A/n: Time for a multiple choice quiz! The correct answer is located at the author's note at the end of the chapter.
Which of the following is true?
A. Dieselwriter finds it convenient to finish a chapter when half of it was written a year and a half ago.
B. Dieselwriter is excessively excited about the new movie (OUT TONIGHT! SQUEE!)
C. Dieselwriter has a joint account called fuzzy oranges with her sister where they write Criminal Minds fanfics.
D. Dieselwriter was accepted into pharmacy school.
Before we begin, I'd like to direct newer readers to the previous chapter before attempting this one. This makes absolute zero sense without it. Well, maybe not zero sense. Perhaps two sense? Three, tops. You may also want a glancy-glance at the flashbacks in Chapters 8-10 if you're bored, only because this chapter's flashback makes reference to them.
The Tales of Weasley the Father
By dieselwriter
Chapter 27: The Tale of Inaction
"You should go talk to him."
"Me? You're the oldest! You talk to him."
"But this is a guy problem. He needs a good man-to-man talk."
"I'm nine. Boy-to-man talks are not nearly as useful in this situation."
"A good father-son chat should do it then."
"But this is about his feelings. I think you would be more sensitive to his problem."
"If I get a vote," a gruff voice called out over the sibling whisperings, "I'd prefer a good father-children talk, if you don't mind me saying."
Hugo and Rose looked at each other in surprise before glancing around the corner to find their father at the kitchen table, looking at the pair of them with both eyebrows raised.
"Hi Daddy!" Rose spoke up in a chipper voice, hoping an optimist's attitude might inject the same pleasant feelings into her father. "You look different. Did you do something with your hair? I like it!"
"He looks like he hasn't bathed in three days," Hugo muttered, and Rosie promptly elbowed him in the gut. "What?" he retaliated. "He smells!"
"Hugo!" she elbowed her brother harder. She knew as well as he did that their father appeared out of sorts, but she wasn't about to tell him that. Perhaps a father-daughter conversation would have been a better idea after all.
Ron couldn't hide a smirk and folded his Daily Prophet to lay it to the side of the table.
"I showered yesterday, I'll have you know."
"But did you use soap? Hey!" whined Hugo, as his sister hit him a third time.
"Is Uncle Harry still mad at you?" Rosie decided to get to the root of the problem, before Hugo could possibly make things any worse.
"Doubtful," Ron stretched, wincing as his shoulders popped.
"But he's avoiding you," Hugo frowned, not understanding the logic. "We haven't even seen him since…you know…." He glanced at his shoes to avoid mentioning the incident at Hogwarts last month.
"That's usually the way things work with us," Ron answered, shrugging off the nearly fatal event. "One of us gets mad at the other for a few hours, a day tops, and then we brood for a month or two."
"A month or two?" Rosie looked incredulous. "Why don't you just go talk to him now?"
"It's his fault," Ron folded his arms defiantly, looking very much like his son when told there would be no playing until school assignments were finished.
"So," Rosie replied, looking very much like her mother, "instead of talking out your problems, you're going to avoid them?"
"I'm not avoiding anything," Ron defended himself, not liking where this conversation was going at all. "I'm merely…waiting for it to come to me."
"Can we look up the definition of avoidance?" Hugo smirked, joining his sister in a nearly impenetrable impression of his parents.
"What we can do, if you two would quit giving me those looks, is play football, if we drop this conversation and never speak of it again."
Rosie's hands remained defiantly on her hips, but Hugo seemed to waver.
"Hugo," she muttered out of the corner of her mouth, "don't give it up now. We almost have him!"
"But how often does he want to play football?" Hugo looked to her desperately. His father had never been a great fan of the Muggle sport. "Come on, we can lecture him later!"
"But how often do we get to lecture him on something?"
"I've an idea!" Hugo's eyes lit up with devious amusement. "We'll play football after he tells us a story about what great friends he and Uncle Harry are."
"That sounds more like a punishment for us."
"But it'll make him learn his lesson. The sooner they patch things up, the sooner we'll get to see Al and Lily again!"
"And what will a story about his and Uncle Harry's friendship teach him exactly?"
"I dunno, I just wanna play football!"
"That was a bribe, Hugo!"
"I know it, and I want it!"
"Two options," Ron rose to put an end to the miniature row. "Option One: I'll give you a story, all right, but it'll be one about where doing nothing is the best thing for a situation. Option Two: Drop the subject and play football."
