leogryffin & blue_moony
Author: leogryffin
Title: Control
Words: 198
Rating: PG-13, pre-slash
Pairing: Ron/Harry
Challenge: if you close the door/the night could last forever/Keep the sunshine out and say hello to never - The Velvet Underground, After Hours
Harry rolled over in his sleep, wailing something about veils and canines. He woke with a start.
“My door is closed,” he said to no one in particular. He never closed his door. It had to be open or he would be trapped in here with no one to let him out and...Harry put his hand to his forehead. Control, Harry. Control.
He caught movement in the room out of the corner of his eye. “Who's there? Show yourself! Did you close my door? Peeves, is that you? If it's you so help me...”
“No, Harry,” came the whisper, “you're not at Hogwarts. You're safe in Grimmauld Place. No one can hurt you.”
“Ron,” Harry breathed, “did you close my door?”
“Shhhh,” came the response. Harry complied, trembling as he felt Ron move closer to him. “we're all weary of hearing your screams at night. We all love you and want to help, but none of them know you the way I do. I think that I know what to do, Harry, to help you with your dreams.” He slid his body between the sheets, cradling Harry, touching him, smoothing his hair. “I'll stay with you tonight.”
Author: blue_moony
Title: Of Solace and Slumber
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 2140
Harry wakes in the midst of a moan so loud the silence to follow makes his
room seem almost embarrassed to have heard it. He pants, swallowing hard
against the cotton-dry feel of his tongue to the roof of his mouth. The
window is open, and the night breeze warm and pleasant, but Harry shivers at
it as if struck down by the presence of death. He draws himself into a sit
and presses the heel of his hand to his temple, trying to force back the
dull, thudding pain across his scar, echoes of a greater hurt.
He doesn’t know where he is, and can’t bring himself to care. His brain
feels thick, muggy, and when he looks to the ceiling the curtain in the
corner of his eyes ripples Veil-like, a solemn whisper in the darkness,
against the night sky beyond, and when he hiccoughs away the nausea
overwhelming his senses he’s sure he can smell dog, wet and pungent, in the
air about him. His world is a bleary smudge of maybes, a constriction in his
chest that won’t go, won’t go, and all about him life hangs an oppressive
weight: the crush of his thin summer sheets against his body, the
manacled-might of his clothes about his skin, the suffocation of a door
closed tight against his writhing, his screams…
He stares at the last, some desperate cling to coherence acknowledging the
door was open before he stumbled into some semblance of slumber, and
remembering, too, what could happen if it were not, if he were trapped.
“No,” he manages, throat tight against the word. “Open… open.” He wets his
lips, hands curled in the sheets about him, groping about for his wand.
What are the words, what are the words? he thinks, frantically, as
his fingers draw up nothing but sweat, a sticky guilt in the fabric.
“Can’t.”
Harry blinks, his sight still blurred without his glasses, his eyes still
hooded by dreams and shadows. “Who-“
“Do you know where you are?” The voice is quiet, so quiet, and Harry vaguely
recognizes it to be male. His eyes are lidded, his breathing ragged, and he
slumps back against the bed and presses his hands over his face.
“Go away,” he chokes out. “Go away… Peeves, if that’s… if you’re… go away or
so help me-“
“Harry.”
Harry shudders, hard, body fighting against the inhalation of breath. And
the room is so cold all of a sudden, a terrible gloom and emptiness. Silence
falls as Harry struggles in hiccoughed sounds to control himself, to make
out in the arcs of air and apprehension what is real and what is only
wishful, the wet dog smell fading to a more realistic, mildew decay, the
faded paisley-print curtains just that, and no more. His world feels all the
smaller in this awakening, and drowsiness begins to tug at him again, to
urge him fall again to what lies between dream and comprehension, to sleep
perchance to fade, and forget, and rekindle the way it should have been.
“Harry,” the voice comes again, after its respectful silence, after Harry
has slumped back against the sheets, body curling tight against itself.
