Beta: kohrin. Thanks very much for that.

Warning(s): Incest, under-age sexual activity (not intercourse), sexual descriptions.

Author's/Artist's Notes: Title taken from Ode to Salvador Dali by Federico Garcia Lorca. Written for the 2011 LJ slash_weasley fest.

0 how he loves you, darling boy. 0 how, like

always, he invents the monsters underneath the bed to get you to sleep

next to him, chest to chest or chest to back, the covers drawn around

you in an act of faith against the night. You Are Jeff - Richard Siken

It was a mistake to send back the Christmas jumper. I knew it almost as soon as I'd done it. My mother had put time and love into that sweater and I threw it back in her face, although it wasn't really her I was angry with. I knew that act would damn me in the eyes of my siblings, too. Especially the twins. I'm glad I never heard their reaction to that. Actually, I wish I'd had the chance to hear Fred's insults. I'd gladly listen to anything he had to say if I had the chance, now.

Those home-made gifts represented our poverty to me then. I was striving for something more substantial. She had thought about me all the time she was making it, though. And I did know that was more valuable. Even then.

She had hurt me. I'd always been her golden boy, and she'd been my champion. She was always proud of my achievements and that had always meant so much. I gained all those positions and qualifications for her as much as for me, to get her attention, her love, her protection. And she always had defended me against all comers. Until it was me against him.

She chose to stand by her husband, not by me. He insulted and belittled me and – for once – she didn't spring to my defence. So the sight of that sweater sickened me, and I sent it back. Then I regretted it.

That first Christmas on my own was miserable. My colleagues all had family to spend it with. I tried to work, but the Ministry closes for Christmas day. I hadn't met Audrey yet. Ordinarily, I relish the peace of a quiet office, but for that empty week it just served to highlight my loneliness.

I saw the New Year in, lying on my flat mattress in my damp bedsit trying to shut out the sounds of bells and fireworks. I craved the company of my family, of any single member of it, except for him. If I had approached any Weasley in Britain, though, every other Weasley would have known about it. They were all living closely together. I would have ended up back in the fold, and that would have meant swallowing my pride; I couldn't do that.

So that's how I came to find myself, one rainy Sunday afternoon in the middle of January, standing outside a cabin on a Romanian hillside. I had no idea what reception I was going to get.

Eventually I knocked and Charlie opened the door wearing pyjama trousers and a yawn. His face snapped awake when he saw me dripping on his doorstep.

"Percy," he said stupidly.

"Yes," I replied with an equal amount of intelligence.

He looked at me. "What? Why?"

I shrugged.

He asked "Does Mum know?"

"No!" I snapped quickly.

He looked at me for a while longer.

"You're getting all wet," he observed.

I had reached the point of saturation where I couldn't get any wetter so I just shrugged again.

"You want to come inside?" he asked.

I shrugged and sniffed. A drip of rain splashed the inside of my nose. "Thanks," I said.

As soon as I was inside, he started tutting. "You're soaked through." He cast drying and warming spells on me. It felt good. "You do realise that you've broken your mother's heart?"

I nodded; it felt less good.

"So why don't you just go home, see her, make things up to her?"

"Apologise to him?"

"I suppose." He took my spectacles from my nose and held them in a warm breeze issuing from his wand.

"That's what it would take, and that would mean admitting that I'm wrong, and I'm not."

Charlie sighed and returned my eyeglasses to my face. The bridge was warm on my nose. "Go and sit in there. I've got a fire going." He watched me walk into his sitting room. "Look at you! You're skin and bone. When did you last eat?"

"I had, um. Well, not breakfast because I came straight here. Well, I was going to ..." but I'd spent the morning debating with myself.

"You haven't eaten today? You're not looking after yourself. Lucky for you I've got some stew on." He went into another room, which must have been the kitchen.

"What about you? You haven't got dressed today!" I belatedly called after him.

He returned five minutes later, fully dressed and carrying two steaming bowls. It was good. I must have eaten mine really quickly, because he was only halfway through his when he got up again to refill mine, and normally nobody can eat faster than Charlie.

"You cooked this?" I asked eventually. It was so long since I'd eaten a home-cooked meal. It wasn't up to Mum's standard, of course, but it was close.

He grinned. "That's why I didn't have time to get dressed."

We sat back when we'd finished, the room full of all the questions we weren't asking.

"Am I allowed to tell them you were here?" he asked eventually.

I shrugged. "You're the one who'll get the bollocking."

"Language!" He feigned shock. "That'll be the company you're keeping."

"They're not all Death Eaters!" I snapped defensively.

It was his turn to shrug. "I'm not working tomorrow. Fancy a bevvy?"

"I am," I replied. "Go on, then."

