Chapter Text
Chapter One — Ordinary Weather, Extraordinary Boys
The first Monday of term broke grey over St. George’s Secondary, the kind of London-edge grey that made the pavements look rinsed and the sky unsure of itself. Delivery vans coughed up the hill toward the iron gates, leaving damp breath in the air. Inside the courtyard, a cluster of Year Tens argued about whether a meat-pie counted as breakfast if you ate it before eight.
Harry Potter arrived with a backpack two sizes too tired and a timetable folded into the square of his palm. He had the look of a boy who would rather observe the day than be caught by it—shoulders set defensively, chin tipped down, fringe falling over a pale line of a scar. The scar didn’t rule his face; it was simply there, the way old cracks are in old mugs—noticed if you hold them just so. His glasses were round and obstinate against the morning mist, and his green eyes—curious, watchful—kept checking the edges of things.
He would have stayed like that (quiet as a bracket) if a long-limbed boy hadn’t loped across the courtyard with a gait that turned clumsiness into cheer.
“New timetable?” the boy said, as if they’d already made friends last year and simply taken a break for summer. Copper hair broke from any attempt at order; blue eyes bright and a little too open for a Monday. Freckles everywhere, like someone had flicked paint at his nose on purpose.
“Yeah,” Harry said. “Year Ten. I’m—”
“Harry Potter,” the boy finished, delighted with himself. “Thought so. I’m Ron. Ron Weasley. Mum says never to let a new kid eat lunch alone or he’ll believe it’s a habit. You look like you’d make it a habit.”
Harry—surprised into something like a smile—followed Ron through a tide of blazers and shouts. They navigated a notice board clogged with audition flyers and football trials. When the bell keened, Ron didn’t sprint. He stretched his legs to match Harry’s pace, an unconscious accommodation that felt like kindness and not charity.
Their form tutor was a man made entirely of chalk dust and tweed who said surnames as if they were the punchline to a private joke. Harry slid into the last spare desk. Ron slid into the desk beside him as if he’d been planning to since Reception.
At break, a girl with a plait as neat as a legal document sat down opposite them and arranged her books spine-to-spine. “Hermione Granger,” she said, in the tone one uses when introducing a precedent. “We did Macbeth last term—you’re lucky you missed it, the staging was ghastly. Welcome to St. George’s.”
“She knows where the actual good pens are,” Ron told Harry with reverence. “Not the ones that explode all over your fingers.”
Hermione sniffed, but there was a shy pride in it. “If you’re both going to sit here, we’re going to have a system for homework. Colour-coded folders. Shared revision cards. I refuse to watch you flail.”
“We’re very good at flailing,” Ron said solemnly.
“Excellent,” Hermione said, smiling despite herself. “Then we can only improve.”
They were a trio by lunch, sealed by the hemisphere of a cafeteria table and a common enemy in the mushy peas. The day wore on and the school behaved like a school—bells, margins, announcements about missing P.E. kits. Yet the ordinary clattered differently, because Harry had acquired Ron’s laugh bouncing off it, and Hermione’s commentary pinning it down with a pin, and there is a way in which friendship—real friendship—changes the weather even if it cannot change the sky.
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September made its way across the calendar by tearing out pages and pretending it meant progress. There was a rhythm to it: English essays written with more sincerity than structure; a science lab where Ron, with a bravery bordering on sabotage, tried to heat copper sulphate to see if it would “do anything interesting.” (It did. The lab windows stayed open all day.) Hermione collected merits like stamps, but secretly loved it when the boys made her laugh in the library, even as she hissed at them about noise.
Harry, who had always learned to take up as little space as a person could, found himself taking up space without apology. It happened in increments. Ron shoved a second chair in for him at a crowded table without asking the table; nobody died. Hermione said, “No, you start,” when a teacher asked a question, and he did, and the answer—uneven but true—sat there on his tongue and nobody cut it off.
They stayed late sometimes. The after-school light was diluted milk in the corridors; somewhere a piano was being convinced to play scales by a patient music teacher. On those afternoons Harry watched Ron in profile, the way people look when they’re not being looked at—unguarded, unposed. Ron chewed biros to death and talked with his hands and listened with his whole face. He’d tip his head, freckles startling when he grinned, and say, “Nah, but what d’you really mean?” as if there were, in fact, a door into the middle of Harry’s thoughts and he had every intention of finding the handle.
