Chapter Eight: News Bulletin

Later, once the initial shock and furor over it died down, Ron would always think it oddly appropriate that he first got the news from the radio The media never let some people go.

On the Saturday immediately following their conversation, Ginny was gone before Ron woke up for the morning, leaving a note saying there was something she had to see to and would be back shortly. It was the first time she had ventured out since arriving at the Burrow, but Ron thought he knew why she had taken off. Ginny had gotten used to traveling over the past few years, not sitting still in one place. Unfortunately, her absence meant he was stuck in the position of having to reassure his jittery, nervous little nephew that she would be coming back and yes, she would be coming back before dark. It didn't take Ron long to decide that Arthur wouldn't have lasted five minutes with his kids no matter who the boy's father happened to be. Ginny hadn't exaggerated when she called her son fragile.

Ginny returned well before noon, dressed in unusually subdued robes and looking less tense than she had in years. There was something almost familiar about the air she had, but he couldn't put his finger on it. The smile she gave him as she straightened from kissing Arthur, whose joy at recovering her was the most animation he had shown yet, looked completely genuine. "Morning, Ron," she said. "Sorry I took off without waiting for everyone to get up, but you know..." she looked pointedly at her son. "Didn't want there to be a fuss."

"No problem," he replied. "Can you look after the kids for an hour or so later?"

"Why?"

"I have to go meet Mendoza, she – "

Ron never got to finish his sentence or go to his meeting with his attorney, because a popping noise announced her as she Apparated into his kitchen. He realized immediately that something was off about her, but it took him a moment to register it.

He had seen Mendoza angry – in truth, he had rarely seen her any other way – but he had never seen her when she was not almost insultingly in control of herself until now. The woman was shaking badly, her eyes were the size of saucepans in a face dramatically paler than usual, and, as the last thing his brain was capable of taking in, she had somehow managed to get someone's blood on her blouse...and on her hands.

"Appointment's off, Weasley," she said, staring straight ahead. "Something's come up." Her eyes darted towards her palms, then shot up as she shuddered violently. "I have to go to the hospital. They should have – " Guessing what she was about to do, Ron reached for her arm, but she Disapparated out as quickly as she had Apparated in.

"Mendoza!" His shout had no more affect on her absence than it did on his confusion. Arthur started crying, and Nicky quickly followed suit. Chloe and Adam looked too stunned to do anything. Lena looked like she was about to be sick as she moved to comfort her brother and cousin. He felt like he had been clocked over the head with a cast-iron cauldron. Ginny's aloof manner, one that suggested that blood-covered lawyers spouting rubbish in one's kitchen was perfectly normal, made her stand out as if she had sprouted extra arms from her head. Calmly, she moved across the room and flipped on the old radio by the sink, raising an eyebrow at his incredulous look.

"Katherine Mendoza's a well-respected member of society, even if she does insist on working," she said simply. "News of whatever's going on might be on WWN, if it's important enough to include her." The WWN didn't fail her for long, because the announcer's voice suddenly cut into an ancient Weird Sisters tune playing for the Classics Hour and gave the news bulletin Ron knew at once explained why Mendoza was panicking and had blood on her hands.

"We have just received news from St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries that Harry Potter has been admitted as a patient after being found in his study with knife wounds to the back from what is believed to have been an assassination attempt around nine-fifteen this morning. Potter is known for..." Ron didn't hear the rest of it. The first thought to fly through his head was Dear God, Harry's been stabbed. Someone tried to kill my best friend. The second thought was Dear God, Ginny was out at nine-fifteen. My sister had motive and opportunity to try to kill my best friend. He met her eyes squarely, and was immediately unnerved by how calm she was. Ginny was a Weasley. She shouldn't have been so calm upon finding out that her ex-husband, the father of her only child, had been literally stabbed in the back.

"Gin...you didn't..." He couldn't even make the accusation. Not in front of the kids – they had enough stress for one morning, between Mendoza appearing covered in what he could only assume was Harry's blood and finding out that their surrogate uncle had been stabbed – and maybe not at all. He couldn't believe that she would actually...

