Mortal Instruments

Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Claire


MORTAL INSTRUMENTS

I have not slept.
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasm or a hideous dream:
The genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council, and the state of man,
Like a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.

- from Julius Caesar


Ron cannot sleep. It is not just that the unusually hot weather engenders restlessness, it is that his own thoughts will not leave him alone. To distract himself, he reads, he plays music, he even does the homework he promised Lupin he would complete over the summer, to make up for all the assignments he missed during that whole business with Grindelwald’s ghost and the Lestranges. He busies himself with Magical Geography, identifying which creatures originate in which countries, marking the answers on maps: here are griffins, here are cockatrices, here, it is said, dragons hide their treasure. But he prefers Arithmancy. Numbers never lie, and there is always only one right answer to any question.

Hermione was always so good at Arithmancy, but no, he doesn’t want to think about that, or her. Memory and imagination are his enemies now. He does not want to remember her and Harry, he does not want to imagine where they are now, or what they might be doing. He jams the heels of his hands against his eyes, quills and parchment sliding to the floor. Turning up his music muffles the sounds that he makes. In the bedroom next to his, Ginny pounds on the wall, irritated by the noise.

***

“Ron. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” He shook off his sister’s hand impatiently, without looking at her. He was staring down the platform. He had mastered, over the past weeks, the art of watching without seeming to be watching, Staring through his hair, through parted fingers with his hands lifted to his face, over the spine of a book, at his two best friends.

They were clutched together now in the shadow of an archway, Hermione and Harry, arms wrapped around each other. A little way away, Hermione’s parents, looking weary, were trying to avoid standing too close to the Dursleys. They were too far away for Ron to hear them, but he could imagine what they were saying to each other, whispered subvocal endearments and promises to write ever day.

“Disgusting,” said Ginny, a little too brightly, at his elbow. “Isn’t it?”

Ron wrenched his gaze away from the end of the platform and looked morosely at his sister. Sometime after Christmas she had stopped wearing her hair in braids, and the wind flicked the coppery strands across her face, hiding her expression. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Please tell me you didn’t invite them to stay for the holidays this year,” she said, pushing the hair away from her eyes. She looked up at him, blinking; they were standing near the back of the train, and the sharp, smoky air had stung her eyes to water.

“I’ll invite whoever I like,” snapped Ron. He didn't want to add that he’d rather be eaten alive by fire crabs than have Harry or Hermione to stay at the Burrow over the summer. Thinking it is one thing; saying it aloud would be betrayal.

He looked back towards Harry and Hermione. Hermione’s parents were still there; the Dursleys had gone. Harry would have to find his own way home. Eventually, Mrs.Granger stepped forward to pry her daughter away. Hermione bid a last and tearful farewell to her paramour and departed, leaving Harry standing alone on the platform, looking after her. Realizing, finally, that the Dursleys had gone, leaving him stranded.

Ron turned and glanced at his sister; she was wearing the bitter, satisfied smile he would never permit himself.

***

On the way home from the station Ron remembered the night that everything changed. Lying in his bed in the Gryffindor dormitory, curled on his side like a crumpled bit of parchment. His hands clamped tightly between his legs because he couldn’t get them to stop shaking; not a violent tremor, but an uninterrupted tremble, as if the bones were vibrating.

He heard the rustle of the curtains before they parted and the mattress sank under Harry’s weight. Hand on Ron’s shoulder, Harry leaned over his best friend in the dark. “Ron, could you talk to me?”

Rolling onto his back, Ron kept his hands clenched at his sides. “Pull the curtains.”

Harry drew the curtains shut around the bed and turned back to Ron. “I’m sorry you walked in on us like that. It’s not the way I would have wanted you to find out.”

“It’s all right.” Ron heard his own voice, so subdued he was a little afraid it would be lost, drowned in the soft din of Harry’s nervous breathing and his own pounding heart. “I was just surprised, is all.”

Ron looked at his best friend then, wondering what Hermione saw there. Harry was not handsome, but the vivid green eyes fringed with coal-black lashes were startling, and the gentleness in them lent unlikely grace to a face that otherwise would have been too thin and angular to be endearing. But it was, and he was, and Ron couldn’t even hate him for this, which was, out of all of it, probably the worst part.

Harry was nearly stuttering. “I know you used to fancy her, but you’re over that, right, I mean you said you were—“

“Yes, of course. Of course I am. Don’t worry about it.”

Harry’s shoulders relaxed. “She really wants to talk to you, you know.”

No, anything but that, I don’t want to see her, no, I mean it, no.

“All right,” Ron said.

When she came in, Harry left them alone to talk to each other. Ron watched him go, silent against the quiet bitterness that whispered in his ear, You are not even that, not even a threat. Hermione drew the curtains around the bed and looked down at him as Harry had done but her eyes were fearful in a way that Harry’s, for all his nervousness, had not been.

“Harry says you don’t mind,” she said,

“I don’t,” he said.

She smelled faintly of gardenia soap and when she leaned forward the ends of her hair tickled his cheek. The front of her blouse fell open and he could see the scalloped lace edging on her plain white bra, could see where the lightly tanned skin of her throat blended into the paler swell of her breasts. They curved into her body like the hopeful arc of a beckoning hand. He was hard under his pajamas and he turned his body so she would not see, but then, she wasn’t looking.

“I’m glad,” she said. “Harry really needs you and of course,” she said, “I need you, too.”

She had had her hands behind her back in the common room, like a little girl caught stealing sweets. Harry’s fingers had been on the buttons of her blouse, lips on her throat, and Ron had wondered through his astonishment why she kept her hands like that. Was she afraid to touch Harry back, was she afraid that if she started touching him, she wouldn’t be able to stop? The body was a treacherous instrument, as he well knew. Thinking of Harry’s hands sliding on her breasts, trembling over the warm skin there, Ron’s hardness grew painful. “You don’t need to worry about me,” he said. “I’m just fine.”

“You think Ginny will be all right? About Harry, I mean.”

“I’ll tell her,” Ron said. “I’m her brother, she’ll take it better from me.”

She leaned to kiss his cheek, her lips just brushing his skin, her breath warm against his temple. “Thank you.”

