawn to D5—exchange the pawns, clearing off the centre of the board. His own pieces would have screamed bloody murder at him for this, but Ron ignores them as he keeps playing. His pieces always did scream at him when any of them were sacrificed, which is probably why wizarding chess never got on big. Not everyone likes arguing with their pieces. Even Ron, who is well used to arguing with siblings, doesn’t always like arguing with animated chess pieces.

It’s almost an art form, the way that muggles play chess.

It’s to Ron’s surprise as much as anyone else’s that at the end of the day when the scores are tallied, he’s sitting in third place. Fifty dollars—it isn’t much, but it’s not nothing, and he looks down the worn green bills with shock.

It’s money. And it’s not the money that’s shocking to him, not really, because he has more in his backpack for travelling, but it’s the fact that it’s money he won playing chess. Who would have thought that anyone could do something like that?

Who would have thought that he, Ron Weasley, could do something like that?

The energy is bleeding out of the room now. The other competitors, most of them smiling and laughing while they’re at it, have packed up their chess sets into long, rolled up bags, and are heading out. Other people, including Max, are walking around clearing up the tables, the chairs, the many chess sets that dominated the room. Ron lingers, trying to soak in the last of it—the last of that feeling, the last vestige of that something that had filled the room.

It felt like—he doesn’t know. He’s not Hermione. He doesn’t have words for it. But for the first time in a very long time, Ron felt something. It was something, and something was not nothing, and it was fun, and it shouldn’t have been as much fun as it was, but it was fun, and he wants more even if he can’t have more. He wants to do this again, and again, and again, and how does he go about telling that to anyone? How does he go about telling everyone he knows that playing muggle chess makes him feel more than anything else does after the war?

“That was fun, wasn’t it?” Max says, breaking into his thoughts as he comes up behind him and claps him on the shoulder. Ron blinks, and he sees that the gymnasium is empty now. “Good job—played higher than your skill level even a week ago. Some of us are going out to eat, you want to join?”

Ron looks down at his newly won cash, and then he shrugs. He can afford it.

 “Sure,” he says. “Yeah. Food would be great.”

They end up in a bustling pub in Midtown, which is a way away from Lower Manhattan but has a lot more space. Lower Manhattan is chock-full of small hole-in-the-wall restaurants, all of which, Ron is told, are great—but they don’t have space on a Saturday night for a group of twelve. So, they end up at something that Max calls a “gastropub”, which as far as Ron can tell, just means it’s a bar that serves food.

He orders a pint—it’s not as good as Butterbeer, but he’s gotten used to muggle beer at this point. It’s not that he likes it, because it really tastes like piss, but the buzz makes it easier to socialize with strangers.

Everyone else is talking, ordering burgers and fries and pot pies and platters of deep-fried things that Ron can’t identify but that Hermione would tell him were bad for him. He eats them anyway, letting the chatter of Max and his friends fill him.

They talk mainly about chess, which Ron finds weird and stimulating all at once. He wants to talk too, but he can’t keep up. King’s Pawn opening, he understands that—but the Open Game, the Scandinavian Defence, the Caro-Kann, the Nimzowitsch, the Vienna Game, all these references fly right past him. When they draw it out on a napkin to start arguing, he follows better, but he doesn’t contribute much.

He wants to, but he’s not smart. He’s not Hermione—everything he can think of saying sounds stupid in his head, or maybe it’d be obvious to everyone around him, and he doesn’t know.

“What do you think?” Max turns to him suddenly, sliding the napkin towards him. “If you were playing black, what would be better—knight to F6, or bishop to C5?”

Ron takes the napkin. It’s a simple enough opening—pawn to E4, pawn to E5, then white's moved a knight to C3 to guard his E4 pawn. A knight to F6 threatens the E4 pawn, but no one in their right mind would trade a knight for a pawn, so the move would just get the knight out from behind the pawns to a place where it can be a threat. Still, with E4 already protected…

“I think I’d use the bishop,” Ron offers, handing back the napkin. “It’s always better to counterattack—and the bishop lets you threaten more of the centre. More territorial control puts your pieces in a better position.”

“See?” Max says, jabbing his finger at the napkin. “And then, if white is stupid enough to try to threaten your bishop by moving his knight to A4, you can counterattack right into the centre of the white line. Bishop to F2 for a check, black has to take it, drawing the king out from the back line and taking castling out of the question, and then you can pin the king down from there.”

“But it doesn’t solve the immediate problem of protecting your E5 pawn,” Jesse, one of Max’s friends, drawls. “We’re not playing the Immortal Draw here—it’s better to back up your own pawn. More conservative, yeah, but more strategic in the long run.”

Max shook his head, laughing. “Being conservative, that’s great for being a good amateur,” he quips. “But to be a Grandmaster…”

“Ooohhh,” Sylvia, one of the only two women in the circle, says. “Here it comes, the Grandmaster comments—”

“You have to know when to take risks!” Max gestures with his pint of beer, slamming it down on the table with a smile. “Enough of that though. Ron, first tournament—you liked it?”

“Yeah,” Ron says, perking up and leaning forward. “It was really good, I had fun.”

“Did pretty well, too,” Tim, another one of the men, comments. “Third place—you even did well against Ambrose, and he’s rated just above 1900. You’re unranked, yeah? Planning on joining the circuit?”

“The circuit?”

“The chess tournament circuit,” Jesse adds, raising his glass to take a swig. “Next one’s in a month—we do them monthly in New York City. The different boroughs take turns hosting.”

“If you do well enough, you can be like Max!” Sylvia grins and laughs. “Taking a run for a major championship title—”

Max snorts. “That’s not for a long way yet. I’m not even invited to the US National Championships. My biggest tournament this year is the US Open, where I expect to have my ass handed to me. One day. You should compete more though, Ron—a lot of promise in your game, today.”

“I wish I could,” Ron says, feeling himself deflate a little. Today was, of course, something that could only happen once. He’s a wizard, but more than that, he’s Ron Weasley—sixth son of the Weasley family, best friend of Harry Potter and Hermione Granger. The idea that he could go out on a limb, go off and play chess as passionately as these people—

Well, the idea is just a little divorced from him. How would he explain it to anyone? How would Harry react, or Hermione, or Mum?

“I should probably be heading out from New York City soon anyway,” he adds, in response to the inquiring looks from the people around him. “Seeing the world, and all. New York City is expensive, I didn’t actually budget for more than a couple weeks here.”

Even a couple weeks was stretching it, and he’s already been here three weeks. It was almost Easter, now.

“That’s no reason you can’t keep competing,” Tim points out, gesturing with his glass. “There are chess competitions everywhere—hell, if I had a gap year, know what I’d do? I’d plan the whole year around chess competitions!”

“Dork,” Sylvia says, throwing a French fry at him. “You’re such a dork.”

“And you wouldn’t?” Tim asks, grinning as he grabs the fry and eats it. “You’d do that too, and you’d also use being a girl to bunk with chess nerds everywhere to save money!”

“I would, too,” Sylvia agrees easily. “I’m not denying that. I’m a dork too, else why would I be here with you on a Saturday night?”

“Ha,” Ron says, joining in on the laughter. “I mean—I guess I don’t have any other plans, but when’s the next competition? And where? How do I find that out?”

“The chess magazines will have listings. You can pick them up at most newsstands, though you might have to ask for them.” Max shoots him a knowing smile. “I think there’s a pretty big competition in a couple weeks in Cincinnati—that would give you time to bus it or however you plan on getting around over there, with time to stop in Philly, or Pittsburgh, or Columbus, too.”

“Yeah?” He doesn’t know anything about these cities, not what or where or anything else about them, but part of him is already planning. He isn’t drawn to any one of them in particular, but he has no plans for where to go next, and is there any reason he shouldn’t go to Cincinnati?

“Yeah, you already have a US Chess Federation membership.” Max shrugs. “You might as well make use of it while you’re stateside, you think? Unless you had other plans.”

“I didn’t,” Ron admits, taking another drink of his beer. “I’ll think about it.”

“You should.” Max grins, then he turns back to the rest of the table. “Another round?”

Ron is not quite drunk when he heads back to the hostel that night, but he’s not quite sober either, and it takes a moment before he realizes that there’s a pigeon sitting on his windowsill waiting for him in his room. The Americans use pigeons for domestic mail, with owls being reserved for international travel, and the pigeon is glaring at him with a beady yellow-black eye.

