ethrosdemon ||| Harry Potter

War: Triangle, Windward Side
by ethrosdemon
naturallycalm@yahoo.com

"I love you," Harry whispers. His fingers hover at the ends of her hair, where it strains the extra inch towards her waist. What he means is 'forgive me', 'thank you', 'don't die'. He says it often. She shuffles the parchments just owled in from Seamus, flips from page to page as Harry's arms reach around her to pull her back against him, his face in her hair. His movements jostle her papers, unsteadying them, and her eyes lose the line she was trying to read. She sighs, but he doesn't let go.

The Ministry still exists. That which grants rigidity in chaos isn't readily abandoned by those who like rules, who seek reasons, who need stability. The building's all but hollow, but the employees keep up their administrative tasks, owling all day and night from across Britain and Ireland, continuing to be bureaucrats even as they are soldiers.

Ron, Harry and Hermione all took jobs before the war broke out in earnest. Their pay came from the Ministry then, and they consider themselves employees still. If anyone ever asked, they would claim to be low-level civil servants. Ron is strong. Harry is gifted. Hermione is intelligent. Finding work was never an issue.

Technically, Ron is an Auror. Practically, he's an assassin who will only kill if it suits him. It usually suits him well. Ron Weasley's worldview prepared him for this vocation long before the Dark Lord rose again and started collecting precious, willing followers to his side. His is a world of loyalty and honor, of very specific delineations between yes and no. He sleeps like the dead he creates. But only after everyone is fed, the next day's tasks are plotted out, and he knows where Hermione, Harry, Ginny, and the twins are.

By his twenty-second year, Ron had dispatched twenty-seven human beings by himself, far more working in concert during the heat of battle. Before his twenty-third birthday, he had extinguished his own brother and then beat the corpse unrecognizable.

Ron is a leader. Harry is a vortex. Hermione is a strategist. There is plenty of burden shifted and slipped between them, and they have patterns and signs only amongst themselves.

When Ron trudged up the path from the apparation point in the back garden, a set place in case of attack, with his look bleak and his dark work robes darker yet in places, Hermione blocked his entry to the house. Rarely do all three of them meet; it's so so very reckless to do with unknown spies lurking and the Dark Lord with a True Seer.

The door opened behind her, and Hermione's eyes tracked Ron greeting Harry silently.

"Whose blood is that, Ron?" She's the only one who would have the nerve or the desire to ask this man -- of all men -- that question.

Her fingers brushed against stubble that was half white. With smooth strokes, she used the sleeve of her robe to remove the spots on his cheeks that weren't freckles. They'd noted his first white hairs the Christmas of their seventh year at school. He'd told them then that his mother was fully white-headed before she was thirty and had been potioning in the red since. That afternoon, death staring out of Ron's face, Hermione saw white flecked through his hair, snowier at the temples.

"Bill's." Ron's lips moved against her palm, and then the tip of his tongue when Harry slid slightly to the side, forming isosceles between them. Hermione didn't ask Ron if he'd gotten any information out of Bill. She doubted he demanded why or what-for, not this time. She also knew Harry would solicit exact details later, when Ron was drunk enough to tell them.

"I love you," whispered Harry. And that's how that started.



back to top