He smells garlic in his food and is viciously reminded of Quirrell and the feel of his face burning under his hands, and the awful, horrid smell. The memory makes his stomach roll, but he swallows and pushes the feeling down. He wipes his hands on his trousers, to remove the soot, even though he knows they are clean. Still, he inspects them afterwards; palms up and palms down, between the fingers and even under the fingernails. There is a bit of ink on one of his fingers, but other than that… They were clean when he woke up in the Hospital Wing as well. He wonders who had washed them then, and if they had used magic or water.
He hears a sound, a quickly cut off word, and looks up.
Ron watches him from across the table, pale and wide-eyed. Ron knows, Harry had told him yesterday, had described Quirrell's death because he couldn't hold it inside himself anymore; the words like a snake, slithering up his throat, poison on his tongue, in his voice. Ron had screamed himself awake this morning. Harry is sorry-not sorry to be the cause of those nightmares. It is easier now, when someone knows, but that doesn't mean he wishes Ron to suffer. He just doesn't want to suffer alone.
Ron mouths you okay? and Harry nods, because really, he is. The nausea passes quickly, quicker than ever before. He breathes deeply, and something unspools inside his belly.
It is the last time that the thought of Quirrell makes him sick.
(Voldemort will never stop making him sick)
The white queen strikes him with her stone arm and Quirrell's face, burned and smoking, twists into a smile.
Ron wakes up in the middle of the night, with a cut off scream, left-over fear making shadows dance like flames. Darkness presses down on his chest, heavy and relentless. He barely manages to turn his head. Harry is asleep, he sees, and not waking them all up with his screams.
Ron wishes he was home, just a few stairs away from his parents. He thinks about getting up from his bed and finding one of his brothers or waking Harry up, but he is afraid that they might have a second face at the back of their head.
He can't risk it being true. He is awake and he knows he is being ridiculous, but he can't risk it.
He can't risk it.
He breaths deeply and waits for his heart to slow down. It does, eventually, and when he feels capable of moving he sits up and runs his fingers through his hair. It is damp, from sweat, and so are his neck, and his pillow. He starts to feel chilly, especially since his back is uncovered now that he is sitting up. He flips over his pillow and wipes his neck with his sleeve. He is about to lie down and attempt to get back to sleep when he sees something black peeking out from under the duvet. He lifts it up to expose it.
There are scorch marks on his sheet. He remembers gripping them when he woke up.
Remembers Quirrell's face, in the dream, burned.
(He could have set the bed on fire. He could have set the bed on fire. He could have burned in the bed of fire. He-
Decades later, a young Auror will ask Harry how old he was when he first killed someone and he will not say eleven.
He will say a higher number, and Ron will look at him sharply but won't correct him.
Ron never tells Harry that he has met a Quirrell once, a wizened old man with grief lines etched deep into his face. He had reported to the Aurors that he was being harassed by some young wizards and Ron was the newbie Auror that was sent to deal with the case. He remembers entering the house and seeing family pictures on the walls. Quirinus Quirrell was in many of them, smiling happily, turban-less.
"My son." The old man had said upon seeing what Ron was looking at, the love and pain in his voice shaping the words strangely.
Harry has always seen Quirrell as an extension of Voldemort and Ron had followed his lead, unconsciously, for years, until that day, when a smiling, young Quirinus waved at him from a photograph on a wall.
"He's dead." the man had told him and Ron couldn't say I'm sorry, because he wasn't.
It left a bad taste in his mouth, like almonds gone bad, only not, because you can't spit out a feeling and wash away the taste.
Quirrell was a man who deserved to die. Ron will never dispute that. But-
His death should be counted. The kill should be counted.
Harry doesn't, Ron knows, Harry doesn't.
"My mother's protection killed him," Harry tells him, later, when he asks. He is not insistent, as if he is trying to convince himself, but definite, like it's the only truth.
Ron swallows his words. Swallows the- You didn't know what would happen when he touched you, but you knew what would happen when you grabbed his face. He doesn't say Your mother's protection was just a weapon and you used it.
He does say: "You did what you had to do."
Harry narrows his eyes. If Ron were anyone else he might feel apprehension, but Ron has seen Harry at his angriest, furious magic spinning around him like glass shards, sharp, no incantation necessary , pure rage drawing blood. Ron had bled, along with everyone else who happened to be there. He will bleed again if he must.
(For Harry he will bleed a thousand times.)
He thinks about saying You killed him, but he remembers that little boy who couldn't stand the smell of garlic and who only lost that haunted look in his eyes after he had shared the burden with Ron, after he had described every second of that event. Sometimes Ron thinks that it a was a full transfer of the burden and not just a partial one.
Harry still dreams of Cedric and Sirius and Voldemort. Not often, but he does. He has admitted it, in a whisper, that one time he drank too much Firewhisky. Not Quirrell, though. He never dreams of Quirrell.
Ron doesn't say anything about how he sometimes, still, wakes up with soot-covered hands and nausea rolling in his gut.
They've both been silent for far too long, and Harry looks like he is about to say something when Hermione enters the room and the moment is broken.
Ron sighs and lets it go. In the end, Quirrell was a man who was going to kill a child in service of a Dark Lord. He is not worthy enough to be carried on someone's soul. Especially the soul of a childthat he was going to kill.
Ron doesn't mind keeping the count for Harry, and not just because he has no count to keep of his own.