“I know it’s late,” Ron mutters at it, catching sight of the scroll of parchment on its leg. “Thanks.”

The pigeon ruffles its feathers, impatient as Ron fumbles the ties, and doesn’t look back as it escapes out the window. Shaking his head at it—pigeons, American witches and wizards are a strange lot—Ron unrolls the letter.

Ron,

Good to hear from you, and better to be able to write back for once! Harry and Ginny and I are all doing well. Harry’s still loving Auror training, as you can imagine, and you won’t believe this—Ginny got invited to the tryouts for the Holyhead Harpies! One of their Chasers is retiring, don’t ask me who. Harry and Ginny keep yelling the name at me, but I can never remember. Gwyneth something, I think. Anyway, what’s important is that apparently scouts have had an eye on Ginny for years! Your mum is having kittens, I think she thought Harry and Ginny were going to get married right when she finished school and start having kids right away, but you know Ginny. There was no way that was going to happen.

Ron laughs, the words on the page almost as good as having Hermione there in the room with him. She's right, though—it doesn’t surprise him in the least that Mum expected Harry and Ginny together as soon as she graduated, and probably with a baby within the year. And he knows Ginny too, which means that he knows Ginny is never going to let this opportunity pass her by. Professional Quidditch is something so few of them ever get a chance at, and for a moment he's jealous, and then he shrugs and lets it go. He's too drunk and too high off the energy of a chess tournament to care, and he's glad for Ginny. 

Harry, of course, supports Ginny in going for it, and they’re flying together to Wales over Easter for the tryout. He won’t watch, he doesn’t want to make the selection committee feel pressured, so he’s just flying there and back with her.

How did the chess tournament go? Write back and let us know! I hope you did great—you always did like chess, and I’m glad you’re getting to explore that. I know that Harry and I don’t pose much challenge for you there, and honestly, I don’t think anyone in Gryffindor did either. I played a bit in public school, before Hogwarts, but I was never good at it. Looking back, I wasn’t patient or persistent enough to become better at it either. Chess is hard, and the amount you need to lose to get better was just not something I could do.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed yourself! I hope you’re taking the time to explore everything that interests you, no guilt allowed (I just won’t have it, not after the war), and I can’t wait to see you when you get back.

All my love,

Hermione

No guilt allowed, she said. All my love, she had said.

The warm feeling in his face is more than the alcohol, more than a good night out. They are just words on a page, but for a moment Ron feels her there with him, sitting beside him on his small bunk.

Why the hell shouldn’t he plan the rest of his trip around chess tournaments? He already has a membership with the US Chess Federation. That's ten sunk dollars that he won't get back. He doesn’t have any other plans, and there, in ink on parchment, were Hermione’s words.

No guilt allowed.

This is his year, and if he wants to plan the rest of the year around chess tournaments, then there's no reason why he shouldn’t.

Chapter Text

Ron gives himself a couple more nights in New York City. He’s been here long enough that he knows people, and it feels strange to leave without saying a word to Boris. Over his three weeks here, he’s played more chess than he has in the last six years, and Boris seems to have taught him something with every game.

It’s Sunday, and it’s a beautiful spring day. The air is warm after a long winter, and people are out in droves—on the greens, surrounding the fountain, crowding on benches with their friends and families. It even smells like spring, the hint of rain and greenery in the air rather than snow and cold. The chess tables, however, are only about as busy as they normally are, and Ron finds Boris at his usual table in the middle of a match with Max.

It looks evenly matched, from his perspective. Both seem to have the same materiel on the board, and they seem to be fairly positioned. He stops, takes out his notebook, and watches as they play through the endgame.

Chess isn’t about one good move, or one lapse in judgement—or rather, Ron thinks, it isn’t at this level. It is one thing for him to defeat Harry in four moves, because Harry, protective of his pieces, never quite understood the importance of getting his knights and bishops out on the board early, but those kinds of mistakes are too long ago and too far away for either Max or Boris to play. Instead, it is the accumulated minor mistakes of many moves that make for a win. A loss here, a questionable trade there, a wrong decision on a fork and everything builds up to a catastrophic disadvantage in the middlegame and endgame.

With a sigh, Boris tips his king after another dozen moves.

“A good game,” the old man says, shaking his head. “I’m no sport for you anymore, Maxim.”

“You’re more sport for him than I am,” Ron says, waving a hand to draw their attention. “Hullo, Max. Boris.”

“Rough morning?” Max asks, a wicked grin on his face.

“I ought to ask you the same,” Ron replies, returning the smile. “Takes more than a few beers to give me a hangover. You?”

“I’m Russian,” Max says dismissively. “I can drink like a fish with no consequences whatsoever.”

“None?” Ron raises an eyebrow. “I could have sworn I saw you throwing up last night…”

Max shrugs. “Still don’t have a hangover.”

Ron laughs, before getting into the meat of why he’s there. “I came by to say goodbye,” he says, a note of apology in his voice. “I really should move on from New York City—the cost here, you know…”

“Oh, we know,” Max replies cheerfully. "We live here. You given any thought to other tournaments?”

“Well…” Ron hesitates. “Maybe. Cincinnati in a couple weeks, you said? I suppose I don’t have any other plans…”

“More competition would be good for you,” Boris grunts, “if you cannot stay. Though, talent like yours—with a coach, you would do well.”

“A coach?” Ron laughs again, a little helplessly. “There are chess coaches?”

“Boris is one.” Max’s eyebrow is raised. “He just took a shine to you, normally he costs the big bucks.”

“I took pity on him,” Boris interjects. “There he was hovering over my shoulder with a notebook. I wanted to see what he could do. That is all. If no coach, then competition is just as well. Cincinnati is a good choice. It has higher level play than the small club tournament here, and you will learn more.”

“I hope so,” Ron admits. “So—the chess tournament listings…”

“Yeah,” Max says with a nod, as if he remembers. “Come on—I’ll take you to the Village Chess Shop, it’s the best store for chess. There’s a good selection of strategy books, too. Boris?”

“Go on.” Boris grunts, turning back to his chessboard. “Leave an old man to his playing. I hope you’ll be better the next time I see you, Ron—you could do well, with enough practice. Good luck.”

“Thanks,” Ron says. Another time, he would have been worried about Boris’ response, but he’s learned over three weeks that the man tends towards less affection rather than more. Even the few words that he’s said are more than Ron has received from him before. “I—thanks for everything, Boris.”

He would have said something about hoping he’d see him again sometime, but he doesn’t know how, or even if that would be okay. So he doesn’t, and he follows Max where Max leads him, into a clean, well-lit shop of chess accessories and books. The books are pricey, but Max points out two more strategy books that he likes, as well as that month’s edition of Chess Life.

“This comes out monthly,” Max informs him, flipping through to the back. “It’s always a good read, but the tournament listings are at the back. It covers the whole of the US, see, so you can go ahead and plan your travels around it if that’s what you want to do. Have fun, and don’t be a stranger—if you’re ever passing through again, come see us.”

“Yeah,” Ron says, adding the magazine to his pile. With the night out, two books, the magazine and the extra nights in New York City, his prize money is basically gone. It doesn’t matter—he’ll work it out. He can spend a little more time in a smaller city and eating more plain pasta or instant noodles. “So, er, are you going to be playing at any?”

Max nods. “Have to, if I’m going to go for my Grandmaster title. But mostly, I play in the New York City area—travel’s hard as a student. But I’m planning on being at the US Open in Florida this summer, so if you’re there…”

Ron will be there, he thinks, but he doesn’t want to make any promises in case he can’t keep them. “I’ll try,” he says instead, heading for the register where he pays for both books and the magazine. “I don’t know for sure, but I’ll definitely try.”

He goes south first, stopping for a couple days in Philadelphia to eat famous cheesesteak sandwiches, then onwards to Washington DC, where he wanders monuments that don’t really connect with him but that he appreciates anyway. These aren’t his monuments, the Washington Monument and the White House and the Capitol and Lincoln mean nothing to him, but they make him think of the monuments back home, the ones they’re still building—one in Diagon Alley commemorating the war dead, another on Hogwarts grounds, and a third in the Ministry of Magic.

Still, he doesn’t linger at them—the throngs of American tourists are a little much. Instead, feeling very Hermione-like, he swings by the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum for an afternoon, thinking that Dad would appreciate either pictures or Ron’s memory of it later as a gift. DC is, however, overall a little too clean-cut, a little too stuffy, for Ron’s tastes, so it’s barely three days later that he heads west.