"Why would I?" she asked. "Harry might die if I stabbed him, but it wouldn't be before he took me out with him, and I've never been suicidal. Besides, I gave up offing people after the War, and everything he has will go to Helena if he dies now. I was just out of my head on Memorial Day." Ron's jaw dropped at hearing his baby sister talk like that. This was not Ginny. He didn't know who it was, but Ginny would never be able to talk about a situation like this like that, never mind when it pertained someone she had once cared about by her own admission. She couldn't have been the one who did it. She would be falling to pieces in more ways than one if she was. Harry would have fought. Unless he didn't have time to fight...unless he had been killed before he could react and it was being kept quiet for some reason... No. Harry was not dead, and it wasn't Ginny who had tried to put him in that condition. It couldn't have been Ginny. He wouldn't let it be Ginny. It had to have been Mendoza or some random person with a grudge. Since Mendoza had never struck him as the sort to kill a client – clients, after all, gave her money – that left a relative of some Death Eater Harry had taken out during the War. But why would someone like that use a knife instead of a curse?

"Go," Ginny said abruptly, breaking into his increasingly frantic thoughts. "Go on to St. Mungo's. You're not going to do any good there, but you're not going to give yourself or anyone else a moment's peace until you see for yourself that the fool's still alive. If he ever wakes up, you can ask him what you asked me, and he'll tell you the exact same thing. Well, he will if he remembers it."

Finding Harry wasn't difficult once he arrived at St. Mungo's. All he had to do was follow the sound of a crowd of reporters. Getting through to the front was difficult, but he managed it somehow, largely in part, he suspected, because some of them recognized him from the old days. Once he did reach it, the number of others congregated there surprised him. The news had traveled fast. Neville Longbottom made a beeline for him.

"I would say good afternoon, but..."

"Any idea what happened, Neville? The radio didn't give many details."

Neville bit his lip, looking anxious. "It was Kate Mendoza who found him," the shorter man said. "He'd given the staff orders that no one was to disturb him except her. The maid heard her start screaming and found her in the floor trying to stop the bleeding with her cloak. Hermione was there...she Flooed over here to get help. The Healers are doing what they can, but whoever stabbed him did it a good while before Kate got there. The Aurors are all over the house...I guess they still see it as an attack on one of their own or something. Can't blame them. All of us who fought that first battle with him are here except Ginny, and some of the others, too. Luna's calm as hell, but she's the only one."

"How'd everyone else find out so fast?"

"Cathy was on call, so that's how I found out," Neville said, with a nervous shrug. "I have no idea about everyone else." Cathy? Who in the... Oh. Neville's wife, Catherine, was one of the Healers here. How had he forgotten that? It had taken him so long to get used to the idea of Neville being married that he should have retained the knowledge for the rest of his life. Spotting a distinctly familiar head of hair, he clapped Neville on the shoulder and instinctively moved to where his wife and sisters-in-law were standing, Fleur wringing a handkerchief furiously, Amelia trying to smooth out her hair – he had a feeling that she had only gotten out of bed because she heard about Harry, Fleur had told him that her bad days were starting to outnumber the good – and Hermione giving the wall the same sort of blank stare Mendoza had back at the Burrow. Forgetting about their situation, he put a hand on her shoulder, and she turned to look at him.

"Ron?" she whispered hoarsely, sounding as if she had already cried more than once. There was something vaguely disturbing about how blank her face was. Suddenly, her already reddened eyes were overflowing, and she promptly buried her face in his shoulder and began sobbing, deep, wrenching sobs it frightened him to hear. If she was this upset, then it was bad. It was really bad. His arms closed around her automatically. This wasn't happening. It couldn't be as bad as Hermione's reaction indicated. After a bit, she stopped crying, but didn't move from where she was.

Ron never did quite work out how long it was between when Hermione turned on the waterworks and when Catherine Longbottom emerged, looking weary and worried. The reporters all moved towards her automatically, but she held up a hand to stop them. "Mr. Potter is alive, for the time being, and that's all I'm going to say to any of you," she said flatly. "Since I'm sure we all want to keep him and the other patients that way, none of you are going to stay here and cause a fuss. If there's a single reporter here in five minutes, he or she will be escorted from the hospital by security."

