"Are – you – mental?" Ron heaved.
Harry was in shock, frozen (somewhat literally) to the spot. Nothing could have prepared him for Ron's reappearance. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes, thinking he might have been hallucinating, but Ron was still there: gaunt, lanky, and covered in grime and dirt. Harry began pulling his many layers of clothes back on, trying to find words.
"R-Ron?" Harry said at last, teeth chattering, his voice strangled in shock. "What are you doing here?"
"What do you mean?" Ron asked, looking confused. "Didn't you send the Patronus?"
"What? No, of course not. My Patronus is a stag."
"Oh, right. Antlers."
Harry looped Hagrid's pouch back around his neck and pulled a few more sweaters on, knelt to grab the sword, and turned back to Ron.
"So," he began, "how come you're here?"
Ron clearly had expected the question to come later, if at all. He began pacing back and forth a bit, looking a little frantic.
"I – well, I remember what you said before I left. I didn't try to come back until I saw the Patronus. I thought you and Hermione might be in trouble, so I followed it here. I've been out here for hours."
There was a terribly uncomfortable pause, wherein the decision of whether to allow Ron back in weighed heavily on Harry's mind. He decided to hold off. He needed Hermione's input for something this important.
"So," Ron said after clearing his throat. "You got the sword?"
"Yeah," said Harry. "But I have no clue how it got there, or who put it there. I reckon it was whoever cast the doe Patronus. Do you have any idea who it might've been?"
"Haven't the foggiest," Ron said unsurprisingly. "You reckon that's the real sword?"
"Only one way to find out, yeah?" said Harry.
Harry pulled the locket out of the mokeskin pouch. It was twitching and ticking loudly, eager to escape what it must have sensed was its destruction. Harry felt a thrill at the prospect of finally being rid of the wretched necklace once and for all. He cast a quick Lumos and searched for a proper spot, and found one just a few meters away: a flat stone outcrop in the shade of a sycamore.
"Come on," he said. He handed the locket to Ron and told him to set it down on the stone and keep an eye on it, taking no chances that the horcrux might pull something and try to escape.
"I'm going to open it with Parseltongue," he said, "and as soon as it opens, you stab it. It might try some kind of mind arts or try and fight back. If it does, you have to fight it with everything you've got, you understand?"
"No," Ron said. "No, it needs to be you. That thing's worse for me than it was for you and Hermione, I don't think I could do it. I won't be able to fight it off. The stuff it made me think – I guess I was thinking it anyway, but the locket made it worse. It affected me more than you, so it makes sense for you to destroy it. You'll have an easier go of it."
Harry nodded, understanding. He only hoped that Ron was right, that he'd be able to fight it off. Ron placed the locket on the stone gingerly and stood behind it, waiting.
"On three," said Harry. Ron nodded.
"One…two…three… Open."
The telltale hiss of Parseltongue passed his lips and the hinges of the tiny locket swung open. Harry froze in terror.
A pair of dark eyes stared up at Harry from the panes of the locket, twitching and wide: Tom Riddle's eyes, before his descent into the Darker magics that mutated him. They gleamed in recognition and triumph.
Harry heard Ron telling him to stab the locket, to move, to do something.
He raised the sword above his head and stepped forward. The locket ticked and thrashed on the stone, but Ron held it firmly.
Then a voice hissed from the locket.
"Harry Potter, I have seen your fears. I know your heart."
"Stab it, Harry!" Ron yelled. "Kill it!"
"I have seen what lies in your soul, boy. You have such darkness in you, such fury. The magic coursing through you, so familiar…"
"Harry, don't listen to it, dammit!" Ron screamed over the voice, but Harry could not hear him. It was as though Riddle's voice had pierced his soul, and he could not move.
"Abandoned by everyone who loved you; your arrogant father, your filthy Mudblood mother… How alike we are, Harry... Abandoned twice by the boy you called a brother… She will abandon you as well, the one you love… Whether by hate or by death, you will lose… Everything…"
"Harry, please! Stab it!" Ron bellowed. Riddle's eyes in the locket gleamed scarlet and a piercing shriek rent the air.
From the locket's windows, a figure crawled out in front of Harry, decaying and skin mottled grey. Hermione's living corpse reached out to him, her movements spasmic and shuddering. She smiled at him, and Harry saw the rotted flesh of her cheek fall away. Nausea flooded his stomach.
"If I had known what choosing you meant," Riddle-Hermione choked out, "I would have left with him… You bring death upon those close to you…"
"No," Harry pleaded. "No – no – no – you're not real."