He was already fumbling with the drawstring on his pajama bottoms as the curtains fell shut behind her. He shoved one hand in his pants and squeezed his eyes shut but the tears came anyway, stinging and childish. He tried to summon the images that made up his customary fantasy repertoire – usually he could make himself come just remembering the way Hermione’s blouses rode up her midriff when she reached up to take books down from the higher library shelves, the occasional flashes of pale slender thigh when she stood up quickly from the table in the Great Hall – but that was wrong, wasn’t it, she was Harry’s now, and from the way they touched each other, she had been for some time.

Then again, what did it matter? Harry’s fame, Harry’s money, Harry’s Firebolt, Harry’s easy flying grace; wanting what was Harry’s had been the currency of Ron’s daydreams since he was eleven years old. He thought of Harry’s hands on Hermione’s breasts and Harry working a leg between her thighs to part them and Harry fucking her up against a wall with her long legs locked around his back and her soft moans muffled against his neck, her slim white fingers tangled in his dark hair. Tears leaked between Ron’s fingers; he bucked his hips up against his hand and came crying, his shoulders jerking, swallowing two different kinds of sobs.

***

Now Ron wonders if he somehow damned himself that first night. Jerking himself off to illicit mental images of his two best friends, how sick could he get? And like most horrific things, it was apparently irrevocable, because he can only get himself off now by thinking of the two of them together. He imagines them in all sorts of situations, in train compartments and empty fields and even Harry’s dreary bedroom at the Dursleys, down on the floor amidst Dudley’s spilled toys. He puts them through their paces as if they were puppets and perhaps he should feel some sense of power from this, some kind of control, but instead there is only a bitter and self-defeating rage. He can no longer star in his own fantasies; Harry has taken even this away from him, even this.

***

He had been wrong in thinking that Ginny would take the news better from him. When he told her, she slapped him across the face. It had not hurt that much but he had been astonished. She had been sitting on the sofa in the common room, reading a book, when he came down to tell her. She looked up at him when he began to speak, her face blank and incurious. “I had a long talk with Hermione and Harry today,” he began. “And it seems that they – that is to say they’ve –“ He cleared his throat. “They’re in love with each other,” he said, and braced himself for tears.

She sat for a moment in silence, then marked her place with her quill, set the book down carefully, and slapped him hard and open-handed across his right cheek. There was something theatrical about the gesture, as if she were a spurned woman striking an unfaithful lover, and Ron wondered in what incomprehensible manner he had managed to harm her.

“You were supposed to keep them away from each other,” Ginny said. Her cheeks were as scarlet as if she were the one who had been slapped. “You promised.”

“I never promised that,” Ron said wonderingly. He was too surprised to be angry.

“Perhaps you should have,” Ginny said. She went back to the sofa then, and picked up her book.

***

Mrs. Weasley suspects an infestation of crabweed in among her prized flowerbeds and sets Ron the task of inspecting them. It is hot, unpleasant, manual work. Each bloom must be dug up, the roots inspected, the flower replanted. Down on his knees in the dry, powdery dirt, he feels it covering his skin, mixing with his sweat, turning to paste. He is grateful when Ginny brings him a cold glass of water and an apple sliced into fourths.

“Thanks.” He sits back on his heels, looks up at her. She is leaning against the fence, eating a piece of apple, its juice staining her mouth like the lipstick her mother will not let her wear. She wears a slightly frayed sundress he remembers from the previous summer. She has grown too tall for it now. It nips her under the arms, pulls across her chest, hitches up too high around her thighs. “There’s an owl for you,” she says. “On the table in the hall. Another one from Harry.”

The water is gone. Ron sets the empty glass down carefully on the dirt. “Okay.”

“Are you going to tear it up?”

Ron looks down at his hands, splayed across his denim-covered knees. His knuckles are rubbed raw from the dirt, his nails black half-moons of grime. His fingers are too long, they look as if he has an extra set of knuckles, maybe two. Harry has artist’s hands, as beautifully articulated as poetry, all slender fingers and the correct number of joints. “I was thinking of burning it.”

“You have to talk to him eventually.”

“No,” says Ron, picking up his small trowel, “no, I really don’t.”

He is conscious, as he starts digging again, of Ginny’s curious gaze on him. “He loves you,” she says. “He won’t stop trying.”

The metal edge of the trowel hits a stone, rebounds, digs into Ron’s palm. He winces. There is a hiss, a flicker of movement, a sting of pain. Ron jerks his hand back. Two perfectly round puncture marks stare back at him from the side of his thumb: red in the centers, turning white around the edges.

Each wound contains a tiny bead of blood. The beads rise and widen, spilling over, splashing down the sides of his hand. Ginny comes and kneels down next to him. Ron is still staring at the wounds in shock. “Was it a snake?” Ginny asks, and shakes her head without waiting for his response. “No – must be poisonweed. Quick, give me your hand.”

He extends his hand to her and she takes it, puts it to her mouth, and he feels the gentle pressure start as she sucks delicately at the punctures. Poisonweed is nasty stuff – thin roots that snake underground, each tendril ending in a sharply toothed and biting flower. The teeth are venomous.

The burning pain in his hand recedes as Ginny draws on his skin with her mouth, turns her head, spits into the dirt. She is sucking the poison out of him, Ron knows; the tickle of her lips on his skin is not entirely unpleasant. When she looks back at him, the corners of her mouth are dark red, stained with his blood. “There,” she says. “All better now.”

***

That night is even hotter than the ones before. There is a bitter and scorched smell to the air as if everywhere there were bonfires burning. Ron leans out his window and opens his mouth and tastes ashes and the metallic flavor peculiar to standing water and old blood. Mrs Weasley had been horrified to hear that there was poisonweed in among the flowerbeds and Mr. Weasley burned them all just to be safe, a dramatic floral pyre. Through Ron’s open bedroom window curls the smoke of vaporizing roses.

He lies on his back in bed and watches the smoke curl over his head. He traces lazy patterns on the air with his fingertips. Harry and Hermione walk across the landscape of his half-closed eyelids; she pushes Harry down and he falls to his knees and when she climbs into his lap Ron is equally aware of the swell of her breasts and the sharp clear line of Harry’s shoulder as he leans to bite at her exposed throat and Ron opens his eyes wide and stares at the ceiling. “I am so fucked up,” he says, out loud. “So fucked up.”