He thinks of the old man again and of the monster-
transportation vehicle for the worst monster of them all, a meaty thing, barely a man
-his son became and perhaps he shouldn't but-
Quirrell, Voldemort, and that unfortunate sod who thought that he could murder the head of the Auror Office. That's three. For now. Ron doubts that the number will stay that low.
Wizards live long lives after all.
Time passes, the number becomes higher and even Ron gets a number of his own.
Harry looks at him when he does, compassion and terrible sadness in his eyes, "The first one is the hardest," he admits, "Voldemort may have been a monster, but that doesn't mean he wasn't human. I ended his life. It was necessary, of course, but I- I ended his life."
Ron looks down at his hands and thinks of Quirrell. He thinks of small hands burning him to death; he thinks of the first one (he doesn't think of Voldemort).
"You had no choice," Harry says.
"I know." This was not his first, he realizes suddenly. Quirrell was their first. Harry may have been the one to kill him, but Ron is the one who carries the burden of it. He feels tears prick at his eyes at the unfairness of it all.
"It gets easier once you learn to handle it."
Like you handled Quirrell's death by hoisting it on me, he thinks, for a moment utterly furious at Harry and whatever magic made the transfer happen. He knows magic had a hand in this. Ron wasn't the one who killed Quirrell, he shouldn't have felt so guilty about it.
He looks up at Harry, ready to unleash his rage.
Harry is looking at him worriedly, concern so deep it swallows Ron's fury.
Harry doesn't know, he reminds himself.
Magic has a mind of its own, sometimes. It is something every magical child is told at some point, with a smile, like it is harmless. Mostly it is. Sometimes it helps. Accidental magic is a form of it. It may be initiated by the strong emotions of a magical child, but it does what it wants, in ways it wants.
Sometimes, magic doesn't help. Sometimes… sometimes it makes one child suffer, so that the other one wouldn't.
Ron blinks, the knowledge for the first time crystalizing in understanding, terrible, terrifying understanding.
Magic has a mind of its own.
Ron closes his eyes, cold fear spreading through his limbs, and digs his fingers into his palms.
"I promise it will get easier," Harry says, his mind still on murder, and Ron nods dumbly.
Magic is all around him. Magic is inside him. His head starts hurting and there is a pressure in his chest that is rising, risi-
Nearby vase explodes and Ron's eyes fly open. Harry is on his feet, with his wand drawn, eyes searching the room for an enemy they won't find. Ron knows this because his headache is gone and the pressure in is chest is rapidly lessening.
He looks at the fragments of glass strewn all over the carpet and-
Harry approaches him carefully, "Ron?" Harry knows accidental magic when he sees it.
-okay, Ron thinks, okay. Vase exploding wasn't a threat made by magic.
It wasn't.
(It felt a bit like a threat. That could have been someone's head, Harry's head, his brain splattered on the wall.)
He feels better now, since it got out. Not so high-strung anymore. It hurts, unexpectedly, that he is feeling better. He doesn't want to feel better. The panic had felt real, this feeling of emptiness doesn't.
He takes out his wand and with a wave of it the vase is repaired.
Using magic still feels natural, he thinks, thought laced with despair. It is still a part of him. Like a limb, or better yet an organ. Spleen. You can live without a spleen, just not very well.
"You are a bit old for accidental magic." Harry comments.
And Ron, seeing the magic shimmering around Harry, like a caress, like a shadow, and his own, around himself, making the fine hairs on his arms and neck stand up, just says, despondently: "Two." Quirrell, and the Death Eater wannabe he killed today. Two. Not one.
It should have been only one.
Harry steps closer, close enough to touch and Ron doesn't understand how he has never before seen the thin strands of magic connecting them. He passes through them with one hand , to see if they would break, but nothing happens. He doesn't even feel them.
Harry grabs his shoulders, alarmed and unseeing, and the strands pulse, with life, fed from both sides of the link. They fade from sight, gradually, and Ron doesn't know how to make himself see them again, but he knows he would never break them, even if he knew how. Harry is his brother. Ron has no doubts that he is linked to the rest of his family as well. He thinks, for just a moment , about what their magics might be doing to each other without them knowing. He shies away from those black, scary thoughts. This is not evil. Ron knows evil. He has met it and fought it and this- this is not evil, just upsetting (not right, it's not right).
Harry's grip becomes tighter.
"I'm fine," he says and then repeats it until Harry is convinced enough to let go of his shoulders.
"What was that all about?"
Ron is not going to tell him, and he doesn't want to lie, "Let it go, Harry." His words are plaintive and he is tired and Harry nods like he is agreeing, but Ron knows him. He is just biding his time. He will tell Hermione all about it and they will gang up on him. Ron knows him.
Harry doesn't know how to let things go.
Too bad. They can gang up on him all they want, he will not tell them. Not this.
His wand gets too hot in his hand, approving, and Ron shudders, chilled to the bone.
Decades pass, a new Dark Lord rises and the kill numbers grow.
No one really mentions Quirrell's death, even when they talk about the Sorcerer's stone and the time it was hidden at Hogwarts. It's always Voldemort didn't get it, sometimes added with Quirrell didn't get it for him, rarely Quirrell died.
(Never: Harry killed him when he was eleven. He burned his face and fried his brain and Quirrell screamed, oh Merlin, did he scream.)