Chapter 3 – Confrontation and Contemplation

Hermione took the offered hand, not really knowing what else to do, and he pulled her to her feet effortlessly.

"What…" Hermione trailed off, her brain still not quite having caught up with recent events. "How…"

"Oh, right," said Ron, looking sheepishly at the floor, "well, erm, sorry about that…" He gestured towards the open door, shuffling his feet. "I, erm, guess I owe you an explanation?"

Hermione tried to control herself, she really did. But she just couldn't help it - she exploded.

"Excuse me?" she screeched indignantly, dropping his hand that she realised with a jolt she had still been holding onto, "You're sorry? After harassing me out of a bar on my birthday, following me home in the dead of night, breaking into my building, and, and... loitering in my hallway with intent to do god-only-knows-what all you can offer is one pathetic little sorry?"

"It was only up a flight of stairs," mumbled Ron, the tips of his ears beginning to visibly turn red under his hair. "And it wasn't like I followed you, I just heard you talking to the guy behind the bar about being a tenant..."

"Oh, well that's reassuring," Hermione cried exasperatedly, throwing her hands in the air, "I'm so glad that rather than trailing me home like a crazed stalker, you listened into my private conversation with my landlord like a crazed stalker! One crime in place of another - how wonderful!"

"Look," said Ron, his voice louder now as he raised his chin and looked her in the eye, "all I wanted to do was apologise for being an complete arse to you last night, maybe give you a more accurate first impression-"

"Oh, I think I was impressed enough last night," interrupted Hermione, her voice like ice. "I've seen enough people like you to know exactly what you're like, and exactly how to deal with you."

"People like me?" Ron said hotly. "And what exactly is that supposed to mean?"

"People who think it's fun to go out every night and get so completely drunk they can't even stagger back to their own house," Hermione spat, feeling herself getting worked up, "people who don't care who they hurt, who they insult, who they make cry, as long as the next drink still appears in front of them, people who'll who wake up not knowing what or who they did the night before, but what the hell, it's just your life, it's not like it's worth anything!" She paused, taking in a breath through shaking lips, not noticing that she was not the only one trembling with rage in the room. "But you're the worst of the lot, because you - you don't even have the excuse of it just being a social thing. You go out, on your own, and your only aim is to get so pissed that you can't stand up without spewing all over the floor – well, what great goals you've set yourself!"

"Don't," said Ron, his voice shaking with unsuppressed anger. "Don't you dare stand there and judge me."

"I'll do whatever the hell I like," Hermione said furiously, "and seeing as this is my house that you just barged into, I think I have every right to think whatever I want about you! And after all, if you're going to act like a 'complete arse', as you so eloquently put it, in a public place, then you are pretty much giving everyone the right to think exactly what they like about you – which from what I can see won't be worth very much."

"You don't know anything about me," Ron said quietly, in an eerily calm voice. "You don't know what I've been through, what I've done, what I've had to do. You have no idea."

"Oh well, now I'm sorry," said Hermione sarcastically, "because you've clearly had such a hard life! Standing there in your clean clothes with your new haircut and enough money in your pockets to buy at least 20 pints – how did you ever cope! Did mummy shout at you so you just had to get out of the house and drink yourself stupid? Did daddy give your baby sister more attention than you so you decided to hit the pub and drown your sorrows?"

"NO!" shouted Ron suddenly, in a voice that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside him, and Hermione took a step back in fear as she noticed for the first time the fiery look in his eyes, the tension in every muscle of his face and the sheer strange power that seemed to be radiating from his body. This wasn't normal – this man wasn't just some idiot drunk. But before she could follow this niggling feeling through to its logical conclusion, his voice interrupted her thoughts.

"You can't just stand there, and think you know everything about me," he was saying in steely tones. "You believe you're so intelligent – oh, I can tell – and yet you assume you know my entire life story based on what you think you've deduced from my appearance. But you know nothing. You hear that – nothing!" His voice was shaking again, and Hermione thought she could see something glistening in those blue eyes, but it was gone almost instantly in a blaze of anger directed her way. She realised that even though she didn't have a clue what was going on here, she was in way over her head already. She needed to do what she almost never did, especially in an argument: she needed to retreat.

