A/N: Longer chapter this time, sorry the last was so short but I thought I felt writer's block coming on and was worried that it would be a while before I posted again.
Thanks to reviewers from the last chapter: krysalys73, BuckNC, the-love-of-ron, and Lily Michelle. You guys are awesome!
A/N II: I don't own it so don't worry about it
* * *
"Where were you last night?" Harry looked at Ron skeptically and smirked. "I left the light on until three o'clock this morning, but you never came down here." The two were sharing the living room for the duration of Harry's stay, seeing as Hermione had unequivocally taken over Ron's bedroom.
"I feel asleep talking to her." There was some degree of truth to that, and he hoped his friend would simply let it go. He stared daggers at Harry, as though daring him to say anything further.
Harry raised his eyebrows slightly but let the subject drop. "You must have one hell of a backache, sitting in the chair all night."
Ron ignored him, flopping down on the shabby blue sofa that some old quilts had been spread over for the past two weeks. He beat on the lumpy old pillow he had procured for himself and sighed, sinking his head down in between the worst of its fibrous masses.
"Did she talk to you?"
Ron looked at his old friend scathingly. "What do you think, Harry?"
"Well, I thought maybe you told her."
"I did." At least that much was the truth. However unwittingly, his confession had seemed to seep from him. He felt a flood of emotion in the pit of his stomach as he thought about it and fought the urge not to be sick. Heat rose in his cheeks as he remembered his confession to her the night before. She had looked so heart-wrenchingly faded, lying there as though she were nothing more than a lump of substance, stripped of all the character that had once made her shine. He felt the lump rising in his throat again and pushed it back. He had failed yet again. The flicker of hope that love could heal all things had faded into the internal darkness that had become his jailer. His love had not healed Hermione.
Harry looked crestfallen, as though he too had believed in the fairy tale notion that Ron's confession of devotion would thaw even the deepest freeze upon the more metaphysical elements of Hermione's humanity. "Oh," was all he was able to say. Ron smiled weakly at him, wondering what he had come to that he felt a weak pleasure in their shared pain.
Sighing, he closed his eyes, carefully stretching his long body around the hard spots in the couch where the springs were trying their best to come poking through. He had slept like the dead, lying next to Hermione but still he could not feel rested. If anything, he felt more weary. He was tired deep down in his very soul. He felt as though he could sleep for a thousand years. Perhaps then the pain in his heart would be gone.
He heard his sister come pattering down the stairs, still clad in her slippers he supposed. Harry greeted her warmly, and Ron opened his eyes, gazing across the room at the couple, feeling a well of something indescribable that reeked of anger and sadness and seemed to settle in his very core. He shut his eyes again. Reality was too much to bear.
"Ron," Ginny whispered, touching him on the shoulder much the same way he did when he wanted to wake Hermione. "Ron, I know you're awake. I saw you looking when I kissed Harry."
"Ginny, please," he said trying to sound irritated but succeeding only in sounding as though he had exhausted whatever supply of hope and happiness he had once had. "Please," he repeated, "leave me alone." He wanted to be alone again more than he ever had in all his life. For nearly a year, he had spent almost every day in solitude wishing desperately for the company of those he had once called friends. Now he would have given almost anything for some privacy in which to grieve for both Hermione and himself.
"Ron," She said softly, "I'm really worried about you."
"I'm fine," he said in a long sigh that choked itself off in the end.
"Let me help you."
He rolled over, turning his back on her, not caring that she meant well. He wasn't the one who needed help. Hermione was lying upstairs worse than dead, and his sister wanted to help cheer him up because his heart was breaking. It seemed somehow pathetically ludicrous.
"I just thought that perhaps it would be better if you were a bit more cheerful when you visited with her." His little sister's voice had a hard edge to it now. "You might be better off as well if you tried being happy once in a while."
He almost laughed. She wanted him to be happy. She made it sound so easy. He had given up on happiness after Hermione had given up her maiden name. As long as Hermione was beyond his reach, happiness too was outside his grasp, nothing more than an abstract idealism that he thought might have existed inside him in another time, in another life,
He would never, ever be happy and it was all Snape's fault.
