Ron wasn’t sure what had awakened him. He had no memory of being startled out of his sleep, so he supposed that he must have woken up normally. Then he realized that it was much too dark to be morning. He wondered why this was and why there were such funny shapes speckling his vision.

He tried to move his arm to touch the spots in the air, but either his arm was very heavy, or else there was something in the way. This frustrated him. Finally, he managed to move his arm, but it immediately fell into unsupported nothingness. Surely there was an explanation for this, but whatever it was, it didn’t present itself to him.

Suddenly, it hit him that he was staring at the inside of his eyelids. He opened them, at last escaping his prior state of befuddled semi-consciousness. It was indeed quite dark, but it was dark in the real way that a room is at nighttime, not in the strange, half-dreamt way it had been before.

His arm was hanging off the side of the bed. Pulling it up, Ron rolled over to look at Hermione, but she was still asleep. For a while, he watched her, eyes tracing the rise and fall of her torso beneath her blanket, strands of her hair splayed onto her pillow.

They were not in his room at Grimmauld Place; they were in an American hotel - and a Muggle one, besides! And they had flown in a real Muggle airplane to get here, which had been a very weird experience. At the time, looking out of the small rectangular window, he could scarcely believe that the blue-tinged world below him was his own at all. He had rather enjoyed the flight (particularly the complimentary honeyed peanuts, which were quite tasty) and had thus been amused when Hermione clutched his hand tightly, looking rather pale as the plane finally entered its descent. “Sorry, my stomach just really can’t take this,� she had said with a grimace, closing her eyes. “It’s like being on the Knight Bus.�

The words “No, it isn’t, more like riding a fast broom� had formed on his tongue, but he had bitten them back. She hadn’t laughed at him the other day, when he had fetched her from the next room away to deal with a particularly hairy spider…at least, not to his face. He suspected that she still entertained Harry and Ginny with these sorts of stories.

Ron blinked, his eyes adjusting slowly to the darkness. He looked around, wondering vaguely what it was that had managed to awaken him. Ordinarily, he could sleep through anything. But the hotel room appeared just as it had when they had crashed on the bed upon their arrival to the States: a bedside table with a Muggle lamp, a door leading to a bathroom, an armchair, and a smooth black box sitting atop a squat dresser in front of the bed.

Ron gazed back down at his fiancée and noticing that her bushy hair shone, illuminated faintly from behind. It seemed that a small amount of light was spilling into the shadow-filled room from behind an arrangement of dark, heavy curtains and pale, thin ones.

With as light, quiet footfalls as he could manage, he crept towards the curtains. The pale curtains were fluttering a little, as if touched by a gentle breeze through an open window. Brushing the curtains aside, he made the rather disconcerting discovery that although they did indeed conceal an enormous window, the window was closed. The cause of the curtains’ movement quickly became apparent, however: below them, at about knee level, was a long metal box blowing cool air out of a set of dark slits. He assumed that this was a Muggle device of some sort, though its purpose was quite unfathomable; was it simply meant to make the curtains move? That seemed senseless, but then, you could never tell with Muggles.

He sighed. He would really have to learn these things if he was to keep up the façade towards Hermione’s Muggle cousin and her husband-to-be. Hermione had been delighted to receive the invitation to Melinda’s wedding; apparently, the two of them had been quite close as little girls, before Melinda and her parents moved to the States. Initially, Ron hadn’t planned on being talked into coming, but when Hermione had written back, she had happily informed Melinda that she, too, was engaged. Melinda promptly extended the invitation to Ron, even suggesting that the two couples spend an afternoon together two days before the wedding. After that, there was no dissuading Hermione, no matter how many times he insisted that he was about as able to pass for a Muggle as he was to pass for a gnome in a tutu.

Ron rolled his eyes slightly before looking out the window. He immediately perceived that something about the view was not quite right. His eyes skimmed the urban world outside the window: the tall buildings, the parked cars, and the something-powered lights (Hermione would know the word) were not terribly different from what he had seen of the British Muggle world. He lifted his gaze and realized what the anomaly was: the sky kept flashing, lighter and dark again. He searched the sky, trying to see where the lightning was, but he couldn’t find any. The sky simply appeared to light up a little, from one shade of darkness to a slightly less dark shade, for a moment at a time. It did this repeatedly, in quick, uneven succession, and yet he couldn’t locate any of the actual bolts of lightning; it seemed that they were all occurring outside of his field of vision.

Was he dreaming? No, he knew he wasn’t; he could distinctly feel the cool streams blowing towards his knees from the strange Muggle air vent. He pressed his slightly stubbly cheek against the glass and drew it back again. It was strange how glass remained cold as ice to the touch even in the middle of the summer.

Straining his senses, Ron noticed for the first time the noise of thunder, but it wasn’t very loud, nor was it raining. Yet the sky kept lighting up. He wondered if this was normal, if this was safe. He stared at a patch of the flashing sky, and for an instant, he thought, someone cast the Dark Mark - but then he told himself it was a ridiculous idea; he was being stupid.

He still felt a little fearful, but some part of him was of the opinion that if it were truly something dangerous, he would hear something somehow. The night wouldn’t be so silent and still, interrupted only by the distant lights of a passing Muggle car.

The thought of waking Hermione, in the hope that she could explain the sky’s disturbing behavior, crossed his mind, but he quickly countered the notion. There was no reason to take away her rest; the adjustment to the time difference was already going to cause enough sleeping problems. He still had no idea what was going on, but he came to the decision that what he needed to do was to stop being scared, to just go back to sleep and not let it bother him.

