No infringement intended.
Wild Card
"Look," Hermione says, "just calm down. I know it sounds horrible the way Rose has presented it, but really..." She shrugs, shakes her head. "Really, it's not that bad."
Heels hard to floorboards, and, Merlin, that feels good. Hermione's fingers carefully smooth the edges of Rose's letter, the parchment staining a dark square onto the bedspread. Rainwater and run-off ink. Ron wants to snatch it from her hands and light it on fire.
"Slytherin, Hermione. How the hell, how the bloody bollocksing hell fuck, does a Weasley end up sorted into Slytherin?"
Bile rises on the last word. Actual sick, burning a trail from gut to throat. Too much vindaloo, tonight. And then the shitload of naan. Because it won't be any good tomorrow, and it's the first of September, and Hugo wasn't here for his portion...
"If you'd just stop stomping..." Hermione begins, but Ron gives up the rest of what she's saying to the thud of his own feet, to the rattle of drawer pulls, the clatter of the mirror vibrating against the wall. The trinkets on Hermione's dresser shake. Necklaces sway from a morose, sculpted metal tree like empty swings in an abandoned play yard. Earrings chink against their ceramic tray. The surface of her perfume ripples inside the bottle, and it's not enough. He wants to rake an arm across it all, smash every bit of it to the floor, then kick at the shards.
"...because I've read the clan history, and if you think you're one of a long, unsullied line of Gryffindors, let me disabuse you of that notion right now. Just because they're the best kept secret..."
Secrets.
Huh.
Hugo and that bloody door. Never tight closed, but never welcome wide-open, either. The width of the crack always just enough to let the general air of "sod off, you lot" seep out. And sometimes on the other side, a sharp, bright eye waiting for Ron to pass. Hugo, and that gaze that bores through and never lets up, never lets in. Eyes like Jay-blue scales, ever weighing. Too bloody clever for anyone's good.
"You did this." Ron rounds, finger pointed. "You and that soddin' deck of cards."
Numbered flaps of coated paper, the endless hands spread out on the floor. The boy preferred cards to pudding, preferred them to any of the Wheezes his old dad would bring home from the shop. Preferred them to flying. How does anyone prefer anything to flying?
"Teaching him how to finagle..."
"Pardon me. I did what?" Her tone is still calm, but her eyes narrow, her chin tilts. She lays the letter to the side, winds a curl around a finger. "Are you implying that, A- our son is a cheat, and, B- my mothering made him so?"
"I'm saying," Ron plants his fists in the bedding between her feet, "if he'd never learned to count cards, never learned to like bending the odds to his favour, then maybe the fucking hat wouldn't have thrown him to that... that den of vipers." He straightens, strides to his wardrobe. "I'm going there."
He yanks open the wardrobe door, skins his knuckles on the edge of the shelf reaching for a jumper. Hermione scoffs. "Honestly," she says. "What are you going to do, Ron? Have it out with a hat?"
A man knows the acoustics of his bedroom. The floorboard that bounces a voice into the hallway. The spot between the dresser and the bathroom door where grumblings vaporize, unanchored, into thin air. The corner that echoes each late night supplication, no matter how softly whispered or sighed. He can tell by the way her voice eddies around him, the way it seeps into the stacks of cotton and wool, that she is just behind him now, out from under the covers and moved across the bed.
And sure enough, when he turns she's on her knees, thighs parted, back arched and chest lifted, balanced just inside the corner of the mattress. These old pyjamas, a gift from her mother on their first night home with Hugo, are one good wash away from the rag bin, and the big buttons, perfect for night nursing, her mother had said then, now slip a bit too easily through the worn, misshapen holes. Slim stripes of ivy skim places where they once hung loose, and Ron remembers when this flannel was plush and new and the quickest comfort his fingers could find on those nights after the delivery room's unstanchable blood, when he'd lie in the dark thinking it wasn't just the baby. They'd all starve and die without her.
He is reminded, and he knows she's right. Of all the news they could have received tonight, this, really, is not that bad.
He looks at her. At the brow raised in question, the finger still working that same strand of hair, and he's only a tiny bit offended that she thinks he might actually believe those top two buttons just happened to pop open by accident.
Damn, but the boy truly does come by it honest.
There's a strip of damp high on the front of her thigh. Rain and ink, soaked flannel plastered to her skin. Ron steps forward, strokes her with his thumb, "Who lets a ruddy hat call the shots, anyway?"
"It's a grand old wizarding tradition." She touches his belly with her fingertips, almost manages a straight face.
"Don't think I don't know what you're doing. That cheap ploy with the buttons— 's beneath you." His face is in her hair now, the damp spot on her thigh pressing against his hip.
"Mmm. You'd know all about that, wouldn't you..." she whispers. Then, as his hands slip under her waistband, "You'll need to write to him... later."
"I know," He says, and, for just a moment, he rests his chin in the curve of her neck.
Hugo's cracked door. His 'painted ladies' and one-eyed jacks. Ron has always pictured the Slytherin dorm rooms as morbid and broad, dark, with only cold, satiny bedclothes glinting jewel gleams out of the stone, the whole room fogged with the rich stench of privilege. And now he must install Hugo inside, one eye watching his housemates through the slit in the bed curtains, the other assessing soft aces and hole cards and the devastating strategies of imaginary opponents.
There are so many ways he could get this wrong, and only the one chance to make it right.
He can't reach his son, so he holds tighter to his wife. She must sense the shift in his touch, because the wanton kitten act falls away, and she's back to being her own steady self, kissing his temple, then the tip of his nose.
The last three buttons glide effortlessly from their holes. She's brushed her teeth, but the corners of her mouth still taste of rosewater and cardamom.
So this won't be what he anticipated, either. But if he just plays it through, it can still be so very good.
Strategically, it's always seemed far too simple to ever pay off, but maybe there is something to Hugo's long game, after all.
Hold, Dad, his son always says. Just let it ride.
.FIN.
For the TL's "I Never" challenge. As in, "I never have before, and I hope to never have to again". ;)
Thanks for reading.