The Apathy

Summer was long and tasteless, as far as Ron was concerned. It served no purpose this year except to irritate him by stretching out its hours, waving snide daylight trimmed fingers at him through windows that were hardly ever opened. Dad worried about them being cooped up all the time, and Mum worried about what would happen if they weren't. He'd overheard them arguing about it once, which meant they were in serious disagreement, because Dad almost never argued with Mum about anything. They became very quiet when he entered the room, and a moment later, Mum shuffled off upstairs, and Dad struck up a falsely cheery conversation with him about Muggle books.

Hermione showed up only two weeks into the summer.

"Don't you think it's odd?" Hermione said, the day she got there, when they awkwardly embraced in the hallway, and Ron discovered that she was getting soft and round in all those girl places. The revelation left him somewhat frightened, and vaguely intrigued.

Stepping back quickly, he canted his head. "What's odd?"

"Sirius isn't here anymore. Shouldn't we find somewhere else to stay?"

The way she'd said it hadn't been unkind, but he saw his Mum stiffen. Quickly, before Hermione could argue, he steered her out of the hallway. He did think it was odd, but he never told her that he agreed.

"You can't just up and move a Headquarters," Ron evaded whenever she brought it up. It'd be too hard to explain that his Mum was clinging to this house as if it was her last living son, no matter that none of her sons were dead. Hermione's family was normal, as far as Ron knew. He didn't think, as smart as Hermione was, that she'd be able to understand the complicated inner workings of the Weasley bunch. Sometimes even he didn't.

Fred and George, busy with their new shop, visited rarely, and the lack of noise where they had been was like an itch Ron couldn't reach to scratch. It seemed like his whole family was pulling apart, and whenever Mum caught him trying to overhear the discussions about You- Know-Who, she would get flustered, like she didn't know what to do with him anymore, couldn't even figure out a way to punish him that she hadn't already.

His involvement in the fight with the Death Eaters at the Ministry of Magic had rattled her, and she hadn't looked at him straight since, as if she couldn't bear to check for any new scars. It was like that first time he'd said 'I hate you' to her in a fit of anger, the first time he'd seen her cry. Right after he said it, he'd have given anything to go back to the five seconds before, when she'd been railing at him about something Ron couldn't even remember anymore. He'd made breakfast for the entire family the next morning, and she'd forgiven him on the spot, as if she'd just been waiting for him to give her a way. But he didn't know how to get back to before he'd gotten hurt at the Ministry, when she hadn't looked depressed all the time.

Percy wrote in July, and they received the letter packaged with one from Cornelius Fudge that Dad set aside. As he read Percy's, his hopeful expression faded and he slowly turned bright red from his thick neck up to the top of his receding hairline, before he very carefully moved to the fireplace and tossed the letter into the flames. It must have been magically protected, because it turned green as it burned and sent off the disgusting smell of rotten eggs.

"Don't tell your mother," Dad warned, when he caught Ron staring at him from the kitchen, and he looked harder in the face than Ron had ever seen him. "She isn't to know he's written us, do you understand?"

At that moment, something broke in another room, and the painting of Old Mrs. Black began screaming insults again. Ron woke like clockwork during the night to the sound of her yelling stuff from behind the curtain they hid her ugly portrait with. She got the loudest when she was insulting Sirius.

"Always knew Sirius would come to a bad end," she screeched. "Couldn't fool me, that boy. His blood was always water thin. Not good Black blood at all. A mistake, he was. Should never have been born."

The adults never talked about important things in front of Ron, as if he was child that couldn't deal with what was going on. *They* couldn't deal with Ron not being a child was the truth, and every day that they tried to keep him from hearing their discussions was another day that his head filled in what their sudden silences left blank. Around him, they chattered on about classes and a new sort of floo powder that limited the chances of injury until Ron thought his ears would bleed or his brain would leak out through his nostrils.

Hermione took being shut out better than he did, burying her head underneath piles of books. But in the end, she always helped him concoct new schemes to overhear Dad and Mum or any one of the other people that came and went, looking hungry and tired. He knew some of their names. Others, he never found out.

The air inside the house was stifling with unused summer days, and Ron's clothes made his skin itch. Borrowed clothes that had belonged to Fred, George, and Percy before they became his own. Ron's arms breached their barriers already, pushed at the loose seams, white flesh showing behind thin fabric. He tore off the patch Percy had put on the sleeve of one sleeve, because he preferred the hole to the reminder of the boy Percy had been.

Traitor, he thought. But it felt so wrong to picture Perfect Percy like that.

Family. Blood. Old Mrs. Black constantly screeching, "Thin blood. Never was right."

Weeks passed uneventfully, inevitably, and something in Ron began to strain for release.

He felt too big, too dumb, too far removed from the people around him. And the silence, when no one was talking, when they appeared to be waiting, was too flat and fragile. It made him feel like a noisy, bumbling fool; he could break his Mum with a hard stare. Ron would think of trees that he'd seen snapped by lightning, charred wood dead on the ground, and then, because his mind could never escape the things no one was saying, of Harry.