He grinned again. He summoned a bottle of mead from a low cabinet next to the fire. No glasses. He pulled out the cork with his teeth then tapped it with his wand to chill it. He offered me the bottle. I muttered my thanks and drank from it. It is a measure of how low I felt at that time that I did not insist on glasses.

We drank together for a while, the sunlight fading beyond the window. We talked about our work, our schooldays and sports. Eventually I said, "He never had faith in me. He never believed that I could make it on my own. I just wanted him to congratulate me on the promotion, but he had to spoil everything." So Charlie changed the subject.

"I'm going to tell you something," he said, "which I've never told anyone before. Only one other person knows about it. Just me and him."

We settled back on the sofa, side by side. The mead was nearly finished. Charlie closed the curtains with his wand.

"Years ago," he said, "Bill and I shared a bedroom. As you know. Bill, he used to try to scare me – this is way back when you were a toddler, before Mum was even carrying the twins. So, we shared a room. Two little beds. And Bill used to tell me tales to frighten me, the way big brothers do. He used to tell me there were monsters under my bed."

"You told me once that the ghoul in the attic would eat my rat if I didn't give you my fudge."

"Well. That's not the story we're concentrating on now."

"As it turned out, of course, given who Scabbers really was, that wouldn't have been a bad thing. Wish I'd kept the sweeties now."

"So, Bill used to tell me all the time that there were monsters under my bed. I knew there weren't, of course. All day he'd be saying it and I'd just laugh at him. I knew there were no such things. Well, not under my bed anyway. There was too much clutter shoved under there for one thing."

I shuddered. I didn't want to think about those dust bunnies and odd socks and apple cores.

"It's all very well being brave and rational in daylight, of course," Charlie continued. "But once it got dark outside and we'd brushed our teeth, I'd be lying there under my Babbity Rabbity quilt, staring up at the cracked plaster on the ceiling and I'd start thinking about the monsters under my bed. Which weren't real. Only, I'd lie there thinking about them so hard that I got to the point where I was sure I could hear them snarling." He tipped the mead bottle into his mouth but it was empty. "So, I'd climb out of bed and cross the room and I'd get into his bed next to him. I never said anything. I just climbed in with him. That was why he did it, of course. That's why he spent all day winding me up about imaginary monsters. It was so that I'd get into the bed with him, and lie there with my little chest against his back, the blankets pulled up high, tucking us into our own little golden space."

I didn't like that idea. I saw myself lying in my lonely cot on a damp nappy while across the landing, my two brothers were warm and happy, with their sticky, skinny limbs wrapped around each other. And below us our parents were busy making twins. I didn't like that train of thought at all.

"I think I might go," I said, wondering why I'd thought I could come here.

"No! No! I haven't finished the story," Charlie said, shifting closer to me. "Listen. So, eventually Bill gave up on the monster stories. He didn't need them any more. I would just sleep in his bed as a matter of course. That's why I didn't make a fuss when Mum gave you my Babbity Rabitty blanket. You remember?"

I didn't. I shook my head.

"Oh. Never mind. Anyway, I didn't need it any more 'cos I had Bill. You ever sleep with someone else like that? All cosy together?"

"Ron got in with me one time after a nightmare."

"Oh, well, you know then."

"He wet the bed."

"No, maybe you don't."

"I didn't let him again."

"Understandable. I'm just saying that we got used to it. We liked it – breathing each other's air and whispering and cuddling – then Bill went off to Hogwarts."

I felt the stretch of my own skin as my eyebrows rose. "When he was eleven? And you were ... um ... eight? You were still sleeping together?"

Charlie shrugged. His shoulder rubbed against mine and I realised just how close he was sitting. "And on holidays. When he came back from school."

"But isn't that, I mean, weren't you getting – was that not a bit old? I mean boys, at that sort of age – when did you ...?"

"The first time I woke up with Bill's little hard-on sticking into me he was embarrassed. I thought he just needed to pee. His coyness made me curious. We got used to it. He was a late developer and I was physically mature for my age, so I wasn't that far behind him."

"I suppose you can get used to all sorts of things," I muttered, blushing myself at the thought of it all.

Charlie put his mouth close to my ear when he said, "Bill showed me how to wank," although there was nobody to overhear him and it just made me feel even more self-conscious.

I pulled away a little. "Most people manage to work that out for themselves!" I snapped.

"I used to watch him," Charlie said dreamily. "I tried to match him stroke for stroke. It was nice. It was safe, you know, just a friendly thing to do."

"I've certainly never done anything of the sort with any of my friends!"

"Of course not. This was family. Family's safe." He patted my knee reassuringly. "We're family, Percy. You and me. Safe. Relax."

I relaxed. His hand stayed on my knee.

