Did You-Know-Who drink coffee? It seemed strange to picture the personification of evil needing something as mundane as caffeine in the mornings, Ron mused as he poured a fresh cup, squinting against the sunlight slanting through the kitchen windows of his and Harry's flat. Maybe that's why Voldemort was so nasty—none of the Death Eaters could make a decent cup of coffee and he'd been in caffeine withdrawal since regaining corporeal form.

Speaking of nasty, Ron could practically feel the waves of cold anger pouring off of Harry. Harry had been already seated at the table when Ron stumbled in, supposedly glancing through the Daily Prophet but Ron hadn't heard a page turn since he'd wandered in. Harry's stiff posture and the way he set his cup of tea back in his saucer with a deliberate clatter let Ron know he was in for it in a big way. Deciding retreat was the better part of valor and also having no intention of getting shouted at before even one cup of coffee, he carefully did not open the conversation himself. Harry could make the first move if he was so cranky.

"How's Seamus?" Ron asked and then cringed. Apparently the coffee had not yet taken effect, if he was deliberately walking into arguments waiting to happen after just warning himself not to. He watched the top of Harry's hair start to quiver slightly over the top of the Daily Prophet and waited for the explosion.

"I'm sure he's bloody brilliant! He certainly seemed ready to tackle the world when I dropped him off at his flat," Harry shouted, slamming the paper down on the table and nearly upsetting his tea. "His best mate had just died from being hit by a stupid Muggle car! Death Eaters around every corner and Dean gets run over walking home from the grocery. And after you ran off to meet with an unidentified contact who could have recognized you and blown the whole operation, I was left wondering if I would be the next one sobbing into someone's shoulder about how we'd done everything together since we were eleven!"

Ron took a sip of his coffee but did not attempt to speak. He was sure Harry wasn't finished yet and interrupting him mid-gale only lengthened the process. The only problem was that they had a 9:30 am debriefing with Moody and it was 8:45 now, so he hoped Harry started to wind down in the next half hour.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" Harry demanded, now striding around the kitchen and still waving the erstwhile newspaper in the air. "You can't just say the hell with protocol and procedure in the middle of a delicate intelligence operation. There's a reason we have rules, Ron, and it's primarily so idiots like you don't get their arses hexed to hell every five minutes!"

Despite his best intentions, Ron simply could not let that one go.

"Harry, since when have you made any effort to follow the rules?" Ron stood and carried his coffee cup over to the sink, raising a pointed eyebrow in Harry's direction. Harry tossed the by now almost shredded paper on the table and shoved both hands through his hair, the motion making his t-shirt ride up a few inches above his pajama bottoms. Ron was displeased to note from the jut of his hipbones that Harry had gone from merely lean to downright thin in the last few months. Too many missions. Too many nightmares he thought Ron couldn't hear from his own bedroom.

"Fine. Fine," Harry sighed. "But you should have helped me apparate Seamus to HQ and then we could have finished the drop together. It wouldn't have taken more than five minutes and then you would have had backup."

"Right, Tonks would have been just fine with us barging right back into an operation that had clearly already been blown to hell after finding out news that a childhood friend just bought it," Ron snarked, forgetting that he was supposed to be ratcheting down the tension instead of winding Harry back up.

"So you admit the operation was already shot and yet you went on with it anyway," Harry concluded triumphantly, rinsing out his own teacup. "For God's sake, Ron, I'm supposed to be the reckless one."

"Harry, we can't bring Dean back," Ron said softly, surprising himself with his own insight. Bright green eyes collided with his as Harry looked up in shock. And I'm not going to be the next to die, Ron wanted to say but couldn't. Suddenly he was back on the Hogwarts Express heading home after fourth year, watching the droop of Harry's shoulders and so desperately wanting to make him understand that Cedric's death wasn't his fault. "Dean didn't even die because of the war—it was random, Harry, totally random. You know that, don't you?" This didn't happen because of you.

Harry turned to the sink and dropped his chin to his chest for a long moment, and Ron watched the sunlight from the window play across the tense lines of his arms and chest in light and shadow.

Finally Harry sighed and lifted his head. "I've already had a shower, so go ahead and take yours. We've got to be at work in twenty minutes."

Ron noticed that Harry never answered his question.

Training Days were as bad as Desk Days, and if Ron were really lucky, he got to experience both in one extraordinarily Long Day. Training Days consisted of eight hours of Moody yelling at them at full volume while they squelched around a muddy moor somewhere pretending to carry out reconnaissance and battle formations, interspersed with the odd five kilometer run. Desk Days consisted of eight hours of mind-crushingly, fist-eatingly boring writing and filing of reports ("in neat quintuplicate," Ron could almost hear Percy mince) with stultifying meetings with readings of said reports thrown in for variety. How lucky could you get to have a half-and-half—pounding yourself into the ground until lunch and a speed shower and then nursing aching muscles and fighting sleep at your desk all afternoon.

