Moving Pictures
Chapter Ten

One might have thought it'd be awkward, but it wasn't – mainly because neither one of them made the mistake of trying to talk. Around the corner, through the door – slam, snick, shuffle – and then Harry found himself up against it, hand still on the doorknob where he'd scrabbled blindly for the latch, gasping into the hard slant of Ron's open mouth against his own.

There was a wet patch on Ron's jeans from where he'd thrown the water, that was seeping through to his own crotch. It should have been uncomfortable; probably it would have been, if they hadn't both been so jazzed on adrenaline. As it was, Harry found it sort of sexy – wet, the fabric seemed to all but disappear, which meant that when Ron pressed a little more insistently against him, he could feel…

Oh, Christ. Everything .

“Wait,” he muttered, and managed to snake his door-knob hand down between their bodies. Ron's cock felt much like his own, when squeezed through fabric – except that to touch it made Harry feel incredibly daring and, when Ron moaned and cursed under his breath, spine-tinglingly powerful. A moment later, when Ron's hand slid under his forearm and homed in on him, he felt his knees buckle.

Oh God oh God did it ever feel good, that firm long-fingered grip curling just hard enough around him, sort of the way you'd hold a Bludger-bat; sweet sweet pressure in graceless grasping do-you-know-how-much-I-want-you flat-out need , fingers on his flesh that weren't his own, whose trajectory he couldn't predict ahead of time. And Ron's tongue in his mouth – maybe they'd minded their hands before now, but the kissing part they had down pat – expertly bruising in the best of senses, the hard ruthlessness of it making Harry want to turn himself inside out from wanting more. Dizzy, reeling, he held onto Ron – solid, pulsing, miraculously familiar – and put all his desire into his grip, the upward-yearning rub of his palm against wet denim.

And then – another curse, an eternally brutal instant of separation as Ron pulled back for air. “Come on,” he said, already fumbling with the button-fly of his jeans. “Before they come back. Before it's too late.”

Before we can't do this anymore .

Harry understood.

He kicked off his shoes and stumbled toward the bed, undressing as he went.

**

Almost immediately after they'd gone, Dudley started having second thoughts.

It was quiet – too quiet, the sort of spooky this-isn't-right quiet that happens when a normally chaotic place empties, like school during the holidays – though as far as that went, Dudley could only imagine it; God knew he'd left that place with as much alacrity as he could muster, every time he'd had the chance.

This would be better than that, surely. Even so, he'd go back to Smeltings in a heartbeat if it meant Mum would wake up – if it meant that none of this would have happened. What's happened to Dad, where did they take him, he'd asked, and the daft old codger with the long white beard had met his eyes with that creepy blue twinkle and murmured something about a closed-casket funeral. Probably a lie, that – or maybe it was just easier to think of it as a lie, than to imagine that it might be the truth.

He thought about that for awhile, then tried not to think about it. Trouble was, there wasn't much to do here; no video games, no Internet, no virtual-reality set, not even a TV – as if he needed any more proof that these people were living in the Dark Ages, wasn't that enough? Ron's room was scrupulously tidy – when his mum had said clean , he'd evidently taken it to heart. Dudley sort of wished it wasn't; in the absence of real entertainment, those stacks of comic books in the corners had looked sort of intriguing, and now they were nowhere to be seen. Probably he'd put them in that locked cupboard, over in the corner. He'd gone through Ron's desk-drawers already, but there wasn't much in them.

The people in the orange robes waved cheerily down at him from the ceiling. Before he forgot himself and waved back, Dudley headed for the door.

The kitchen was quiet and sunny and deserted, the old wireless turned toward an open window that looked out on the vegetable garden. Dudley could hear Molly Weasley humming along with it as she weeded.

“If you're hungry,” a voice said, “there's fruit on the sideboard. And scones in the tin.”

Dudley whirled, but didn't see anyone.

“Over here,” said the voice, and Dudley found himself staring into a mirror – one of those old-fashioned wavery silver ones you saw sometimes in old movies. It was staring back at him with a stranger's face. He blinked.

“You talk ?”

The mirror smirked. “Can't get anything past you, can I?”

Dudley didn't appreciate the sarcasm. “What kind of scones?” he demanded, and the mirror shrugged.

“Don't know. Usually they're raisin. Fresh this morning, so what does it matter?”

If he were at home, there would be chocolate bars, Dudley thought – not that he was supposed to eat stuff like that, between meals, but it was always there and he knew how to get to it. And raisin scones had never been his favourite. If his mother had tried to fob him off with a raisin scone when he wanted a snack, he'd have pitched a royal tantrum.