He wants to go to sleep but he is afraid he will wake up touching himself and with his head full of Harry and Hermione doing unspeakable things to each other. He considers tying his wrists together or to the headboard but then he isn’t very good at knots. He is sitting in the center of his bed and looking at his hands when Ginny comes in and crosses the room and shuts the window beside the bed firmly and turns to look at him. “If you let the smoke in it’ll give you nightmares,” she says.

“Don’t you knock any more?” Ron says, but his annoyance is half-hearted. He is glad to see her. He remembers when she had shrieked out with nightmares after her first year at school, how he had slept in the bed with her, held her in his arms. The feel of her asleep, a small live thing under his hands, the beat of her heart through her skin, her hair in his face that smelled like sweat and apple soap.

She puts her hand on his chest and pushes him gently down. “You need to sleep,” she says. “I can feel you not sleeping, through the wall.”

“Oh, yeah?” Ron looks at her as she gets into bed beside him, flipping the sheet up over them both, demure and practical with her hair curling down over the neat smocked batiste of her nightgown. “What does it feel like, me not sleeping?”

She reaches out and takes the front of his pajama shirt in her small fist, holding it tightly. He remembers the force with which she struck him in the common room, the breath puffing out between her lips like a gasp. “It feels like this,” she says, and lies down, still holding his shirt in her hand, gripped tight, her knuckles white as bones.

***

He wakes up in the middle of the night anyway, gulping the hot and stifling air as if it were water and he had been dreaming about the desert. The tension in his body is like pain. He tries not to move because Ginny is asleep next to him, her face pressed into the side of his shoulder. When they were children she used to come to him to tell him about her nightmares but his are not the kind of nightmares you want to tell anyone about.

He shifts his hips and realizes he has woken up hard again, not that surprisingly since he has been so scrupulously avoiding touching himself lately. His hand is flat on his belly, fingers lightly scraping the skin. It would be easy to move his hand downward, but Ginny –

“It’s all right,” she says, her voice muffled in the still air, “go ahead.”

He doesn’t move. He’s sure he’s heard her wrong. She can’t possibly mean what he thinks she means.

She sighs, a small puff of breath against the sensitive skin of his neck. “I can hear you anyway through the walls,” she says. “I always know what you’re doing. What’s the difference?”

He still doesn’t move. He’s having another fucked-up dream, he decides suddenly. There is no end to the tricks his subconscious delights in playing on him. Martin Miggs the Mad Muggle who liked to eat bits of airplane metal for Sunday lunch had nothing on him, Ron Weasley. Ron Weasley who can only jerk himself off to mental images of his two best friends fucking. Ron Weasley who holds still without moving as his little sister pushes her way in under his arm, curls against his body, and slides her open hand past the drawstring holding his pajama bottoms closed.

The muscles in his stomach are jumping wildly and she is whispering something under her breath, something soft and soothing, and all the breath leaves his lungs in a startled exhalation as her small hand wraps around him. She arches up, kisses his cheek, sweet and feather-light. “Close your eyes,” she says, “baby, baby, close your eyes,” and the irony of being called baby by his own baby sister is not lost on him but he closes his eyes nevertheless. His arm is around her, his fingers knot themselves in her hair as her tight hand is stroking up and down the length of him and nobody else has ever touched him like this before and it is nothing like touching himself. Here remembers the maps on the wall in Lupin’s study: here there are dragons, here there are mermaids, here there is unknown country. Here there is a body all softness pressed against him and he is shaking and arching himself upward, hard, against her hand and wondering if she knows his rhythm from years of listening to him through the wall or if it is simply that his needs are simple and easy to decipher and then he doesn’t care because he climaxes with a choking gasp and it’s over.

She leaves her hand where it is, and smiles up at him. In the half-light her eyes are the color of walnut shells, dark and polished.

“Did you,” he begins. “Have you ever – did Harry…?”

“No,” she shakes her head. “Never.”

His own relief at this takes him by surprise. He holds his arm out and she tucks herself against him, hand on his chest, small feet folded under his ankles, knees interlaced with his. Ron thinks of the poisonweed that knots itself around the stems of roses and clings until it kills them both. He falls asleep.

***

At breakfast that morning, Ginny comes downstairs after Ron does, and sits down by her mother. Ron watches her as she reaches lazily for a muffin from the basket. As she moves the strap of her sundress slips down her arm and he can see the fingerprints he left on her shoulder, a row of dimming bruises against the pale and freckled skin. She glances up and sees him looking at her and he starts so badly that he accidentally cuts his hand and his mother has to reprimand him for getting blood in the butter.

***

“Never again,” Ron says.

His mother has left them to do the washing up after breakfast. Desultorily, Ginny lets the Scour-Spell cleaning brush do its work. Ron holds the drying cloth. It has a line of blue and gold and violet flowers embroidered around the edge and when his hand shakes they seem to flicker as if a wind had ruffled their petals.

“Oh, Ron,” she says. “Don’t be dramatic.”

Heat and the steam from the sink have curled her hair in damp tendrils along her temples, her neck, the pale gold furrows behind her ears. Sweat sticks her dress to her breasts and shimmers at the sharp divide of her collarbone.

“It’s nothing,” she says. “You worry too much. Here.” She hands him something. “Dry this plate.”

Ron shakes his head blindly and sets what she has handed to him down on the counter. “Don’t come to my room any more,” he says.

She raises her head, looks at him curiously. The tops of her cheekbones flush dark pink. “But what about the nightmares?”

“Go to Mum if you can’t sleep –“

“I didn’t mean my nightmares,” she says, and puts down the scouring brush and turns around to face him and there is a quizzical look on her face and then he has pushed her back against the sink and he is kissing her. The water in the sink is still running and he can hear it dimly over the coursing blood in his ears. The back of her dress is soaking wet and so is her hair and she is soft and fluid and pliant, even crushed between his body and the sink and cabinets behind her, she is opening herself, trying to find a space for him, folding herself so that they fit together. When he lets her go she says his name.

