The first time he dreams of him he wakes up trembling. He shakes so hard he can barely get a glass of water to his lips and it spills out on the bedroom floor; the moonlight makes it shiver and shimmer like a living thing, perhaps, Ron thinks later, like the backbones of a snake.
As things become blurred by morning and sunshine, the dream wavers just on the edge of real for Ron, and he finds himself thinking of it often, of the opaque darkness on the inside of Harry's teeth, the slow slide of sweat at the nape of his neck and the hidden canyon behind his collarbone where Ron remembers pressing his mouth.
It's potions and Quidditch the next week and Ron looks at the lean boyish lines of Harry's body and dismisses it entirely. It is later that summer in the lull before the war that the dreams start again, this time dangerous and peaceful, when things are ready to slip and whither on the edge of a knife.
Who lays the first footsteps of temptation? Dreams. The Sandman tempts us down a path we never considered, toward a person we never realized.
Egypt is just like the word. Strange and slow and sultry. Ron cannot roll it on his tongue, or curse it out like English or spells. Everyone speaks Arabic, even Bill who forgets when he sees them it's, "Ron!" and then a slew of syllables Ron doesn't understand. He practices in the mirror the next day and the next, moving his lips around the b's, holding the long notes of the l's, and sliding the soft subtle s's out of from between his lips; it is almost as soft as the sound Harry makes when Ron opens his mouth to the inside of his thigh.
He wasn't supposed to come. The summer after graduating and Hermione's at the ministry and flooing in and out of bookshops, and the Bodleian Library looking up circles of protection, pentagrams of perpetration, runes, kanji, and hieroglyphs just to "be ready" as she calls it. She and the rest of Wizarding England have got that fragile desperation just around the eyes. Mum packs his suitcase and sends him off to the ministry appointed portkey zone. Somehow last minute and mangled suitcase, Harry shows up and pressed 2 fingers against the portkey and they make it to Cairo, shoulder's banging black and blue.
Cairo is not at all like he imagined. Even though he's been before he doesn't see half the things he sees now. He whispers Cairo and thinks of magic carpets, and air thick with spices and unnamedable things. He imagines the pyramids rising out above the city and men with turbans and curved scimitars trying to sell him things in dark alleyways. Instead he gets woman with curves and sunglasses wearing the latest fashions, and a clustered city around the Nile.
Here the lights are always on and sound clamors up from the street below their room. Here Ron has time to think and listen to what Harry says. They have dinner in a tiny jewel box of a restaurant all mirrors, beads and candles, and Harry tells Bill about men in fez's, zinc bars, Palm trees and Bill laughs and laughs.
Bill's older now too. He's started smoking again, and when he catch him he winks and tells you not to blab to mum. He looks out over the Nile which is thin and grey in the distances the only way he can see the difference between it and the city is the light scraping between the ripples of water.
Bill says "Look at that."
Ron looks, he squints and wants to touch the dunes beyond where they are a dark stain on the cloak of night.
"You see that," he says it slower and older, Ron thinks he can count years into that voice, Bill traces a comet trail of light around the dimness of the Nile with the end of a cigarette
"that is the lifeblood of Egypt."
The dreams come again, dreams of silence so brittle that when he breaks them all the shards come back to stab into him like knives. At other times there are dreams of broken silences the dim wind over a battleground and he doesn't want to look down at the body he's carrying. In the last dreams Ron leaps for him, crushing his body to the floor below and the only sound is of one long drawn out breath, and perhaps the silence of shattered things that cannot be put back together.
It makes sense Ron thinks that in Egypt the sandman would be the most visceral.
Sometimes Harry disappears, but he's stopped looking for him after the first couple times. He sleeps in the heat of the day and opens his eyes to Harry leaning over him and beyond him is their room of maps where every inch is plastered with Albania, Argentina, and a million other places that he can only dream of. Harry's got eyes like the deep earth places inside fairy mounds, and the green moors way out in Scotland, but even more like the Nile. Other times when he is gone Ron goes out for a drink. He finds he is thirsty all the time and it's so hot he's tried the local brews, the milk with almond pulp, and the dark bitter tea that Harry likes so much. Then he climbs the stairs back up up to the top and the room of maps to finds Harry laid out on the bed defined by the shadows and curves behind the mosquito netting and he feels want heavy and electric inside him, moving up his spine.
