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Ron stirred at the insistent tapping.
At first he thought it was Bill because even though Bill was letting him shack at his place during his honeymoon, as he'd put it, he was also keen on making sure Ron earned his keep.
"You're disturbing my married sex life, Ron," he'd said with a casual pat on his shoulder. "So you better clean the chicken coop while you're here."
Ron grumbled into the pillow, mumbling too early and I'm up. Then he woke up some more and realised the tapping was coming from the window. He jerked up, blinking blearily at the snow-frosted glass. It was still dark outside, a thin sliver of blue along the horizon.
"Pig?" he muttered, and immediately stumbled out of bed to the window. He let him inside, cold air flooding in. Ron hushed Pig urgently when he hooted and circled the room excitedly. He calmed down when he nested on top of Ron's head and started pecking at his hair.
Ron tugged the folded paper off his leg. There was only his name on it. Ron recognised Ginny's handwriting instantaneously, and his insides gave a funny little jolt. He stared at the folded piece of paper, his chest tight with dread at what it meant. He hadn't seen Ginny since that night when he'd broken into Hogwarts to see her, and Ron didn't know what she could be writing to him about.
Maybe she'd finally realised what they'd done had been wrong. Maybe she'd finally realised she hated Ron for — for letting it happen.
He took a deep breath, then cautiously opened the paper. There was only one sentence.
did you find them?
Ron couldn't have described what exactly he felt in that moment. His legs went weak, and he had to sit down with a strained exhale. Pig shifted, fluttering his wings, and rubbed his cheeks against Ron's head with a soft hooting noise.
"Yeah, yeah," Ron said, reaching up to pet him. "I missed you too, daft owl."
He stared at the words on the paper and thought about not answering it. It'd be the reasonable thing to do, the right thing to do, but then Ron recalled Ginny's words from that night — it's not something that's going to end — and he jerked up abruptly and quietly rummaged through the desk for a quill. Not that Ron had a great track record of doing the right thing anyway, evidenced by the fact that he was currently stuck at Bill's place.
He scribbled down an answer: not yet. at bill's place right now.
He still hesitated for a moment before he tied the paper to Pig's leg and sent the owl off into the cold morning twilight. Ron watched it go, shivering in the lingering chill.
The day went by as the days before it. Ron did the chores Bill wanted him to, ate with Bill and Fleur, then holed up in his room for the rest of the day because there was only so long he could watch them shamelessly flirt with each other. It didn't help that veela tended to get prettier when they were in love, and Bill kept laughing at Ron for getting dazed around Fleur, and watching them made Ron think of Hermione and Ginny and several conflicting emotions he shouldn't be feeling.
He shouldn't have been thinking of Ginny at all.
Ron was used to repressing all thoughts of Ginny; he wasn't possessive, he was worried; it wasn't about Ginny dating, it was about her dating the wrong blokes. He didn't look for traces of his sister in all the girls he looked at; her eyes, her nose, her smile. But ever since they'd crossed the line that night he'd broken into Hogwarts — a line that shouldn't even have been there to be crossed — thoughts of Ginny kept sneaking in, especially when Ron was asleep.
He groaned, muffled into the pillow. He didn't have time for this. He should be figuring out how to get back to Harry and Hermione.
Ron dozed off a bit around midnight, the radio droning low on the bedside table. It was after two when he startled awake at a quiet knock, and it took him a moment before he realised it came from the window. He looked over, disoriented, expecting to see Pig again, but instead —
"Ginny?" he breathed, disbelieving.
She was standing outside the window, holding a broom. She had Pig with her, fluttering frantically over her shoulder. Ron blinked, momentarily stupefied. Then he clambered up and opened the window, the flood of cold air shocking the last cobwebs of sleep from his mind.
"It's bloody cold," Ginny said, shivering despite her thick fur-lined cloak. It was a clear night, crisp moonlight catching in her bright red hair.