"Football it is, then!" Hugo grinned widely as he sprinted out of the room in search for his trainers.
"I knew this was a bad idea," Rosie mumbled as she followed her brother out of the kitchen.
Ron sat back at the table, sighing as he ran a hand through his already tousled hair.
He couldn't sleep.
Something creaked ominously in the old house, and Ron snuggled deeper into his sleeping bag, wincing as his injured knee twinged. His back wasn't feeling particularly fantastic either, given the only thing separating him from the hard wooden floor was the thin material of his sleeping bag.
But these weren't the reasons he was up so late. Ron shifted on his side to look at Hermione, situated atop the sofa cushions he had bullied her into sleeping on. She looked peaceful and he was quite happy to see it; today had been insane for all of them.
He turned to his other side, sneaking a peak at Harry's sleeping form. Ron smiled to see his mate barely visible above the mouth of the sleeping bag, drooling lightly on his pillow. It made Ron feel better to see him without worry lines creasing his face.
There was another creak somewhere outside of the drawing room of Grimmauld Place and Ron situated himself to stare at the shadowy ceiling, his heart thumping loudly in his chest.
Now I know why Hermione didn't want to sleep by herself tonight, Ron thought as he caught a glimpse of a small, dark, eight-legged something hiding in the midst of the cobwebs decorating the dark yet elegant chandelier hanging above him. He gave an involuntary twitch and stared at the spot of ceiling directly above him, to keep the possible-spider in his line of sight without staring at it directly.
Thus keeping the source of a potential panic attack within his peripheral vision, Ron gazed at the dark shadows dancing across the ceiling and reflected on the relative nightmare that had been that night.
And how big of a failure he had been to Harry and Hermione.
The spider-shaped blob remained stationary for the next few minutes and Ron breathed a minor sigh of relief, feeling more confident about the thing being dead.
Ron, turn out the lights.
That was all the help he was to them tonight. Death Eaters had attacked and he had been too busy trying to choke down that God-awful Muggle cuppa-thing-oh Hermione had ordered for him to notice. Mind, that really had left a rather nasty aftertaste in his mouth, but to be so preoccupied with that and Hermione as to ignore such a looming threat….
He shifted, pulling his arms out to rest them behind his head, greatly annoyed. That wasn't entirely true, after all. The sheer absurdity of Muggle culture and, more importantly, Hermione did seem to occupy the forefront of his mind, but the welfare of his family had definitely been sitting sidecar tonight.
We know what's going on! Voldemort's taken over the Ministry, what else do we need to know?
How about if his family was safe? Apparently not high on the list of priorities of their group…but Ron shook that idea out of his head. Of course Harry and Hermione would be concerned about his family. It was stupid to think otherwise. They had just been thinking logically about their situation, while he, as expected, had not.
Family safe, do not reply, we are being watched.
But it still hurt, someplace deep inside his gut, remembering the fear and the 'hope for the best, expect the worst' attitude he had been sporting tonight in regards to news about his family. He hoped they were sleeping better than he was right now.
His back aching and fully convinced now, after fifteen minutes of immobility, that the spider on the ceiling was in fact dead, Ron turned on his side and came face-to-face with a wide awake Hermione.
Heart beat back up to impending spider attack rate, he watched her unblinkingly, entranced by her sleepy brown eyes shining out of the darkness.
That's Dolohov.
Where any normal reader of Twelve Fail-Safe Ways to Charm Witches would either attempt something romantic or at least a word of comfort, the only thing Ron could think to whisper to her was, "I didn't kill him."
"Who?"
"Dolohov."
Hermione didn't seem annoyed at being woken up to participate in an absurd conversation, just confused.
"I know. We modified his memory."
"I mean before. When we were getting Harry out of Little Whinging. Dolohov was the Death Eater I thought I killed."
Understanding flooded Hermione's eyes and she didn't look the least bit tired now.
"I'm glad then," she whispered in reply.
"He could've hurt you, though," Ron said, his thoughts clearly torn on the matter. Of course he didn't want to have killed Antonin Dolohov that night, earlier this summer. But there was no doubt in Ron's mind that Dolohov would have killed all three of them tonight if he had had the chance. "I could have prevented tonight's attack—"
"If it hadn't been Dolohov it would've been someone else, possibly someone worse."
They sat in silence as Ron pondered that bit of information.
"If you hadn't've been there tonight, Harry and I would have had to kill them both. There's no way we would've been able to do a Memory Charm."