Harry wasn’t used to anybody hunting for a handle.
Sometimes he’d glance up and find Hermione watching both of them, measuring—a mathematics of human edges and overlaps. She knew a geometry Harry didn’t yet, or pretended to.
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They invented a habit that simply became their life. Wednesday evenings: library table by the radiator, three mugs of contraband hot chocolate Hermione swore were “for medicinal purposes.” Fridays: the pitch, where Ron yelled at players twice his size and then turned around to make sure Harry had his scarf on straight. Saturday mornings: the charity shop loop, where Hermione sought old paperbacks and Ron tried on suits far too large for him and stared in mock devastation when the sleeves buried his hands.
“You look like a solicitor’s scarecrow,” Harry told him once, and Ron laughed hard enough to knock the hanger rack.
“Come off it,” Ron said, straightening the lapels with exaggerated elegance. “I’m a vision.”
“You are,” Harry said, and then had to stare very seriously at a row of mismatched teapots because his ears had gone hot.
He didn’t know what to do with the way praise felt when Ron was the one who made him say it.
---
There were little disasters to keep them honest. Ron got detention for letting off a stink bomb in the boys’ loos a week after overhearing a sixth-former sneer about Harry’s scar. “Coincidence,” Ron claimed, straight-faced, but his blue eyes waited for Harry’s reaction. Harry waited exactly four seconds, then smirked and held up a packet of mints. They split them in the corridor, breath sharp as a dare.
Hermione found them after detention—in the art block stairwell, legs out, back against cold concrete, the shared silence of people who think if they speak they might break the spell.
“You’re hopeless,” she said, but her voice was fond. “You know you smell like a crimescene?”
“Minty crimescene,” Ron said. Harry laughed—the sudden unguarded kind that made him tilt back his head and forget how rooms usually felt. Hermione, catching the light on his face, filed it away. Sparkling moments, she would have called them if she were sentimental. She wasn’t. But she noticed.
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When October made its case for autumn, the school held the usual bonfire night a week early, because the headteacher believed in supervised fire and pre-emptive safety lectures. The field was a crowd of scarves and hands cupped around paper cups. Someone had convinced the fireworks to behave.
Harry stood near the touchline, breath clouding. Ron loomed into his shoulder space without a thought, the exact warmth Harry’s body had apparently been designed to register. They watched the sky. In the blue-white flare, Harry could see the line of Ron’s jaw, the scatter of freckles, the concentration—yes, that was it, the way Ron concentrated on the world as if it were a game he’d like to win but not at the expense of anybody enjoying it.
“Which one’s your favourite?” Ron asked, when sparks drifted down like new stars.
“The ones that look like they’re falling and then don’t,” Harry said, surprising himself. “The bit where you think it’s over, and then—” He gestured upward; a fraying burst unfurled in answer. “That.”
Ron nudged his shoulder. “Always more in the middle of things than you let on, aren’t you?”
Harry thought of the cupboard under the stairs and the long summers where he tried to fit himself into the quiet. He thought of how, lately, when he looked at Ron across a room, a sort of fizz ran along the wires of his nerves like a badly behaved firework that refused to die.
“Maybe,” he said.
Hermione joined them, cheeks pink with cold. “You both smell of smoke and poor decision-making,” she announced, and then handed each a toffee. She stood between them with the contentment of someone whose plans were working out nicely, even if the plan was nothing more complex than: keep them in orbit.
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It was never one thing.
It was a bus ride—rain diagonal on the window, Ron asleep with his head tipped into the corner, Harry’s shoulder aching to be brave. Harry watched the rain double the world and thought wildly, I could let him lean. He did nothing. The ache remained, but so did the possibility, which was worse.
It was a Tuesday—Harry ill, throat raw and head cotton-wool, the dormitory smelling of disinfectant and teenage despair. Ron appeared in the doorway with a collection of objects that could only have been assembled by someone who cared more than he knew how to tidy his caring: a carton of orange juice, a battered paperback, a ridiculous woollen hat with earflaps. “Mum says vitamin C,” he said, shoving the juice at Harry. “Hermione says reading. I say hat.” He looked pleased with this division of labour. Harry, in the hat, laughed until he coughed, and then Ron sat down beside him on the bed, utterly unconcerned with germs, and read aloud in a voice that got better as it went along, the way people’s voices do when they’ve forgotten to be self-conscious.