Trouble was, who was around to see a tantrum in this place? The mirror?

Well, forget that. Too much effort, no certain payback. He stood scowling in the kitchen doorway for another moment, then – pique and indecision overcome by plain old curiosity – grabbed a banana from the bowl of fruit and went out to see what Molly was doing.

“Shut the door behind you!” the mirror yelled. Dudley jumped, startled, and – for the first time since he could remember – obeyed without an argument.

**

There was a locked door between him and the world, and everyone else would be gone for hours. Long before he'd met Harry Potter, Ron had been longing for that blessed confluence of circumstance; now, ironically enough, he hadn't the slightest inclination to marvel over the pleasure of finally getting it.

Things to do, people to see.

Besides, solitude was overrated.

If you looked at Harry with his clothes on, he was sort of a pinkish-tan colour – all that gardening he'd been doing for his aunt, and after that a lot of Quidditch played without the benefit of sunblock. Ron supposed he looked about the same, if you emphasized the ‘pink' in ‘pinkish'. But underneath, if you looked at the bits the clothes covered … oh. White as the inside of a Marshmallow Hobgoblin and just as soft; skin so satiny and pale and untouched that Ron couldn't believe Harry had been walking around in it for as long as he had.

He already had favourite bits – belly bits and thigh bits, and those sensitive ticklish panels that started just under the armpits and ran right down into Harry's bony, narrow hips. Everything on Harry looked stretched-out, as if it barely covered his bones; Ron imagined those miles of invisible nerve endings standing on tiptoe, straining to hold one another's hands.

No wonder he quivers when I touch him .

He wasn't sure what to do. In fact, if he'd slowed down enough to think about it, he'd probably have run screaming – maybe that bloke-on-bloke thing flew in certain parts of Muggle London, but the wizarding world hadn't embraced it, that was for sure, and how they were going to handle this sudden mad attraction in a dormitory room, with Seamus and Dean and Neville always lurking about, was completely beyond him. So it was a good thing he wasn't thinking, because if he was, he'd be missing out on this . He ran the heel of his hand down Harry's stomach, pressing harder than maybe he ought, and wrapped his fingers around his cock, which was shortish but – for such a skinny owner – rather sturdier than Ron had imagined it'd be, having felt it already through the denim of Harry's pants. Harry's mouth opened and closed a couple of times, goldfish-style, and a shudder ran through his whole thin pale body. Ron felt himself trembling in response, like the two of them were two prongs of the same tuning fork and they couldn't help but feel the same things sympathetically. He tightened his grip and eased his fist upward. Harry's long narrow foot wrapped round the back of his knee and tugged.

Their mouths bumped together again, blindly, and held – this, they knew how to do. Taste of milk and sugar and the cinnamon that'd been dusted over the bread pudding from dinner. Taste of newness and urgency. Ron plastered himself against the wriggling, welcoming body underneath him and felt Harry's thighs – long and lean and practically hairless, vice-grip muscles from all that broomstick-hugging – clamp around his erection and refuse to let go.

No room for his hand now; reluctantly, he withdrew it and repositioned at the small of Harry's back. How had they ended up on their sides, when just a minute ago he'd been on top? Mystery. Wasn't going to question it, though, not when every breath, every bump of his hips sent quivers of full-out rapture rocketing through him. His hand ratcheted up the bony xylophone of Harry's spine to settle at the nape of his neck. They still hadn't stopped kissing.

It was its own sort of hypnosis, this rhythm they'd found – so mesmerising and insistent that the kiss had eventually to break, so they could get that much closer, so cheek could press cheek and arms wrap round tight enough to meet again at the back. “Christ,” Harry whispered, the word harsh in Ron's ear, and Ron had a moment to wonder: who's he? Oh, yeah …

And then it didn't matter, because that infitesimal but mutually satisfying shift of hips that buried his cock between Harry's grasping thighs even as it sent Harry's in a long sticky slide against his abdomen … that marvellous miraculous thing they were doing was getting faster, and faster, and oh Merlin did it ever feel good, whoo boy yes indeed, everything they said sex was cracked up to be and more beside, electricity inundated with a kind of overarching tenderness that made Ron's throat ache.

Probably there was more to it than this – even now, with Harry's breath hard in his ear, with their four legs laced together like his mum's knitting, Ron could imagine what it might be, how it might feel. But surely, he thought, surely not everybody had this.

For once in his life, he was the lucky one.

He closed his eyes, buried his face in Harry's thick lank hair, and let himself go.

**