"It was lucky I was there then," she answered with a small smile, but she shifted in her sleeping bag, clearly trying to find a way to truly respond to his dilemma. "You would have found a different way, Ron. You're not a murderer. Neither is Harry. Is that why you were so preoccupied?"
"One of the reasons," Ron grumbled into his pillow. So she had noticed how worthless he had been tonight.
"I'm sorry," she amended, knowing immediately that she had hit a sensitive topic. "I wasn't thinking. I know you're—what's that look for?"
"Sorry," it was Ron's turn to apologize as he wiped the smirk off his face. "I didn't think I'd ever live to see the day where you'd not think."
"Oh, ha ha," Hermione scoffed, but seeing how pleased Ron was with the idea she replaced her scowl with a tired smile.
They sat in relative silence for a few moments, still watching each other, waiting for the other person to show a sign of wanting to sleep.
"I'm sorry," Hermione finally repeated, breaking the silence.
"Hm?" was his less than intelligible remark.
"For earlier, when I cut your knee. Everything was just happening so fast and I—" where Ron expected her to continue rambling, she stopped herself to take a breath, "I panicked, I suppose."
"It's okay. It doesn't hurt." She gave him a disbelieving look and he added, "Much."
She gave him a small grin as she somehow shifted deeper into her blankets while still remaining visible.
"You're not cold, are you?"
"No," she said, but she averted her eyes.
"What's wrong then?"
She looked him straight in the eye, and he tensed under her scrutiny.
"Is something bothering you?" she blurted out.
"I thought that was what I was asking?"
They shared a secret smile before she moved to sit flat on her back, staring up at the ceiling.
"If you're worried about your family, I want to know. If you're scared about…the war, I want to know."
He knew what she was getting at and realized he had indeed terrified her with his talk of murdering Dolohov. But why shouldn't she be concerned about how easy talk of murder had become for him; they had both seen how killing Dolohov had affected him before when it was an accident, yet he had practically volunteered to do it tonight. Perhaps they were both simply masochistic: he for doing this to himself and she for sticking around to witness it.
"You promised me."
He glanced over at her face, but she kept her eyes resolutely above her, glaring at the chandelier as though it had broken a promise to her rather than he.
"He killed my uncles."
She kept her attention above her but answered him.
"You want to kill him because of that?"
"No. I don't want to kill him at all. Doesn't mean we shouldn't've though."
"D-doesn't it?"
It felt as though a draft had swept through the room, causing a chill to settle down in their tired bones. Ron watched as her gaze focused on something he was certain wasn't there, something intangible that he wouldn't be able to grasp without her maddening intellect.
"We're in a war."
She flipped over to watch him again with flooded eyes, not bothering to deny the obvious truth.
"He tried to kill you. I can't just let people who want to hurt you walk away freely, Hermione."
"It's not your job to protect me from the world, Ron."
Well, to some degree Hermione's claim held truth. He had been her primary instigator and number one partner in rows over the years, after all. And it was a good thing his job wasn't to protect her, because he could have been fired on numerous occasions; as he seemed to recall she had spent a decent amount of her second year and the end of her fifth year term boarded up in Hogwarts' Hospital Wing.
But that didn't mean he couldn't try. He had been trying for the better part of six years, ever since they had become friends, really, to protect her. From Malfoy, from Snape, from Umbridge, and from that scumbag McLaggen…. He could even remember heaving up a number of slugs to shield her from Malfoy's insults.
That's what he'd been doing since they had become friends nearly six years ago. Mind, he had probably inflicted more pain on her than anyone else, but when push came to shove, he had always been there to shield her.
He looked over to her, not really sure how he was going to respond, only to find that he didn't have to. She was already fast asleep once again, breathing slowly and deeply.
He smiled and watched her for a while, finding comfort in watching the curls cascading around her face shift whenever she would dig her face a little further into her pillow.
Something indiscernible shifted in the air around him and he frowned, lying on his back to determine why he was suddenly feeling on edge.
His answer came in the form of the spider he had taken for dead, which was rapidly descending upon him, suspended in midair by the thinnest silvery thread.
"Bloody hell!" his exclamation was surprisingly meek and he ducked his head as the spider fell onto his pillow, looking more like a droplet of ink on the fabric in the darkness of the drawing room.
Ron scrambled away, getting tangled up and dragging the blanket along with him.
"Incendio!"
His pillow was engulfed in flames a moment later, and Ron watched on in blank surprise as Harry rubbed his eyes, not looking altogether awake nor alert despite the fact he had cast a rather dangerous spell.