“Ron?�

Taken by surprise, Ron jerked around a little quicker than he intended. There was Hermione in her white nightgown, out of bed and walking towards him, and even in the dim light he could see the amused expression on her face.

“Don’t worry, it’s just me,� she chuckled, coming to stand next to him. “Couldn’t sleep without hearing your snoring.�

“Uh, Hermione?�

“Hmm?� she responded, eyebrows rising at the note of worry in his voice.

“There’s - � Ron hesitated, not wanting to sound like an idiot. “There’s something going on with the sky. Look.� He pulled the curtains and gestured.

He watched her face, illuminated by the flashes of light. After a second, her eyebrows knotted together and her jaw dropped partway open. To his alarm, she looked as bewildered and troubled as he felt. But then the worry lines on her forehead smoothed, and the frown was replaced by a grin. “Oh, of course,� she laughed.

“Care to explain?� Ron asked, a bit peeved by her reaction. Whatever it was certainly hadn’t been obvious to him.

“Sorry, it’s just - it’s the Fourth of July. It’s a holiday, and the Americans celebrate it with fireworks - you know, like George’s, only these are Muggle ones. We’re probably just too far away to see them - to see the individual fireworks.�

“Oh.� That would indeed explain it. Now rather embarrassed, Ron hurriedly changed the subject. “Er, why is it a holiday?�

“It’s their Independence Day. The anniversary of the American Revolution, two centuries ago.�

This reminded him considerably of May 2nd, although of course, that was a day for not only celebration, but grief. “Sort of like us?� he asked her.

“Like us fighting to overthrow Voldemort?� She shook her head. The ghost of a smile played on her lips, but her brown eyes were solemn. “No, Ron, they were fighting to overthrow us.�

He stared at her in incredulity, wondering what in Merlin’s name she was talking about. But before he could get the question out, she went on, “I mean, not us us, but you know, the rule of the British. The first few States were colonies of Britain, and they wanted their freedom.�

Aside from an initial “Oh,� Ron digested this surprising piece of information silently. It came as a bit of a shock to know that the British Muggle government had ever been thought oppressive. Seamus had once talked about a couple of great-grandparents who considered the British a bunch of tyrants, and Ron reckoned that he had probably learned at some point that the States had once been ruled by Britain, but only now did the information genuinely strike him. “Why? Was Britain - I dunno, hurting them?�

Hermione shrugged, her eyes growing distant as she transferred into textbook mode. “Basically, we - that is, the British - were taxing them to help pay for an earlier war, which we had fought partly on their behalf, and which we didn’t think they had contributed very much to. Oh, and we began to enforce some unpopular trade laws, so that the new taxes would really raise profits. They thought that if they were going to be taxed, they at least ought to have seats in Parliament, and because we wouldn’t give them one, things just got worse from there.�

Ron did try to follow all of this, but he couldn’t help snorting, “Hermione, is there anything you don’t know, or can I sell copies of you as wizard encyclopedias?�

She made a face but didn’t retort; instead, she leaned into his side, putting an arm around him. They stood there for a while longer, watching the night flash light and dark and light again. “So - you don’t reckon the taxes would have hurt their economy?� he asked.

Hermione hesitated, still staring out the window. “I don’t know. I don’t think it would have, you know, destroyed anyone’s livelihood…except maybe for a few wealthy American merchants.�

“Right…� said Ron unsympathetically, thinking of the Malfoys. Then he mentally jabbed himself for sounding unsympathetic. Harry, too, was quite wealthy - although even so, a cushion of Galleons meant that a lost job wouldn’t be as much of a problem as it would be for others. “So, why didn’t the British give the Americans a spot in the government?�

“Well, a lot of the Americans were people who had left Britain because they didn’t fit in - religious dissenters from the Church of England, immigrants, that sort of thing.�

Ron frowned in confusion. “What do you mean? Weren’t they all immigrants?�

Hermione waved her hand in negation. “Immigrants to Britain - foreigners who had been living here,� she clarified. “Anyway, that was why the British government wouldn’t give them the seats - because we didn’t see them as British, only as a population inferior to the mother country. Their problem was self-interest - we did need their taxes to pay war debts. Ours was, well…blood purity, essentially.�

Both of them grimaced at the comparison, and Ron squeezed Hermione’s hand. She laid her head on his shoulder, and for the thousandth time, he marveled at the way a head filled with so much knowledge could feel so light and soft. Of course, her words could be quite a weapon when it wanted to. Vivid images of Hermione’s verbal aggression on subjects she cared about - most commonly elf rights - appeared in his own head and made him smile.

It occurred to him that Hermione’s legal battle for elf rights was another fight in which one side did not necessarily have better justification than the other. She might be right about the way house-elves should be treated, but she was wrong about what the elves actually wanted to be doing, and although the fact that there were opponents to SPEW outraged her, it had come as no surprise to Ron.

And what about the elder generation of Finnigans? Were they right? History had never been his strong point; all he really knew about were the Wizarding Wars, where right and wrong were clear as night and day - as Dark and light.

“It’s not always just good or evil, is it.� He spoke the words as a statement, not as a question.

“No, it’s not,� Hermione said softly, and Ron squeezed her hand again as the Muggle fireworks flashed across the sky once more.