He doesn’t remember leaving the kitchen but he finds himself stumbling down the porch stairs a few moments later. The air is bone-dry, heat-stunned, fragrant with the remnants of last night’s fires. Already he is drenched in sweat and his blue shirt is like a wet rag hanging off his shoulders. Ron sets off towards the quarry, his feet kicking up puffs of dust from the dry ground underfoot, almost running.

***

The grass by the quarry’s edge grows long and unkempt and Ron lies down there on his stomach, his chin on his arms, and stares at the ground. He examines the roots of the grass blades where they poke out of the dark earth, and the determined lines of ants that march by millimeters from his hand. Harry had never been willing to kill any kind of insects, even ants; if he found them in the dorms, he would carry them to the window and release them outside. “You’re too softhearted for your own good,” Ron had told him, but now he wishes that perhaps Harry were a little more softhearted even than that.

The day wanes but the heat and dryness do not dissipate. If only it would rain. Ron lets his mind wander and he dreams of cold things: slivers of ice, clinging icicles, frozen drinks, icebergs drifting in distant seas. The bottom of the ocean, five miles down, where the water is dark green. Ginny’s hands had been cool, touching him, winding sleep and desire out of his nerves like ribbons winding a maypole. When they had been children they had played a game, picking an ordinary word and repeating it over and over and over again until it seemed to lose all meaning and sense and become a chorus of irrelevant noises: racquet, whisper, sugar, mirror, dark. Sister, he whispers to himself now, sister, sister, my sister, she is my sister.

He stays out lying by the quarry until twilight has come down blue and heavy and the air is filled with buzzing insects. They are attracted to the open cut on his hand and he soon grows tired of batting them away. He drags himself to his feet and back to the house and the front door is open and he goes in but the house is almost silent, the lights are off, where has everyone gone? Has something happened?

He stumbles into the kitchen and there they are, his father and mother and sister sitting at the table, all in a row like the Three Little Bears; Ginny is holding her mother’s arm and their father has his face in his hands and Ron stands there staring at them and dying inside although he doesn’t show it. He swallows and hears the dry click at the base of his throat. His mother has obviously been crying. “Mum,” he says. “Daddy…”

He hasn’t called his father that in years.

“Ron.” It’s Ginny’s voice, and he looks at her and her eyes are clear and warning. “Ron, it’s about Charlie.” She tucks a curl of hair behind her ears. “He’s missing in action. In Morocco. Bill owled this afternoon...”

It takes a moment for her words to sink in and then he has to grab the side of the table for support so that he does not fall over. He is drowning in relief, and that is the worst part: he will never forget this about himself. That he was relieved, that he was drowning.

***

And finally that night: it rains. The sky breaks in half and pours down water and it lashes against the windows and the walls of the house with such force that the pictures rattle on their hooks and the windowpanes shudder and seem about to crack. Ron knows how they feel.

He goes downstairs barefoot. He catches a glimpse of himself on his way out the front door. The humidity has made his normally straight red hair curl until he seems to be wearing a thorny and inappropriate halo. Outside the world is impossibly wet but it has hardly cooled down at all. The air is damp and thick, as if he were pushing his way through wet and heavy hanging curtains.

Churned to mud, the ground sucks at his feet as he crosses the garden. At the back of the garden is the shed where the tools are kept. It has a tin roof, and when they were younger, every time in rained, the two youngest Weasleys would crawl into the shed and listen to the rain pound down like Muggle gunfire.

He does not really expect that she will be there now but she is, and almost immediately her presence assumes for him the sad inevitability of a dream. He forgets the blood at breakfast, forgets his flight later. This is Ginny, translucent as a ghost in her white nightgown with her whiter face upturned to his and her hair straggling out of its plaits. She is sitting on a burlap sack thrown over the mud. He sits down next to her.

He puts his hand over hers, her thin white starfish fingers, gritty with mud. “You used to tell me,” she says, “that when it rained it meant the angels were all disappointed in me because I’d been bad.”

“I never said that!” Ron laughs, turning towards her. As his eyes adjust he can see her more clearly. Her nightgown is soaked, translucent, the lines of her body show through it like the moon through a cloudbank: pearlized, faintly blurred. The v of her collarbone pointing to the space between her rounded breasts, her nipples cold and peaked through the cloth, the plane of her belly, the darker triangle of her panties. He remembers her body pressed against him and her hands on him and is instantly hard again.

“You did,” she says. She is smiling a little, leaning towards him. Her hair, wet and heavy, slips over her shoulders. “You were a right prat.”

“Well, I’m sorry now,” he says, wanting to look away from her, but he can’t.

“You said their names last night,” she says. “While you were asleep.”

“Whose names?”

“Harry and Hermione, of course.” She blows out an exasperated breath. “ What is it you think they’re doing that bothers you so much? Just fucking all the time?”

“Ginny!” Despite everything her use of such language shocks him.

“I can’t imagine them doing much,” Ginny says. There is an brittle look to the back of her eyes, bitterness or wickedness or secret amusement. “They’re both so rigid, so stiff. Harry especially, he’s like a doll or a puppet. He walks like there’s this invisible string connecting him to the sky, pulling him up and along. I can’t see them down on the ground, tearing each other’s clothes off. Even what I did to you last night, I can’t see them doing that, can you?”

The rain has slowed. It is a dull ongoing roar now, and the small toolshed thrums as if they were trapped inside a beating heart.. He had thought the rain would clear his head but he can still think only in fragments: here the sound of her voice, there the smell of wet sacking, the ache in his own wanting body. “I don’t want to think about it,” he says.

“Do you think she takes his clothes off for him?” Ginny says softly, and she is leaning towards him, her hands following her voice, sliding across his stomach, cool and damp, rainwater slicking the path of her fingers as they slide up under his shirt. “Does she unbuckle his belt and slide his zipper down or does she let him do it, does she sit and watch him and touch herself?” She is half in his lap now, straddling him, her nightgown rucked up around the tops of her thighs. She smells of girl, damp and heavy, of sweat and rain. “You can touch me,” she says. “If you want to.”

Here there are dragons, here there are dangers. From this place no traveler has ever returned. There is the path and the precipice: he puts his hands on her wet body and steps off the edge. He grasps her by the waist, pulls her down against him, his mouth is full of her drenched hair, the taste of rain and tin, she rubs her damp cheek against his, finds his mouth, sighs into it with her lips wet and open. It is messy kissing, frenzied, unpracticed. He rolls her onto her back, trying to cushion her body with his hands and arms but she wriggles free of him, hooking her thumbs into the waistband of her panties, dragging them down.