"Look, I'm sorry," she said slowly and calmly, the way she had been taught to talk down some of the more dangerous of the visitors to her office if they ever got themselves worked into a state. "I didn't mean to offend you. I shouldn't have judged you."

"Yeah, you did mean to actually, and no, you shouldn't have," Ron said disdainfully, "don't try any of that cycle-analysis muggle crap on me because it won't work, all right?"

"Okay," said Hermione, feeling riled, because she had been outsmarted by someone she had clearly under-estimated. "Well, if you want me to talk straight with you, maybe you could start by giving me an explanation as to why the hell you're here?"

"Forget it," Ron said, shrugging and beginning to back towards the door, "I thought… Never mind, all right? Just never mind." He turned to leave, and Hermione found herself taking steps forward and grabbing hold of his arm to stop him. For some reason she couldn't fathom, she didn't want him to just walk out of her life like this without at least understanding some of the reasoning behind his turning up.

"No," she said firmly, "you're not leaving till you tell me what you came here to say."

"Oh really?" said Ron dangerously, his right hand straying to his pocket again, "and how exactly do you think you're going to stop me? I came here of my own free will, and I'm leaving of it, right now."

"At least tell me one thing about yourself!" Hermione heard herself pleading, not understanding why – she had never been a begging kind of person. Ever.

"So now you want to know?" he snapped, spinning himself round to face her again. "All right, here's something, you'll love this – my best friend died two years ago, half of my family went with him, and I drink to forget, okay? How does that fit in with all your assumptions? What do you think of me now?" And with that he wrenched his arm out of her grip and ran out of the door, only pausing to slam it behind him.

Feeling numb, Hermione grabbed hold of the sideboard in an attempt to keep herself steady, but she found herself sinking to the floor for the second time that morning. She felt sickened, horrified at the way she had acted, at the self-righteous, spiteful monster she had become. But more than that, she felt the horrible realisation that she now knew what she had seen in the man that she could relate to, she knew the reason she had been drawn to him. It was grief she had seen in his eyes. It was loss.

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Cursing loudly to try to stop the tears falling from his eyes, Ron staggered down the stairs towards the exit. He needed to be outside, he needed fresh air, because the walls were closing in on him…

Stumbling out of the front door he found himself retching uncontrollably and it was pure acid he brought up, accompanied by a horrific burning sensation. But he didn't care, because the pain brought him back to reality, the pain almost stopped him remembering what had been, what might have been, what should have been. His life could have been so different, so easy – he slammed his hands over his ears to try to block out the memories, but he couldn't. He was forced to live through it, like he was always forced to, like he saw them every night when he fell asleep.

Fred, motionless on the floor of that corridor, never to laugh or joke, to tease him, to make him ridiculously angry or make him laugh till his stomach hurt ever again.

His mother, fallen in the final battle, sent sprawling across the Great Hall of Hogwarts by a curse that no-one was there to deflect while trying to stand guard over the body of her beloved son.

Ginny. So small in death, still his baby sister to him even as she had been on the verge of becoming a woman. Never to become one. Cut down by Bellatrix Lestrange with the same curse that had claimed the life of Luna Lovegood.

Percy – too cruelly snatched away from the family he had so recently rejoined, killed by Augustus Rookwood in his attempt to avenge his mother's death, the image of his broken body lying on the stone floor vivid in Ron's mind.

And Harry. So close to the life he had always wanted, so near to freedom from the cursed existence he had been living all his life. Slain by the woman that Ron hated more than he could possibly explain, the woman for whom he believed torture was too little a punishment. Lestrange.