West Virginia is mountainous and rural, and he stays a little more than a week. It’s cheap, and Ron is all too aware of how much he has bitten into his capital in the big cities. A week in West Virginia helps, and the spring weather is perfect for hiking. He drops by a national park for a few days, and then swings north through Ohio, stopping in Columbus, before heading further west to Cincinnati.

He reads his chess books when he has a spare moment—which one would think would be practically all the time, but he is stopping through enough cities that basic things like finding transportation, a hostel, meals, and interacting with people take everything out of him most nights. He gets through a couple of them furtively while on the trail in the rural wilderness, where he uses magic left, right and centre for shelter, food, and light.

Its during long nights camping in the dark—sometimes near others, just as often alone—that he practices on the small travel chess set he picked up in New York City. The theory tables in the books are terse and hard to follow, but he manages with the help of the chess set. Pawn to E4; Knight to F6. Knight to C3; Pawn to D5. White trades pawns, getting them off the board; then white takes his bishop to C4 while black sends his knight to B6. The tables are dry and condensed, and Ron has to play it out to even begin seeing the whys.

He loses in Cincinnati—the New York City tournament was, Ron realizes, a community-level amateur tournament. There were competitive players there, but the bigger chess circuit includes people who do very little except play chess. Some even come with coaches, though most don’t. The level of play is higher, but Ron doesn’t mind losing.  He’ll fight to the bitter end, but at the end of the day, this is a chess game, and Ron isn’t the same person after the war as he was before. Before the war, he was upset and blamed himself for losing Quidditch games, and after—

Well, it took a genocidal maniac hellbent on conquering the world to unsettle him.

So, in Cincinnati, he comes out decidedly average—over ten matches, four wins, three draws, and three losses. He goes out for drinks with a group of young players around his age there too, and gets an invite to look them up whenever he’s back in Ohio. Then, running off the newest edition of Chess Life, he picks another tournament and heads northwards towards Chicago, passing through Indianapolis on the way.

In the Windy City, he picks up another middling success, ranking somewhere around twentieth in the fifty-person tournament, at five wins, one draw and four losses. He runs into two Candidate Masters there, and improbably pulls out a draw against one of them, which he knows by now will give his Elo rating a boost. He won’t have a rating of his own until he’s finished a minimum of six tournaments, but he knows enough to know that a draw against a Candidate Master can only work in his favour. Then, after two nights in Chicago, he packs up for Minneapolis with a stop in Milwaukee on the way.

By then, he’s firmly in the Midwest. Ron likes rural areas—the Burrow is rural—but he never really conceived of the sheer size of the United States before he went there. There are no real train lines, out in the Midwest, no quick travel other than by airplane that Ron can’t afford on his shoestring budget. All there are are bus lines, awful terrible buses that drive all day or all night, and while Ron appreciates the savings of sleeping on a bus, he doesn’t appreciate the crick it gives in his neck.

So, it being well into May, he turns south.

A bus to Des Moines, but he doesn’t linger more than one night, then onwards to Kansas City and St. Louis. There’s another tournament in St. Louis, where he comes in third and picks up another small award, but three tournaments in, Ron knows that St. Louis was a small, amateur-level tournament in much the same way as his first New York City tournament. He spends a night there, checking out the paddlewheelers and the zoo, before he turns east towards Louisville and then south towards Nashville.

He plays a somewhat bigger tournament in Nashville, landing in the upper third of the competitors there, and discovers that unending live country music in the bar gives him a worse headache than a hangover. But he hits it off with a fellow chess player named Alan, who lets him crash for weeks while they argue chess theory and play endless games together, before Ron feels like he can’t impose any longer and they promise to meet up at the US Open in six weeks’ time.

Ron is four tournaments in, and somewhere along the way, he’s decided he’d like an Elo rating before the US Open. Unranked players always get tacked onto the bottom of the list in alphabetical order, which means that Ron is always playing someone of middling skill for his first game, and he’s always the perceived underdog. It’s why he usually wins the first match too, but he’d like to walk in and see his name somewhere in the top half of a bracket instead of the bottom half. But to have a rating, Ron needs to play, and the next two closest tournaments on the way to the US Open are in Atlanta and Jacksonville.

Atlanta is the harder of the two tournaments—it’s the bigger one, and it’s full of people who are treating it like a training run for the US Open. Ron still wins his opening game, and then he wins his second, and then there’s a three-run losing streak before he draws. He ends up somewhere in the middle again, which doesn’t feel as good as it did in Cincinnati since he is trying for a good rating, but shakes it off with another round of drinks at the pub before he goes down to Jacksonville.

Jacksonville is a big tournament, but heavy on amateur players. Ron supposes that he, too, is an amateur—no one is paying him to play—but the label is starting to feel uncomfortable. He likes chess. Ron really, really likes chess, and he’s starting to think that he doesn’t want to be an amateur. He wants to be like Max, staring up at a Grandmaster title; he wants to be Alan, who isn't sure what he wants to do yet but certainly wants it to involve chess. Heck, he wants to be Boris, playing chess on a cold spring day in a public park, scouting out talent and coaching.

But all of this goes unspoken and very nearly unthought. He thinks about it, and then he dismisses almost as fast—what would Mum say? What would Harry say? Bloody hell, what would Hermione say?

Chess is a game. Chess doesn’t pay the bills. Chess is a hobby, and as much as Ron loves the tournaments, as much as he wants a high rating, as much as he dreams about a Grandmaster title, these are only dreams.

Even if he breaks the top three again in Jacksonville against a crowd of retirees.

Orlando at the end of July is hot.

That is an understatement. It’s not just hot—it’s a steam oven, the conflation of hot air and damp climate making Ron’s skin burn every time he steps outside the hotel and convention centre. Breathing itself is a task outside, almost like he is trying to breathe underwater, and despite everyone he meets telling him he really should go out, see some of the big tourist sights like Disney World or Universal Studios or the Epcot Centre, he can’t bring himself to leave the cool, air-conditioned confines of the hotel.

Thank Merlin for the hotel. Thank Merlin for air conditioning. Thank Merlin for climate control.

And thank Merlin for Alan and his friends from Nashville, who split the cost of a hotel room with Ron, bringing an unacceptably expensive hotel room stay to the cost of a decent hostel bed.

He gets to Orlando the day before the US Open starts. It’s his first multi-day tournament—nine days long, though each day only has one round. The time limit here is much more generous than any tournament he’s been in before too, up to two hours per player as opposed to the half-hour he’s had at every previous tournament.

Once, Ron would have said that four hours was far too long to sit still, let alone play a chess game. He’s still not sure he’ll take the entire time (though his new friends tell him that very few people do), but it’s nice to think he won’t be rushed. Not when this is the biggest tournament he’s ever been in.

The US Open has more than five hundred entries every year. It’s the largest tournament that’s not restricted by invitation or ratings—not that the ratings aren’t a soft barrier anyway, when Ron sees the lists. Nearly everyone in the tournament is rated, making Ron very glad that he went out of his way to get rating before the tournament.

1755. At 1755, Ron is firmly in Class B, and in the upper end of it. It’s high enough that there are prizes specifically for Class B, a fact for which Ron is grateful because he won’t be in contention for any of the biggest awards. But the prize pool of the US Open is huge, some $25,000, which is spread across many categories. Overall tournament champion, and another prize for the top women, of which there are few. Best junior, then top scores in the Expert, Class A, Class B, and Class C categories.

In normal circumstances, Ron should have been nervous. No, not just nervous—he should be breaking things left, right, and centre. Memories of his disastrous year on the Gryffindor Quidditch team keep assaulting him at inopportune moments—the sound of the crowd jeering at him, the song Weasley is Our King echoing off the stands. No matter how hard he tries, he can never really forget that the song was written to mock him, and it’s one victorious use is a drop in the bucket compared to the many times it’s been used against him.

But he isn’t. The mood of the convention centre is a big party—a big, chess-themed party. People have come from across the United States for this event, hundreds of them, and not only players. Some are just enthusiasts, here for some casual games in the lobby or carpeted hallways or cafeterias, while others are here to watch for the players of tomorrow. Players like Max, or Ambrose, or a half-dozen other names that go into one of Ron’s ears and out the other.

There’s a part of Ron, a very quiet part, that wishes his name were among them, whispered about as a player to watch. He firmly ignores it.