“You too,” she says, tugging at him; their clothes are so wet it is like peeling away tissue paper, the kind that comes in expensive boxes of chocolates. They are only as naked as they need to be: his pajama bottoms down around his knees, her dress pushed up under her breasts. He is afraid of hurting her, crushing her under him, but when he draws back to get his balance her grip on him turns fierce, pulling against his resistance.

Now, she is whispering, and he thinks how small she is, and that he cannot possibly fit himself into her, that he will break her in pieces and then break himself. But they have started something now, an engine incapable of running down, a tide that has to come in. He whispers frantically in her ear that she should wrap her legs around him and she does, and her wet arms and her wet hands lock behind his head and when he pushes into her she screams out loud.

He has to bite down on his lip and grit his teeth to hold back the noise he wants to make. He is terrified he has hurt her. He props himself up on his hands, looking down at her. “Ginny – Ginny –“

She is very white but she pulls him down as she rocks her hips up to meet him. Arched under him, she is hot and soft and he gasps, his fingers digging hard into the spongy wet dirt. “Ginny, stop or I won’t – I don’t want to hurt you –“

She wraps her legs around him more tightly, pushing up against his resistance. “Please,” she says, an inarticulate little moan of a word, and he’s gone; he drives back into her with a groan and suddenly it all seems as inevitable as Arithmancy. Numbers never lie and neither does the body. Nothing has ever felt this good to him and it builds in his spine, in the back of his brain, in convulsing nerves and the desperation of his grip on her body; he wants to bring her with him but he can’t. He’s gone too soon. There is nothing merciful about the spasm that ends it, flinging him up against her and breaking him like a wave flung against jagged rock and for that moment he is blind and smashed apart and he forgets everything, even his sister, even her.

And then like a wave retreating, he returns, surging back into himself, finding that he has not been wounded after all, or even changed. He falls to the side and pulls her fiercely up against him, cradling her face, kissing her damp cheeks. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, “sorry, sorry.”

She touches her fingers to his mouth. “It’s all right,” she says. “It’ll be better next time.” Her voice is the grave whisper of a judge pronouncing a compassionate sentencing, and he hides his face against the palm of her hand, not wanting her to see his expression, his horror or his gratitude.

***

His mother smells of tears and oranges when she kisses him goodbye. They are on their way to Bill’s house in Cairo to see what can be done about Charlie, and Mrs. Weasley always packs oranges in her purse for journeys. Ron has come to associate the scent of them with traveling, only now he is being left behind. “You look after your sister,” she whispers in his ear, and Ron is able to promise, without irony or even a second thought, that he will. When she pulls back she has a disapproving expression. “Oh, Ron,” his mother wails. “You’re all over mud. What were you doing last night?”

“We were out in the toolshed,” says Ginny. She is sitting on the stairs, having bid goodbye to their parents before Ron came down. When he had passed her on his way down the steps she had whispered something to him and he had nearly fallen downstairs.

Mr. Weasley frowns. “Really, children,” he says. “You’re too old for such shenanigans.”

Ginny smiles, a demure, close-lipped smile. “I know,” she says. “We’re almost all grown-up.”


***
Arthur Weasley Disapparates first, and then Mrs. Weasley, with a final wave to her two children, follows him. Ron is left standing in the foyer, looking up at his sister where she is sitting on the stairs, the smile just fading from her face.

Then he is running up the stairs and she is running down them. They collide on the first landing with the force of a dam collapsing, sending a billion metric tons of water flooding over the countryside, tearing up trees by their roots. Ron pulls her sundress up; she is wearing, as she had whispered earlier, nothing under it. He tells her in a voice he barely recognizes to brace herself against the banister and she does it, splaying her hands behind her, her eyes on him, fixed and determined, accepting of whatever he wants to do to her.

This time he is determined to make it last longer, and while his hands fumble at the zipper on his jeans he thinks he might have a chance, but then he’s inside her and she’s arched and trembling against him and her hands are clenching and unclenching on the banister railing, the same railing they used to slide down on their way to breakfast when he was ten years old, racing each other. Her fingernails scratch against the wood now and the muscles in her legs are tensed and shaking and she says his name twice and then not to stop but it’s over, he doesn’t want to let go but he can’t help it. His arms tighten around her as he comes as if he’s afraid he might lose her, even though he knows he is the one who is falling and she is not.

He blinks sweat out of his eyes when he opens them and sees her looking down at him, looking the way she had when he had cut his finger on the poisonweed. “I keep trying to wait for you,” he says, “but I just can’t.”

She kisses his forehead. Her tone is wry. “You always did get to do everything first.”

***

The dry heat has broken, and now the days are only summer days: warm and sweaty-damp. They bring a picnic lunch down to the quarry, and eat bread and cheese and quince jelly on a spread-out quilt from the spare bedroom. Sticky with jam, they curl close, Ginny’s head in Ron’s lap, and he strokes his fingers through her hair, over and over. She turns her head so that her chin digs into the spot above his knee, and lets a ladybug crawl slowly up and down the length of her outstretched arm.

Ron has always thought of falling in love as something dramatic, a moment of epiphany, a great realization crashing in upon him, as definite as it was inexorable. Certainly he has loved before – his family, his friends, Hermione, in a way, although he is apt to dismiss that now. But the act of falling in love – well, he would know, wouldn’t he? Soul and spirit and blood and body teaming up to send his brain an unmistakable message: You are in love. Get ready to burn.

But this is Ginny. He has loved her all his life. Nothing has changed.

Or at least, that is what he tells himself. And when he burns, he thinks it is only the weather.

***

It is too hot to sleep inside the house, so they drag Ron’s mattress out onto the porch and pile pillows on it. Ginny, barefoot, jumps on the pillows, and Ron tells her to stop but she won’t so he wrestles her to the mattress and pins her there, laughing, holding her wrists.

“Get off me,” she says, as she has said a hundred, a thousand times before, petulant sometimes and laughing sometimes and tearful sometimes and breathless from tickling sometimes. “Ron!”