It is on one of these occasions that he fucks him for the first time. The heat of Egypt is not the honeyed heat of Italy, or the playful heat of California, it is a slow burn a dry heat that opens skin and lips and leaps inside. Ron draws his forearm across the slope of Harry's shoulder and the he can feel the sweat left there like blood spring up from the cut of his own hand. Ron kisses him, he lets his mouth touch the zygomatic arch of his eyebrow and the curves of jaw and hips that he's tasted in dreams. Euphoria of the spirit, Euphoria of he mind. Euphoria of the body. His hand clutches Ron's hair and draws his wrist up to tongue the 3 freckles on the underside.
Later it rains and Ron watches him lean out of the window to receive the water on his skin.
Ron thinks about dreams and the sandman and the pyramid slope of his nose, his golden robes, his eyes like the deep pools in desert caves.
He writes to Hermione about squeezing through secret tunnels and tomb robbers with missing teeth, about the Wizarding sarcophagi and the hidden doors that are still unknown to muggles beneath their glamour. He tells her about this city with the sand creeping in at every angle and the natives brushing it back out with brooms, and scarves. About he lights that never go out and the old opera houses left over from before the war, about climbing the pyramids of Giza in an invisibility cloak and sitting on the very top looking out at the stars with Harry laid out right next to him.
Before he mails the letters sometimes he leans down to touch the sand and put a little inside the letters hoping maybe she'll have a taste of what's it's like here in the city of dreams.
Ron and he fly out at midnight standing at the windowsill doubled up on the Firebolt. They take a long route out way, way over the dunes and the wells down into the Valley of the Kings. The dunes are grey and the rocks are like ornaments and gravestones marking he-who-was-king, and so on. Harry is quiet here. They are both quiet as the dust of ages settles upon them, as death creeps up around them and plays a melancholy tune. Here death is not readying himself for war.
It is in the early desert light that Ron stretches out and Harry is above him at the window, the morning is still cool and dry left over from the night. He can hear the 3 minarets waking the city for their morning prayers. He doesn't know if this is dream or real, but he's never really seen him until this morning. The light shines through his candlewax skin, his hair is a mass of night shadows, and his eyes are like that of the Nile deep and green moving. Ron thinks about loving him, about his love for him which is heavy and heartbreaking here.
The Botanical garden is a few blocks away and they sit on a bench in the spray of the fountains. All around them are hedges and shrubs and above are rows of date palms their heads hanging heavy and worshipful. Harry turns to him and says
"Do you think, when we get back-?"
"I don't know."
He nods and looks down and shuffles his trainers, leans against your shoulder.
He looks at Harry and thinks that if the Nile is the lifeblood of Egypt, then Harry is the lifeblood of England.
He could stay here forever. Bill says he loves it here, "the heat, the women" he says and winks and drinks a toast to mum. Ron makes sure to see him twice a week for a drink and they talk a little, or sit in silence.
Harry sits with a sheet spread over his sweating body, he is like a king buried under the white dunes of cotton ready to be reawakened, and there are the dark damp places where sheets enfold his body.
Do you like it here?
Yes.
I do. But I couldn't stay here forever.
Why?
I'd go mad. It's like living in a dream that won't last.
Ron knows that it is only this summer at this time. He knows it clearly concisely. He knows that he's in love and that Harry loves him here in this place in the realm of the sandman. Harry is like England, green, and growing, and full of water, and hope. When Harry comes to Egypt he spends his days walking by the Nile his friend and confidant. Ron is like Egypt, with his red fire hair, and the sands and grains the present so many possibilities.
To love here is to love then fall apart. To love here is to live in a half dream.
When the return to England Ron knows these dreams will never come again.