Ought

Ought

"I knew my way in the darkness or in the light."

~ Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

We haven't gone upstairs in months.

It wasn't always like this. We used to walk up those stairs twenty times a day, sometimes all the way to the top and Ron's old room. In the spring, when the apples in the orchard were still tart and green, we'd eat a few and get bellyaches. We used to sleep in separate beds and have separate dreams and run in the garden all day in the summer sun. We used to rake the leaves in the autumn and watch Dad tinker in his garage until Mum would call us in for dinner. We used to make cocoa and roast marshmallows over the fire in the kitchen in the winter. But we haven't done any of these things since before the house got so still, its quiet threatens to consume us. No, we haven't done any of these things in years.

At first, we went up and down the stairs and pretended like everything was all right. We had to, we thought. Ron had a job at the Ministry like Dad once did, and I worked Mum's knitting needles to darn every jumper in the house that first autumn. Every now and again, someone would come to the door, and I'd answer it. Most of the time, it was people from the Ministry, people we had known at Hogwarts a lifetime ago. They'd bring food and books and gossip, and sometimes we'd sit and have tea. Eventually, they quit coming, except for Susan Bones, who dutifully came every Thursday at two o'clock on the dot. Every now and again, she'd even bring Hannah Abbott with her. Other than that, when the door would pound, it was more likely to be photographers or reporters wondering if I'd like to say a few words about the new Headmistress or if I'd care to have my picture taken to help this or that. I'd shut the door in their faces, and finally quit answering the knocks altogether, even for Susan and Hannah. It was cold outside, and I had knitting to do.

That first winter was the worst. We didn't know what spells they had used to keep the house warm, and after the leaves left the trees, it felt like our toes would freeze off in the night, and we never slept. After the first snow, when several inches sifted through the roof into Ron's old room, we had the idea to move into Mum and Dad's bed, which was the biggest in the house, after all, and we piled all the blankets on top of us. It was so heavy, we couldn't even turn over in our sleep, and instead we just lay there like icicles, summoning extra warmth from our held hands, but still we didn't sleep. But after Christmas and the blizzard when Hedwig was lost, we finally decided to move the bed down into Mum's sewing room on the first floor. It was a tight fit, but we got the bed in finally, with only enough room for the door to open and for us to walk around. It wasn't so quiet down there, on the first floor. The wind whipped above us through the rest of the house, making creaks like floorboards squeaking and groans like chairs being moved that echoed down the stairway and through the open door. We heard it all on the first floor, in that big bed in the small room, and with the fire crackling in the kitchen, we finally slept. After that, things felt warmer.

I don't remember when exactly it happened, but by spring, we put out the fire at night and took off several layers of blankets. By summer, it was boiling in the house, and even with all the covers off and in our thinnest pyjamas it was still too hot to sleep. Those summer months it was quieter, too. The air stilled in the heat, too lazy to move, perhaps, just like us, and so even with the windows opened, nothing stirred. The days were so sultry, I slept right through them, and eventually, so did Ron. He hasn't been back to work since. At night, sometimes we'd sit out on the porch in our thin pyjamas and look at the stars. Ron never wore tops; it was just unbearably hot. Eventually, I gave up on gowns, and so we'd sit out there in our knickers and stare up at the sky, which was suffocating in the summer, the way it got so near. And we would wait for the absent breezes to touch our skin and send a chill right through to our spines. It was okay: no one came by the Burrow anymore.

By the next autumn, we were sleeping naked all the time. It was easier that way: fewer clothes to wash, at least. I don't know how Mum ever managed with nine of us in the house when I could barely make do for the two of us.

When the weather turned, we put the blankets back on the bed, and when winter came, we were sleeping tightly curled into each other. Ron smelled warm, like Percy's old books, and Fred's old jumpers, and George's old cloaks. I would press my forehead into the hollow between his shoulder blades and sing silly lullabies that I'd make up, wrapping an arm around his chest and hitching a knee up over his thigh. My left side fit along him perfectly, like we were the ones who were made to be twins.

When we were nine and ten, everyone else had already left for Hogwarts, and so it was just me and Ron and Mum. She couldn't help that she was always so busy. Ron and I often spent entire days by ourselves after lessons while Mum did this and that and kept things sane in the Burrow. We liked to play in Charlie's room the best. He had a blue rug the exact color of what we thought the ocean ought to be, and so we'd pull the red afghan off his bed and pretend like it was our raft and we were castaways in search of shore. We'd wreck, always, on the island that was Charlie's bed, finding shelter underneath it in the jungle of forgotten socks and outgrown hobbyhorses and outdated magazines. In our cave, we always played the same game. At the bottom of the pile of Quidditch Quarterly magazines, there was an old, ratty porno. The pages had lost their sheen and were soft from overturning, and we'd look through the pages eagerly, entranced by the lurid lifting of skirts and spreading of legs. It was dangerous, we knew: if Mum caught us, we'd be in as much trouble as Charlie, no doubt, and then Charlie would get mad at us and then what would we do? So we were always deathly quiet as Ron picked out the girl, saying, "You be her." Then I'd flip through one of the other magazines, deciding on a boy to match the girl. "You be him," I'd say, pointing him out. Ron always wanted to be a Cannon, but after a while we'd done them all, and so he'd have to be an Arrow or a Wasp. We'd look over at each other's decisions, and then nod together, close the magazines soundlessly, put them back in the pile, and play.