He leans his head down so that his hair falls down and tickles her face. “Make me,” he says.

She smiles up at him and slides her bare leg up between his, rubbing her instep along his calf. She arches her back so that her breasts flatten out against his chest. When she tips her head back he is aware of the scent of her trapped in the hollow of her collarbone, freed by her movements, the smell of soap and sweat and apples. She holds him to her with only the arch of her body, grinding her hips against his pelvis, making him gasp. “I can make you do whatever I want,” she whispers into his ear, and there is a laugh trapped behind her voice. “Now get off me.” When he looks at her, hurt and startled, she smiles. “I want to be on top of you,” she says.

She had told him it would get better and it has. She no longer grasps him blindly with her eyes shut, accepting and enduring him as if his body on hers was a test of love and patience. He has learned to climb more slowly, to hold on longer, that lessons of fire are the slowest and not the fastest kind of lessons. He spends hours on her, a whole day once, learning what she likes, how to touch her, how to kiss her and where. He knows how she curls up when she comes, as if she were protecting her heart, knows the sound of her voice saying his name when she’s gone beyond hearing herself. She holds his hand against her face when he is inside her, and once she bit him so hard that he bled. He was very proud of the bite mark and kept showing it to her until, exasperated, she hit him with a dishtowel and told him get over himself.

This dampened his pride only somewhat. Ron is amazed at himself, at his own body and what it is capable of. He can stand in front of the mirror now and not simply be aware of all the ways that he is not like Harry: not as handsome, not as graceful, not as interesting or unusual or memorable-looking. He sees instead what he thinks Ginny sees when she looks at him. He sees that he is taller than Harry, that his lashes are longer, that against skin burned brown by the sun his blue eyes stand out startlingly, their color unblurred by glasses.

Every day she tells him that she loves him: she whispers it when they go to sleep and moans it into his ear when he moves inside her and says it casually when she hands him the toast at breakfast and he is happy: dizzily, drunkenly, banging-off-the-walls happy, so happy he can hardly breathe around it, as if the happiness were a giant inflatable balloon inside his chest. Happy enough to feel sorry for Harry, magnanimous and regretful. Perhaps it was wrong of him to stop answering Harry’s letters. Perhaps he ought to make a conciliatory gesture? Giggling helplessly, he writes Harry a completely insane letter – Hey, Harry, buddy, how are you doing? Are you having a great summer? I’m having a great summer! – and posts it with Pigwidgeon, who has to be coaxed to come near him, apparently put off by Ron’s lunatic grin.

Ginny moves on top of him now, straddling him, and he runs his hands up her bare legs and watches as her eyelashes flutter. He is always watching her, because he wants her all the time, because he also wants her to be happy, because he is afraid that one day she will wake up and realize what they have done, what he has done to her, and she will hate him, and he’s afraid of what it will do to him if she does. At some point during the past weeks it ceased to be one thought in his mind: She is my sister and I love her, and became two separate ideas, as if the sharp stinging pleasure she had taught him had cut the thought in half.

She is his sister.

And he loves her.

***

They are in the kitchen; Ron is sitting on the floor, a copy of Simple Household Spells open in front of him, trying to figure out how to fix the broken leg on the breakfast table. Ginny is leaning against the cupboards, holding a wet dishtowel to her throat, letting the cool water run down into the open neck of her blouse. She is gazing down at him dreamily, her eyes full of distance and heat. “It’s weird,” she says. “With just us here, I feel like this is our house, and we’re married, like Mum and Dad when they were younger and they didn’t have any of us.”

Ron looks up at her and grins. “Yeah, but did Dad even throw Mum down on the breakfast table and -”

“Ron! Gross! Yuck!” Ginny shrieks, and hurls the wet dishcloth at him. He stands up, laughing, holding it and advancing on her, and she backs away giggling and then there is a knock on the front door and they exchange startled looks.

And who has come to our cabin here, deep in the heart of the woods, hidden so carefully away from all the world?

Silently, Ginny does her blouse up as Ron goes to the door and unlatches it. He swings it open and on the front doorstep is Harry with his hands in his pockets and a strained and hopeful smile on his face. Harry who is shorter than Ron had remembered but otherwise just the same, maybe a little thinner which adds to the refinement of his face, makes him more beautiful, tragic, and appealing, and therefore even more deserving of a sharp kick in the kneecap. Ron restrains himself, but barely. “Harry…what are you doing here?”

The hopeful smile fades slightly. “I got your letter,” Harry says. “I hoped – I mean, I wanted to see you.”

“Oh,” says Ron. He opens the door a little wider. “Do you want to come in?”

Harry is fidgeting now. “Is there anyone else home?”

“Ginny. She’s in the kitchen.”

“I was hoping I could talk to you alone,” Harry says. “Maybe we could take a walk? Down to the quarry, or –“

“Not the quarry,” Ron says, sharply. He sees the misery in Harry’s face, and relents. “We can walk into town. I need to pick up some things anyway.” He is aware of Ginny still standing in the kitchen, staring at them both, the wet cloth drying in her hands. “Come on, Harry -let’s go.”

***

They take a shortcut through the fields behind the house. There are scattered copses of trees there, and they duck under the branches and walk where it is cooler and the air smells of leaves and heated dirt.

They have come to a clearing in the center of which is an enormous oak tree. Ron leans against it, where the cool shade is filled with the rustle of leaves. Deep grooves are scratched into the tree’s trunk: the gashes are light around the edges with age, dark in the middle as if they still bled sap. Ron traces the lines of them lightly with his finger, remembering how they used to come here every summer and cut their heights into the bole: Harry and Ginny and himself, until they stopped growing. The last incisions remain as a memorial: Ron the tallest, Harry several inches shorter, and Ginny, there at his shoulder’s level. “I remember,” he says, and looks up at Harry. “I’m sorry I didn’t write you back.”

Harry shrugs. He is holding a torn-off branch in his hand; the leaves that cluster on it are the same dark, glossy green as his eyes. “It’s all right,” he says, as he has always said. “You were upset.”

“I’m not any more,” says Ron.

Harry looks up at that, and meditatively, at Ron. “No,” he says. “You seem different.”