“You’re not at Hogwarts. This is Grimmauld Place, okay? The others couldn’t
handle the screaming, that’s all. We tried a Silencing spell, so you could
stay, but McGonagall caught us, and said it was a bad idea. She was right,
too. If you’d done something… If something had happened, and we couldn’t
hear it…” The voice becomes a sigh, troubled and thinning.
Harry closes his eyes then and thinks of Hogwarts, of the dorm rooms and the
fireplace warmth of mornings, the cheer of bright tapestries and easy
laughter and hearty breakfasts - growing boys need their strength -
and, oh, the promise that the world can wait, that growing up can wait, that
maybe, just maybe, no one that day will demand that they feel and act and
work as men, and women, so early in their lives.
A lie, Harry mouths at the ceiling, eyes slit against the dark -
Harry, who at one, and eleven, and twelve, and fourteen, and… and fifteen
was brought to fight against the most terrible force of wizarding might
their world had ever seen. A lie then, yes, for him and all the rest.
Childhood was the lie, the indulgence of many leading only to a harder fate
when at last time and circumstance brought youth to adulthood, and to the
realization that life was never meant to be easy, in this their day and age
of corruption, of violence, of terror.
But, oh, how Harry now wishes for such a lie, for such a comfort when the
illusions fade, and Sirius is dead anew. How he wishes, too, for some proof
that this waking doom is only a stage, and will pass, and that maybe adults
can find peace too, though he can’t for the life of him think how. What good
can there be in this world, in the midst of all the hurt, the cruelty?
“We’re all really worried about you, you know. We care. It’s just that… it
scares us sometimes, you know? To care and not be able to help. And they
can’t, Harry. They can’t ‘cause they don’t know you the way some of us do.”
The voice pauses, as if hesitant, and Harry thinks of Lupin, who must surely
share his hurt, or certainly suffer more for it, and of Dumbledore, his
tears, and of Molly, and her self-same fears of losing everyone she loves.
What is this measure of mankind, anyway, that grants anyone the belief that
they can know another? What a horrible thing, Harry thinks, in his fuzzy,
half-asleep logic, for anyone else to have to endure his thoughts, his
knowledge, his habits and life. Who would ever take such a terrible weight
upon their shoulders?
“I think I know you better than them, Harry. And I think I can… well, I’m
going to try at least to… help you. Okay?”
It’s Ron, Harry realizes suddenly, and his eyes widen at the epiphany.
“Ron?” he asks, bracing his forearm on the bed and pushing himself half-up.
“Ron, bloody hell, you there?”
“Yeah.” Ron approaches slowly. He’s in hand-me-down pajamas himself, and his
hair is an unkempt tangle, red fringe skewed over his eyes. His bottoms
don’t quite fit right, slung loose about his hips as if time and wear have
strained the waistband beyond repair, so that it lays bare the final dip of
his abdomen, the darker red stubble on his skin. He scratches awkwardly at
the back of his head, and then lays his hand on the edge of the mattress,
coming closer. “Look, Harry. Your screaming doesn’t scare me that much. I
know you’re just… really alone, I guess. And I know that’s got to hurt
wicked bad. And… I want to help you with your dreams. I want to stay, if
that’s okay.” He pauses, his mouth sloping into a twist of a smile. “I
promise I won’t kick.”
Harry’s heart is pounding, a blood-rush in his ears as Ron approaches, and
the chill about the bed seems to disappear with the nearness of another,
truer form than any his visions have granted. Ron stills by Harry’s head,
and his smile broadens tentatively as he lays his hand over Harry’s, and
squeezes. “Bill used to… when I was younger, and I was afraid to sleep, what
with Fred and George always playing their pranks… he used to help me sleep.