It was a Friday—Hermione furious about a history essay mark; Ron offering to start a petition; Harry offering to help rewrite the thing; the three of them bent over a table, a small, hardworking constellation. Hermione would later pretend she hadn’t seen the way Harry’s fingers paused when they brushed Ron’s, like someone hearing the beginning of a favourite song through a wall.
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Jealousy didn’t arrive in a blaze. It arrived as the petty fog of November and the way the corridors squeezed you on rainy days.
There was Cho from the music block who laughed like glass windchimes and said, “You should come to the winter concert, Harry.” There was Lavender in the lunch queue who looped an elastic around her hair with a snap and said, “Sit with us if those two are late.” There was Romilda who said, “Your eyes are ridiculous,” and meant it. Harry, who had spent years being unlooked-at, didn’t know where to put the attention. He tried to spread it around like butter on toast. It kept pooling in the same place.
Ron developed what he called “responsibilities.” He hovered, checking notes and waiting in doorways and sitting too quickly when someone else sat near Harry. It was not subtle. Hermione wrote a list titled, Things Boys Do When They’re Not Ready to Say It Out Loud and put it in her pencil case, where she could look at it and sigh.
One afternoon, after football practice, a drama club girl with red lipstick and large opinions kissed Harry behind the bike sheds as a warm-up to a rehearsal dare. It was, objectively, a good kiss; Harry had nothing to compare it to and everything to compare it to, all at once. He felt the soft press, the certainty of it, and then the odd sensation of his own mind tilting back toward the field, where Ron’s voice was usually rising above the general noise. He stepped away and said something decent and polite—he hoped—because he was that sort of boy.
He turned, and there—stiff at the corner of the sheds, jaw crooked in an almost smile—stood Ron. For a moment, Harry saw how they must look: two ordinary boys at an ordinary school, one of them unexpectedly kissed, the other accidentally witnessing. There are crueller things to see. And yet.
“Right,” Ron said, in a voice that belonged to someone who’d expected a punch and received a clock striking midnight instead. “I’d better—coach wants—” He gestured, vague and pointless.
Harry took a step. “Ron, it was nothing,” he said, which, as reassurances go, was either true or a lie, depending on whether you measured the thing that had happened or the thing that had been revealed.
“Doesn’t matter,” Ron said, too quickly. He tried on a grin that didn’t know where to sit on his face, then left it anyway. “See you later, yeah?”
He went before Harry could speak the sentence forming behind his teeth: It wasn’t you, so it didn’t land.
Harry stayed a moment with the smell of damp wood and old chain oil, palm cold where his hand had touched brick. He felt suddenly, ferociously sure of something he was not ready to name.
---
Hermione cornered Ron by the vending machines, where the lights flickered in judgement over packets of crisps that claimed to be baked, not fried.
“I know jealousy when it sulks past like a lost dog,” she said, selecting a water she would later not drink. “If you’re going to haunt corridors, at least choose interesting ones.”
Ron stared at the machine as if it had failed him. “Hermione, don’t start.”
“I started weeks ago,” she said briskly. “The evidence is piling up: change in mood when girls pay Harry attention, an increase in hovering behaviours, a suspicious enthusiasm for ‘walking home the long way round’ if the long way includes all the places Harry might be. You’re not subtle.”
“Not trying to be anything,” he muttered. “Just—he’s my best mate.”
“Precisely,” Hermione said, softer now. “And perhaps there’s a word that goes near ‘best’ you’re afraid of.”
Ron’s shoulders went up as if he could tuck his heart under them. “He didn’t look unhappy,” he said, and it took Hermione’s very best self-control not to roll her eyes and cry, That’s not the point and you know it. Instead she said, “Harry thinks very hard about other people’s happiness before he allows his own. You know that.”
Ron tugged at a thread on his cuff until it came loose—a surrender flag from a jumper Mrs Weasley had probably repaired twice already. “What if he doesn’t—what if it’s just me?”
“Then,” Hermione said, crisp and kind, “you will still be his best friend, and the sky will not fall. But if it is not just you and you keep pretending it is, you will both be lonely in a room full of people.”
Ron made a noise like a laugh and didn’t look up. “Why are you so good at the worst conversations?”
“Practice,” she said. “And because I love you both and refuse to let you rot.”
She left him with the water bottle and the machine’s humming and the knowledge that bravery was not only for games and pranks; sometimes it was simply picking the right corridor.