Ron flushes. Surely what he has done showed on his face. He feels guilt woven through and through him like the color striped through rock candy. He wants to look away.

“Hermione and I broke up," Harry says.

He is picking the leaves off the branch he is holding, one by one, with a methodical dispassion.

Ron leans back against the trunk of the tree. The gouged and uneven bark is rough against his back. “You did?”

Harry’s expression is wry. "She didn’t tell you?” He reads Ron’s look, sighs, "You didn’t read her letters either.”

“No," Ron says, and then, “I’ve been – distracted."

It’s not much of a defense, and he knows it. Harry, however, hardly seems to hear him.

"It seemed the best thing to do," he says. “Our friendship, really, is the most important thing, don’t you think? We decided it wasn’t worth risking. It’s the three of us, that’s what matters.”

Ron speaks hesitantly. "It’s not because of me, is it?”

"No." Harry’s gaze is level. In his eyes is a sort of fatalistic bitterness: the quiet anger of someone who has learned that the universe will always conspire to deprive him of everything he loves, and that no one else will ever believe that this is happening. "It was just something we decided on our own."

Ron takes a step forward, lays his hand on Harry’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he says, and he means it.

***

Harry bids Ron a slightly awkward farewell on the porch of the Weasley house, but it is evident in the way the boys talk and look at each other that their friendship is repairing itself. Ron can look Harry in the eye again. When they hug good-bye, Harry leans into the awkward caress a little too hard, as if he cannot quite sustain the enormity of his relief on his own.

Ron walks from the sunlight of the porch into the cool shade of the foyer and the first thing he sees is Ginny sitting on the lowest step of the stairs. She is still holding the dishtowel, and it has left a damp patch of clear fabric on the front of her white shirt. She stands up when he comes in and he thinks helplessly that she is always the most lucid thing in a room to him, as if her presence faded her surroundings, depriving them of clarity. She is all he wants to look at and he can’t remember when it happened but he knows that it did.

"Harry’s gone,” he says.

“I know. I was watching out the window.” Her tone is carefully neutral. “They broke up, then?”

“Yes.”

She says nothing. It is so quiet that Ron can hear the clock ticking in the kitchen and the drip of water from the sink. She turns her head to look away from him and her hair brushes her cheek. It is thick and fine and the same weight and texture and color as Bill’s and Charlie’s, so why is it that he notices the way light shines through it, the way that the scarlet blends to strawberry gold at her temples, isn’t it the same hair he has himself?

"I suppose,” she says, finally, “You won’t want to keep on, then? You’ll want to stop.”

He looks at her in disbelief; how can she think this is something that can be ended, a clock that can be stopped, a spell that can be broken with a simple finite incantatem?

She lifts her chin, smiles at him. "It’s all right,” she says. She reaches up, touches his cheek. “I expected it.”

Anger and betrayal cut off any reply he might make. He stands there as if petrified as she walks past him and goes into the kitchen. He hears the sound of the water as it begins to run in the sink. He hears the clink of dishes. She has gone to clean up breakfast, as if nothing had happened.

His feet begin to move. They carry him into the kitchen. She is standing at the sink, her back to him, her hands in the water. He comes up behind her, wraps his arms around her too tightly. She tries to say something but he is compressing her ribcage and it comes out as a gasp. He presses her hard against the counter, his cheek against the nape of her neck, his fingers on the buttons of her blouse. They are slippery with water and soap and he pulls at the fabric, tearing it. She grasps his hands with hers, tugs on them hard. He is resistant as she draws his hands up to her face. She kisses his fingers, closes his hands inside her own, holds them tightly. She tells him not to worry, there is nothing to worry about. Her voice is soft and tinged with pity.

***

An ibis arrives from Cairo, carrying a letter from their mother. Charlie is much better, his injuries almost healed; he is up and around and walking with a cane. “We will be coming home TOMORROW” Mrs. Weasley has written at the bottom of the letter, and Ron stares bleakly at his mother’s familiar capitals and crumples the letter up in his fist.

Ginny, coming down the hallway with a pile of laundry from the washing line folded in her arms, stares at him. ‘What on earth’s the matter?”

Silently, Ron shows her the letter.

She shrugs. “Well, they had to come home sometime.”

Ron can feel his lips draw back over his teeth. “Have you even thought about what we’re going to do?”

Ginny looks irritated. “Don’t snarl at me, Ron.” She hefts the laundry in her arms and considers. “What do you mean, what are we going to do? What did you have in mind, anyway? Telling them? Some kind of big family council?” She sees the look on his face and laughs. “You can’t be serious.”

“They’ll know,” Ron says. “They’ll figure it out.”

“They won’t notice anything unless you tell them. Which I know you’re not stupid enough to actually do –“

“Don’t call me stupid, Virginia –“

“Then don’t act stupid, Ron Weasley!” She is glaring at him and everything is suddenly so very normal, here they are, a brother and sister shouting at each other in the hallway of their house. A perfectly ordinary fight, except for what they are fighting about. “They don’t need to know! They don’t ever need to know!”

Ron knows she is right, but he doesn’t care. There is a knot of pain in his chest and it is tightening with every word she speaks. “We can’t hide it from them forever, you know.”

Ginny turns her head away from him. He imagines he can see the edge of her smile catch the light, like the glint off the surface of a knife. “I wish you wouldn't talk about forever,” she says.

***

Ginny is right about their parents. They notice nothing. They arrive with hugs and kisses, their clothes smelling of smoke and honey and city dirt. Ginny offers them tea in the kitchen, and Ron helps her make it (as if it is their kitchen, he thinks with a pang, and their parents are guests) and their mother tells a story about how Arthur saw a doll in the marketplace in Marrakesh and wanted to buy it for Ginny but of course, she adds with a warm smile, she reminded him that Ginny was too old for dolls now. Mr Weasley chuckles and Ginny serves the tea with a tight smile.

Charlie sits quietly through the tea and talk. He is still pale, lank-haired from fever, and the scars stand out narrow and red on his throat, his jaw when he turns his head, his wrists where the sleeves ride up when he reaches for the teapot. He asks, quietly, for his favorite biscuits, and when Ginny rises from the table to get them, reaching up on tiptoe to the high shelf where the colorful biscuit tin is kept, Ron puts his hand on her back, fingers splayed – to steady her, he tells himself, what any brother would do – and for the first time that night he feels his body relax, her skin warming his fingertips through the thin cotton of her shirt.

