A/N: Hello readers! So, my new semester of classes start in a week and unfortunately, I am going to become very busy very fast. I tell you this because updates may be slowing down on this story as a result. I am going to do my absolute best to try and get a chapter up for you about every two weeks, but sometimes this might not be possible. My apologies in advance!

In other news, I re-edited and fixed up the mess of errors that was my missing moments Ron/Hermione story, There Goes My Heart. The updated, fresher version is now posted in full over at Ao3, so if you're looking for something to read in between Fleeing updates... *hint, hint*

Finally, thanks again for all of your kind reviews. I appreciate each and every one and they inspire to keep up with my writing!

Chapter Ten

"Come back!

Even as a shadow,

even as a dream."

-Euripides, Herakles

He awoke, with Hermione still pressed against his side, at seven o'clock. He could feel her soft breathing tickling his neck and the light pressure of her arms draped across him. Yet as good as it felt, a small part of him was disappointed. No one had noticed their sleeping arrangements. His mother hadn't burst in on them on her way down the stairs to make breakfast. That meant it was a bad day. Though every ounce of him was screaming to stay put, there lying in bed next to his girlfriend, he forced himself to move, detangling himself gently from Hermione, who pulled the blankets closer and stretched out in his absence. It took another few moments to find his slippers in the dark, and then he was making his way downstairs. His father and Percy were already seated at the kitchen table, with nearly empty bowls of cereal set out in front of them. They looked up as he entered.

"You're up early," Percy observed, peering at him over the top of his glasses. Ron shrugged. It was more of a formality. They all knew Ron hadn't slept in since they'd returned home.

"Just wanted to see you off," he said, which was mostly true. "Is it going to be a busy day at the office?" That was a given, considering they'd both been gone months. He asked it anyway, for conversation's sake.

"Oh, yes," his father answered politely back, "Kingsley's been revamping the entire Ministry, undoing all the changes that were made during the war. It's quite the process, lots of work to be done in every department…." He glanced at his watch, "Speaking of which, Percy, we'd better get a move on."

They stood up, dropping their bowls into the sink on the way towards their cloaks, hung on hooks beside the door. "Erm, Dad?" Ron asked, stopping his father just as he was slipping on his cloak, "Is there anything you need me to do before you get home?"

His father finished doing up the fastenings and shot him a smile that looked out of place and insincere against his worn face. "Of course not. Just take care of yourself, son." He stared at him for a moment, making Ron all too aware of the dark circles under his father's eyes, then nodded once at him and was out the door.

"Watch over Mum. And George," Percy muttered, coming up behind him. He clapped him on the back, then disappeared as well. Ron was left standing alone in an empty kitchen.

He considered making breakfast. At the very least, he could scramble some eggs before the others came down, but he quickly decided against it. Something held him back, the lingering hope that maybe his mum would come down, that maybe she had just wanted a bit of a lie in. It was a futile hope; if she was going to come down, she would have done so already, before his dad and brother left, but he sat there and wished for it anyway.

Forty minutes and two cups of tea later, there was no sign of his mother, or anyone else for that matter. He'd almost decided to go back up to bed, but then there was a familiar tapping on the kitchen window, and he was distracted by the morning post.

As he had grown accustomed to since his return to the Burrow, Ron was greeted by not just the usual tawny owl that delivered their daily paper, but by a small peck, all laden with parcels of envelopes. Harry had many admirers. It had made them all (or at least he, Harry, Hermione and Ginny) laugh reading them for the first few days, but the novelty had worn off quickly. Buried within the letters of thanks and congratulations were usually a few particularly nasty ones, demanding to know why Harry hadn't offed Voldemort sooner, or worse, declaring their support for Voldemort and issuing vague threats (these had quickly been sent to the ministry, and now all their mail was subject to preliminary inspection for possible dangers). He gathered up the letters quickly and in one swoop dumped them into the trash. Then he turned to the Prophet. On the cover was a large image of a candlelight vigil, each flame gently flickering underneath the caption "Mourners Reflect on the Battle of Hogwarts" in bold, black font. He cringed. More funeral interviews. He very nearly tossed the paper into the bin right behind the letters, but held himself back. His father always liked to read the Prophet when he got home, no matter how cringeworthy. Just as he was setting it aside he felt a tapping on his shoulder. It was the only owl remaining in the kitchen, one he hadn't noticed before, and it looked very official-like, not a feather out of place. The letter it was holding out to him bore the ministry seal.

