Disclaimer: Not Jo Rowling, please don't sue
A/N: This has bee bugging me since Transitional Phase. Now it has been written and I don't know quite how to feel about it all. Ron's PoV, Future Fic, RonHermione implied.
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Playing house, that's what she calls it.
Head resting against the bare glass, eyes squinting in the unfiltered sunlight, a strand of hair caught between her teeth as Crookshanks meows at her feet and begs for attention. She says it without the smallest bit of hesitation, as though it's the only truth that can exist. He thinks he can see the tiniest hint of a smirk around her mouth but decides it's just the sunlight, golden and almost garish on her pale face.
She looks at him then, her eyes—brown slits that seem almost a thousand miles away—practically demanding he agree. Her night shirt slips dangerously low as she does so and he's eyes fall forward to the jagged line that runs curved just below her collarbone.
He turns then and walks out of the room. He doesn't look back.
-
He doesn't know now why he ever thought this would work. The three of them in one house, (a real house, not a cave or a shack or a lopsided tent out in the middle of no where) functioning like a family and if not that, at the very least functioning, regaining everything their two month stay in a ministry hospital took from them.
Now, looking around at what they have, he grimaces. A cramped kitchen that houses that muggle box of hers, the thing that always nearly empty (and drones terribly whenever he opens it and hums all throughout the night keeping him up), a bathroom with cracking plaster on the ceiling and a cloudy mirror no amount of wiping can clean. Four rooms, a few chairs and stacks of unopened boxes labeled 'books' and 'Harry's clothes'. Two mattresses and a camp bed that creaks dangerously even though Ron is sure Harry can't weigh more than a racing broom wet, not the way his shoulder blades protrude through his shirts. It feels as though dust gathers daily on the unused mantle and on the stairs threaded by weary feet, even on the kitchen counter where they eat most their meals.
But Harry still doesn't sleep, not without the aid of a potion, walking the short hallways restlessly in the night, his tired steps adding to the constant whine of the box in the kitchen, creating an endless rhythm that presses against his temples until not even his pillow over his ear can drown it out.
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Harry walks most of the day.
He wakes—if they can call it waking considering he doesn't truly sleep—early and by the time Ron and Hermione have pulled themselves from the half-sleep haze that wraps them throughout the night he has already fixed whatever they have into breakfast, mostly eating out of the pot or pan instead of off the mix-matched plates Ron's mother donated as a house warming present.
Afterward he dresses and steps out of the house and goes for a walk, down the grey streets, disappearing from under her watchful gaze as she peers after him through the windows. They never join him, having mutually decided that Harry needs the time to clear his head. This leaves them alone together for most of the day until Harry returns for lunch and then again when he retreats upstairs to write or doze, usually until dinner.
Sometimes they sit together, him besides the dusty mantle and her in a chair by the window, sometimes still dressed in their nightclothes, other times dressed as though going out were actually an option. Sometimes they talk, almost normally, about the weather or their families or Harry. Most of the time they sit in silence, her hand pressed to her chest as she looks out the window, pale face neither tanning nor burning from her brief periods in the sun. Her elbows are grey where they peek out from her sleeves and her feet dangle bare over the side of her chair.
Crookshanks darts back and forth between them until at long last he scoops him up, setting the ginger puffball firmly on his lap, calloused fingers stroking lazy circles. Sometimes though the silence is too much like the buzz that fills his night and he steps out, into the kitchen or up the stairs to his room, with its bare mattress and lone box in the corner, his clothes flung around haphazardly. He lays down then, eyes fixed intently on the ceiling and the cracks that run in twisted patterns, reminding him of the scars that run up and down his arms.
Sometimes he closes his eyes and hears the door open and she lies down besides him.
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There is too much left unsaid.
War has a way of making words rather pointless, and they have learned the value of silence. But still there are certain things that persist, things that demand formation in the way of sound. Ron's not sure he knows how to handle it, not when he was a blighter with words before and is hardly any better now. He can't say the things that are required at times like these, can't break the stillness that settles over them with a new thickness as daily as the dust gathers on the mantle.
At dinner they eat in silence, bowls of canned soup despite the summer heat, followed by cheap lemon popsicles that Hermione bought as a treat at the corner store. They sit on the front steps for a time, sticky syrup dripping down their fingers and dropping into perfect circles on the grey street. There are few passersby at this hour and the only source of light is the streetlamp at the far end of the street. Its moments like this when the words bunch up at the back of his throat, as severely as they once did only months ago, before they parted ways and he was certain he'd never see them again. Words that tangle and push against his throat like a cough making it hard to get a proper breath in.
Beside him Harry drops his popsicle onto the sidewalk with a small smile and Hermione doesn't bother to scold him for the ants that will surely be present come morning.
'How come he gets away with that while I get lectured for losing the cap to the toothpaste?'
The words pull rank and threaten to march off his tongue with accuracy that might prove fatal nowadays so Ron bits down hard on the tart ice in his hands and proceeds to spit them out onto the sidewalk.
The words land in lopsided shapes at their feet.
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It gets unbearably hot.