* * *
"Mum, I'm worried about Ron." Ginny tugged on the corner of Witch Weekly, looking her mother directly in the eye. "Harry is too."
Mrs. Weasley sighed heavily, a tired look in her eyes. "We all are, dear. I've tried talking to him for nearly a year now, but he just seems to tune both your father and I out. I thought maybe he just needed some time to recover after Hermione and Severus," she shivered as she said the name, her face contorting oddly for a moment, "were married."
"Don't you think he's had enough time," her daughter asked. Mrs. Weasley noticed the cynical note her voice had acquired since she had ushered her onto the scarlet Hogwarts Express at the start of her seventh and final year that fall. It made her feel very, very old.
"Yes, Ginny, I do." She said it with as much force and finality as she could muster. Having raised seven children, she knew that her daughter was challenging her, and she was going to put a stop to it. "You can't force someone to be what you want them to be though, dear."
"I don't want to force him to be anything, mum." There it was again, a hint of stubbornness, a taste of sedition. Mrs. Weasley's eyes hardened for a moment, and then she let her face relax. She had been young and idealistic once too. Then life happened.
"Don't you Ginny," she asked a touch coolly, this time being the one to challenge. She covered her tone by smiling warmly at her daughter, though she knew that the look was a bit patronizing. She watched her daughter thinking, her face going from the contorted mask of question, to the placid look of dumbfoundedness, to the hard edge of anger. No doubt, she was wrongfully convinced that where she was pushing she was entirely welcome.
"No," she said at last. "I just think it would be better if he were happy." The corners of Ginny's mouth dropped a little, and a bit of the sparkle left her eyes. "He seems so very sad." Her voice had gone from razor sharp to whisper soft in only a moment.
Ms. Weasley put a reassuring hand on her youngest daughter's shoulder and squeezed it warmly. "I just want to make it better," Ginny said after a moment. "I want him to be happy." She looked up at her mother, and the older woman smiled down at her. "I guess I do want him to be something, then," she said, frowning a bit at her admission. "I just don't see why that's a bad thing."
"It isn't a bad thing, Ginny," Molly Weasley said in a voice that sounded as though it had been rehearsed and refined through a multitude of successive practice sessions. "It's just, I don't know." She looked out the kitchen doorway into the living room where her son was once again laying like a morbid objet d'art: sad, inert and defeated. "You can't change the way someone feels about themselves unless they want you to. Does that make sense?"
Ginny frowned a bit thoughtfully, scowling as her mind mulled over her mother's latest admission. "It's not how he feels about himself, though. It's how he feels about Hermione. If he would just let it go…" Her voice sounded almost wistful, and for a moment the older woman felt as though her nearly adult daughter were nothing more than a small child filled with euphoric dreams and hopes regarding how the world worked.
"Gin, he can't let it go. It looks so easy to us, but he can't." Molly Weasley had had this talk with herself in regards to her son so many times that it sounded strange to hear the thoughts becoming spoken words. "He just can't move on, and that's a part of him that comes from the inside and is in no way related to anything Hermione has ever said or done. He thinks there's something there, and he won't give up until it either destroys him or he finds out that there is not."
"Can't you do something?" There was that childish innocence again. Her daughter's eyes were so like they had been the day that she had asked her, nearly fifteen years ago, to bring their family cat back from the dead. She had carried the poor inert creature into her mother atop of her pillow, asking her to make it better, confident that her mother could. She nearly cried now, seeing that same hope in Ginny's eyes, the same confidence that if there was something to be done for Ron, her mother would be the one to do it.
She shook her head slowly, the sadness that she felt for both her son and the innocent smile of her daughter seeming to weigh it down and hinder the movement. "He has to find out for himself." She squeezed her daughter's hand, and blinked back the tears that she knew would be coming if she looked too long. "He has to decide when it's time to stop holding on and start letting go. Just try to help him find his way, dear. The best thing you can do for him is to support him, whatever his decisions." She smiled at her youngest and squeezed her hand again.