"What are you doing here?" Ron whispered, darting an anxious look at the door, and stepped back automatically so Ginny could climb in. Pig rushed inside as well and flopped on Ron's pillow with a happy, excited hoot. Ron shut the window, hushed him irritably, and turned to look at her. "Did you fly here?"
Ginny shrugged, setting the broom against a wall and tucking her arms around herself beneath the cloak. Her ears, her cheeks, and the tip of her nose were all red.
"I wanted to see you," she said simply, and for a moment Ron could just stare.
"Ginny," he said, low and deliberate. "Bill and Fleur are in the next room."
She rolled her eyes, glaring. "Relax, Ron. You might think I'm a slut, but I didn't come here to have my wicked way with you. I can control myself."
Mortified shame heated Ron's face and ears. "That's—" he said, his toes curling absently against the cold wood floor. "Ginny, I don't think that."
He'd just — He could barely handle the thought of her dating, and seeing it with his own eyes had been too much, so. Ron had put his foot in his mouth, as usual. He recalled, suddenly, Ginny yelling you don't want me but you don't want anyone else to want me either. Ron realised dimly how selfish it was, expecting her not to date while he couldn't and wouldn't do anything about his feelings, and he'd been half-heartedly pursuing Hermione himself.
Then he glanced at the broom and frowned. Without thought, Ron cupped her face, his hands over her cheeks and ears. "You're freezing," he grumbled unhappily, then turned around and grabbed the blanket off his bed. "You shouldn't have flown out here." It was the middle of the night and winter, and she'd been alone, Pig notwithstanding. Ron tossed the blanket over her shoulders and bundled it around her, scowling.
Ginny scoffed, but stayed still. "Like you didn't break into Hogwarts to see me," she pointed out, and Ron could feel his ears flush with heat again because — that had been different. Voldemort's locket had been messing with his head, he hadn't been thinking right. Ginny was just reckless and willful.
She was looking up at him wordlessly, and Ron had the fleeting thought that Lavender's eyes had been brown too.
He took a step back, feeling self-conscious. He hesitated for a moment, then muttered, "Wait here," as if Ginny was in a mad rush to go off right after getting there. He snuck out of his room, his heart pounding with anxious dread. Bill and Fleur often stayed up late, doing unspeakable things to each other behind an imperturbable charm. Ron really didn't want to bump into them right now. Didn't want to risk Bill finding out that Ginny was in his room because he didn't have the faintest clue what kind of an excuse to make about why she was there. Bill had always been decent to him, but Ron was pretty sure that even his decency would swiftly die if he ever found out that Ron had always loved Ginny a bit too much and he'd slept with her once under the influence of Voldemort's locket, and twice or three times after that.
The first time might only get him beaten and disowned, but Ron was pretty sure the other two would get him buried.
He made a cup of tea, keeping an apprehensive eye on the door of Bill and Fleur's room. He didn't breathe easily until he got back to his room and closed the door.
Ginny was sitting on his bed, petting Pigwidgeon. "Thanks," she said when she looked up, taking the cup from him. "You know," she said conversationally as Ron grabbed his wand from the bedside table and cast a muffliato charm at the door just in case. "I named Arnold after you."
Ron turned to stare at her, feeling thrown. "An anagram," he said blankly.
He was half-tempted to ask why, but he had an inkling he already knew.
Ginny shrugged. "Couldn't name him directly after my brother, could I. Would've probably looked weird when I kissed him."
Ron flushed, feeling it all the way down to his toes. The things she was saying.
Another memory unspooled in his mind, of the day a few weeks after Harry and Ginny had started dating, of her saying that she'd told Romilda Vane that Ron had a pygmy puff tattoo, but not where. He made a funny noise in the back of his throat. "You did that on purpose," he said accusingly.
Ginny glanced up, her mouth quirked in a small, cheeky grin, knowing exactly what he was referring to. Ron's breath snagged, his arm twitching with the sudden urge to touch her, to brush her hair behind her ear or something. Deliberately, he went to sit on the chair by the desk instead, blindly grasping the Deluminator for something to do before his hands got any other stupid ideas. He started flicking it on and off restlessly, the small light on the bedside table flying back and forth.