"Harry… Dear Harry, you are but a curse upon the world around you… We are all better for your absence," cooed Riddle-Hermione. She jerked suddenly, her spine snapping backwards, hands outstretched to him. "Loving you has brought me nothing but pain."
Harry screamed in rage and drove the sword down on both Riddle-Hermione and the locket. Ron leapt out of the way. There was a discordant wail, a shriek that tore at Harry's very soul, and he sank to his knees, wrapping his arms around his torso.
Ron helped him to his feet, but Harry saw a tightness in his expression that bode ill for whatever came next. Shaking his head, he picked up the remnants of the locket and shoved it back into the mokeskin pouch. After his breathing evened out, he turned to Ron.
"After you left," he said, "we had to move on. Both of us. We couldn't just wallow around in pity and waste time. We killed the snake. We worked together on things, didn't argue or ignore one another. We're a team. And we – Ron, I know this isn't easy for you. But we're together now. I – I love Hermione, in every way I know how to…"
Ron nodded but said nothing. Harry motioned for him to follow, and they walked back to the campsite in complete silence. Harry could sense that he had several difficult conversations to deal with in his immediate future, and after what the locket had shown him, having those conversations were the last thing he wanted. He just wanted to sleep. Ron's eyes were red and puffy, he was obviously distraught at the revelation that Harry and Hermione had gotten together in his absence.
Just before they reached the wards, Ron cleared his throat.
"I'm sorry," he said thickly. "I'm sorry I left. I said things – things about you, things about your parents, Christ… I never meant any of it, but I know that doesn't make it any better."
"Mate, I told you before you left that I'd forgiven you for anything you could do to me. It's not me you have to plead your case to," Harry said. "But you need to accept what I told you at the pool. The whole jealousy thing won't work anymore. We're a team, and you have to come to terms with that if you want to come back. If you can't, no hard feelings. You can still help in other ways if you want."
"Right," Ron said quickly.
"Right. I'll go grab Hermione, and we'll meet you back here, yeah?"
Harry moved through the wards and toward the tent, savoring the resplendent warmth inside. Hermione's bluebell flames radiated heat throughout the canvas, and he sank down in a chair for a moment.
"So. Where've you been?"
Harry leapt to his feet, raising his wand.
"Harry Potter, if you point that wand at me, you will regret it," Hermione fumed. She had apparently awoken in the night and found him gone, and was very unhappy with him.
"I can explain…" he began.
"Sit," she demanded. He obeyed. "Talk."
Suddenly fearing for his life, Harry quickly told her of the past two hours, from the doe Patronus to finding the sword. He faltered at whether to include Ron's bizarre reappearance and decided to tell her the truth.
"Where is he?" she asked.
"Outside the wards. I told him to wait there for us. He, er, wants to be back back. I told him I'd have to talk to you about it."
"Why would you need to talk to me about it?" she asked, tapping her fingers on the table.
"Because," he said bemusedly, "we're a team. I won't make decisions for you, Hermione. And I won't make decisions this important without talking to you first. I thought – that's a good thing, isn't it?"
She nodded absentmindedly. He fidgeted in his seat for a moment before retrieving what remained of the horcrux from his pouch and setting it on the table in front of her, followed by the sword of Gryffindor.
"You destroyed it," she said.
"I did."
"Did – did it fight back?"
"Yes," he said quietly, "Yes, it did. The things it said – things it showed me…" He couldn't bear to meet her eyes, imagining the Riddle-Hermione and what being close to Harry could mean for the one still living in front of him. And an altogether different fear had risen in him: a fear that Riddle was right, that there was darkness in him. he felt dirty, tainted. Hermione leapt across the table and wrapped herself around him, straddling his lap and running her hands through his hair as he shook.
"It wasn't real," she said softly in his ear. "Whatever you saw, whatever it said, it was just that part of him trying to escape its fate. Look at the locket, Harry. You did it, you won. Two more and we're done."
"Two more," he murmured. "I guess we need to figure out what to do about Ron."
Hermione sighed heavily. "Yes, I suppose so."
"I – I, er, told him that we're together. I hope that's alright? Only, I didn't want it to be a surprise later on. That is to say, if we decide to let him come back, or if he even really wants to. He might just feel guilty, I dunno. It's Ron."
"He's really not as complicated as all that. We'll talk, he'll talk, and then we'll decide together."
"Yeah," Harry said. "Together."