Ron started to disengage from Hermione and approach Catherine once the reporters started moving, but his sometime wife was very reluctant to let him go. Of all the career choices he had considered, sanity anchor wasn't one of them, but he kept an arm around her as he moved towards the light-haired Healer. "What d'you mean, for the time being?" he asked in a low voice, hoping to prevent eavesdropping by any stragglers among the reporters.

Catherine looked up at him with faint annoyance. "Exactly what it sounded like I meant," she said. "When I left the room, he was breathing, his heart was beating, and most of his brain seemed to be functioning. He was still unconscious, and I have no idea how long it'll be before he wakes up or even if he does. If Kate had found him right after it happened, I would have been able to tell you more, but as it is...he wouldn't have lasted fifteen more minutes, I don't think, and probably not ten. He was stabbed twice, once much deeper than the other, and he lost a lot of blood. Our assassin wasn't playing games – she knew what she was doing with that knife."

"She?" Hermione asked.

"Call it a hunch," Catherine said, shrugging tiredly. "I can't help but think it was a woman. A woman's style, you might say, but I'll leave the investigations to the Aurors. Keeping the man alive is enough of a job for me." Ron and Hermione exchanged a look. Though she and Neville didn't publicize the fact, Catherine's family was known for turning out Seers. She herself didn't have visions or the like, but they both knew from experience that her hunches often turned out to be right.

"Can we see Harry?" Ron asked bluntly.

For a moment, he thought the Healer was going to run them off, but then she sighed. "You two and you two only, and don't think I'll feel at all guilty about kicking you out if you cause too much noise. I shouldn't allow it at all, but...I think Harry would want you there. Who knows, you might even do some good. Some of the Mindhealers say that it does." Neither of them gave her time to change her mind.

Harry looked like he was dead already as they took their all-too-familiar posts on either side of his hospital bed. Hermione pressed her hands over her mouth and nose hard, but she didn't start crying again. For a moment, Ron was overwhelmed with memories of other times he and Hermione had sat this same vigil and still others where it had been him and Harry over Hermione or, more rarely, Harry and Hermione over him. In spite of the cold dread in the pit of his stomach, Ron couldn't help noticing how easy it was to slip back into their trio. The dream team was together again, even if it had taken a tragedy to pull them out of their lives and back to where they needed to be.

"Hey, mate," Ron said after several minutes of silence. "Remember the game that day? The Cannons won. You've got to come around so I'll have someone to listen to me gloat about it. Hermione never will. She still thinks Quidditch is just a game people put too much weight on." The light tone he was trying for didn't come off right. Damn, he hadn't felt like this since his father died. Arthur Weasley had made a good end, but there had been two days where he lingered like this, and all his seven children and wife could do was sit by and wait for him to finish dying. That wasn't the most encouraging thought... "No one who lived through the Killing Curse and dueling You-Know-Who and Basilisk bites and all the rest can't go down to a knife," he continued on doggedly, noticing that he sounded like he was trying to convince himself more than he was trying to convince anyone else. "Selena'd never forgive you." Selena Wyatt had become Head of the Auror Division not long after Harry completed his training in that field and a good ten years before she should have had any hope of it. More time in office had done little to smooth the edges of the woman's often abrasive personality, and there was more than one reason why Wyatt was the worst nightmare of the more political Ministry employees.

Hermione, the one who could go into the realm of feelings without permanent image damage because she was the girl, regained full control of herself at last and reached out to give the hand closest to herself a squeeze. "What idiot over there means, Harry, is that we love you and we're not going anywhere." There was a slight catch in her voice, but she didn't break down. "Never."

Ron gave her a grateful look she returned with a weak, very forced-looking, smile. "What she said." Some part of his brain couldn't help but wait for the sarcastic comeback...but it didn't come. Somehow, he didn't think it would have even if Harry hadn't been out of it. "You're stuck with us, to the end."

"To the end," Hermione echoed.

And then, having done all they knew to do, they could only wait.