No one bothers with dressing anymore and for the first time in all their time living together; the three of them spend their mornings laying the feeble shade of the bent tree out back. They begin a diet of lemon ice and lukewarm soup. No one bothers with much.
At night the fridge insist on droning but Harry no longer walks the halls, perhaps it's simply too hot to trouble with something so frivolous as walking.
Ron would understand if that were it.
After all it's too hot to sit by the window and too hot to pet Crookshanks, and most definitely too hot to invite his mum over. It's too hot to think.
He takes to spending his days in bed, sans shirt, with the window wide open. He can feel perspiration beading his lip, pooling in the hollow of his throat, stinging the wounds that haven't fully healed despite time and medication. His hair, which has been in good need of a trimming for quite some time now, irritates his forehead and sticks to his neck.
He wonders for a time if it's too hot to bother with showering after a while it all becomes too much, and despite the hassle of moving, he makes his way downstairs to the bathroom where the water rattles in the pipes before coming out in an icy jet over his head.
He shivers and sighs and begins the slow process of doing away with the sweat, rubbing soap that smells faintly like his father along his arms and through his hair.
And when that is done he stays there, beneath the showerhead until Hermione bangs on the door and demands he get out.
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She takes to sleeping with him on the third day of the heat wave.
Her nightgown, white and plain and so much like the ones his mother once purchased for his sister, ride up her legs when she turns in her sleep, exposing white skin and boney knees and he sees the scar on her chest a bit more closely. She wraps around him in her sleep, arm tense as it curls around his chest, chin prodding where it rest against his shoulder, her breath hot against his neck.
Where Harry's footsteps have gone absent, her breathing takes its place in the duet with the whine from downstairs, riddling his night with holes of breathlessness, a combination of newfound restlessness and the growing feeling of claustrophobia that sets in from the moment she turns towards him in her sleep.
He feels every breath she takes, feels it against his neck as much as he can feel the rise and fall of her chest against his arm. Some nights he is sure he can even feel her scar white hot against his flesh, his own shoulder aching at the contact.
Words bubble over in his throat while she sleeps, and he wishes he were brave enough to say them when she could hear, acknowledge, accept, reciprocate.
Instead he lies still besides her, whispering truths to the cracks in the ceiling, truths he will try to forget come morning.
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Hermione cuts his hair.
It unnerves him at first, partly because no one but his mother's cut his hair up till now and partly because Harry's sitting on the lip of the tub staring, clearly smirking.
'Stop fidgeting Ron, or I'm going to end up chopping off your ear.' He highly doubts that the dull pointed pair of scissors that she dug of one of the many unpacked boxes will actually do much harm but he still and allows her work. Harry breaks into giggles ten minutes after the initial cut and Ron realizes, perhaps a bit too late that her hands are shaking. 'You know you could have just used magic.' He says coolly, and Hermione glares.
'Scissors work just fine, Ronald. Now quiet, I'm trying to concentrate.'
His shoulders slump a little then, knowing already how touchy she is over the fact that household spells and charms—like healing charms—have never come easily as testament by his dodgy hair cut and the scar that runs across his shoulder.
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He invites Harry on a walk.
The sun blares down on them and Hermione's eyes dig into his neck as she watches from her window, a lone pale face hovering behind the glass. They walk down the street, past the lamppost and around the corner. They stumble across a half-hearted park, devoid of all children or any shade and he walks over to the swing set. One of the swings is missing its seat, and he lowers himself into one of the sturdier looking ones and pushes himself off with his feet.
Harry stands just shy of him and watches. 'It's hot.' Harry says after too long a silence—but then this whole thing has been too long a silence so it doesn't really matter. He pushes his glasses up his nose as they begin to slide off and runs a hand through his hair. The scar on his forehead is too distinct for their generic surrounding and Ron shifts his eyes to the sharp blue above his head.
'Why haven't you written Ginny yet? Or Lupin?' But the questions stay locked behind his teeth and he pushes off harder.
The swing creaks and Harry sighs.
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After nearly two weeks of unrelenting heat, it rains.
The temperature drops enough to warren a blanket but it itches against his legs so he kicks it away.
Besides him she sleeps, as ever, turned away from him for the first time since she began sharing his mattress, back curved and head bent towards her chest. She wears a pair of his pajama bottoms tonight, legs clad in faded maroon instead of white and he leans towards her.
Her breathing is softer tonight, perhaps drowned out by the rain, and he strains his ears to make it out against the phantom humming downstairs. He can feel the rungs of her spine against his chest as he curls around her; feel her hipbone press sharply against the palm of his hand, her hair tickles his chin, smelling like lemon, and her breathing is a faint wisp. A word slips easily from his mouth then, and she stirs just bearably against him.
She remains still besides him and her breathing fills the room.
-
She breathes against his shoulder the next morning, fingers curling around his arm.
'What if this doesn't work?'
The words process slowly through his sleep clouded mind and the rain taps against the window in a low winding drizzle.
She says with short words the things that have been clawing away inside his throat for since before it all even started (it seems as though there is always a before now). He's not surprised, she has always been better than him.
'It might.' He yells inside his head and she shifts next to him.
Maybe she heard.
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End
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