"When Bill left school I was fifteen. He moved to London for the year, for training. He got his own lodgings. He didn't come home."

"No." I looked into the flames of Charlie's fire and felt disappointment. "So that's when it stopped?"

"Not exactly." Charlie's hand rubbed at my thigh. Then he blurted out, "We sort of set up an illegal portkey so I could sneak out of school and go and visit him -"

I jerked away, half stood, "You shouldn't be telling me that! I work at the Ministry! I'm supposed to report things like that!"

"But you won't," he said softly, "because I'm family."

I exhaled in exasperation. "No, of course not," I said quickly. Then I sat down again and snuggled up to Charlie because it had been nice, being so close to him, having his hand stroking my thigh and squeezing my knee. "How did you get out of Hogwarts?"

"Hogsmeade weekends," he replied, "and there are other ways. Eventually we worked out other ways." He put his hand back on my leg. "It doesn't matter," he said, and it didn't. Not with his strong fingers smoothing away at me like that. "I hated the dorm at school. I was so lonely there. I didn't know who to trust. There was always someone moving about at night. In Bill's bed, it was just the two of us. It was dark, but it wasn't a dark full of unknown terrors. It was a golden, velvet, comfortable dark." Charlie's voice was deep and soft.

"One time when we were wanking together ..." Charlie's fingers moved on to my inner thigh. "I swapped our hands. It felt so much better – me stroking him and him stroking me – so much better than just doing it to myself."

I gulped. I was feeling very hot.

"When I turned sixteen and it became legal, I was determined to lose my virginity. But I was scared, too. You know?"

I nodded. I knew all too well.

"I needed someone I trusted. I needed to do it with someone who wouldn't laugh at me for being a virgin, who wouldn't hurt me, someone who wouldn't expect too much from me, or avoid me afterwards." Charlie looked right into my face then and he asked, "Are you a virgin, Percy?"

"No," I lied. My voice was too high-pitched to be convincing.

"I knew I could trust Bill," Charlie murmured. "I knew that he'd love me just the same no matter what."

"You went to his lodgings?" I squeaked. I wanted details. I'd stopped caring about how wrong it all was, because the blood was rushing to my cock. I wanted to know everything.

"He was in Egypt by then," Charlie said softly, near my ear. "It was so hot. We hardly wore any clothes. We were sweaty even before we touched. We lay on his camp-bed under the canvas of his tent. It was airless in there, all zipped up against the mosquitoes. We were breathless even before we started kissing. We took off each other's clothes."

My breathing was heavy, panting onto his neck. Charlie ran his free hand through my hair. I could picture that scene in the desert, and I could feel Charlie's body beside mine in the mountains.

"We ran our hands over each other's bodies. Everywhere. We licked at each other's salty skin."

Something warm and wet touched my earlobe. It was followed by Charlie's breath and his words, so it must have been his tongue. It made me shudder.

"I licked his cock." Charlie stroked his hand up, between my legs, to cup my erection. "I put his dick in my mouth and I sucked it." He pressed back and my hips lifted – both of us increasing the pressure of his hand on my cock. "Then he pushed his finger into me, into my arsehole." I groaned; Charlie's hand started to rub up and down. "I got onto all-fours and he pushed his fingers into me, one after the other, in and out." His grip tightened and his hand moved up and down. "Then he poured olive oil over us both, over his cock and inside my hole." I swore under my breath as Charlie lifted my robes with his other hand, all the time he was pulling at my cock and his mouth was against my ear, his tongue caressing my lobe between his filthy sentences. "He pushed himself into me."

"Oh yes, oh Merlin yes!"

"Thrusting into me again and again and again. Hips snapping forward. Slamming in." Charlie reached under my robes and took my hot, hard cock out of my underpants. "And he stroked my dick like this, spreading my pre-come down it like this, fondling my balls like this."

"Oh. Like that. Just like that."

"And then I came, and he came, and then we slept together, cuddling each other in spite of the temperature. It was dark, but it was our dark. We made it golden." Charlie's mouth shifted away from my ear and onto my mouth. He licked at my lips. I parted them. Our tongues moved hard and fast in each other's mouths. He dragged my robes over my head. Then he kissed me again. My hands roamed over his still clothed body, trying to find fastenings, wishing he hadn't changed out of his pyjama trousers.

He broke the kiss and I opened my eyes. I hadn't realised that I'd closed them. We were lying on the floor. We must have fallen off the sofa. Again, I hadn't noticed.

"Fuck me, Percy," Charlie said. "Fuck me just like that. Like he did."

I could only nod. For a moment I thought that we might move to Charlie's bed. But really, neither of us could wait that long. I sat up, my head spinning, and we stripped Charlie between us. We kissed again – long and sweet and deep. Then he kissed butterfly kisses down my body until he reached my cock. I held my breath. He licked it in one long stripe from base to tip. Then he opened his big mouth and almost all of it went inside.

