Chapter Seven: The Losing Side

Ginny had said she was staying at the Burrow for a week, but Ron wasn't altogether surprised when the day she was supposed to depart came and went without her returning to Europe to find Colin. She was afraid to move and afraid to stay where she was, and he could hardly blame her. They were both waiting, though she didn't know for what and he knew all too well. For Mendoza to discover her missing letters and make the connection to him. For Hermione to make some reckless, desperate move. For the world as he knew it to fall apart. Waiting had never been something Ron was good at.

He was halfway through fixing himself an early breakfast when Ginny walked into the kitchen one morning, looking somehow odd in pajamas and a rough ponytail. It had been years since he saw her look anything other than perfectly put together. She fell into a chair without speaking, staring down at the edge of the table as if it contained all the secrets of the universe. He had done that often enough himself to recognize the look. After a few minutes, Ron offered her some sausage and scrambled eggs. She nodded her thanks as he sat down. After several more minutes of silence broken only by the birds outside the window and the clink of cutlery on chipped china, Ginny looked at him.

"Have you ever wanted something so much you'd do anything to have it?"

Ron thought about it. "I don't know. I guess I've thought I have, but I don't know." Ginny seemed to see that as an invitation to keep talking, because she picked up again as if he had never spoken.

"I don't even know now what it was I was playing for," she said, tapping the nails of her right hand against the wood absent-mindedly. "I was so new to that world that I got swept up in things too big for me to understand, then. By the time I got it, it was too late. The damage was done, and I couldn't change things." Her eyes swept up from the tabletop to scrutinize his face. "I didn't mean for anyone to get hurt, Ron. You believe me, don't you?"

"Gin, I don't even know what you're talking about."

"You remember how happy Mum and Dad were when Harry and I announced our engagement," she said, as if that was an explanation. "It was their fondest dream or something. He was practically already a member of the family and rich on top of it. If their little girl had to go fall in love with and marry someone, no one better, right? I was just young and stupid enough then to think that I did love him." She gave an unwilling chuckle. "I came closer to it with him than with anyone else, at any rate. I was obsessed for so many years, and it leveled out into something damn close to love. I don't think that kind of love exists, not now, but I did then and the result is still asleep upstairs. My boy was born nine months after the divorce was finalized." She didn't go into any more detail, and Ron was frankly grateful. There were some things he didn't need to know about his sister and his best friend.

"What about Colin?" he asked.

"I told you that Harry hasn't trusted me for years, even before we split. You and the others didn't know anything because we were careful to keep up appearances, but he watched every move I made. It was like being married to a stranger, in the end. He completely shut himself off from me. I was lonely, and Colin was there..." She shrugged, as if it were all of no great consequence. "We had an affair. I left Harry, and then had another affair with him. I married Colin. I had Arthur, and once he was born and I knew he was Harry's, I did what I thought I had to do and kept him a secret. That's all there was to it." Somehow, Ginny actually managed to make all of that sound perfectly everyday and sane, nowhere near as unnatural as Ron thought it was.

"Gin..." Asking seemed decidedly tasteless and tactless, but Ginny was his sister. He didn't have to pull punches with his sister. "Were you ever planning on telling Harry about the kid?"

Surprisingly, Ginny's eyes glistened with tears. "I didn't want to," she said quietly. "I still don't want to." Something akin to desperation entered her voice. "I don't have to, either. Colin and I are the only parents Arthur's ever known. He's fragile, Ron. I don't see how, not with me and Harry for parents, but he wouldn't be able to handle something like that. Especially not with the...resemblance." Ron couldn't repress a mirthless laugh at that. He thought it highly likely that even Arthur would notice that Mummy's friend happened to look like him. Ron had no intentions of being anywhere in range when that particular reunion happened. Harry's temper could be unpredictable, especially when it came to the scraps of family he had found or put together over the years, and Ginny wasn't much better.

Ron shook his head, reluctantly acknowledging that he was just putting off facing the real issue. He knew what it was Ginny wanted him to do but couldn't bring herself to ask him. She wanted him to pretend that this whole bloody mess had never happened and to stand to one side while she continued on as she had been. What he didn't know was whether or not he had it in him to do it. What Ginny was doing to Harry was, more or less, the same thing Hermione meant to do to him. Ron didn't pretend, at least to himself, that his character was lacking in flaws, but that would be the highest form of hypocrisy. "If you can't do anything, Gin," he said finally, "then I will."

Ginny flushed angrily. "You're my brother. You're supposed to be on my side."

"I am on your side, but I can't let this one go, sis. I haven't got it in me."

"Then get it. I won't lose my boy because you're sentimental, Ronald."

"What did you do?"

"Beg pardon?"

"What did you do that makes you think you wouldn't stand a chance of keeping the kid doing things the legal way? Mendoza told me they almost always give kids to the mother. Why're you so afraid?"

"I – " She was cut off from saying what Ron thought was coming by a sudden cry of 'Mama' from upstairs. "Need to go take care of my son," she finished smoothly, as if that was what she had been planning to say all along. Hell, it might have been. Ron was beginning to get the impression that he didn't know Ginny that well any more. "He gets upset if I'm far from him, and Colin being back on the Continent isn't helping matters."

Ron couldn't remember the last time he had felt so torn in different directions off the top of his head. Ginny was his sister, but he knew in his gut and in his brain that what she was doing and planning to do wasn't right, and there were those death threats she had been tossing around. He thought she had just been desperate and rambling, maybe even bordering on hysterical, but there was always that chance that she had been serious. He didn't know what to do, and he couldn't win for losing. That was the way it had always been for Weasleys, and probably the way it always would be. Life on the losing side.