Gingerly, Ron untied the note from the owl's leg, and it flew off immediately. To his surprise, the letter was addressed to him. Or, to him, Harry and Hermione, that is. He knew he should wait for the other two to come traipsing down before opening it, but curiosity quickly got the best of him. He ran his finger beneath the flap to break the seal, and was startled to find, upon opening it, that the letter was from the Minister of Magic himself. Or stand-in Minister, anyway, until they could fill the office properly. It was odd to get formal letters from Kingsley, the man who had eaten his mum's meals for weeks beside the rest of them back at Grimmauld Place. He skimmed the note hurriedly, and gulped. Neither Harry nor Hermione was going to like this. Just as he was debating the best way to break it to them, the very two people in question trudged into the kitchen, flanked by a yawning Ginny. His sister raised a questioning eyebrow in his direction as she emerged. "You're up early."

Ron attempted to smile. "Wanted to see Dad and Percy off. First day back and all."

"How domestic of you," Ginny snorted, grabbing the cereal and the milk from the fridge and sliding into the seat next to his. He ignored her, shifting his attention to Harry and Hermione (who was looking at him rather shyly, he thought) and holding up the letter.

"From Kingsley," he muttered, shooting them both a pointed look. Hermione snagged it first, read through it, shot him a look, then read through it again before handing it over to Harry, who was so impatient he had been trying to read it unsuccessfully over her shoulder. After he had finished, they too collapsed into chairs, casting each other grim looks.

"Well I can't say I didn't see this coming," Hermione said, frowning, "Though I did expect a bit more of a warning…."

"Yeah, short notice all right," Harry snorted, grabbing a bowl and taking the box of cereal from Ginny a little too aggressively. Some of its contents came flying out of the top and scattered across the table.

"What's Kingsley said?" Ginny asked briskly, staring between them.

"He's coming here to do the official report. Today at five." Harry was not quite meeting her eyes.

"What do you mean 'official report'?"

"They'll want to know how we did it," Hermione answered wearily, "The details of Riddle's demise. Of our year. The ministry has to have an official report for the records. And they'll need it before they release a statement to the press, which will have to be soon." She nodded towards the paper, lying forgotten on the corner of the table, "You've seen what they've been writing, it's been the same stories for a week. They haven't got any solid information about anything, except for the battle. People are desperate for more news, obviously…. They'll have heard about the ministry break-in, and Gringotts. They want to know why that happened, what Harry's been up to all year. Plus," and at this she turned to Harry and Ron, "we broke about three dozen laws. I'm sure Kingsley has something to say about that as well."

"Well, they can't punish us for all that, can they?" said Ron ludicrously, staring at her, "We didn't do anything that wasn't absolutely necessary in defeating him!"

"Yes but the ministry doesn't know that, do they?"

"So what do we tell him?" Ron asked, looking to Harry. There was a significant pause.

"The truth," said Harry finally, staring into his cereal bowl as if hoping it would swallow him whole. "All of it."

Ginny suddenly turned very cold. "I'll go take some cereal up to Mum and George," she said stiffly, reaching for the box and some extra bowls, despite having not even started on her own serving.

"They might still come down!" Ron protested after her; but any evidence of this was nonexistent. Ginny shot him a pointed look, and he could only shrug weakly and watch her go.

"You haven't told her, have you?" asked Hermione, turning to Harry after she had left.

Harry frowned. "Well, not explicitly, no…."

Hermione rolled her eyes. "And how do you expect to get back together with her if you're still keeping her in the dark all the time?"

"Who said anything about getting back together with her?" Harry snapped, but Hermione sent him a pointed look of her own and he let up on the charade. "Okay, okay. It's just…strange, isn't it? We're the only three people who know. I just can't—it's too hard to tell her."

Ron understood what he meant. For so long, they had been alone, the only people in on Voldemort's secrets, the only people who knew even part of Dumbledore's plan to defeat him. It had always been the three of them, hidden away, keeping to themselves, buried in secrecy, avoiding questions. And now it had come time to let everyone else in. It still felt like having it all out in the open would be a sort of betrayal, and it was a very difficult feeling to shake.