“Hey,” someone says, clapping him on the shoulder as he examines the lists. They’re not like any other match-up lists he’s ever seen, these ones sorted by Elo rank and last name, each match-up listed twice. “Glad to see you made it!”

Ron turns around with a grin. “Max! It’s good to see you too!”

“You staying in the hotel?”

“Yeah,” Ron says. “Got a room with some guys from Nashville. Fourteenth floor.”

“Nice! I’m on the sixteenth with the New York crowd—room 1611.” Max looks up at the board. “You got a rating! Class B?”

“Yeah,” Ron replies, perking up. “On the higher end of Class B, too. 1755.”

“It’s a great ranking for only playing seriously for, what—four months?” Max smiles. “Congrats!”

“More like good luck, here.” Ron laughs.

“Don’t worry, there are a lot of kids in your division,” Max says, waving a hand dismissively. “Kids who play seriously usually make Class B in high school, so you’re probably a little under-ranked right now. It’s a good sign.”

There was a time when Ron would have smarted at hearing that, and a part of him still does, but mostly he lets it roll of his back. Post-war, there are worse things that people can say about him. They could call him a coward who’d abandoned his best friend in his time of greatest need, after all—they could say that he hadn’t had what it took to stick it out in the war against Voldemort. He had gone back, but he’ll never know whether that was really enough.

“Yeah,” Ron says instead, shrugging. “I hope so, anyway—I could definitely do with the prize money.”

Max nods cheerfully, clapping him on the shoulder once again. “I’ve got to go find my match-up, but drinks, later? Come on by around six—we’ll be ordering a pizza.”

“And deconstructing your matches for the day, right?” Ron grins.

“Bring your move sheets.” Max smirks, then he disappears into the crowd to find his own match-up and table.

Shaking his head, Ron looks back up at his own match listing, takes note of the table number and the start time, and heads off to find it.

He narrowly wins his first match, against a bespectacled teenager that looks quite a lot like Harry did maybe four years ago before his growth spurt. His opponent doesn’t really speak to him, though Ron doesn’t think it has anything to do with him—indeed, the teenager looked very stressed and kept looking to one side, at a woman watching that Ron guesses had to have been his mum. He lingered over his moves, using nearly ninety minutes, before Ron checkmated him around move thirty-four.

“You should have knocked him out faster,” Max says, munching on a slice of pizza while pacing the room looking at Ron’s move sheet. Tim and Jesse, both of whom he recognizes from New York, have come down too, while Alan has decided to tag along with Ron to the party. “Look here—he moved his bishop to H5, why? And you didn’t capitalize on that? You could have checkmated him four moves earlier if you’d just ignored it instead of chasing it, it wasn’t a threat—”

“I thought it was,” Ron finds himself arguing, justifying the moves he did make. “If I’d left it there, he would have been in a position to move in on my king in two moves.”

“Well, it didn’t hurt you in the end.” Max sighs. “A win is a win, and it’s a point—so think on it when you play tomorrow. Alan, isn’t it? Practice game?”

“Yeah,” Alan drawls, reaching for one of the many chess sets littered around the room. There’s one on the desk, which Jesse and Tim are fighting over right now, three scattered on the beds, even one on the TV table. Alan is also a Candidate Master, meaning he and Max theoretically equivalently matched. “Since we won't be facing each other tomorrow—I lost today, and you won.”

Ron grabs another beer from the mini-fridge and settles in to watch.

The next day proceeds much as the first one did. Ron doesn’t even have a hangover—they had all kept the drinking easy the night before, and he’d gotten pleasantly buzzed but not drunk. He starts at the boards, looking for his name, and then he has another hard-fought match with a narrow win. That night, they hole up in his and Alan’s room, this time with Sylvia and another one of her friends joining, and they go over their games over dinner.

The third day is much the same, and the fourth, and the fifth. Not all of them are wins for Ron—at the end of day five of nine, he’s sitting at two wins, a draw, and two losses—but their back-of-the-napkin calculations suggest that Ron’s probably picked up an additional ten points on his rating already. If he does well in his last three matches, he’ll pick up even more points, which feels…

Strange.

Ron likes his Elo rating. He likes what it stands for—he likes that this is a measure of chess skill, in a way, and that he’s doing well and getting better. He likes the promise it has, the way that there’s a clear ladder upwards. At 1800, he’ll get into Class A. At 2000, he’d be a Candidate Master, at least in the US—internationally, he’d get that rank at 2200. At 2400, he’d be an International Grandmaster.

He hears the way people talk about the Grandmasters—he loves the way people talk about Grandmasters, with awe and respect in their voices. He wants to be one, and for the few days of the US Open Chess Tournament, he can pretend. He can pretend like this is a future for him. He can live in a warm chess bubble, and he doesn’t have to think about the future beyond his next game and how many points he can gain towards his rating.

He only lifts his head above the water once—a few days before Harry’s birthday, when he frantically storms the hotel’s gift shop to find something appropriately Orlando-themed to send to his best friend, along with a scrawled postcard of a theme park he’s never seen. He finds a hat with round, plastic mouse ears, which the clerk assures him is very much one of the best tourist gifts he can possibly buy for his friend, and he bundles the whole thing up, uses a surreptitious Point Me spell to locate the closest wizarding post office in the city, and sends it.

And then it’s back to chess. A win. Another draw. And on the final day, a win, followed by a loud, exuberant night out at the pub with his chess friends.

And then it’s over. The US Open Tournament is over, and cold, bitter-tasting air of the hotel hits his lungs like a sharp dagger, popping the bubble he’s lived in for nearly ten days.

The lobby downstairs is packed with departing chess players, and the mood is noticeably deflated. People are tired—half of them are hungover from the parties the night before. Ron is with them, wearing sunglasses which do nothing near enough to block out the searing morning sunlight. He winces, sipping at a bottle of water.

“Where are you off to next?” Max’s voice is like a bugle next to his head, and Ron grimaces.

“I’m not sure yet,” Ron admits, suppressing a foul-tasting burp. “There’s a tournament in Dallas in three weeks—was thinking of going to New Orleans for a bit, then moving on west to Texas.”

“Sounds fun,” Max says, nodding appreciatively. “Lot of… cowboy boots out that way.”

Ron laughs weakly, suppressing a disgusting tasting burp—Max sounds dubious even as he says it. “I guess I’ll see for myself. And my girl—I bet she’d like a pair of cowboy boots. More than a chess set, anyway.”

“Hermione, right?” Max grins. “You talk about her when you’re drunk, you know. She sounds like she’d like chess, from what you said.”

“Doesn’t have the patience for it,” Ron replies, shaking his head. “That’s what she says. She likes to win at things, and the amount of losing that you have to go through to get better at chess doesn't work for her.”

“It doesn't for a lot of people,” Max says agreeably, looking around the crowded lobby. Ron has no idea how he doesn’t have a hangover right along with him, given how much he had been drinking the night before. “You think you’ll make it to the US Chess Championships in Salt Lake City in November? I’m still mulling it over—on one hand, we won’t be able to play, but on the other, being able to watch the Grandmasters play is its own reward.”

“I thought I might, yeah,” Ron replies nonchalantly. The Championships had come up the night before, with a mix of people arguing in favour of going to watch or staying home and waiting for the move sheets and analysis to appear in Chess Life. Unlike everyone else though, Ron wasn’t occupied with a job or school, plus he was already travelling, so he might as well. Even if it seemed like not a lot of people in his circle of newfound friends would be there. “I'll have to head home to Britain in December—can’t miss Christmas with my folks—so I guess it’s a bit of a last thing in America, for me.”

“Right.” Max nods. “I’ll keep thinking on it, then. A lot depends on my exam schedule in December, but I’ll see if I can make it out to watch. Either way, if you stop off in NYC on the way back, give me a ring, won’t you? You have my number.”

Ron, indeed, had the number scrawled into a notebook. He also had the numbers of a half-dozen other friends scrawled in his notebook, not that he was sure he’d ever use them. After this year, he’d go back to England, back to an uninspiring life as an Auror, back to magic, and he’d never have the chance.

He doesn’t say that.

“Of course,” he says instead. “Hopefully I’ll see you at the championships, but if not, I’ll definitely try to stop by on my way home.”

“Grand,” Max says, and someone’s calling his name. “I’ve got to run—looks like Tim’s at the front of the line. See you later.”