He’d just… you know, be there, and then everything…”
Ron inhales a little sharply against his words, voice faltering at the
approaching lie. No, everything will not be all right, not for
a while at least, and Ron is not up to making an such declaration yet, with
so many dead, with so much fear resurfacing. Instead he squeezes Harry’s
hand again, reassuringly, and sits at the side of the bed, while Harry turns
to face him, shifting a little to his side, as if making room.
Harry’s expression is drawn, and haggard, but he smiles back, wan thing
though his gesture is. “Yeah,” he says, softly. He’s tired. Tired of talk,
yes, and vague promises, but of night, too, and this hole that seems to
fester inside him, like a spell that burned him through and left only exit
wounds, cauterizing the rest of him into stasis, and so denying Harry even a
proper end to this strange thing of waking life. Comfort is a queer thought
in his mind, a foreign possibility that seems more fairytale than all the
horrific visions that have plagued his dreams as of late. And yet it proves
itself all the more real than the haunted flights of his mind as Ron, so
silent Harry wonders at first if they’re still breathing, either of them,
draws back the covers and slides under the sheets, a light presence on the
bed, as if Ron fears to rest a slumping weight on the aged mattress.
Harry closes his eyes, and then opens them again, as if some strange spectre
of reality had need of passing through him before he could recognize the
softness of the mossy brown eyes on him, the hand still an inoffensive
presence over his own. Harry shifts more to face Ron, who is likewise turned
on his side, and though the room is far from sub-zero Harry thinks, as he
studies not only his best friend but the space between them as well, that he
can see their breathing, an entwined thing between their mouths, as heads
and thoughts rest on lumpish pillows and new-found uncertainties.
And, oh, he thinks, is this how grown men measure the worth of their lives?
Do we make sanctified the pain of sacrifice, the ache of loss and fragility
of soul in these small bouts of breathing in the quarters of our brothers,
our friends? Do we make life worth it here, in the trust and care of each
other, in the unspoken promise that a moment’s relief, the chance to feel
even the lightest touch of love is worth it, all of it, the pain and the
ache and the death?
His mind is thickset with these thoughts, heavy with the swimming weight of
what if that dribbles through him, as he watches Ron watch him, and
as they share together against the same pillow a smile, fingers twisting to
clasp more firmly at each other, to bind closer what no language could ever
hope to make truly tangible.
“Thanks,” he whispers, words almost unnecessary now as Ron shifts his other
arm, laying head in the crook of his shoulder and extending his freckled
hand to tousle gently through Harry’s fringe.
“Anytime,” Ron whispers back, and readjusts upon the bed, body turning
closer to Harry’s, the heat between them, beneath the sheets, a building,
scented thing promising security throughout the night.
They are careful about each other now, in the witching hour fall of night,
as Harry shuts his eyes again and allows his breaths to even out, a
gratitude expressed better in the relief that lines his tired face than in
any further discourse. He will sleep now, he knows, his hand tucked into
Ron’s own. He will sleep now with dreams, yes, of Veils and canines and
laughter cut short, but they will be softer, more muted recollections,
losses he can temper with the knowledge that all is not gone, all is not
lost, so long as there remains even one friend, even one face turned gentle
towards him at sundown, at daybreak, and most importantly through the trials
that lie between.
There will be time, Harry thinks, as he nods off, Ron still watchful and
awake beside him, guarding. There will be time in the mornings and days to
come to explore this thing of shared hands and smiles, to test the conduit
of breath and life that runs between them now, an easy, familiar thrum. Time
enough to draw each other closer, to seek out greater comforts against the
rising impetus of war and sacrifice.
But for now it is enough, this simple reminder of good, of patience and
love, in a world of cruelty and injustice. It is enough to be lulled to
sleep by the simple presence of Ron, sweet Ron, friend and faithful through
the hurt, and herald to the fact so pristine clear now, though neither yet
has courage to speak it true, that there will be a sunrise come of this, of
night and war and loss, and that when it comes - whenever that may be - they
will meet it, the two of them, as man was always meant to: made whole at the
end, at the beginning, by one another.