As I've already hinted, I was, in truth, a virgin. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. I had to use all of my self control to stop myself from ejaculating into his mouth when he sucked. It was the most sensual thing I had ever experienced. Honestly, I've never felt anything so erotic since, either.

I tried to warn him that I wasn't going to last long and some kind of coherent language must have issued from my mouth, because he pulled off and turned round, getting onto all fours with his tight, tanned arse in my face. That didn't improve my chances of holding out very much.

I took a deep breath and scrambled onto my knees, trying to remember what had come next, wondering whether Charlie kept olive oil, and if not whether butter would do. I took a buttock in each hand and eased them apart. I ran my thumbs through the sweat of his crease. Until I reached his pucker.

It was tight closed. I ran a finger over it, around it.

"Fuck! Percy! Stick it in!" Charlie yelled.

For one heated moment I thought he meant for me to put my cock in his tight, dry hole and I knew that wouldn't work. Then I realised that he meant my finger.

I stuck a finger in my mouth. It tasted musky and salty like Charlie's skin smelled. I pushed at the tight ring of muscle.

His heat closed itself round my finger. We both gasped at the same time. I forced myself to concentrate. In and out, that's what he'd said. I was hesitant at first, nervous of hurting him. He urged me on, though. I moved faster. I added fingers. I remembered and I moved my other hand round his body to grab his cock. I couldn't get a proper hold, so I swapped my hands round. I wanked him like he'd wanked me and at the same time I shoved into him with my fingers.

"Fuck me, now, Percy," Charlie said. "Fuck me just like he did. Now!"

I took a deep breath. For years I'd been scared of sex. Excited, yes, and desirous of it, but so nervous, too. I'd never had anyone with whom I had felt secure enough to try anything like this. I had worried about whether I would get it all right, and if I didn't, then whether I would be forgiven. But this was Charlie. He was my brother. I knew that I was safe and that – whatever happened – he would always love me. It helped me, afterwards, to understand that, really, no matter how much you hated and despised me for what I had done, that deep down all of you still loved me and always would.

I leaned back and took hold of my cock. I tried to calm, worried that it was going to go off in my hand and I'd have to wait for my taste of Charlie's hot, hungry hole. He shoved something into my hand – a vial. Then I poured its sticky contents over us both, over my cock and inside his hole. I lined up and I pushed gently in. It was velvet and warm and tight and indescribably wonderful.

Charlie gasped. He took some deep breaths. I moved back, without pulling all the way out. Then I pushed back in. I got a firm grip on his hips, then I remembered his cock and moved one hand back under him. I stroked him firmly and thrust into him at the same time. I thrusted into him again, and again, and again. Hips snapping forward. Slamming in. He moaned and cried out under me. His cock was so hot and wet in my hand. He was matching my rhythm and pushing back onto me.

Then he stiffened. "I'm coming," he warned. I relaxed, stopped holding it back. Rushes of intense pleasure sped through me. I blacked out.

I came to with Charlie kissing my neck. He lay down beside me, with his chest against my back. We were on the floor, near the fire. I looked into its golden flames. All around it was darkness. I felt safe and loved. I was warm, even as my sweat cooled on my skin, and Charlie's come did on my hand. I reached round for his hand and held it, wrapped his arm over my waist, both of our hands lay together by my belly. It was good. I slept better than I had done on any night in my damp, lonely bedsit.

We cuddled, feeling cosy, safe, warm, friendly, trusting, happy, loving, sticky, secure and relaxed, with our limbs wrapped round each other. It was wonderful. We were joined in the dark and golden hours. Family.

It's been a difficult year for you, Ron. I understand that. Now you're the hero and everyone expects you to be happy and strong. And, you are those things. But I know that you're tired, too. Tired and sad and trying to recover. You need to be looked after and hugged, but you daren't ask for that because you're a hero, and heroes are supposed to be strong.

You want to be happy, you want someone to touch you and relax you and make you feel good. All those girls who pursue you though, they want to own you. You don't know how many of them are in love with you, and how many just want to stand in the shadow of your glory. Maybe you will want to be owned by one of them, but just now you're too exhausted to make that sort of decision. If you let them pleasure you, then they'll expect your commitment. It's too early for that. You've been through too much.

You don't mind if I sit a little closer? Here? Like this? With my hand here? I can make you happy and relaxed, Ron. I can make you feel secure. It's safe. I'm family. I'm your brother. You're safe with me. Whatever happens, I'll always love you.

We can be like Bill and Charlie in the desert, and the way I was with Charlie in the mountains. Fuck me, Ron. Fuck me just like that.