---
Harry avoided mirrors for a couple of days, as if they might show him something he wasn’t ready to say aloud. He did the homework. He joined the cues. He kept noticing where Ron was—more precisely, where Ron wasn’t. The absences had weight. They bent the timetable around them.
On Thursday, he went to the football pitch after last bell, because weather didn’t care about feelings and the team did. He made himself carry cones. He made himself run laps he had not been asked to run. He looked for the bright copper of Ron at the edge of the grass and felt something ease when he found it.
They talked nonsense at first, the way boys do when the real thing is a door they can’t yet open. Harry asked about a striker who ran like he owed someone money. Ron moaned about his maths teacher’s obsession with imaginary numbers. Harry, because he could, because it mattered, nudged his shoulder into Ron’s—a brief, ordinary touch—and then let it go.
It was not a truce, because there had been no fight. It was a recognition: I know where you are.
“Cho asked if you’re coming to the concert,” Ron said, eyes on the scuffed grass.
“Dunno,” Harry said. He took a breath that hurt less than he expected. “I said I might. I wanted to see if—you were going.”
Ron scuffed the toe of his trainer. “I mean, I could. If you want.”
“I do,” Harry said, and because it felt like the right kind of courage, he added, “I’d rather you were there than anyone else.”
Ron’s head jerked up. His blue eyes did a startled, hopeful thing, as if someone had opened a window. Then he grinned, and it was the grin that made Harry feel as if the whole pitch—fences, grass, floodlights—had quietly tilted toward them.
“Good,” Ron said, as if Harry had delivered the weather report he’d been waiting on. “Because those seats are brutal and I’ll need someone to complain to.”
“Very noble,” Harry said, unable to stop smiling. The relief wasn’t neat. It didn’t fix the unspoken. But it made a space where the unspoken could live without poisoning the air.
Hermione, watching from the stands with a book she wasn’t actually reading, closed it and allowed herself a private, victorious nod.
---
December hurried in with paper chains and the smell of the music block sweating carols. Harry and Ron sat shoulder to shoulder at the concert and laughed at all the right places, clapped for Cho, and shared a sleeve of mints in penitent memory of the Crimescene Incident. Ron leaned in to mutter asides; Harry leaned back to hear them. In the low light their faces kept arranging themselves into something that would be obvious to anyone who wasn’t them.
The interval was a milling of parents and teachers and the ancient ritual of warm, flimsy squash. Cho found Harry; Lavender found Ron; Hermione found patience. Harry, who had started to understand that wanting and liking were cousins but not twins, was careful and kind and a little quiet. Ron’s eyes found Harry’s across a fizz of chatter, and something answered in both of them—simple as there you are and complicated as what now.
After, out on the steps, they breathed the cold like a cure. “You were right,” Ron said. “The percussion solo did sound like dropping pans.” Harry laughed. Their breath entangled. It was nowhere near a kiss. It was enough that they both knew it wasn’t nothing.
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Term wound itself down with exams and biscuits. On the last day, Hermione made lists for January and pretended not to care when the boys teased her. Ron tried to swap his German oral for extra P.E. without success. Harry packed his bag slowly, each object stowed with the attention of someone who, for once, did not dread the next page.
At the gate, the world was all parents and buses and the particular chaos that happens when a school empties itself into the holiday. Hermione hugged both boys with brisk efficiency and then lingered, eyes bright and bossy.
“New terms have rules,” she said. “Mine is: we tell each other the truth before the lie gets heavy.”
Ron opened his mouth. Closed it. “About what?” he said, weakly.
Hermione arched a look that would have taken down the Roman Empire. “About what we want,” she said. “And what we’re afraid of. Happy Christmas.”
She vanished into the crowd like a general disguised as a civilian. Ron stared after her, then at Harry, then down at his shoes, which had developed absolutely nothing to add.
“Happy Christmas,” Harry said. He meant: I’m not going anywhere you can’t find me.
“Yeah,” Ron said, and his grin was the one Harry had come to count on—the one that made the stupid, stubborn hope inside him sit up straighter. “See you, mate.”
They parted—boys in an ordinary crowd. That night, lying awake in separate bedrooms, they both reached for their phones, typed you home? and then—without quite meaning to—deleted the question and sent: there you are.
Which, for boys who were still learning the geometry of everything, was as good as saying: Something is happening, slowly, properly, and I think it might be us.