Title: Control
Words: 198
Rating: PG-13, pre-slash
Pairing: Ron/Harry
Challenge: if you close the door/the night could last forever/Keep the sunshine out and say hello to never - The Velvet Underground, After Hours
Harry rolled over in his sleep, wailing something about veils and canines. He woke with a start.
“My door is closed,” he said to no one in particular. He never closed his door. It had to be open or he would be trapped in here with no one to let him out and...Harry put his hand to his forehead. Control, Harry. Control.
He caught movement in the room out of the corner of his eye. “Who's there? Show yourself! Did you close my door? Peeves, is that you? If it's you so help me...”
“No, Harry,” came the whisper, “you're not at Hogwarts. You're safe in Grimmauld Place. No one can hurt you.”
“Ron,” Harry breathed, “did you close my door?”
“Shhhh,” came the response. Harry complied, trembling as he felt Ron move closer to him. “we're all weary of hearing your screams at night. We all love you and want to help, but none of them know you the way I do. I think that I know what to do, Harry, to help you with your dreams.” He slid his body between the sheets, cradling Harry, touching him, smoothing his hair. “I'll stay with you tonight.”
Author: blue_moony
Title: Of Solace and Slumber
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 2140
Harry wakes in the midst of a moan so loud the silence to follow makes his
room seem almost embarrassed to have heard it. He pants, swallowing hard
against the cotton-dry feel of his tongue to the roof of his mouth. The
window is open, and the night breeze warm and pleasant, but Harry shivers at
it as if struck down by the presence of death. He draws himself into a sit
and presses the heel of his hand to his temple, trying to force back the
dull, thudding pain across his scar, echoes of a greater hurt.
He doesn’t know where he is, and can’t bring himself to care. His brain
feels thick, muggy, and when he looks to the ceiling the curtain in the
corner of his eyes ripples Veil-like, a solemn whisper in the darkness,
against the night sky beyond, and when he hiccoughs away the nausea
overwhelming his senses he’s sure he can smell dog, wet and pungent, in the
air about him. His world is a bleary smudge of maybes, a constriction in his
chest that won’t go, won’t go, and all about him life hangs an oppressive
weight: the crush of his thin summer sheets against his body, the
manacled-might of his clothes about his skin, the suffocation of a door
closed tight against his writhing, his screams…
He stares at the last, some desperate cling to coherence acknowledging the
door was open before he stumbled into some semblance of slumber, and
remembering, too, what could happen if it were not, if he were trapped.
“No,” he manages, throat tight against the word. “Open… open.” He wets his
lips, hands curled in the sheets about him, groping about for his wand.
What are the words, what are the words? he thinks, frantically, as
his fingers draw up nothing but sweat, a sticky guilt in the fabric.
“Can’t.”
Harry blinks, his sight still blurred without his glasses, his eyes still
hooded by dreams and shadows. “Who-“
“Do you know where you are?” The voice is quiet, so quiet, and Harry vaguely
recognizes it to be male. His eyes are lidded, his breathing ragged, and he
slumps back against the bed and presses his hands over his face.
“Go away,” he chokes out. “Go away… Peeves, if that’s… if you’re… go away or
so help me-“
“Harry.”
Harry shudders, hard, body fighting against the inhalation of breath. And
the room is so cold all of a sudden, a terrible gloom and emptiness. Silence
falls as Harry struggles in hiccoughed sounds to control himself, to make
out in the arcs of air and apprehension what is real and what is only
wishful, the wet dog smell fading to a more realistic, mildew decay, the
faded paisley-print curtains just that, and no more. His world feels all the
smaller in this awakening, and drowsiness begins to tug at him again, to
urge him fall again to what lies between dream and comprehension, to sleep
perchance to fade, and forget, and rekindle the way it should have been.
“Harry,” the voice comes again, after its respectful silence, after Harry
has slumped back against the sheets, body curling tight against itself.
