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He doesn’t really remember ever seeing Ron cry when they were younger. He’s sure this is just some kind of false memory: all babies cry, right? Toddlers and little kids, too. Ron musthave cried. But he can’t remember a single occasion when he did.
Right now, he can only recall two memories from childhood that star Ron: holding him, when he was only two hours old, and seeing these big blue eyes blink back up at him and thinking how strange it was to see his father’s old eyes in a face so very young, and the time Ron broke his arm falling out of a tree in the orchard. It had been Ginny who screamed then, as loud as her little lungs could, yelling and yelling for their mother, and later Ginny who had cried in the hospital, thinking the injury was her fault because she’d dared Ron to climb the tree.
Bill recalls comforting her at St Mungo’s, taking her on his lap and rocking her to try to stop the sobs and watching Ron, sandwiched between himself and Mum, white and clammy and clearly in a lot of pain and yet, somehow, not crying. Mum went in to see the Healer with Ron, and Bill took Ginny in search of sweeties from the canteen to cheer her up, so he supposes that he might have cried then, when he wasn’t in front of his big brother. And there had probably been other, less major injuries and hurts that had made him cry, over the years, that Bill hadn’t been aware of.
And maybe that, too, was the problem. Sometimes, Ron felt more like his nephew than his brother, not because he didn’t love him, but because he simply hadn’t been there whilst he was growing up. They were too far apart in age—Bill has been in school since Ron was two, and then after he finished at Hogwarts, he had left.
He hadn’t just left Ron; he’d left Ginny and the twins and Percy and Charlie, too. He couldn’t tell you what Ginny’s first word had been. He could maybe hazard a guess at her favourite colour or Quidditch team, but he couldn’t say for certain. He knew that one of the twins was allergic to shellfish but, hand on heart, couldn’t say if it was Fred or George. He knew that Percy had had a serious girlfriend for several years, and thought that maybe her name had begun with ‘P’, too, but he wasn’t sure. Charlie had lived in Romania for many years now, but he still didn’t know if he could speak the language fluently.
A proper big brother would know all of these things, just as a proper big brother would know what to do, on finding his youngest brother sobbing on the kitchen floor. A proper big brother could cope, would not think of his other siblings ex-girlfriends or minor allergies when he was supposed to be thinking about how to protect Ron from whatever evil had thrust him and his friends on their doorstep several hours ago, having clearly been tortured.
Bill is tempted, for a moment, to walk back out of the kitchen and pretend he hasn’t seen his brother’s tears. He can pretend to himself this is to allow Ron to save face, or for the sake of his pride. He’s eighteen now, an adult in the muggle and magical worlds. He wouldn’t want to be seen weeping like a baby by his big brother, like he hadn’t wanted Bill to see him crying when he’d broken his arm, aged seven.
But this is a lie. It isn’t Ron’s pride he’s thinking of. It is his own terror.
It is the fear that had kept him running for years, away from his home and his family, away from everyone that might love him. The feelings inside him, the darkness and the sadness that would not go away, no matter what he did. This isn’t a terror that can be blamed on the war, or the horrifying things Ron and Harry and Hermione, and so many others, had experienced. This fear that lived inside him was something deeper, something that wouldn’t go away even if everyone woke up tomorrow morning and found that Voldemort had been killed and all his followers surrendered. This terror stops him from crossing the room and holding his brother when he clearly needs him, because what if he doesn’t get it right? What if he can’t fix it? The fear of failing keeps him from trying, even now.
And Bill hates himself for it.
It’s Fleur who saves him. Again. Fleur, who has saved him where no one else has, yet. Fleur, who is arrogant and boastful and spiteful and a hundred other such things, but who had looked at the face of the thing that lives inside him and said in that fierce, loving voiceno and you cannot have him and he is mine, not yours. Fleur, who has pulled him out, time and time again, told him he is worth it, told him to keep going.
This time, she creeps up to him in the doorway and says, “She is sleeping, but she will be okay. We are all safe, for now.” And when he looks at her, silently questioning, she simply pushes him forwards and adds, “Tell ’im.”
And she turns and walks back up the stairs, and Bill crosses the kitchen floor and kneels down and wraps his brother in his arms and holds him as he shakes and sobs and soaks his shirt front. Ron, at eighteen, is more grown up than he is at twenty seven. Ron has seen more, known more, been through more than most people in their forties or seventies or nineties. Ron hasn’t been a child for a long, long time, and maybe that isn’t fair, but it is how it is.
Ron has to be strong for Harry, who has to be strong for the whole of Britain, or maybe the whole world. But Bill can be strong for Ron, and if Fleur was strong for him, it would work out. Somehow.
He worries, at first, that he won’t know what to say to him. But Ron can only say one word, one name, over and over, through his tears, and Bill thought of Fleur’s words and soothed and promised and swore that she would be okay. And, eventually, when the tears ran their course and Ron calmed enough to ask after the others and to see if they were safe in the cottage, and he had said that they were, and not to worry, Bill knew what else to say.
“You love her.”
And if Ron had been a child crying on the kitchen floor a moment ago, he’s entirely an adolescent when he blushes and fidgets and says, shyly and hopefully and haltingly, “D’you think she likes me, too?”
He’s about to laugh—actually laugh!—and say to him “Don’t be stupid!”, but then he remembers the past year, with Fleur and his mother and the rest of his family too, and thinks that, maybe, love does make you stupid. And Ron has a right to be young and stupid and in love, like he did and they did and the whole world does. So he bites his tongue and says, truthfully, “I think the two of you are meant for each other.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” Bill says, and Ron sort of sags against him and Bill lets him, lets him sit there with him as long as he needs to, until his breathing grows slow and soft, and then he nudges him, ever so gently, with his shoulder.
“You should get some sleep,” he says firmly, “proper sleep. In a bed. You need a rest. Fleur’s set up the guest room for you and Harry and the other lad.”
“Mm’fine here,” Ron mumbles, and this, this, is what Bill remembers from childhood.
It’s just there, suddenly, in his brain like he’d never forgotten it: images coming back from school and telling Ron, the only one who’d listen about what he’d been up to at Hogwarts. Charlie’d only want to know about Quidditch and Percy’d pretty much make him recite his lessons again and again and no one could get the twins to listen to anything but Ron would sit, rapt, as he told him about feasts and secret passages and snowball fights and cosy common rooms and a hundred other things. He’d listened and listened and listened as Bill talked and talked and talked and eventually he’d fallen into almost-sleep, and Bill had tried to send him off to bed, but he’d slumped against him and said mm’fine here in the same voice and, right now, Bill would give all the gold in Gringotts to turn back the clock to that moment.
But he doesn’t, and instead forces Ron up the stairs, into some pyjamas, under the covers. His brother is all but sleepwalking in his total exhaustion, accepting Bill undressing him and helping him in a way that would normally leave him cringing in embarrassment, but Bill has been here, too. Ron won’t remember, in the morning, and Bill won’t tell him.
And then, just as he dims the lights and pulls a blanket around his brother, Ron’s eyes open and look at him with total clarity and asks, again, “Is she going to be okay?”
“She is,” Bill promises.
“How do you know?” Ron asks.
“Because,” Bill says, “she has you.”