The only thing better than the schedule was his frame of mind all day. As he watched Harry glide through patches of heather and nimbly scale stone walls, Ron realized that he was paying closer attention to the play of muscles in Harry's legs and back, and, well, his backside, than the tactics he was supposed to be learning. He hadn't forgotten his disastrous physical reaction in the club the other night, and when Harry lifted the hem of his shirt to wipe his damp face, Ron found a similar hardness arise as his eyes followed beads of sweat inching down Harry's hard torso. He tried to play off his resulting fiery blush as a result of their five kilometer run. He was straight, dammit, and he was definitely not checking out his best friend.

The afternoon was filled with the bitter realization that while he was worried about his dick reacting to inappropriate stimuli, Dean was dead. He remembered small things like Dean cheering himself hoarse at Gryffindor quidditch matches and refusing to ask for a throat-healing tonic from Madame Pomfrey because that would be against house pride. He remembered how Dean had played straight man to Seamus' bad jokes for so many years that their rhythm was as smooth as Fred and George's interplay. He remembered Dean deciding to go out of 7th year Potions in a blaze of glory by keying his potion to explode right in Snape's face as he leaned over to examine the cauldron. The sight of Snape's greasy hair suddenly falling out in clumps leaving him looking like a plucked chicken had been relived at many a Saturday afternoon gathering to drink butterbeer and listen to the Cannons on the wireless. They would never again open the door of their flat to see Dean holding up a six-pack and asking with a grin what the odds on Chudley were this week.

By five o'clock Ron's brain had worn a track between remembering the bob of Harry's adam's apple in the smooth white column of his throat as he leaned back and chugged water after their run and the fragile, crushed feeling of Seamus in his arms, huddled against the wall in the rain and telling him that Dean was dead. Deciding to chuck it all in for today, he threw his quill in the general direction of his inkwell and went in search of Harry.

"Ready to wrap up for today?" Ron said, leaning over the lip of his cubicle wall and seeing Harry with his feet propped up on the desk and squinting at a map across his legs.

"What? Oh, yeah, let me just…" Harry trailed off absently as he shuffled through seemingly endless stacks of paper strewn haphazardly across all surfaces. It never failed to amaze Ron how Harry could be such a neat freak at home (a leftover from his hideous aunt's slavedriving, Ron reflected darkly) and feel perfectly comfortable with his cubicle in a permanent state of looking like it had been ravaged by a crazed basilisk.

Basilisk…Parseltongue…Harry's tongue…which was caught between his teeth as Harry searched for an elusive file…no, no, Ron was most definitely not thinking about Harry's tongue in any context whatsoever.

"….always something good there," Harry was finishing.

"What, sorry?" Ron tuned back in, feeling his ears turn slightly red.

"I said," Harry drawled, swinging on his cloak, "I don't feel like cooking, so let's go to Grimmauld for dinner. We can get the news and your Mum always has something good cooking there during the week."

Ron mumbled something agreeable as he and Harry headed for the lifts, stealing a glance at Harry's ink-stained fingers and wondering how his hands always appeared strong and graceful at the same time. It just wasn't fair to Seamus. Best mates shouldn't die.

Flooing out into the kitchen of Grimmauld Place with a grin still on his face from sharing a muffled laugh with Harry at seeing Percy ostentatiously pretend not to know them in the Atrium of the Ministry, Ron's smile faded as he realized that Harry had stopped dead still in the hearth.

"What—" Ron cut himself off as he stumbled into Harry and saw Hermione seated alone at the table, no sign of the usual pre-dinner hubbub that usually prevailed at Order headquarters on a weeknight. She was facing away from them, parchment spread all across the scarred wooden table, but her head was in her hands.

"What's the matter, Hermione? Headache? Long day? Have to talk to Snape?" Ron jauntily swirled off his cloak, hung it on a hook on the wall, and threw his gloves on a convenient side table.

"Shut up!" Harry hissed, jerking at Ron's sleeve as he attempted to stride forward. It was then that Ron noticed that Hermione had not yet scolded them and they had been there more than ten seconds. He looked again and saw that her shoulders were shaking and his mouth suddenly went dry. Hermione never cried.

"Hermione, what is it?" Harry asked gently, pulling out a chair and sitting down. Ron followed suit and tried to catch a glimpse of her face, still buried in her hands. She finally looked up at them, tears streaming silently down her pale cheeks.