He shoulders his way back through the crowd, and Ron shuts his eyes and tries not to feel the time slipping away from under him.

Here is the thing about time. The more one wants it to slow, it speeds. Days slip by, faster and faster, the less one is looking forward to the end.

That’s how it feels—like a long, long run, and Ron's never liked running. He doesn’t hate running, he was fit enough to make the Gryffindor Quidditch team, but he doesn’t like running. Running makes him feel like he’s on that long, hateful year camping in the woods, freezing his bollocks off and starving, running from Voldemort.

Just as he tells Max, he heads west—first to New Orleans, where he lingers a few days in the French Quarter and actually runs into a hidebehind in the somewhat scuzzy neighbourhood that his hostel is in. He writes a long letter to both Harry and Hermione detailing the adventure, then gets the hell out of the haunted city and heads for Houston.

In Houston, the food comes as a surprise—there’s so much of it, and it’s cheap, and he lives of banh mi and pho before packing up and heading to San Antonio where he really does buy a pair of cowboy boots for Hermione. He ships them to her as an early birthday gift, spending a good hour trying to pick out the exact right pair of boots and wishing he had Ginny with him to help. All the leather looks the same to him, so in the end he picks one in a colour that reminds him of her eyes and sends them over to her with an unimpressed-looking eagle owl.

From San Antonio, where he also managed to find a used copy of Bobby Fischer’s Fifty Greatest Games, he takes a bus north to Austin, and then to Dallas. After the US Open Chess Tournament, every tournament feels small—Dallas’ thirty-odd person tournament is not even a tenth the size of the US Open. There, Ron picks up his first tournament win, with a two-hundred-dollar prize that pays for a bus ticket to Oklahoma City and then to another regional tournament in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

He places in the top eight there, not high enough for a prize but hopefully high enough to add points on the Elo rating that he can’t carry back with him into the wizarding world, and then it’s off to Phoenix, Arizona. He stops off for a week in the Grand Canyon, since all of his American friends have said that he has to see it, and sends everyone back home endless postcards of the glorious, sweeping vista.

In Phoenix, he wins another small city tournament, along with a hundred dollars as a prize, and then he heads up to Las Vegas, Nevada. He doesn’t stay on the Strip—it’s firmly out of budget, no matter the season—but in a dank motel room on the bad side of town. He doesn’t linger in Vegas, because between the dank motel room and the gambling houses everywhere, he’s sorely tempted to try his luck. It’s only by imagining Hermione’s reaction that he doesn’t, and since there’s no chess tournament there, he figures it’s better to keep heading west to see California before he has swings back east towards Utah for the US Chess Championships.

Los Angeles, then San Francisco—fortunately, both cities have friends of either Alan’s or Max’s that he can crash with for a few days, both of whom provide him with stiff competition in their regional tournaments. He comes out strictly middling in both of those tournaments, somewhere lower third of the top half, but that doesn’t matter.

He’s getting better—his rating is still climbing, even if it’s not by much. If he stays in the US, he’d probably make Class A within the next year.

He’s not, though, so he pushes that knowledge away.

In November, Ron heads towards Salt Lake City, Utah. It’s two states over from California, where he’s spent the better part of the last month. Aleem, one of Max’s friends with whom he’s crashed for the past few days in San Francisco, drives them both across to watch—he’s a grad student, so as long as he spends some time marking in the evenings, he can spare the few days.

It’s the better part of two days’ drive. Ron would have helped, but he’s pretty sure that his experience in the Ford Anglia when he was twelve doesn’t count, so he desists. Still, the company is nice, even if Aleem is quieter and more reserved than Max or Alan.

They talk chess, mostly. Aleem talks about the best Russian players—the Russians, he says, treat chess as fundamental, and their best players are lauded as heroes. Ron doesn’t quite know what to think about that, and from the tone in Aleem’s voice, neither does he.

The hotel in Salt Lake City hosting the US Chess Championship is set up like the Quidditch World Cup. It’s not as crowded as the US Open, since few people have the time to want to come to watch a tournament they can’t compete in, but the hallways are still crowded with people playing casual games. A lot of them are locals, or from fairly close by, Ron guesses.

It’s the ballroom set up as the competition space that feels done up like the World Cup. There’s a stage at one end of the room, with a small set of tables, and projected on the back using magic that Ron doesn’t understand are blown-up videos of the chessboards. This is the Championship, so there are few enough people that it’s a round robin tournament, and Ron spends the weekend in a hard, wooden chair, watching the games.

He doesn’t, for once, take notes. There’s not much point, and anyway, it’s all going to be in next month’s Chess Life, if he can find a copy in England. Instead, Ron just sits, and he watches, and he tries to make sense of the moves as best as he can. Aleem, beside him, mutters analysis that Ron largely ignores—these players are better than he is, better than Aleem is, better than anyone that Ron has ever watched play before. They know the chessboard, they know where each and every piece is, and they seem to intrinsically know the next best move. Watching high-level chess is like watching two titans directing armies, and it’s all done in silence.

The silence only serves to preserve the experience for Ron. The silence surrounds everything with amber, an almost frozen memory in time when he sits, watching four games at once, trying to analyze and think about what comes next—but of course Ron isn’t thinking about what comes next, not really. He’s thinking about the next move in the game, not next week, not next month.

He doesn’t want to think about next week, or next month. But inevitably, the US Championship comes to an end, a new national champion crowned—and Aleem drives him to the airport in Salt Lake City. They exchange goodbyes, more phone numbers, and that’s it.

That’s it, and Ron’s on his way home.

He has Bobby Fischer’s Fifty Greatest Games in his backpack.

He doesn’t bother taking it out to read.

Chapter Text

“Ron!”

The carrying voice is immediately recognizable, and Ron is struck by how much he missed it. He looks around, crowds of people—business people in suits, travelling families, students, who knows—streaming around him.

Hermione is waving at him, bouncing up and down on her toes, her dark brown curls bouncing in a loose, airy puff. She’s stopped fighting her natural curls, Ron can see—instead, she’s taken to simply cropping it short and letting it fly free. It looks good.

Harry is standing beside her, his hands in his pockets as he scans the crowd. Ron raises a hand, waving back, and makes his way over.

Hermione jumps on him, her curls bouncing all over his face. “Welcome back!” she says, and some part of Ron is perpetually surprised at how genuine she sounds as she says it. He knows that Hermione missed him—she and Harry, in the few letters they were able to get to him, both said they did. But at the same time, some part of Ron doesn’t ever believe he’d be missed. There’s not much to him, after all, nothing to make him miss-able. What about him would they miss?

Still, he returns the hug a little more fiercely than even he expects, Hermione letting out a squeak, before he turns to Harry, who pulls him into a rough, manly, one-armed hug.

“Good to see you, mate,” Harry says with a grin. “It’s been an age, and Grimmauld Place is lonely without you.”

“Gee, thanks, Harry,” Hermione replies with an eyeroll. “I moved in after Hogwarts—didn’t have anywhere else lined up, and Grimmauld Place has enough space for all of us. And technically, both Ginny and I did.”

“But I never see either of you,” Harry complains, though Ron can tell he’s not seriously upset. “Ginny’s at training camp and it's the middle of the Quidditch season—”

“She made the team, then?!” Ron interrupts. “Mum must be over the moon.”

“Yeah, she’s a reserve Chaser for the Holyhead Harpies now.” Harry grins, beaming with pride. “She’ll be first string within two years, I’d bet on it. As for your mum, well, Gin had some sort of blow-up fight with your mum over it, that’s why she moved in. She didn’t want to talk about it.”

“Because Mrs. Weasley is—” Hermione cuts herself off. “Never mind, it’s nothing.”

“If you were going to say, ‘Mum has some strange ideas about Ginny’, you might as well come out and say it,” Ron volunteers with a snort. “Mum does have some strange ideas about Ginny.”

“It's not that, it's—well, your mum always wanted a family. It was the most important thing to her, and she identifies being a woman with being a mother,” Hermione says, shaking her head, and the almost textbook-like analysis makes Ron smile, even if it is of his own mum. “She has a hard time understanding that Ginny wants a career—and a demanding one of being a professional athlete, too. Sorry, Ron, but it’s true.”