"But what if he never does?" There she was again, two years old and innocent, reluctant to cross the threshold into reality and have her naivety further shattered, ground up by the unyielding destructive natures of life and time.
Mrs. Weasley looked out the back window and into the garden, staring at a sun that was trying to peek its way through the thick white clouds that seemed to blanket the entire sky. "Then maybe he knows something we don't," she whispered softly, breaking contact with her daughter and turning back to her newspaper, trying to distract herself from the wounds life had given her family, and their shared pain which no magic she possessed could heal.
* * *
It was cold, for June. She remembered the way her wedding dress had been cut, it's thin straps leaving her arms bare. She had refused the tradition of gloves in much the same way that she had refused the tradition of marriage for the sake of love. Her skin had prickled with what muggles called gooseflesh, and the nylons her mother had insisted upon had caught a bit on the tiny lumps. She supposed that had she been marrying a man she loved, the warmth in her heart would have overcome the frigid temperature. What she felt, however, probably only made matters worse.
He was standing at the travesty of a muggle alter, waiting for her, looking neither pleased with he appearance nor happy to see her. Her father had noticed the look as they proceeded up the aisle and had frowned at her again. "Are you sure," he had whispered and she had nodded back to him with the confidence that only righteousness could breed. Her parents had objected from the start and she could not wonder why as she stared at Severus, scowling from beneath the greasy sheen of hair he had neither bothered to wash nor pull back. Faintly, she was disappointed that she had spent any time at all on her own beauty. Rolling out of bed and donning some sort of funeral attire would have made her look like a more appropriate bride for her waiting groom.
She had shivered slightly all through the ceremony, everyone looking at her concernedly except for Severus, who had simply looked annoyed. He was scowling at her as though she were nothing more than a mere student of the worst sort and not the woman who was about to become his wife. She had glared back at him, and she saw the corners of his mouth curl in a twisted masochistic smile that was more of a snarl and which made him look even more fearsome than he had on the day she had met him, eight years ago come September.
They had shared a kiss that lasted just long enough for their lips to brush. His mouth was like ice upon hers, and she felt as though the warmth of life were being sucked from her as she held his hand in the manner tradition dictated and they headed down the aisle together. There had been none of the traditional fanfare and clapping. Harry looked away as she tried to catch his eye, and Ron shook his head as though he could not believe that she had gone through with the ceremony. He looked as though he had been crying, but she was certain his tears were not born of happiness.
The reception afterwards had been blissfully brief. A receiving line, some congratulations and a fine dinner served in the Great Hall. A few friends and some colleagues had attended but the gathering was still quite small. She supposed there were many who refused to even try to understand and she smiled a sad smile for their ignorance rather than for self-pity.
She had followed Severus down to his chambers, and he had shown her the room where she would be sleeping. She remembered her relief and the brief jump her heart had taken at his kindness. She had been thinking for weeks now of the terrible effects nightly slumber on his tiny sofa would have and was filled with gratitude for the small bed and private chambers that had once been a private research area and reeked of cabbage. They would share the rest of the living space as though it were a grotesque adaptation of one of the house common rooms. She had turned in for sleep almost immediately, not even bothering to tell her new husband good night.
She remembered the way she had lain there, wishing for the reprieve of either sleep or death but finding neither. Her mind had refused to yield to the temptation of slumber, and she had lain awake, staring at the small wind up antique alarm Severus had put beside her bed, sipping water from a beaker and thinking of Ron.
It had been nearly a year since then, and gradually he had strayed from her mind, slipping away into the life she had used to know, no longer a part of who she was.
Now he was back, and he was hurting, but she couldn't bring herself to talk to him, couldn't bring herself to ease the pain they both shared by talking things over with him in a civilized way.
She couldn't bear to hurt him again.
He was a part of her past, once again a piece of her present, and the key to her future.
She had tried everything to change the last, but fate was a great, unyielding thing.
If she could just stay quiet, just become nothing, just make them give up then perhaps everything that was to come would never be.
Because she loved Ron, she would have to break his heart beyond repair.
She wondered if either of them could bear it.