"It's Seamus," she blurted in a choked voice. Ron fished around for a handkerchief before remembering he'd never carried one in his life and settling for swiping a dishtowel off the counter. She accepted it with a grateful nod and continued.

"When Harry came by to tell me about Dean last night, he asked if we could arrange to have someone be with Seamus for the next couple of days because he didn't seem to be taking it well at all," Hermione sniffed. "Parvati left at four and I was supposed to be there, but I was so close to cracking the code on these files you recovered that I l-l-lost track of t-time and forgot all about it. Th-then about four thirty we got a Floo call from St. Mungo's. Seamus…Seamus—he jumped out the window of his flat! Someone called for an ambulance broom team but he was d-d-dead when the paramedics got there," Hermione finished and dissolved in tears, her frame heaving with wracking sobs.

Ron's breath froze in his chest with her revelation and found he could hear nothing in the deserted kitchen above Hermione's crying save the strangely loud ticking of his mother's family clock with their faces on the hands. He looked across at Harry and saw him looking back, blinking rapidly as if he were trying to keep his eyes from spilling over too.

Without a word they left their chairs, knelt on either side of Hermione, and wrapped their arms around her. He wasn't sure how long they stayed there holding her, knees starting to ache as she soaked Mrs. Weasley's embroidered dishtowel with tears, still afraid to break their silence because it would mean that her news was true.

The double funeral was brutal, as Ron had fully expected it to be. Even though it was wartime, the death of two such bright, promising, well-loved wizards could not go by unnoticed and ungrieved. Ron watched Harry stand ramrod straight in his formal black mourning robes next to him at the graveside during the interment, cheeks white, jaw clenched and eyes fixed determinedly in the distance. The sick feeling in Ron's gut coalesced into the bitter but fierce knowledge that Voldemort had a lot to answer for and he, Ron Weasley, meant to see that he did answer for the suffering he had produced.

Ron felt like he and Harry could not touch one another at all today or they would break. Seamus and Dean were the ones lying in those coffins, but it could have been Harry and Ron, and why wasn't it? The unspoken question hovered between them in the bitingly clear February air of the cemetery. They took turns taking Hermione's arm and holding her hand, knowing that she was still writhing in guilt for not being with Seamus and possibly preventing him from taking such a drastic step in his grief. As they steered her away after the service, Ron saw a small blonde woman alone some thirty feet away with a familiar build. He realized it was Ginny come to pay her respects and felt the world was a pretty poor place if she couldn't come to an ex-boyfriend's funeral as herself.

After depositing Hermione in her flat under a duvet, with a cup of hot tea in her hand and Crookshanks on her lap and strict instructions to leave all work until tomorrow, Ron followed Harry through the Floo back to their flat. Harry trailed wearily off to his room as Ron loosened his tie and started to sift through several days worth of unopened post. Tossing a few bills and fan letters for Harry on the table, he opened the icebox and wondered what he could throw together for supper. It never failed to disorient Ron how after an earth-shattering event like the lives of two childhood friends being suddenly snuffed out, ordinary things like getting hungry and fixing dinner still kept happening. He sighed and plucked a glass jar of pasta out of a cupboard—it would be quick and filling after such a draining day.

Without warning the jar exploded in his hand. All of the jars in the cupboard had exploded, as had the containers on the counter, resulting in a deluge of foodstuffs and ingredients cascading onto the floor. Even the kitchen windows had sprouted cracks. Ron looked down at his bleeding hand and shook glass fragments and drops of blood onto the floor before it clicked.

Accidental magic. Wild magic. It hadn't come from him so something seriously bad was happening to Harry. Suddenly terrified by the silence coming from Harry's bedroom, Ron plunged his hand into his robes for his wand.

"Harry!" he shouted, lurching and sliding across the pasta-covered floor and already registering that the blood making his wand hand slick would mean he might have to fight with his weaker-casting left hand.

Battering the bedroom door open with his shoulder Ron immediately threw himself in a roll to the side and came up on one knee, wand tracking across the room for targets. The spells poised behind his lips faded as he saw Harry, seated alone on the bed with a piece of parchment in his hand.

"Harry, what is it? You almost blew up the kitchen."

"Ron," was all Harry seemed to be able to get out, his voice a hoarse whisper. "Ron," he said again and held out the parchment with a trembling hand. Ron dropped his wand on the bed and tried not to get blood on the note as he read it.

Dearest Harry,

Two down, how many to go? How many before you surrender your foolish quest and kneel before me? Two down, Harry—who's next?

Lord Voldemort

Reviews requested!