“I wasn’t going to argue.” Ron shrugs. “Look—when we were kids, Mum was always after Ginny to help with the housework. Like, we all had chores, but Fred, George, and I got like, yard work, or getting eggs from the chickens, or de-gnoming the garden. Ginny got like, helping to cook and clean. I’m not going to say we were treated equally. I was being sarcastic anyway, I knew Mum wouldn’t be thrilled. Grandbabies, remember?”

“She already has one,” Hermione points out, sounding as annoyed as if she was dealing with Mum herself. “And Bill and Fleur aren’t done yet.”

“Anyway,” Harry interrupts, looking profoundly uncomfortable. “Anyway, so even if Ginny and Hermione moved in, Ginny’s away at training all the time and Hermione’s working all the time. I might as well be living alone.”

“I’m home plenty,” Hermione retorts, smacking Harry on the shoulder. “Mostly in the evenings and at night. You just don’t see me because that’s when you’re walking your beat.”

“How is that going?” Ron asks curiously. Auror training is formally a year long, with two years of working closely with a senior Auror pair. After the war, the pairs are in short supply, so some Aurors-in-Training are assigned only to one senior Auror. “Who are you working with”

 “Julius Quigley.” Harry grimaced. “He told me on my first day that he wasn’t impressed with me—but it’s fine. He’s a good Auror, it’s just taking awhile for him to warm up to me. He thought I was riding on my fame, I think, but we’re getting on better now. In any case, we should get going. Your mum’s throwing a party for you at the Burrow, and everyone wants to hear your stories!”

“My stories,” Ron grins, but the smile feels plastered on, a fake. “Right. I have a ton of them.”

The Burrow is comfortingly familiar and depressingly mundane all at once. It was his home—it was where he lived growing up, it is where Mum and Dad live still even if everyone’s moved out, and to some part of him the Burrow will always be home. But he’s seen more of the world now, and there’s something about the same-ness of it, the fact that for so long the Burrow was the four corners of his world, that strikes him differently. He’s happy to be home, or a part of him is, but the rest of him wants to be on the road. Gone, a new chess tournament around the corner, in a new city.

He pushes the thought away. He’s back in England now, he’s home, and chess is a million miles away.

“Ron!” Mum’s been watching for him from the kitchen window, and he’s barely within the front gate when she’s throwing herself at him, flyaway red hair blowing in his face. “You’re so thin—what you’ve been eating on the road…”

“A lot of pasta,” Ron volunteers with a laugh, returning the hug. Mum smells nice—of lemon-scented dish soap and sweet baked pies, and he’s startled to realize that he missed her, and home, and all of it. “A lot of pasta with tinned tomatoes.”

Mum sniffs and shakes her head. “We’ll have you fed up again in no time,” she says, gesturing for them all to come in. “I would have liked to have your party outside, but it’s too cold. You’ll all have to squeeze inside.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Weasley,” Harry says, polite to a fault. “Is there anything we can do to help? Set dishes, so on?”

“No, no,” Mum replies distractedly, looking towards the kitchen as something starts boiling over. “No, it’s all fine, we have it handled. It’s Ron’s coming home party, I’m sure everyone wants to hear all about the trip!”

“Right,” Ron says, the grin on his face becoming rather fixed, as he follows her into the Burrow.

True to Mum’s word, it is crowded inside. Dad’s home, talking to Bill while Fleur chases a toddler around; Charlie’s there, laughing with George and Ginny over something or other. Percy is curled up in a cushy armchair, a book open in his lap that he’s not reading, since he’s listening in on Dad’s conversation with Bill. The absence of Fred is still present, but it doesn’t loom over the room the same way that it did last year.

“Ron!” Ginny shrieks, the first to catch sight of him. She’s up on her feet before he realizes it, tackling him to the ground. “You’re back!”

“You’re heavy,” Ron complains, even if he isn’t really bothered by it. “All that Quidditch training?”

“Yep,” Ginny replies, pulling back with an impish grin. “I played two weeks ago, against the Falmouth Falcons—only half a game, Jones took a Bludger to the head and was concussed and had to sit it out. She’s out for another week, so fingers crossed I get to play against the Appleby Arrows too!”

“And we get tickets, right?” George calls out. “Free tickets.”

“Ron gets this ticket,” Ginny shoots back. “You had the last one to the Falcons game, and I only get one free ticket per game. You have to pay with the masses, this time.”

“Brilliant,” Ron replies, beaming. He has definitely missed Quidditch. “How are the Cannons doing?”

“Why do you even ask?” Ginny smirks. “They’re still losing, of course.”

“Come on, come over and tell us about your Grand Tour,” George orders, and he’s looking so much better now than he did a year ago that Ron can’t help but comply.

He talks about France, about Italy, about Slovenia. He talks about food in France and Italy, about the tourists, about the beaches and sun and trekking in the Alps, about Slovenia and how it had the most beautiful hiking scenery even if he needed a guidebook and translation spell to get anything at all. He talks about Romania and Charlie and the dragons, at least until Charlie stops him—“I know all this, I’m not sure why you’re talking about it”—and then he talks about heading south through Bulgaria into Greece, and about blue skies and turquoise waters and white sand beaches in the Greek Islands.

“They put trains underground?” Dad asks at one point, fascinated when Ron talks about taking public transportation everywhere, particularly in any of the major cities. They all have subway lines, including ticketing gates, and the whole concept stirs Dad’s excitement.

“There’s one right in London,” Hermione points out, kindly not rolling her eyes. “They’re rather common—in fact, the London Underground has been running since 1863.”

“Better than buses, anyway,” Ron cuts in, before the story can go completely off the rails. “The subway lines and light rail were way better options when it came to public transit within cities—buses are awful no matter where you go.”

He moves on, talking about flying over to New York City from Athens, about glimmering, glittering high towers full of office workers and the noise of one and a half million people and the smells of food from literally everywhere in the world. He talks about Times Square, and Central Park, and walks in a dozen neighbourhoods, before he goes on to talk about Philadelphia, and Washington DC, and Columbus and Cincinnati and Chicago and all the cities he visited across the United States.

He talks about the hidebehind in New Orleans, about the little hoodoo shops in the South that are wizarding and Muggle all at once, about the wizarding districts he saw once in passing at the Owl Post Office and never explored.

“You stayed in the US the rest of the year?” George asks at one point. “That’s what, eight months?”

“Yeah,” Ron says, a little sheepish about it. “Yeah, er, the US is really big. Like, it’s hard to imagine how big it is—it’s so big that people can’t Apparate everywhere, you know? And the Floo networks just aren’t big enough to connect people, something about the density of connections needed to keep a network going, or it all collapses. American witches and wizards all drive cars and take the train and fly like Muggles, the country is just too big. So given that… yeah. It was just so big, and there were always other cities to see with their own cultures and all, so… yeah.”

“A shame,” Percy says with a wistful sort of sigh. “I had hoped you’d have visited South America, or Japan, or China…”

“You could go yourself,” Ron offers, raising his eyebrow. “You earn decent money.”

Percy shrugs uncomfortably. “The time off work and all,” he says, shaking his head. “Go on—what were you saying about the food? I had thought the Americans would mostly eat the same food as us, but tacos and burritos and chili…”

Ron laughs and goes back over a flaming hot bowl of chili he had in New Mexico so spicy he had cried right there in the diner, but since it was his entire meal budget for the day, he’d eaten it all anyway.

There is no chess in his stories. There is, instead, a vacuum filled with sights and smells and sounds, but lacking in any real substance. No one asks what he does, other than see things, hear things, and eat things, and no one seems to notice the lack.

“Hey,” Hermione says, appearing in the doorway to the bedroom that Ron has claimed for his own. Initially after the war, he and Harry had gotten a flat elsewhere, Harry saying that the memories of the war there were too strong—since Ron had gone off on his travels, however, Kreacher had finished redoing Grimmauld Place and Harry had, probably with no small amount of reluctance, moved back in. There was plenty of room for Harry and however many of his friends he wanted, and indeed it felt empty even with him, Ginny, Hermione, and Harry there. And Kreacher, who still insisted on keeping his cupboard even if Harry had said he could have a bedroom for himself.

“Hey,” Ron says, looking up from his bed. It’s a double—bigger than any bed he’s ever had before, really, big enough for two. He thinks about inviting Hermione in.

He doesn’t.

“What’s up?” he asks awkwardly. He’s seen Hermione in her night clothes before—flannel pyjamas, the hems dragging on the floor, a knit cardigan or plush robe wrapped around her top. It’s not sexy, it’s comfortable, but the memory of her curves pressed against him, even in the midst of a war, looms large in his memory.

