Disclaimer: As usual, characters are not mine.
Author's note : I first posted this story in French in 2002, when I was still in college. At the time it was supposed to be a mutichapter story, but I never ended it, I lost my muse somewhere. Years laters, I am posting a one shot version of it.
I kept with the timeline I used at the time, so I'd say it is cannon compliant until book 4.
Enjoy!
Things were not going well between us. Things had not been going well for a very long while between us. For too long, I'd say. He was only 20 years old, his friends, our friends too. I was 19 at the time. He was my elder, and he wanted to rule ( or ruin) my life. It was bad enough that I would sometimes dream of strangling him, but I never wished for his death. Ever. I never wanted him to die. And I killed him.
Well.. I did not, but I did. I killed him.
Not with a spell, not with my bare hands, I did not even touch him. No, I touched him, sort of. I slapped him. Then I left, I fled. He tried to follow me, and now he's gone. DEAD.
Everything happened so fast. I never should have left him alone in a place unknown to him. He was older than me, an auror, but there were ( a lot of) times where I wondered if his brain had evolved past the pre-teen years. For real.
I had invited him to visit my new flat, in the Muggle part of London, not very far from the Leaky Cauldron. I had chosen this flat specifically for its Muggle location. After a day ( or night, depending on how you see it) of hard work at the pub, it was a relief to live in the Muggle world.
After the War, I wanted to live my own life, and I had heard that Tom wanted some help at the pub, and rejuvenate it to make it more interresting to the younger generation of wizards and witches. He had somehow added a secret floor for the lot of us who wanted to ¨ let our hair down ¨, and I was to be barmaid there. The pay was ok, and Tom really needed my help. Since Dad had known Tom for years, it did not take as much time as I expected for him to convince Mum to let me live my life. In less than two weeks, we had her understand that I had grown up and I could take care of myself.
My flat was quite small, the kitchen smaller than my pocket, but I was eating most of my meals at the pub, and my rent was not big.
So, that day, my original plan was to tell my brother, whose ideas concerning women were backwards and regressives to say the least. According to him, women should be at home and serve ther husbands. Education was necessary so they could educate their offspring, take care of the household. His views on women were worst than the views that some ¨Purebloods¨ had on Muggles before the war.
I avoided the subject for a while, enquiring how was work at the ministry. Around 7pm, the sun was setting, we were sitting in a nearby public bench, across the street from my flat, and I started telling him about some of my hopes and dreams, and eventually my new work and place to stay.
It did not go well.
Wham! The stream of insults, I got them all : whore, the shame of the family, that I should be disowned... All of this because I wanted to be different from them, to live my own life.
He was the last one in our family to know. And the only one with that reaction. This is not to say that everybody was pleased, but they all accepted it and in the end, supported me. The Bill and Charlie, the twins, and ever Perfect Percy (you coud not find a wizard more anti-alcohol than him) encouraged me to follow my heart and be my independant self. They accepted me for who I was.
Not Ron. He turned his back on me. Because I was not like him, because I wanted different things, because I wanted to live my life my way, not the usual way for purebloods, not his way.
That was it.
¨SMACK!¨ I slapped him on the face. I hit him. He deserved it.
I never had had the guts to do that, even if I dreamt about it for a while. It felt so good doing that, I felt alive.
Then I ran. I crossed the road, and instead of going back to my flat, I kept running, in hope I would outrun my auror of a brother. Cars were honking but I kept going. Until...
Until I heard the tires screaming and the sounds of car hitting something. Someone.
I froze in place, not able to move. Then I saw him, a broken, unmoving, bloody form. And lifeless already, from what I would be told later. His spine was severed and his skull looked what you get when you drop a watermelon on the floor.
From what the witnesses told the policemen, Ron never looked if it was safe to cross the road ( he never understood traffic lights) and the driver of the car was speeding. He never had a chance.
After I left, it took him a few seconds to react from my hand on his cheek, almost as if he was stunned. Then he ran after me, determined to get me. Was it to keep yelling at me or to excuse himself, I will never know.
The only thing that I know is that I, Ginevra Weasley, killed my brother.