In the blink of darkness, illuminated only by the light of the moon and snow outside, Ginny went on, "I thought — If I dated other people who reminded me of you, I thought it'd go away. It didn't work, so I figured if I could just divert what I felt for you into something else, I'd eventually get over it. But that didn't work either."
It's not something that's going to end, she'd said.
Ron's throat ached, the urge to hug her almost overwhelming.
Bill and Fleur are just behind the wall, he reminded himself.
Sister, he corrected himself.
But if that worked, they never would have gotten into this mess in the first place.
Ron looked at Ginny and thought about Hermione. He'd always cared about her as one of his best friends, but he would have never considered dating her before she'd shrunk her teeth, and he'd looked over at her one day and dimly thought that her smile reminded him of Ginny's. He realised it was terrible, but he didn't know if it was any more terrible than wanting to kiss his little sister.
"Hermione and Lavender both have brown eyes," he offered, rough.
Ginny glanced at him with her own, holding the cup of tea to her mouth. The wisp of heat above it dispersed as she breathed. "Yeah. I noticed," she said dispassionately.
"You know," she went on in that conversational tone that made apprehension instantly coil tight in the pit of Ron's stomach. "I wrote in that diary for weeks before Tom replied to me."
It took Ron a fleeting second to place the name — and then it felt as if his insides were trying to crawl out through his spine. "Ginny," he said with a mounting sense of horror, but she ignored him.
"I wrote about Harry, but when I looked back, it was mostly about you. The stuff you wrote to me about in your first year, the things you told me you'd done, and I — I thought you were amazing. That you could befriend even someone like Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived. The things you'd done with him.
"And then I got to Hogwarts too, but you were always busy with Harry and Hermione, and you barely spent any time with me, not like you used to at home. And I kept — I was so lonely and confused and resentful, and I hated Harry and Hermione and you too. I wanted them out of the way, and that's not really a normal feeling to have about your brother's friends."
Ginny looked at him, inexorable and unrelenting, as if she was pulling at a festered scab. Ron couldn't breathe through the feeling in his throat.
"You know what was the first thing Tom wrote to me? It's okay."
"Ginny," Ron rasped, all but begging her to stop.
She gave a laugh, utterly humourless. "That's how he got in. He was older and kind, and he listened to me, and he reminded me of you. That's why I — I couldn't bear to have you hug me. To comfort me. After."
Ron remembered that: the long, long hours of digging at the cave-in, not sure if Ginny or Harry would make it back, but stubbornly keeping at it while Lockhart annoyed him because what else could he do, and then seeing her face through the hole and reaching for her, desperately, irrepressibly relieved and happy that she was alive, she was okay. He'd tried to hug her, but she'd stepped back crying uncontrollably, and Ron had never understood why. She'd always come to him when she was crying, or hurt, or scared.
And now he knew it was because he'd been the reason Voldemort had managed to possess her in the first place.
Pig hooted softly in the following silence and hopped onto her lap. She put the cup down on the bedside table and petted him absently.
"He lied, you know," Ginny said, seemingly neither here nor there. "I wasn't completely unconscious in that Chamber, and I heard him lie to Harry about the stuff I wrote. I — I never understood why, but. Those things aren't static. He knew things that he shouldn't have known, things that happened to him decades later. And."
It hit Ron, suddenly. A memory of her saying you never wanted to want this. Was that all this was? Was that what she'd been thinking about ever since Ron had left her at Hogwarts?
"He knew, Ron," Ginny went on, her eyes gleaming suspiciously in the low light. "He knew, and I knew there was something wrong with you, but I — I just wanted you so much."
"Ginny," he burst out, darting off the chair and putting his hand over her mouth before she could say any more terrible, damning things. "Stop. Please." Ron kneeled in front of her, cradling her face. He rested their foreheads together, their breaths mingling in the negligent space between them.
