A/N: I clearly do not own Harry Potter or and of the related rights.

This work is not finished, but it refuses to leave my brain so I guess there is hope.

The title was chosen quickly, so it might not remain the same.

Heretic

Chapter 1

'We might have been better off with Lord Voldemort.'

It was a stray thought really.

The kind of dark illogical thought that would appear unbidden in a person's mind. He had had thoughts like that before though, little niggles that didn't fit but sometimes appeared all the same. The kind of thought that you were supposed to cast aside as wrong and ignore until it disappeared.

Except this one didn't.

This silly stray thought wouldn't go away. No matter how much he ignored it or tried to forget about it.

Ron hadn't really paid too much attention to it at first. At the beginning it only took a mere second to cast it aside. It was illogical. It was wrong. It went against everything that they had fought for.

But it came back.

At every funeral.

Every birthday party.

With every day that they had to be more and more careful.

Sometimes it would turn up innocuously; when he struggled to find potions ingredients or a certain book. Other times it would flash across his mind in blazing fury; when he had to let a criminal get away because of muggle regulations or when he realised another piece of his childhood was now illegal.

He really did try his best to ignore it, not to give himself a chance to actually think on it. He hadn't wanted to. He was the strategist; if he thought too much he would have to consider it fully – and he tried so hard to avoid that. Because he knew he was right. Because every time he thought about it the more sense it made. Because he always managed to think of a way to make things work; and that idea was too dangerous.

The problem was that it became harder to ignore.

Eventually he gave in. He sighed in defeat and went to sit down and puzzle it out. To weigh all the information; divide it into pros and cons and compare them objectively. He did what he was best at; he laid out the information and considered it. To find the best solution with the options they had once had. To consider every choice they had made; review the strategy and the results of every action that was taken. To treat that little thought like any other case or incident, to view it rationally – without prejudice or morality. The very same ruthless dissection that made him so good at his job, the ability to separate himself from the equation that had made him both famous and infamous.

He had been hoping to prove that traitorous thought wrong. To somehow come up with an irrefutable argument that Voldemort had been wrong, and they had been right. That this life they had fought for and built was better than the alternative. All he had accomplished was driving himself to tears and misery.

He was left sitting at the kitchen table sobbing like a teenager with a broken heart.

Because that horrible traitorous thought had been right.

Because no matter how he changed his perspective or tried to turn things about it was true. They would have been better off. The Wizarding world; his family and friends; even he would have been better off had Lord Voldemort succeeded.

It went against everything...

There was no justification for war that could possibly please everyone.

Regardless of what you fought for, or how hard you tried to prevent collateral damage; someone will consider it cruel, pointless and unjustified. War pulled innocent people into itself. It dragged them from the lives they lived and flung them into horror; breaking and staining as it went. At the end of a war there were really only two kinds of people left. Those that were alive and those that were dead. You could spin any narrative you please, but that was the one fact that remained. The villains and the victims changed places with every retelling; but the dead stayed dead.

The thing that reduced Ron to tears that day was a similar fact, one that could not be denied. They had chosen the wrong side. They had unwittingly destroyed the last chance for their world's survival, and they had celebrated their victory.

But they were dying.

The wizarding community of the United Kingdom was growing smaller every day. They had cast aside the old traditions that had kept their magic strong. In a haze of moral self-righteousness they had destroyed the last vestiges of their culture and knowledge. Believing that they would create a new world and ways of life, a better one.

All that they had accomplished was the acceleration of their own decline.

For centuries muggleborns, by whatever name they were known, had been brought into their world. Educated in the ways of their society and integrated into it. Their community had innovated, invented and grown on its own course to suit their own needs. Hermione had once rankled that there never seemed to be more than one or two generations of a muggleborn. She had claimed that they had all been killed or ostracised. She was wrong, the truth now bore down on Ron in his mind. They never vanished; they only became so integrated that you couldn't tell them apart from their peers. They became wizards and witches, members of society, no different than any other. Accepted and adapted, their heritage lost it's meaning, because they were now the same as their peers. This slow continuous addition to the bloodlines had kept their population healthy. The differences of their worldview often sparked insights or advances in spellcraft. Ultimately however they would all leave that world behind and fully embrace their identities as members of the magical world, losing those differences and finding lives amongst their own kind.

Voldemort had once claimed that the muggleborns were a scourge on their society.

Only now, far too many years too late, did Ron realise that this was what he meant. That the muggleborns by proudly claiming that title and refusing to fully accept their nature as witches and wizards were squeezing the life out of their world. By applying the ethics and morals of their birth society and refusing to understand the ways of wizardkind they were slowly ripping it apart. Viewing their world, their ways and their entire lives as a place to visit; a novel existence that they were not part of. Something that they thought should conform to them rather than they conform to it. The Ministry, filled with greedy, power hungry and complacent people was only too happy to encourage this. What better way to gain power and tax revenue than to have generations seeing them as the heroic protectors. The benevolent advocates of integration and progress.

It left a bitter taste in Ron's mouth.

It had never been the wizarding world that ostracised the muggleborns; it had always been the muggleborns who refused to accept that they were members of their society and would be judged by its rules. No one could live in a society without being subject to it's rules. Exceptions and accommodations were often the most definitive sign of exclusion.

There were fewer children born every year; fewer still developed enough magic to actually cast. They claimed that it was a disease; something that could be cured with enough time and research - but Ron knew better. He knew they lived in the nightmare of every pureblood noble who had ever warned against those ill-advised policies. Their magic was draining, seeping out of their population like water into the earth.

Had they really expected differently? When they banned magic dense areas and objects? When they demanded that wizarding people live more and more hidden? When they banned large gatherings in fear of discovery? Or put restrictions on household magic use?

On a sunny afternoon Ronald Weasley sat at his kitchen table and wept. He wept because they had destroyed their world, and he seemed to be the only one left who knew it. That little stray thought had just become a fact.

The only fact that mattered.

A/N: The amount of time I spent agonising over capitalising wizard, wizarding and wizardkind or not is ridiculous. I decided not.