He would never forget the fleeting look of sheer exhilaration on his friend's face as Tom Riddle fell to the ground, only to be replaced by that shocked and wide-eyed stare as the jet of green light hit him from behind, that woman standing behind him. He had watched in horror as she dropped her wand and fell to the floor beside her master, weeping over his body, frozen to the spot as she was dragged away, kicking and screaming, to a cell buried in the depths of the ministry.

He hadn't moved even when his father came towards him, a broken man, weeping on his shoulder and asking him for help to move the bodies of his family, his friends. He had just stood there motionlessly, staring at the body of the one person who had accepted him, not because they shared blood, or because they knew his brothers or his parents, but because of himself. Harry Potter had known Ron for who he really was, and there was no-one who could understand how he felt. No-one.

Breathing raggedly, Ron turned to face the brick wall of the building and held himself up against it, trying to control the sobs which threatened to wrack his body. It had been more than two years, and the images were as clear to him now as they had been on that day. They just refused to fade away. The drink blurred them at the edges, but they were still there, always there. Furious with himself for getting so worked up, he brought back his arm and sent his knuckles slamming into the concrete. Grunting, but relishing the pain, he drew back his hand and did it again. Yes – this was good. He kept on doing it, mechanically bringing his arm back and punching it forward, letting the pain wash over him, focusing on it, shutting everything else out. Feeling the blood stream down his knuckles and seeing it pool on the cold ground out of the corner of his eye only served to make him switch to the other hand. He just couldn't stop.

Startled by a noise coming from the street behind him suddenly, he jerked round, his hand flying to his wand, but it was only a cat. He looked down, and felt sick when he saw what he had done to himself. Most of the flesh was torn away from his knuckles, the white bone of one of his fingers exposed to the unforgiving morning air as it whipped around him. He felt faint – this was going to require more complex healing charms than anything else he had done. But he would do it himself, like he always had. One rule, and only one: nothing that could make its way back to his father's ears. Merlin knew he had enough to deal with.

Trying his best to clear his mind, he turned slowly on the spot, and the sickening squeezing of Apparition took hold of him. When he opened his eyes again he was in a small, dimly lit room, furnished only by a second-hand and shoddy-looking chair with a dull throw over it and an old muggle TV propped up on a cardboard box. Home, sweet home.

Sinking into the chair, Ron pulled out his wand and began prodding at the open flesh wounds on his left hand, sewing them back together with a mixture of whispered and complicated spells. He winced in pain, but though there was a miniature of Firewhisky on the kitchen shelf he didn't go through to get it, despite being sorely tempted. Somewhere between last night and this morning, he had decided that the alcohol wasn't helping, and that he needed to quit before he did himself any more damage than he already had. That girl had been right about something at least.

Her. She had got under his skin, that much was clear to him. He hadn't deliberately hurt himself like this for a long time. What she had said had hit a nerve, true, but it was more than that. When he had seen her last night it was as if he had met her before, almost like he had always known her. He had felt more wounded by her barbed comments than he had by those of anyone else, even his own remaining family members. There was just something about her. He thought back, trying to pinpoint the moment that he had decided that he wasn't going to give up on this one, that there was something special about her. Everything was a little hazy because of the amount he had had to drink – the sobering charm didn't bring back lost memories, after all – but he could remember that everything had been going all right, and then he had said something that made her turn cold. He had reached for her arm to try to reassure her that he didn't mean any harm and then-

Ron sat bolt upright in his chair, ignoring the spark that flew from the end of his wand and grazed his still wounded left knuckle. The heat that had come from her, burning his hand; he hadn't recognised it in his intoxicated state, but now his mind was clearer he knew that he remembered it for what it was. Magic. Pure magic, like the kind of uncontrollable surge of power that he had experienced as a young boy, the kind that had yet to be mastered.

She was a witch.

A/N: Sorry about the wait, but as you can see, it was a longer chapter than usual. Had to be to get everything in that needed to be really. Ever so slightly angsty, but it needs to be to enable good character development for the rest of the plot. If it's not to your tastes, I apologise!