"I told you it wasn't just the locket. I mean, yeah, I probably never would've without it but. All it did was use stuff that was already there," Ron said, his voice quiet and rough and urgent. He couldn't say it made all the things I was already feeling worse because Ginny would take it the wrong way.
Tears were slipping down her cheeks. Ron leaned infinitesimally forward, their noses nuzzling. Bill and Fleur, he reminded himself desperately, and kissed the corner of her mouth instead, her closed eyes and forehead, Ginny's breath hitching.
He wanted to tell her please don't cry. But he remembered another thing that Ginny had said that night: Harry doesn't like people who cry. So Ron pulled her down, dislodging Pig, who hooted indignantly before settling back on the bed, his head tilted in confusion. Ginny burrowed her face in the crook of his neck, clutching the back of his shirt. She didn't cry like she used to as a kid, when she'd put her whole body and voice into it. Instead, shivers wracked through her small frame, and she held her breath in an effort to stop, but it only made it worse, hot gasps of air on the side of Ron's neck. He swept his hand up and down her back soothingly, murmuring nonsense and pressing his lips to her head.
He ached with how much he loved her. He'd never said it. Not to anyone. He'd vaguely thought about saying it to Hermione, someday, but Ron figured it was only fitting if Ginny was the first.
Ron moved his head and whispered the words into her ear, his voice trembling with the enormity of it.
She took a gasping breath, somehow shifting herself closer to him.
She calmed down eventually, going slack in his arms, still grasping the back of his shirt. Pig hopped onto her shoulder and rubbed his cheek on the side of her head. Ginny gave a wet laugh, then made a displeased, tired noise. "Sorry," she said, moving her head and sniffing.
"Don't worry about it. You were always a crybaby," Ron said with an undercurrent of nostalgic fondness, smoothing his hand down her hair. She even reminded Ron of six years old, crying about a lacerated knee that she'd got falling on gravel, and he'd tried to clean up as gently as he could before their mum noticed.
It was insane that he still wanted to kiss her.
"Just with you," said Ginny.
Ron licked his lips. It was a stupid, bad idea, but he couldn't stop himself from saying it anyway. "Couldn't you — I mean, with Harry—"
"Ron," she sighed, sounding tired and older than sixteen. "I know Harry is your best friend and all, but he really doesn't care what I feel as long as I don't bother him with it." She gave a sardonic little laugh that twisted deep in Ron's chest, sharp and jagged. "I mean, my brothers have all almost died and been mutilated twice, and he didn't even think if I needed comforting. It was all about him."
Ron cradled her closer, protective and desperate and futilely angry. He figured he'd always known that Harry wasn't exactly — the best at considering other people and what they might be feeling or thinking. Hermione had said it might have to do with how he'd been raised by his Muggle relatives, which was — fine, he got it, but this was his little sister, and Ron had pushed her into it because he'd been too selfish to really let her go.
"Ginny," he said, hoarse and unsure. "I meant what I said. You deserve better. So if I — I mean, if we—"
Ron couldn't finish the thought. It was too impossible, too unthinkable that this could go on or work out. Cousin marriages were common; every pure-blood family had at least one or two cousins marrying. But the last time siblings had married had been sometime in the thirteenth century. And even if it were still possible, Ron didn't think their family, Harry, or Hermione would ever forgive them. Just the thought of telling Hermione that he couldn't be with her after all because he wanted to be with his little sister was making something hysterical claw its way up Ron's throat. Forget about siccing birds on him — Hermione would probably just kill him outright. And he couldn't imagine that conversation going any better with Harry.
"It doesn't have to be Harry," Ron rasped finally.
Ginny huffed out a breath and pulled back to look at him. Pigwidgeon hopped off her shoulder and went to peck at the things on the desk.
"Ron," she said, "you caught me kissing Dean and you all but called me a slut, and then you went and started dating Lavender." Her mouth thinned unhappily, and Ron felt his ears go hot with shame because, yeah, he shouldn't have said that to Ginny or used Lavender to ignore his own mess of feelings.
"You can barely stand seeing me with Harry. So if I — if we can't — I guess Harry is better than nothing." She shrugged, seemingly indifferent to how terrible that sounded. Ron had no idea how to fix it.
