They started sharing a bed the summer after.
It's not because it's comfortable to sleep like this, the curves of their spines pressed against each other, vertebrae rubbing together with a gentle buzz after every shift and sigh, limbs spilling over the edge of the tiny twin mattress. It's because Ron's not used to the hollow that comes when others leave--the empty rooms, missing scenes, and words that should have been said echoing imagined only in his head--and Harry's too familiar with the feeling.
In the shadows of the room, Ron's hair turns a murky rust colour, as though he's fading with the wallpaper. At night, after he's truly asleep, Harry wraps a piece around his index finger, and against his skin it glows.
They spend their days inside, and the morning light tugs at the crowns of their heads with watery fingers when they pass through the hall, the particles of ash and dust settling on their seats, their skin, their smiles. In the parlour, where the shadows overlap so that they are unable to tell where one hour falls and another opens, they play endless games of chess. Harry still loses more than he wins, and any victory in chess is Pyrrhic, but he's learning how to linger, how to accept sacrifice without shame, how to shelve his cleverest ploys with only the dampest spark of emotion once they're noticed.
The room is quiet except for the clack of the pieces on marble, but when Harry stands to stretch, he nearly jingles. The pawns he keeps in his pockets, buttons, and scraps of carpet and glass, tokens from a house exhaling its secrets, bump against each other, wishing to coalesce. When Harry leaves to wash up before bed, Ron pulls them from Harry's trousers, places the shriveled skins of memories in his cupped palm, trying to feel what once fit into the jagged edges and turned them smooth. He can't, so when he expects that Harry thinks he's drifting in sleep, Ron flings a hand casually over him, clinging to the flesh and everything under. Below his hand Harry's left hipbone is a seamless glass knob, and he taps it once, waiting for the tremble of an echo as proof of the rest.
August approaches and the summer sags from its own mass. Sound comes in viscous waves, distorted like underwater murmurs, and Ron slows his steps to carry the weighted days. At dinner his fork slips from his fingers, forgotten and unhurried, as he waits with the rest. Only Harry's ready, and their games are taut now as he maneuvers without hesitance, and that first August afternoon is marked with four quick losses and a stalemate. When he thinks Harry's asleep, Ron turns in bed and moves his hand from Harry's hip to heart to measure the beats, then lifts it, unsatisfied but no longer unsure.
The next night, Harry empties his pockets into the rubbish bin and cuts a lock of Ron's hair away. Each morning he ties a thread to his finger, then allows it to slip to the floor, where it glimmers against the grime caught between the yawning baseboards and hall rug. He does not move toward Ron that night or the next, only idly twirls the fresh band at dawn before setting it to drift in the dust, a reminder to his later self to remember.
He has seven strands remaining when Percy arrives and three when Ron forgives his brother for faith. The last ring he sends out the window of the train, where it flies into the smoke, and the refracting light is the reverberating thrum of a sonata's closing note, the hitch of his footsteps when he walks past Ron's bed each night.
When they return to the home for the winter holidays, they find the wallpaper beginning to take leave and the gaps between rooms widening. At night, Mrs Weasley's cries are born still onto her pillow, nine strangled sobs and lives, and Harry wonders why she doesn't choke with the enormity of it.
Ginny loses a button her blouse the second day, and Sirius is taken entirely off the Black family tapestry, but neither says a word through the long afternoons, and the days fall from Harry's hands. There's only silence and scraps now, but every room is marked with the memory of more, and that's what he holds to while the liquid present slides over his fingers and away.
Night is still the same with its battles for blankets and slowly syncing breathing patterns, though Harry's vertebrae are emerging, a string of embedded pearls, and Ron pitches forward into the wall more often than he should. Now when Ron's sleeping Harry opens his mouth onto his shoulder and screams his secrets into his skin, because there is nothing he can do to make the bits he's gathered into one, and the fragments of glass are cracking further in the chill. In the mourning he sits with a taint on him and wonders why what he can't forget can't be seen, while what he can't remember is perched proudly on his head.
After the sixth confession (I'm sorry I'm trying I'm sorry) Ron's fingers trip down his back, stumbling over the bones and falling onto flannel, and he murmurs, "It's not your fault."
And Harry sleeps in his own bed the next night, and notices not the thread of gold on the floor, but the rust encroaching on the metal frame, on his.