“You’re not at Hogwarts. This is Grimmauld Place, okay? The others couldn’t
handle the screaming, that’s all. We tried a Silencing spell, so you could
stay, but McGonagall caught us, and said it was a bad idea. She was right,
too. If you’d done something… If something had happened, and we couldn’t
hear it…” The voice becomes a sigh, troubled and thinning.
Harry closes his eyes then and thinks of Hogwarts, of the dorm rooms and the
fireplace warmth of mornings, the cheer of bright tapestries and easy
laughter and hearty breakfasts - growing boys need their strength -
and, oh, the promise that the world can wait, that growing up can wait, that
maybe, just maybe, no one that day will demand that they feel and act and
work as men, and women, so early in their lives.
A lie, Harry mouths at the ceiling, eyes slit against the dark -
Harry, who at one, and eleven, and twelve, and fourteen, and… and fifteen
was brought to fight against the most terrible force of wizarding might
their world had ever seen. A lie then, yes, for him and all the rest.
Childhood was the lie, the indulgence of many leading only to a harder fate
when at last time and circumstance brought youth to adulthood, and to the
realization that life was never meant to be easy, in this their day and age
of corruption, of violence, of terror.
But, oh, how Harry now wishes for such a lie, for such a comfort when the
illusions fade, and Sirius is dead anew. How he wishes, too, for some proof
that this waking doom is only a stage, and will pass, and that maybe adults
can find peace too, though he can’t for the life of him think how. What good
can there be in this world, in the midst of all the hurt, the cruelty?
“We’re all really worried about you, you know. We care. It’s just that… it
scares us sometimes, you know? To care and not be able to help. And they
can’t, Harry. They can’t ‘cause they don’t know you the way some of us do.”
The voice pauses, as if hesitant, and Harry thinks of Lupin, who must surely
share his hurt, or certainly suffer more for it, and of Dumbledore, his
tears, and of Molly, and her self-same fears of losing everyone she loves.
What is this measure of mankind, anyway, that grants anyone the belief that
they can know another? What a horrible thing, Harry thinks, in his fuzzy,
half-asleep logic, for anyone else to have to endure his thoughts, his
knowledge, his habits and life. Who would ever take such a terrible weight
upon their shoulders?
“I think I know you better than them, Harry. And I think I can… well, I’m
going to try at least to… help you. Okay?”
It’s Ron, Harry realizes suddenly, and his eyes widen at the epiphany.
“Ron?” he asks, bracing his forearm on the bed and pushing himself half-up.
“Ron, bloody hell, you there?”
“Yeah.” Ron approaches slowly. He’s in hand-me-down pajamas himself, and his
hair is an unkempt tangle, red fringe skewed over his eyes. His bottoms
don’t quite fit right, slung loose about his hips as if time and wear have
strained the waistband beyond repair, so that it lays bare the final dip of
his abdomen, the darker red stubble on his skin. He scratches awkwardly at
the back of his head, and then lays his hand on the edge of the mattress,
coming closer. “Look, Harry. Your screaming doesn’t scare me that much. I
know you’re just… really alone, I guess. And I know that’s got to hurt
wicked bad. And… I want to help you with your dreams. I want to stay, if
that’s okay.” He pauses, his mouth sloping into a twist of a smile. “I
promise I won’t kick.”
Harry’s heart is pounding, a blood-rush in his ears as Ron approaches, and
the chill about the bed seems to disappear with the nearness of another,
truer form than any his visions have granted. Ron stills by Harry’s head,
and his smile broadens tentatively as he lays his hand over Harry’s, and
squeezes. “Bill used to… when I was younger, and I was afraid to sleep, what
with Fred and George always playing their pranks… he used to help me sleep.