Finally, *finally*, he gave his thoughts a shape, a name. *Not* Sirius, rotten eggs, and Old Mrs. Black. *Not* his absent brothers, Hermione's skinny wrists, and his Mum's sadness.

Harry. Just Harry.

"I don't know why no one will talk about it," muttered Ginny one afternoon over supper, poking at her food nervously. "When I say Harry's name, people react like he's the one that died."

Everyone fell into silence at once, and all the blood drained out of Hermione's face. She looked like she might break if she dared to twitch, stiff and gray like that time she'd been petrified. As nauseating as it was to see Hermione react like that, a part of him was glad that Ginny had the guts to say what he was thinking. Mum sent her to bed early, yelling to all that would hear about the dangerous power of words. And then, when she stopped yelling, she just looked old, like the faded parchment they got second-hand because they couldn't afford to buy it fresh.

Ron didn't see Harry at all that summer. It just wasn't the same without Harry there, and now that Ron had admitted to missing him, Harry's absence felt more real, something Ron couldn't get past. Mid-summer, Harry wrote to tell Ron that Dumbledore wanted him to stay with the Dreaded Dursleys, and never mentioned anything about visiting in the few letters he sent after that.

Harry didn't mention a whole lot in the letters, actually. There was nothing about Sirius in them, and nothing that would reveal how Harry was dealing with everything that had happened, unless he was seriously laughing it all off, like the letters implied. The humorous bent Harry used to describe how his summer was going was almost more disturbing than knowing Harry was miserable, and it left the rest up to Ron's imagination.

There was no way Harry wasn't hurting. The question was, how much?

Harry had often said that he wanted to live with Sirius one day. He'd worn his hunger on his face when he spoke of it, in the breadth of his flushed cheeks, his lips pressed into a thin line, like all his dreams might come true in this life Sirius had promised him. Harry was hungry for a home the way most teenage boys were hungry for girls, and Sirius was dead, nothing left of him to feed a skinny boy with scraggly hopes.

When he could, Ron grabbed a spot of time alone in his bedroom, and lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling. On it, he could read all the things that had happened the year before, and he would lie there for hours sometimes before he was interrupted, brooding about You- Know-Who, his latest argument with Hermione, Sirius, and Harry, always Harry. Closing his eyes, Ron would try to picture Harry as he'd last seen him, but the picture in his mind was fuzzy, just a hurt curve of shoulder and a mop of messy hair.

It was hard remembering, letting himself remember.

Harry sitting by Ron's bedside while he recuperated from his newest battle wound, trying to look happy to be there, failing. Feeling like he was losing Harry's friendship. Like he hadn't been good enough, fast enough, *something* enough to deserve it. The achy disconnected sensation that had swamped him whenever Harry made a hasty exit from the hospital wing, because he couldn't get up and follow, he could barely *move*; he had pushed it down. He had shoved that feeling so far away he'd lost sight of it, forgotten it completely.

Often, as he lay there in his bed, the first memory that popped into his head was the way Harry's face had gone blank every time Ron so much as said, 'Si-', as if because he was dead, Sirius had never existed. Hardest to face, the memory of Harry walking away after Ron tried that final time to corner him, leaving Ron stuck in his shoes, unable to follow.

Trapped by the memories, Ron was almost always relieved when Hermione barged into the room and demanded he stopped being a lazy layabout and help her finish the dusting or some other chore that she'd thought up. They both knew that she was really only trying to distract him from whatever was bothering him and could manage fine on her own, but he appreciated it just the same. Hermione wasn't all that bad, really.

When they argued, it was because Ron was starved for some noise, for someone substantial to fight with. After, when Hermione stormed off, hurt and confused, Ron locked the words he'd said away, not knowing where they had come from. They were always the same anyway, something about stupid girls, their stupid books, and their stupid, *stupid* hair.

The day of his return to Hogwarts loomed closer, and Ron made a pact with himself that he'd stop nursing his hurt, but he'd find himself in his room again, taking out the letters Harry had written him. He read them so often that he could recite them with his eyes closed, and kept them tucked beneath his pillow at night, fingering the edges while he drifted to sleep, dreading things Harry hadn't actually written. By the time he boarded the Hogwarts Express, the letters were smudged with fingerprints, ink smeared, words illegible.

Following Hermione down the corridor, Ron couldn't keep his hands still and he compulsively cracked his knuckles, ignoring Hermione's sharp annoyed glance. His stomach was doing a fine imitation of a troll stomping across a pond, and before he was ready for it, Hermione was opening the door to their usual compartment. Ron lagged behind, tugging on the frayed edges of his too-short sleeves.

"Harry!" Hermione smiled widely, and disappeared inside the compartment.

Ron bit his lip and forced himself those last few footsteps to the door. When he got there, he saw that Hermione had Harry locked in an enthusiastic embrace. Harry actually looked a little desperate for air, and made an eye-rolling motion at Ron when Hermione refused to release him, clinging to him like a burr.

"Hello, Ron," grunted Harry, sounding constricted as he patted Hermione's back comfortingly.

Ron closed the door and leaned against it. "Hello, Harry," he said, just as if Harry hadn't been in his head like a fever all summer long. "It's good to see you, mate."