He stared at her, at a loss — and then they both froze when there was a sudden voice calling his name. For one terrifying second, Ron thought it was Bill, but then Pigwidgeon hooted with confused distress and pecked at something violently. The Deluminator flew to the floor and stopped next to them. Ron released a shuddering breath, feeling stupidly, inexpressibly relieved.
"You heard that too, right?" he asked as Ginny picked up the Deluminator and brought it up to their ears. "I didn't imagine that?"
"Yeah," she said, her voice trembling slightly. "It sounded like—"
They heard it again. And yeah, that was definitely Hermione's voice saying something about a wand.
"Has it done that before?" Ginny asked.
Ron shook his head, his eyebrows furrowed. He took the Deluminator from her and peered at it. There didn't seem to be anything different or wrong with it. He glanced up and met Ginny's eyes; she looked as puzzled as Ron felt.
"Try clicking it?" she suggested.
Ron shrugged and clicked it. At first, he thought it hadn't worked; the light on the bedside table had gone dark, but the room was still illuminated by a bluish, pulsing glow.
"Look," Ginny whispered, pointing, and there it was. A ball of light outside the window, hovering in the back garden.
"It looks kind of like—"
"—a portkey light, yeah," Ginny finished.
Ron realised, somehow, that this was it.
He looked back at Ginny in the wash of pale blue light, her eyes, her nose, her lips — and just for a second he hesitated, torn and pained. Then he took a bracing breath and said, "Ginny."
At the sound of her name, Ginny turned her head and regarded him quietly. "You're going," she said after a pause.
"I have to," Ron said. He never should've left in the first place. He'd promised to help, and then he'd bailed.
Ginny gazed at him for another moment, searchingly, and then she said, "Yeah. I should get back too." She got up, and Ron got up with her.
"Are you going to fly back?" he asked as he started haphazardly packing.
"What," Ginny said, picking up the broom and beckoning Pigwidgeon to her shoulder. "Want me to stay the night here instead and explain to Bill what I was doing?"
Ron grimaced. "Right."
He threw the rucksack over his shoulder, stopping briefly. "Keep that daft owl quiet, okay?"
She nodded, and Ron opened the door, glancing at Bill and Fleur's room nervously. He gestured at Ginny to follow him, and they snuck outside without incident and walked to the garden. Snow crunched beneath their feet, inordinately loud in the quiet winter night, and Pigwidgeon looped around them excitedly. As they rounded the corner, the ball of light started to float towards Ron, then seemed to go right through him, leaving a lingering heat behind. Ginny made a surprised little noise and stepped closer to him. She reached for him but didn't quite touch him, her hand lingering a hairsbreadth above Ron's heart.
"What does it feel like?" she whispered, curious and maybe a little worried.
"Hot," Ron said, rubbing his chest. He knew somehow what he had to do, but he didn't know how much time he had before the magic would fade or when he'd get another chance. "Ginny—" he said, then he looked at her, and it hit him again.
He was leaving. This was it, and this time he wouldn't come back before he'd helped Harry and Hermione destroy all the horcruxes.
Ron dragged in a breath, the air cold and stinging. He glanced at the cottage, the dark curtained windows. He hesitated for a second before he thought fuck it and tossed his rucksack heedlessly on the snow and scooped Ginny up in a tight embrace. She hugged back just as fiercely, her face pressed in the crook of his neck. Ron didn't know why he had the absurd feeling as if he was saying goodbye to her.
"Be careful on the way back," he murmured into her hair, cradling the back of her head with one hand. He meant everything else, too, in those words.
"You too," Ginny said in a small, hoarse voice, meaning everything else too. She squeezed him tighter, then took a deep, wavering breath and stepped out of Ron's arms. She cleared her throat and looked up at him, braving a smile. "This time don't come back before you're done."
"Yeah," Ron said roughly, picking up his rucksack. He kept his eyes on Ginny as he disapparated, and then he was gone.