"Maybe we could practice on her?" Hermione suggested gently, glancing between the two of them. "Before Kingsley gets here, we could tell her, so we know exactly what it is we want to say."

"I don't know if I can tell it twice in one day," Harry admitted.

"Well, she can't learn it from the newspaper," Ron said firmly. "None of my family can. We have to tell them."

"Can't we just get it all over with at once?" Harry groaned. Ron silently agreed, but Hermione began to ramble about Ministry regulations and they both knew it wouldn't be an option.

"Okay. So we tell Kingsley tonight, and then tomorrow, we get everyone together and tell them. The Prophet won't be given anything to report until it's been cleared by the Ministry's security protocol. Nothing will be out until Wednesday at the earliest. Deal?"

They had all agreed by the time Ginny reemerged, looking pale.

"How were they?" Ron asked immediately. Ginny just gave a slight shake of her head before planting a grin on her face.

"So who wants to go for a fly? It's a beautiful day."

Even Hermione, who hated flying under almost any circumstance, agreed to this plan, which seemed to confirm just how desperately they needed to get out of the house. He cleared the dishes, ran upstairs to change, and had just passed Ginny's room on the return trip when he nearly tripped over the empty cereal bowl outside of Percy's door. Right. It would be easy, so so gloriously easy, to just walk by, meet the others outside, and head to the field for a fly. But perhaps he just couldn't not torture himself a little. The suffering seemed to swallow him; he couldn't stay away. So he doubled back and pushed on the door gently. George was sitting, back to him, on the added cot, staring out the window. He didn't even turn around as Ron entered.

"Hey," Ron said to his brother's back. There was no response. "Erm—we're going to go for a fly, if you're interested."

Still nothing. Ron rambled on, "Hermione, even. I know, I was shocked too. Maybe we could even convince her to practice quidditch for a bit. Three against two. That'd be fun, right?"

Shit. Why had he said that? George didn't play quidditch without Fred. They were a set. And Fred was the one who had reworked the whole gameplay of backyard quidditch to accommodate smaller numbers. God, he was bad at this. Why couldn't Bill and Charlie have stuck around a little longer? They were so much better at this sort of thing. He had no idea how to help anyone.

"We don't have to do that, though," he amended quickly, though it was really too late to fix the mistake, and the panic was clear in his voice, "We can just fly. It's really nice outside, it might be our only chance all week. It's supposed to rain tomorrow, you know."

If he had resorted to talking about the weather, it was a lost cause. "Okay, yeah, I understand," he said nonchalantly, as if George had actually responded. "I'll just leave you to it then." He hated one-sided conversations. There was no acknowledgement whatsoever that George had paid attention to even a word of what he'd said. He may as well have been talking to the wall for five minutes. "Come down if you change your mind," he said finally, standing in the doorway awkwardly for a few more moments before retreating. On the way out, he snapped the door shut a little too loudly in his relief. At least he could say he had tried, even if he'd done a shit job of it. And George had eaten something for breakfast, which could only be considered an improvement, enough to satisfy Percy anyway.

As he stood on the landing, his eyes drifted over to the other door shut firmly, just one flight up. Well, since he had already dampened up the day good and well, he might as well do the thing properly. Crossing over to his parents' room, he knocked gently. After quite a pause, his mother's voice rang out, surprisingly steady. "Yes dear?"

He cracked the door open and stepped inside. His mum was sitting up in the made bed, already dressed for the day and flipping the pages of what appeared to be an old photo album. Her empty cereal bowl sat on the nightstand beside her.

Ron cleared his throat. "Erm, I wanted to tell you…the Minister will be here today."

Her hand stilled midair and the page she was flipping fluttered back down. "The Minister? Why?"

"He wants to speak with Harry. And, erm, Hermione and me as well, I suppose. Do a report."

Her eyes narrowed as she peered at him with her most critical gaze. It was a look that had dotted his childhood, one that meant she was trying to cross-analyze him, searching for something in him that he had left unsaid. As she came to whatever conclusion (probably figuring him out a bit too well) the look began to fade away. Ron shifted uncomfortably, waiting for her to respond. Instead she patted the bed behind her, and, for the first time in years, Ron climbed in beside her.