He’d just… you know, be there, and then everything…”
Ron inhales a little sharply against his words, voice faltering at the
approaching lie. No, everything will not be all right, not for
a while at least, and Ron is not up to making an such declaration yet, with
so many dead, with so much fear resurfacing. Instead he squeezes Harry’s
hand again, reassuringly, and sits at the side of the bed, while Harry turns
to face him, shifting a little to his side, as if making room.
Harry’s expression is drawn, and haggard, but he smiles back, wan thing
though his gesture is. “Yeah,” he says, softly. He’s tired. Tired of talk,
yes, and vague promises, but of night, too, and this hole that seems to
fester inside him, like a spell that burned him through and left only exit
wounds, cauterizing the rest of him into stasis, and so denying Harry even a
proper end to this strange thing of waking life. Comfort is a queer thought
in his mind, a foreign possibility that seems more fairytale than all the
horrific visions that have plagued his dreams as of late. And yet it proves
itself all the more real than the haunted flights of his mind as Ron, so
silent Harry wonders at first if they’re still breathing, either of them,
draws back the covers and slides under the sheets, a light presence on the
bed, as if Ron fears to rest a slumping weight on the aged mattress.
Harry closes his eyes, and then opens them again, as if some strange spectre
of reality had need of passing through him before he could recognize the
softness of the mossy brown eyes on him, the hand still an inoffensive
presence over his own. Harry shifts more to face Ron, who is likewise turned
on his side, and though the room is far from sub-zero Harry thinks, as he
studies not only his best friend but the space between them as well, that he
can see their breathing, an entwined thing between their mouths, as heads
and thoughts rest on lumpish pillows and new-found uncertainties.
And, oh, he thinks, is this how grown men measure the worth of their lives?
Do we make sanctified the pain of sacrifice, the ache of loss and fragility
of soul in these small bouts of breathing in the quarters of our brothers,
our friends? Do we make life worth it here, in the trust and care of each
other, in the unspoken promise that a moment’s relief, the chance to feel
even the lightest touch of love is worth it, all of it, the pain and the
ache and the death?
His mind is thickset with these thoughts, heavy with the swimming weight of
what if that dribbles through him, as he watches Ron watch him, and
as they share together against the same pillow a smile, fingers twisting to
clasp more firmly at each other, to bind closer what no language could ever
hope to make truly tangible.
“Thanks,” he whispers, words almost unnecessary now as Ron shifts his other
arm, laying head in the crook of his shoulder and extending his freckled
hand to tousle gently through Harry’s fringe.
“Anytime,” Ron whispers back, and readjusts upon the bed, body turning
closer to Harry’s, the heat between them, beneath the sheets, a building,
scented thing promising security throughout the night.
They are careful about each other now, in the witching hour fall of night,
as Harry shuts his eyes again and allows his breaths to even out, a
gratitude expressed better in the relief that lines his tired face than in
any further discourse. He will sleep now, he knows, his hand tucked into
Ron’s own. He will sleep now with dreams, yes, of Veils and canines and
laughter cut short, but they will be softer, more muted recollections,
losses he can temper with the knowledge that all is not gone, all is not
lost, so long as there remains even one friend, even one face turned gentle
towards him at sundown, at daybreak, and most importantly through the trials
that lie between.
There will be time, Harry thinks, as he nods off, Ron still watchful and
awake beside him, guarding. There will be time in the mornings and days to
come to explore this thing of shared hands and smiles, to test the conduit
of breath and life that runs between them now, an easy, familiar thrum. Time
enough to draw each other closer, to seek out greater comforts against the
rising impetus of war and sacrifice.
But for now it is enough, this simple reminder of good, of patience and
love, in a world of cruelty and injustice. It is enough to be lulled to
sleep by the simple presence of Ron, sweet Ron, friend and faithful through
the hurt, and herald to the fact so pristine clear now, though neither yet
has courage to speak it true, that there will be a sunrise come of this, of
night and war and loss, and that when it comes - whenever that may be - they
will meet it, the two of them, as man was always meant to: made whole at the
end, at the beginning, by one another.