Hermione hesitates thoughtfully, then she walks in. Ron doesn’t have a chair in his bedroom—there isn’t much in his bedroom, truth be told—so she looks around and settles herself on the newly refinished hardwood floor on by the door. “Tonight,” she says.

“Tonight?”

“You didn’t talk about chess.” Her dark brown eyes are steady on him. “In all your stories, you didn’t talk about the one thing that drove you from city to city, how you planned your trip through America, any of it.”

“I know.”  Ron looks away.

“Why not?”

“I just—” Ron stops, thinking through it. “Look, they wouldn’t understand, Hermione.”

She snorts, softly. “Of course, they won’t, if you don’t try.”

“No, just—” Ron snaps, then he shakes it off when he sees her raised eyebrow. “Where would I even begin, Hermione? Hullo, George, I spent eight months of my year off playing competitive chess with Muggles, and now I have an Elo rating of 1803?”

Hermione shrugs. “Why not?”

“I’m not—not Percy, I’m not…” Ron stops, not sure where he’s going with it. “I’m just—I’m not a competitive chess player. That’s not me.”

“The last six months were just an aberration, then,” Hermione replies dryly. “So, what are you then?”

“I’m…” Ron pauses, trying to think it through. “I’m a Weasley, I’m a Gryffindor, I’m Harry’s best friend—”

“Still defining yourself by your relationship to other people?”

“Isn’t that important?” Ron fires back. “Family is important to me—I missed everyone when I was away, and all.”

“Sure.” Hermione shrugs again. “But family can be important to you without defining you. Did you like playing chess competitively? I thought you did, in your postcards—and a rating of 1803 is supposed to be quite good, isn’t it?”

“Class A in America,” Ron says, a hint of pride in his voice. “Not internationally—the international FIDE ranking system is a bit different, they don’t come with classes or titles until 2200.”

“Uh-huh,” Hermione replies, shooting him a flat look. “So—you enjoyed it. Why not share it? Why not keep playing?”

Ron sighs, looking down and picking at his bedspread. “I’m not in America, anymore.”

“There are competitive chess clubs here too. I could find one for you.”

“Yeah, but…” Ron says, then he trails off, staring into the darkness at the end of his bed.

He should be excited to hear about being able to join a chess club here. Scratch that—he is excited. There’s a part of him that’s leaping, a terrier with its ears perked up and nose pointed right at the new idea, and all his shoved-away thoughts of flare into being. He can just about see it, a life over a chessboard, filled with strategy and tournaments and titles. He can see himself wearing a title of International Grandmaster with ease, clearer than he could ever see himself as a Prefect, as Head Boy, as a professional Quidditch player, as all those things he always, somewhere, knew were pipe dreams. This one is not a pipe dream, because he's reached out and touched it, and the strength with which he wants it is startling, scary in its force.

But how can he want this?

“What would people say?” he says. “It’s not—not a career.”

“Aren’t the friends you made abroad making careers out of it?”

“Yeah, but—” Ron pauses. “They all have day jobs, too. Mostly my friends were students, but some were teachers and so on. They worked day jobs.”

“I’m not saying it would be easy.” Hermione leans forward, wrapping her arms around her knees. “I don’t think it would be easy, and I think you’re right, you’d need a day job and to do other things too. But why can’t you make this a career for yourself? You can try, at least.”

Ron shakes his head. “What would people say? Mum, George, Ginny, Harry, even Percy—”

“Fuck what they’d say.” Hermione’s frown is quick, appearing and disappearing like a ghost on her face. “You’re not them, Ron, and I know Harry at least would be supportive. Confused, yes, but ultimately supportive. Ginny and George would tease you, sure, but they’d have your back, your dad would be fascinated by the Muggle world again, and Charlie, Bill and Percy wouldn’t care.”

“Percy would talk about how it’s a dead end,” Ron points out. “Limited career prospects and all. Mum would be the same, all about a career that can support a family and all, I need to think about the future…”

“You never listened to Percy before, so why now?” Hermione asks reasonably. “As for your mum, well…”

She falls silent, looking away.

“What about Mum?” Ron asks, a hint of challenge in his voice.

“Nothing bad,” Hermione says, looking up at him. “But, you know, not every family looks like yours. My mum works, you know, and she has my whole life. I went to a creche attached to my parents building, then school. Most Muggle families have dual income households, where both the parents work. I’m going to work, whether I have kids or not. Sometimes, I don’t think your mum understands that. You don’t have to think about supporting a family, we do.”

It’s the closest that either of them has come to talking about the elephant in the room. It’s been years—a year at Hogwarts where they fought and steadfastly ignored each other, then a year at war where they had shared a room, then a tent, with Harry and had held hands at night with nothing said at all. Then, a kiss at the Battle of Hogwarts, and then a year of awkward Something where no one had ever broached the subject. They were together, there had been an understanding that they were together, but they never talked about it. It had never seemed like the right time.

“We?” Ron can’t help but ask, and the word comes out a croak.

“I mean, I assumed—” Hermione says, scrambling upright. Between the darkness of his bedroom and her dark skin, Ron can’t tell if she’s blushing, but she’s reaching for the doorknob. “Sorry, I know we never talked about it—”

“You assumed right,” Ron says, practically leaping out of his bed to reassure her and, hopefully, stop her from leaving. “I just, we never talked about it. We, I like the sound of we!”

“Right!” Hermione says, turning around. Her voice is strained and embarrassed, but she’s still there, and her hand is off the doorknob. “I suppose we should talk about it, right? Sometime. Sometime soon.”

“I love you,” Ron blurts out. He doesn’t really know what else to say. He can tell that his face is flaming red, his skin has never been able to hide his embarrassment, and his ears are on fire. “Always have, or at least since I knew what love was, and I—er. Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Hermione says, taking a deep and shaky breath, even as an embarrassed grin is sneaking onto her face. “I love you too, Ron.”

“Even if I’m poor, and an International Grandmaster of chess?”

Hermione laughs. “Especially if you’re an International Grandmaster of chess.”

Ron doesn’t decide right away. One would think it would be that simple, but it isn’t.

Not because of anything Mum or his family would say—or, well, it is partly that. It’s one thing to say that he shouldn’t care about what they would say, but it’s another to discount their advice entirely. Mum loves him, and she has a point.

Chess doesn’t pay. He knows this. Even in America, all his friends who played seriously and competed had jobs or were planning on having other jobs. Max, half of his friends, and Aleem were in college; Alan was a teacher. The people he met in passing at tournaments had talked about their day jobs as clerks, bookkeepers, and project managers, or working in stores or offices. The number of people who hadn’t worked alongside playing chess he had met is exactly one, and it’s Boris—and Boris, as far as he remembers, is retired. He isn’t living off coaching chess.

Choosing to focus on chess doesn’t mean not working. But making chess a priority—his priority—does mean taking jobs that are not a career in the same way as his siblings do, that Mum would want him to do. It means stepping away from being an Auror, means finding work that gives him more flexibility for tournaments, and practically, it also means not having a lot of money.

He doesn’t want to be an Auror anyway. That realization is startling, but also starkly obvious. A year ago, he didn’t know if he wanted to be an Auror. Now, he knows he doesn’t. Everything about it fills him with dread, from going back to training in January, to walking the beat like Harry does, to fighting more dark wizards. For him, Voldemort was enough—and he doesn’t think that anyone should expect anything more from him in fighting dark wizards. Fighting one was enough, and he isn’t cut out for it.

And then he compares that to a chess tournament, to the eager excitement of waiting for his matches, to the thrill of trying to pin someone down on the board, to the highs and lows of wins and losses—and it just doesn’t compare. He wants to play chess. Even the few weeks since his last tournament are itching at him already, his fingers wanting the feel of plastic play pieces in them, his chess strategy books a poor replacement for actual play. He’s brought out his board a few times, but Harry is no sport at all, and Hermione really does get frustrated and quits the second she feels like she’s losing.

He misses chess, the chess community and chess competition, like a deep ache.

But when he finally decides, it doesn’t feel like a decision. Instead, it just feels inevitable.

It all comes out over Christmas pudding.

“So, Ron, are you looking forward to going back to Auror training?”