"Thanks," Ron eventually responded in an embarrassingly high-pitched voice, which only came after most of his pillow had been reduced to ashes.
Harry's reply was nothing more than a half-snore as he rolled over in his sleeping bag like a giant caterpillar, his fingers still wrapped loosely around his wand. Ron had to admit that his reflexes, even the subconscious ones, were frighteningly good.
He rose his eyebrows in further surprise a moment later when a new pillow plopped on top of the remains of his old one. Hermione looked at him in undeniable bleary-eyed amusement, nudging the pillow closer to him as if to entice him to use it.
He reached forward to take it and brushed her hand, instantly feeling her warmth spread into him like a pillow infested with acromantulas getting the Harry treatment.
She kept her hand where it was, blinked heavily, and silently reached out for his. Ron swallowed, feeling his heart attempting to pound out of his chest as her eyes closed. He held onto her hand even after she fell asleep, rubbing his thumb over her smooth knuckles, wondering if she had been fully aware of taking his hand or if it had been some sleep-induced attempt at comfort from the only nearby source.
He still couldn't sleep, but at least now he had more positive thoughts keeping him awake.
"Dad!"
"What now?"
"You can't touch the ball with your hands!" Rosie looked exasperated as she tried explaining the rules of football once more to her father.
"But Hugo was holding it two seconds ago," Ron whined, hiding his mischievous smile while placing the ball back on the ground.
"That's because I'm keeper!" Hugo hollered over at him. "Honestly, Dad, this isn't all that different from Quidditch."
"Apart from the fact that it's incessantly dull," Ron mumbled, clumsily dribbling the ball forward in an attempt to get a shot on goal.
Rosie sprung forward and easily blocked her father's advance. However, she kicked the ball too hard and it sailed beyond the bench marking out-of-bounds.
"There you go, Dad, your throw in."
"So now I'm allowed to touch it?" Ron panted as he jogged to the ball, picking it up in his hands. "This game makes no sense."
"DAD!" both children laughed in dismay when their father carried the ball rugby-style in bounds to the goal, depositing it in while Hugo held his sides in laughter.
"So I win now, right?"
"I surrender," Hugo sat on the grass, wiping the perspiration from his brow with a chuckle.
"You are hopeless," Rosie hiccupped, unable to stop smiling.
A loud Crack! cut the air like a gunshot, making all three Weasleys stare up at their house in confusion.
"Was someone supposed to stop by the house today?" Rosie asked her father.
"I'll go check it out," Ron replied. "You two stay here. It's probably just Mrs. Puckle's car backfiring again."
Both children shrugged their shoulders, knowing that the only thing around older than Mrs. Puckle herself was her ancient automobile.
Ron made the short hike to the house and froze as the sound of broken glass could be heard. He sprinted towards the source of the noise but was a moment too late; another Crack! echoed up and down Knightstone Drive and Ron found his front yard deserted. Turning towards his house he could easily see the broken kitchen window.
Knowing his wand was sitting on his bedroom dresser, Ron cautiously made his way up the porch steps, stepping over the one that creaked regularly. Opening the front door slowly, Ron gave the deserted street one more glance before entering.
The house appeared as empty as he had left it, but Ron ventured slowly into the kitchen anyway, eyes and ears alert to every sight and sound.
He stepped over the glass on the kitchen floor, noticing nothing out of the ordinary except for a small object on the floor.
A dark, dead weight sunk into the pit of his stomach as he kneeled beside the object, disgusted and horrified with its aching familiarity.
Tied to the brick in the middle of Ron Weasley's kitchen was a simple note, tidily written in black ink:
Release the followers of the Dark Lord and no one will be harmed.
A/n: Anybody else get freaked out by that scene in DH Part 1 where Dolohov's just laying there and Ron's being particularly murdersome? Hmm…
And speaking of DH…WHO'S READY FOR TONIGHT? WAHOOOO! MIDNIGHT RELEASE OR BUST!
(I am very excited for this, as if you couldn't tell.)
I hope you all enjoy this pre-Deathly Hallows Part 2 treat. I am very much hoping this movie will bring me more inspiration for future chapters. LONG LIVE POTTER, and LONG LIVE TALES!
~dieselwriter
P.S.: How did I get up to 27 chapters already? I have never written anything this long in my entire life!
P.P.S.: Answer to multiple choice test: E. All of the above! (It was a trick question)