When Ron turns back to the table, a moment later, his parents are drinking their tea, his father’s hand resting on Mrs. Weasley’s. Only Charlie is looking over at him, his eyes narrowed as if he is still staring into the desert sun.

***

Ron can tell Charlie wants to talk to him, but he escapes to his bedroom early, pleading tiredness. He turns the lights off to discourage anyone in the family from knocking, and sits in the dark at the foot of his bed. The music that crackles through the WWN radio on his bureau sounds unfamiliar, and Ron feels old, old down to his bones.

He knows it is her from the way the doorknob turns, first left and then right, she knows perfectly well how his bedroom door opens but she is warning him who it is, so that he can compose himself before she comes in.

He wants to stand up, face her when she comes in, but he lacks the will to do much more than raise his head. In the gloom, he can see only what of her is spectral; white dress, white hair ribbons, white socks on shoeless feet, the whites of her narrowed eyes. “You should turn the lights on in here,” she says. “You’ll be tripping over things.”

“Shut the fucking door,” Ron says.

She doesn’t flinch, but he can sense a greater alertness in her; she even flips the bolt on the door before she comes over to sit down beside him. The smell of her so close is almost more than he can stand.

“You’re not still upset about not telling them?” she asks.

“I never wanted to tell them.”

“No,” she says. “You just didn’t want to stop.”

He leans to kiss her, then, and she lets him, lets him catch his fingers in her hair, dragging hard against the ribbons. “Don’t you see,” she says, when he lets her go, “not stopping is just like telling them. They’ll find out –“

“This is my last summer in this house,” Ron says, desperately, as if this means something.

“But not mine,” Ginny says.

“They won’t know if we – we’re going back to school in two days –“

“Let’s worry about school when we’re there,” Ginny says, and it is not much comfort, but to a desperate heart everything that is not the obliteration of all possibility is still some form of hope. Ron subsides, taking his hand from her hair, not noticing the marks his fingers have made on her cheek, the side of her throat.

“I mean, if we don’t,” he says, incoherent still, “then what was the point?”

Ginny drops her face into her hands. Her shoulders shake. For a moment Ron cannot understand what is happening; then he puts his hands on her back, holding her as the tremors shake her bones. He makes soothing noises, but there is a lightness in his chest – if she can cry, she must care, there can hardly be another explanation.

Ron sees no transgression in this lightness of heart. She is his little sister, after all; it does not seem so unnatural to take pleasure in her tears.

***

“Ron. Are you all right?”

Ron shakes off his brother’s hand impatiently. “I’m fine, Charlie.”

“It’s just – you seem a bit fussed, is all.”

Ron does not reply. He is standing on the platform, beside his brother, waiting for the Hogwarts Express. Students are swarming the train, in loud excited groups, but Ron does not want to lose himself among them. He is afraid that if he does, Ginny will not be able to find him again when she returns from her excited conversation with Mandy Brocklehurst.

“You know,” Charlie says, “you can talk to me about anything. I hope you know that, Ron.”

“Mm hmm.” Ron’s eyes are still on his sister. She is wearing a dark blue skirt and white shirt; her hair is loose, cascading down her back. She shivers a little in the cool fall air. Ron thinks his mother should really not have let her out of the house in a skirt that short.

“I know,” Charlie continues doggedly, “that some things are hard to talk about…”

“They certainly are,” Ron agrees fervently. Ginny tosses her head, laughing, and Ron wonders what on earth she can be telling Mandy – what is there to say about their summer that is not forbidden or a lie?

“But that’s all the more reason they should be talked about, Ron. No matter how…” Charlie pauses delicately – “…bizarre.”

Ron mutters under his breath, then pitches his voice loud enough for Charlie to hear it. “Thanks.”

“It’s just that…” Charlie pauses again, this time because he is squinting into the crowd. “Isn’t that Harry?”

This snaps Ron out of his daze. “Where?” He scans the crowd, doesn’t see him, finds him at last in a knot of other Gryffindors. Tall, bespectacled, tie unknotted. Same old Harry. Not laughing, but not looking unhappy either. He is glancing around him to either side, probably wondering where Hermione and Ron are.

Ron has hardly started forward to greet him when a violet blur streaks across his vision. It is Ginny. Ron tries to catch her arm as she walks past him, but she is moving too quickly. As she nears Harry, her walk settled into a more seductive loping gait, her hand dropping to her hip, her other hand rising to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. Harry glances up as she closes the distance between them, green eyes guileless behind his glasses; he smiles when she puts her hand on his arm, slim fingers spread wide, a delicate little star against the stark blackness of Harry’s jumper.

Every nerve in Ron’s body cries out in sudden protest; he starts forward, but Charlie clamps a hand over his shoulder. “Ron – no."

Ron struggles to get away from his brother. “Let me go, Charlie – can’t you see -?”

Charlie hauls Ron backward with the ease of years of brotherly practice. His grip is tight without being reassuring. “Can’t you see,” he says, “you’ve got no right – no right at all?”

Ginny is smiling up at Harry. She is reaching up to brush a strand of hair away from his forehead. Harry is smiling: a little puzzled, a little gratified, surprised, probably, at this new Ginny who stands with such confidence and clear knowledge of her own power. He angles his head down when she speaks, and Ron cannot look away, though he knows this, and so much else, will be haunting his nightmares soon.

He has stopped fighting Charlie now. There is no point. He can see that in the look on her face – the silent triumph that Harry, of course cannot see. But Ron knows his sister’s face as well as he knows his own, and in her eyes he finds the answer to the question he had asked her the night before: What was the point? This silent triumph is more than the knowledge of conquest: it is the finally-realized greed of a girl with six older brothers, who is used to waiting to get what she wants. Ron remembers when they were children – and he is so far from a child now – how she hung on to him when she learned to ice-skate, and the way she healed his cuts and scrapes when she was learning Medical Magic, and the way he was always the one she tried everything on, be it spells or cooking. He should not be surprised now, he knows. This is hardly the first time she has used him for practice.