“I'm not going back,” Ron says offhandedly, his mouth full of pudding. He isn’t thinking—he was listening to Harry and Ginny talk about Quidditch. The Harpies are in a good position this season, but the Tutshill Tornadoes and Pride of Portree are also strong contenders this year. The Cannons are dead last, as per usual, but Ron lives in hope.

“What do you mean you’re not going back?” Mum’s voice is sharp, clear and cutting, and the conversation around the table dies as people look over. Ron’s still chewing, but he swallows the lump with difficulty and looks around, a deer caught in headlights.

“I just—I'm not going back,” Ron says again, fighting the urge to mumble. “I’m—I don’t want to be an Auror. I don’t think I’m cut out for it.”

The noise that comes out of Mum is a cross between a snort and a huff. “Of course, you’re cut out for it—look at everything you did in the war, look at Hogwarts—”

“But I don’t want to do it again,” Ron replies, looking down at his food. “It’s just not—I don’t want that to be my life, always chasing after Dark wizards, walking a beat. I want to focus on—other things.”

He doesn’t say chess. He doesn’t know why he doesn’t, because he should have expected the question that came afterwards.

“What other things?”

Ron shrugs. Hermione kicks him under the table, and she’s glaring at him—why is he embarrassed, why isn’t he telling them about, really, a rather innocent part of his life, why is he ashamed? And it says she’s behind him, all the way, and that more than anything else strengthens him. It’d come out eventually.

“Playing chess, mostly,” Ron says, keeping his voice casual. “I got really interested in playing professionally when I was in America—went to tournaments every month, went to the US Open and watched their national championships. I want to do more of it. Hermione said she’d help me find a club here.”

“He did really well,” Hermione says, looking around with an earnest expression on her face. It must have been biting at her not to answer for him before. “A rating of 1803—that’s very good, and without being coached or focusing on it for years… it shows a lot of potential.”

“Yeah.” Ron plasters a smile on his face. “I mean, I’ll have to get a job and all—”

“Chess isn’t a career,” Mum interrupts with a frown. “It’s just a game. How will you support yourself, support your family—”

“You’re taking it a little far, Mum,” Ron replies with a weak laugh. “I’m getting a job, but it doesn’t cost much for me to share with Harry, and I don’t have a family yet. I just need to find something that’ll let me pay the bills and gives me time to play.”

“That could still be being an Auror,” Mum points out stubbornly.

“Not really.” Harry adds quietly beside him. “Junior Aurors don’t have any control over our schedules—we’re walking the beat alongside our training partners, and we’re on their schedules. It’s all-consuming. Anyway, if Ron doesn’t want to be an Auror, that’s all there is to it. We fought Voldemort so that we had the freedom not to fight, if we didn't want to. This is why we fought.”

“I need help at the shop anyway,” George says, digging into a second portion of his own pudding. “One of my regulars left. It’s flexible enough. Ron can start in the new year when my seasonal temps leave.”

George doesn’t look at Ron when he says it, but he can feel the iron-solid support behind his words. He barely needs to think about it—a job is a job, and he probably would have just started looking in Diagon Alley or coffee shops anyway.

“Thanks,” he says, shooting a smile at George. “I appreciate it. Let me know the date and I’ll be there.”

“You can’t support a family on a shop clerk’s salary—”

“People do, Mum,” George cuts in with a frown. “People poorer than us do. Anyway, I’m a shop clerk. A glorified one.”

“I can see Ron working at the shop and playing chess professionally better than I can see him being an Auror anyway,” Ginny says flippantly, her long red hair swinging. “Obviously, if he’s not playing for a shit team like the Chudley Cannons—”

“Hey!”

“Then he’d play chess,” Ginny finishes. “Personally, I’d rather he plays something that he wins at.”

“Professional chess is very well-respected in the Muggle world,” Hermione adds, reaching over the table for Ron’s hand. “If Ron wants to try playing professionally, I’m in support, and we’ll work out the financial aspects for ourselves.”

Their hands are clasped on top of the table, there for everyone to see. It’s a weird feeling—Ron doesn’t think it’s unexpected, exactly, because no one around the table seems to be surprised, but they’d never said anything. They’d never been public. There had been one public kiss at the Battle of Hogwarts and that was it, that was all, and they’d never spoken about it to anyone. And yet, no one at the table is surprised, and no one is squealing or making a big deal of it as Ron half-feared they would, and it’s…

Nice. It’s solid.

“Then that’s settled,” Percy says, scanning the table. “I thought there was a Yule log. Did someone already eat the entire Yule log?”

Three months later, it’s Ron’s birthday.

It’s also the London Open.

The last three months have been—odd. It’s the best parts of his Grand Tour abroad, where he isn’t stressed, and there’s chess, and there’s friends, without the worst parts of being in a new place, of finding lodging and food everywhere. He’s still living in Grimmauld Place, he and Hermione both, mostly because Harry doesn’t want to live alone and Ginny always away training. He works at Weasley Wizarding Wheezes stocking shelves and ringing out customers, and sometimes he even manages the other staff. George likes inventing, likes heading up the business aspect, but Ron doesn’t mind working as an assistant manager.

In his spare time, he plays chess. Hermione finds him a club not too far from Grimmauld Place, full of old Russian men who are all too happy to have someone new to trounce, and Ron learns in leaps and bounds. Or so he thinks—having not travelled to tournaments, he can’t be sure.

This is London, and even in London, the energy of a chess tournament is the same. It’s the largest tournament in England, and there are hundreds of people crowded in the conference halls, along with dozens of tables and chess sets. People still line the carpeted hotel corridors playing games or arguing about strategy. Rolled up black bags, big enough to carry one chess mat, two sets of pieces, and a timer are ubiquitous.

Ron is already sitting at his assigned table, Hermione having pushed her way to boards early to find his name and assigned table. She’s there with him—she has no idea about chess, not more than how the pieces move, but she’s there with him, sitting anxiously in the closest available spot to his board.

His opponent arrives, slightly out of breath and offering a hand in greeting, which Ron stands and shakes. There’s a speech from the organizers, one that Ron has long since tuned out, since it’s roughly the same anywhere he goes, and then—

Then they begin, and Ron moves his king’s pawn to E4.

Chapter Text

The air in the convention hall is electric. The pleasant buzz of competition fizzles along Ron’s nerve endings, heightening everything. It’s the London Open in the year 2009, and while this should be old hat to him by now, it isn’t. It never is.

Every competition is a new one, and every single one brings the same feeling he had at his very first tournament: excitement, discovery, a certain amount of nervousness.

In the last ten years, things have changed. More things have stayed the same. He and Hermione moved out of Grimmauld Place after a couple years, to their own flat in Oxford; Ron changed chess clubs to one closely affiliated with the university there. Harry and Ginny get married, in a wedding that the Daily Prophet calls the event of the century, though the century has barely begun; he and Hermione do the same a year later in a courthouse ceremony that’s so brief that Mum accuses him of eloping and depriving her of the chance for another wedding. Ginny’s retired from professional Quidditch, moving into a role as Quidditch Correspondent for the Prophet; Ron quits his job at the joke shop when it becomes clear that he’d be working just to pay for the nursery fees for Rose and Hugo (Mum has words on that too, but Ron ignores her).

But Harry is still an Auror. Hermione still works for the Ministry of Magic, getting promoted almost every other year for her sheer competence. And Ron still plays chess.

A decade of chess, and Ron has gotten better. He teaches chess sometimes, both to beginners at the chess club and to the club at the local Muggle school. He earns a pittance for it, but he doesn’t do it for the money (though the money helps). He does it for the experience, mainly, and the training. And in ten years, his rating is sitting at a very nice 2192, a mere one win against a Grandmaster away from becoming a Grandmaster himself.

This is the London Open—the biggest tournament in England, one of the only ones where other Grandmasters can be relied upon to play.  And this year, Max is here. Max, International Grandmaster ranked at 2289, is here from New York City, and Ron is facing off against him next. Harry, Hermione and the kids are all in the crowd, and that heightens his adrenaline. They're watching him, and they're watching him do what he does best.

One more win—that’s all he needs. Just one more win, and he’ll have a Grandmaster title for himself.

“Good to see you,” Max greets him over the table with a grin. He has his phone out, and he snaps a picture. “For the others. I’m not going to make it easy for you, you know.”

“I don’t expect you to,” Ron replies, grinning back to him. “I’ll win on my own merit, thanks.”

Max quirks an eyebrow up at him. “Good luck.”

“You, too.”

They wait for the signal, and the game begins.