4.
In the end, Ron supposed he shouldn't have been surprised when they began to drift away.
When the ICW formed an international task force for threat monitoring, evaluation and control, they called Harry Potter, Britain's resident dark-lord-taker-downer. And Harry Potter, being the man she was, said yes, packed his bags, grabbed an transvisa and booked it out of the war-torn country that was slowly learning to stand on its own feet. He was gone before Ron could so much as blink.
And when Hermione Granger received an offer for a learn-and-teach position at the secretive, floating school, Al-madrasah'til-Sahr, she grabbed her little beaded purse for Destination: Bumfuck, Nowheresville. (Ron didn't actually know where she went. "It's classified, Ronald, like I've said a hundred times now. Will you please stop asking?" )
Ron stayed home, first overseeing the rebuilding of Hogwarts, then ensuring the safe reestablishment of shops down the length of Diagon Alley. He repaired relations with the goblins of Gringotts, and armed with a brother well-versed in bureaucracy, he and Percy oversaw the new purge at the Ministry of Magic. He won them over, the men and women of Britain, with the blue-eyed charm and self-deprecating humour he'd inherited from his father.
They watched him, just the same as he watched over them, this boy-man with sorrow in his eyes and heaviness in his step, the last remaining symbol of the war, who worked tirelessly for his broken country.
They called him brave and loyal and modest to a fault.
He thought it was all a bit ridiculous.
But when a reporter cornered him on his way leaving the Ministry and asked him why he'd refused to play Keeper for the Chudley Cannons, he said, "There's too much work to be done." The next day, his quote was the headline.
As the media's eyes turned on him, so did the enemies'.
There was the time when a coven of rogue vampires from the Transylvanian border had stormed a press conference for improving inter-specie relations, and held him against dripping fangs, asking him Harry Potter's location.
There was the time when an old Russian crime family abducted him off to Moscow, and tortured him relentlessly for four weeks, demanding information on Harry's survival of the Avada Kedavra, on Hermione's school, on the Elder Wand's new holder.
There was the time he'd been the keynote speaker at the Wizengamot's Annual Summit, and they lashed out at him, the elders who wanted their Golden Boy back from wherever the hell he'd disappeared to.
So he fought off the vampires, and threw the ones who remained alive into Azkaban; he spat his bloody saliva into the eyes of his torturers and said, 'Never!'; he begged a hundred apologies for his friend's absence, for his deserting girlfriend.
For a long time, he just waited.
