Garbage

Garbage

By Caducee

Ron sagged into the soft seat of his office chair, sighing as he always did when he came back from one of those assignments where he had to wait around all day for a boring being to do something worthy of attention. In other words, he had to spy. It may seem great and exciting, but Ron Weasley didn't think so. At least, not anymore.

Today had been unproductive, if his weary sigh was any indication. Droopy eyed, he attempted rubbing the sleep from his eyes... without much result.

And so they landed on the garbage can as he glanced at his walls to try another alternative - anything! There it was, steely as ever, and glaring, no less, reminding him that his job had many downsides to it.

Hermione had convinced him, the year of the War, that this particular job would be good for him. They had been talking quietly in the wand light one late night, occupying themselves while the others - a handful of them - in the camp sat around the fire and drank beer and firewhisky to forget the biting cold creeping up on them all.

"You're great, Ron," Hermione had whispered as the wand light flickered. "You like sitting patiently and figuring out what your opponent will think before he does. This surveillance job would be good for you, after all this." And in her eyes, the light warmed, and he found himself agreeing with her wholeheartedly.

He'd loved the challenge at first. He'd had complex assignments, like listening to a coded conversation from a witness's memories and cracking the code to a hidden and locked chamber in a famous entrepreneur's mansion. It was then confirmed that this same man was the founding member of a dark sect.

Of course, the fact that he didn't care for his job anymore hadn't looked good with his boss. Ron had discovered Hermione's twisted and mangled body in her bed one afternoon - she had put up a good fight, as he'd tested the blood on the walls and had found out it wasn't hers. He'd broken down that same afternoon in her bedroom, staring and staring at her as if she would raise and smile instead of wearing that hard-jawed, contorted expression. From then on, seeing his unenthusiastic expressions, his boss had decided to dump more and more boring exploration and surveillance assignments on his desk. Following these two events, Ron's life had lost all the colour it had once had.

Ron frowned suddenly. There was something stuck between the trash can and the wall, next to the door. Why hadn't he ever seen it? It would have been easy to levitate it and throw it in the bin, where it would have simply vanished like every other piece of garbage.

But, upon closer inspection - Ron leaned over his desk, peering at the little light yellow paper - he very nearly fell over.

This was one of Hermione's little lined Post-its.

And just as suddenly as he'd realised this, he remembered Hermione coming into his office one afternoon with a great parcel under her arm, and she'd shown him her new office material. He and Hermione often met up after work for a bite, and it gave them both the opportunity to hear one another's thought about this or that... or go out and discover new flavours at a new bistro or a cheap restaurant. And they both liked meeting up at his office, because it was closer to all the muggle accommodations such as the Underground, because Hermione wanted him to discover another world. He didn't mind because, while it was longer than simply Apparating, it gave him the opportunity to discover the streets of London and its surrounding cities.

Hermione reached inside a bag and produced a yellow something. "Look, Ron, these are colour coded: things I need to do now, phone and fire calls, and things that aren't due until quite a bit later."

Ron smirked, circled her, closing the door behind him, and took the yellow cubic shape into his hands, noticing that it wasn't completely solid in his hands. He furrowed his brows and ran his finger along the corner, seeing and feeling the small pages fan him. he looked up, head cocked, and started, "You sure you'll use that last one? God forbid Hermione Granger should not finish something the minute she receives it." He plucked one of the sticky pages from the stack and inspected it intently, not noticing the way she rolled her eyes with a tender smile painted across her lips, crossing her arms over her chest without answering.

Afterward, Ron remembered, she reduced the items and they went out for a walk in the snow. Before, though, Ron had waited diligently for Hermione outside while she went to the bathroom. She knew her way around the building well enough by now.

On closer inspection, as Ron levitated the bit of yellow paper, he noticed writing on the piece of sticky paper that he'd plucked from her stack of Post-its. The note flew into Ron's hand, his head leaping in his throat. There, Hermione's neat handwriting!

And then his heart went slack and his world sank, closing before his eyes as tears spilled all over the note and his hands. They were shaking with what he recognised as sharp spasms in his heart.