He felt as if he were a small child again, climbing into his parents' bed with Ginny (and occasionally Fred and George, if they were willing to sit still long enough) and settling against the pillows beside their mother, waiting for her to begin story time. She'd read Babbity Rabbity or The Hopping Pot complete with voices and gestures and they'd be beside her laughing and peering over each other to get a closer look at the illustrations. Later, when they were a bit older, they'd pass the book down the line, each taking a turn at reading aloud.

Instead of children's books, however, Ron now found himself staring at the family photo album—a thick, leather-bound volume that usually sat in the living room and that he'd only flipped through once or twice, to see photos of his dead uncles and grandparents out of curiosity. But his Mum seemed to have already passed through the oldest of the photos, of her parents and siblings and girlhood, and even of her early days of marriage. The page she tilted towards him was one covered in photographs of himself, just born.

There he was, wrapped up in a knitted blanket he was sure his Mum had done herself, held by his Mum and Dad, by Gideon and Fabian, a few short months before their deaths, by his Granddad Weasley. In a particularly horrid one, in which he was happy to see that he was wailing, he was held by his Aunt Muriel, her critical eyes peering down at baby-him as if he were an unpleasant stain on her otherwise spotless dress. On the next page—him and Bill, him and Charlie, him and Percy, him and Fred and George. He found himself staring at that one the longest, the identical faces of his twin brothers in miniature, wearing matching looks of disdain as they balanced their new baby brother between them.

Before he was finished soaking it in, his mum flipped the page. It was a collage of past Christmases. A battered tree they'd waited to buy until last minute, one Christmas when funds had been running especially low, decked out in tinsel and acorns and strings of popcorn. Ginny opening a doll. All the siblings lined up with their Weasley sweaters the year before Bill left for Hogwarts. Himself, two thumbs up, behind a decadent Christmas pudding.

Each page revealed old memories he'd long forgotten. Photos of early quidditch games that saw him nearly falling off the broom, the matching swim trunks he and his brothers had worn for years when swimming in the summers, a very small Ginny, lip bit in concentration, as she bent over a drawing at the kitchen table. And so many, so so many, of Fred. Alone, with George, with him or another sibling, with his school friends. Realistically, there probably wasn't a larger percentage of Fred pictures than pictures of any of the rest of them in the album, but it sure seemed it. Each picture with Fred seemed more prominent than the rest, as if amplified on the page. A hundred different Fred's, crying or smiling or laughing or running. Fred, Fred, Fred, Fred.

It was when they reached a page with only one photograph, an enlarged one of the twins at around nine or ten, in matching birthday hats, making goofy faces at the camera, that Ron had to avert his eyes. He almost had to stop himself from physically pushing the album away, off his mother's lap, off the bed. Coming in here had been a bad idea after all. He didn't want to see anymore photos. He could no longer sit here and look at them. There was a growing wetness in his eyes, and in that moment he wanted nothing more than to get away from all of it, back downstairs to where Hermione and Harry were waiting. And yet he found that he couldn't move. His mother was running a thumb over the photograph as if stroking it long enough might allow her to reach through it and pull Fred back.

"He was a beautiful boy." They were the first words she'd spoken since Ron had sat down. Her voice cracked as she said them. Ron felt himself blinking rapidly, hoping she would put the album aside, say she had had enough so that he wouldn't have to. But she didn't, she just flipped to the next page. It was another page mostly of him, Ron, only older this time. Hogwarts-aged. A lot of them were from summers, featuring Hermione and Harry by his side. Those memories seemed lifetimes away.

He noticed that the corner of the page was folded over to mark it, and his mother's fingers deftly moved over it to smooth it back down. "I brought this up here after you left," she explained softly. "Of course, the pictures are no substitute for the real thing." She smiled at him fondly, reaching a hand over to pat him on the cheek. But his eyes had already drifted over to a picture from the World Cup, shoulder to shoulder with his brothers. It was the only photograph on the page that had Fred in it.

Fred was sporting the colors of the Irish, waving an Irish flag in one hand and sloshing around a firewhiskey in the other. He tried to recall the moment the photo was taken, but found his memory lacking.

His mum was right. Photos could never do a person justice.