I'd lie down on my back. Ron would prop himself up on his elbow and look over me. Sometimes I undid the buttons, and sometimes he did. His fingers would ghost over my tiny nipples that were not quite breasts and over my stomach, which was lean and hard. I still had the body of a boy, the body of my brothers, but it was all right with Ron because we were just pretending. He'd climb on top and just kind of push down. His weight would sink my sharp shoulder blades into the floorboards. Sometimes he'd wriggle, just a little, or put his mouth over mine. It wasn't kissing; it was just pretend. After a bit, he'd take his shirt off, too, roll it up and over his shoulders and I'd tug on it until his head popped out, hair on end. I'd run my hands along his ribs where I knew he was ticklish, but he'd never laugh. This was a serious business, this act of pretending. We'd press our chests together, and I remember learning how warm skin on warm skin made us hot where we touched, so that soon we'd be sweating and panting.

It happened like that in the winter: my skin was cold everywhere Ron was not touching. But mere contact was not enough, and I wanted to wrap myself up in him, like a blanket. It started with hands skittering along his breastbone, feeling the coarse hair that had grown there in the last few years. His hand touched my knee, ran down my calf as far as it would reach, and then back up my thigh. I tugged a little, maybe, to persuade him, and he turned under my hold and then he was pressing into me with lips and hands and hips. He was hard, and I put my hand down to feel it pulse. It turned out he liked the same things that Harry had, years ago, and we found a rhythm that stuck. We were wordless in the darkness, just his breath panting into the curve of my neck as he came, and my breath whispering at his ear, urging him on. The bed squeaked and the fire crackled, and I saw his back arch up in the darkness above us: a shadow outlined in gold light from the fire in the other room. Afterward, we wrapped each other up in ourselves, legs and arms an intricate tangle, and he feel asleep, his head over my heart.

Maybe it had been that night when the idea of the ending had been sparked, as I saw the shadows leaping, driven by the dance of flames in the fireplace. I went out into the kitchen for tea, slinking out from Ron's body soundlessly. As the kettle heated, I looked at the photograph of us in Egypt, smiling, waving. A family. When I picked up the dusty frame, that's when I saw them: a box of Dad's Muggle matches. I opened the box and looked down at the red-tipped sticks. Thoughts of soldiers and coffins. The kettle went off, and I put back the photo and the matches so Ron couldn't tell they'd been moved. I drank my tea at the kitchen table, eyes on the pyramids in the background, and thought how it would be so easy to just watch it all burn.

Before, it had been simpler to go on living without thinking too much about it. There was a war that could either be lost or won. If we lost, the world would be Voldemort's. If we won, we thought, the world would be as it ought. But there were debts to be reckoned and prices to be paid by both the losers and the winners, and the price we paid we paid in blood and love. It wasn't easy, but there was only one direction in which we could move, and that was to the inevitable end.

It hadn't happened like I thought it would at all. It is years later, and neither of us can say his name. We thought we'd be with him forever: I as his wife and Ron as his brother.

In the end, they tell us that we won, but the world is nothing like it ought.

It is nearing my birthday (I think I'll be thirty in this timeless place), and we haven't been upstairs in months. Not since the spring when the roof finally gave, and we went up the stairs holding hands with our wands drawn. It had pushed against my chest, the sheer weight of it. I had seen my friends murdered and my family torn from me, and I don't think there was an ounce of courage in me left. It was just a willingness to carry on, endurance I have grown to begrudge.

When we stepped onto the second landing, we saw the chimney spire where it sat on Percy's bed, as if it was always meant to be there. And we laughed, hoarse and out of practice, and then we turned and went back down. I made tea, and we decided we didn't need the upstairs anyway. We never even went up there, anymore.

I wake up alone this morning with the sheet in a sweaty tangle around me, and I panic at the sense of being alone. That panic leads me round the house: through the living room, around the kitchen, and to the porch, where I see him, finally. He stands still, in just his shorts, the grass poking into the hair on his legs, and I itch in sympathy just to see it. His face is to me, his hand raised as a visor to shield his eyes from the sun. I follow his gaze from beneath that shadow to the top of the house, now considerably closer to the ground.

"Ginny," he says simply, "the house is falling down."

"Yes," I say, looking up at the hole that had fallen in several stories to Percy's room. It hadn't looked so big from the inside. "The house is falling down."

"What are we going to do?" he asks.

A group of swallows rises from under the collapsing roof with a clap of wings. "What do you think we should do?"

I can feel Ron's shrug even with my back turned.

"Well," I say, "that settles it then." I go back inside, but I stop with the door perched open on my heel. "I thought I'd make pancakes."

He stays where he is for several moments, looking up at where the roof had stood suspended for decades by magical bonds we could not recreate, even though we had been conceived, born, and raised under them. I cannot see the look in his eyes under the shadow, but I know it well enough. It is calculating, the look he gets when he's worked six moves ahead to how he'll take your king. Finally, he drops his hand and comes inside. He kisses me as he passes, grazing his hand against my swollen, uncomfortable belly as he does so. "I like pancakes," he says against my lips.

"I know."

Over his shoulder, the swallows land in the top boughs of one of the trees ringing the orchard. Tomorrow I will go there for wood. It will be simple, to let it just consume us. We've been living long enough, suspended, feeling the coals burn slowly away our souls, that I know the power of heat when I see it. I don't know what sort of ending Ron has in mind, but it is obvious he sees it coming from a long way off. The baby kicks, a sharp reminder of life.

Tomorrow, there will be smoke and fire, matches and flames, nothing as clean and simple as magic.

It never ought to have ended like this.