Breath of Life

There wasn't much left in Ron to give by the time he had to step into a dead man's shoes.

After the war - a noun that had taken on capital letters all by itself in the public consciousness, to become The War and embrace a thousand connotations - after The War, Ronald Weasley was well known in the wizarding world for his own deeds, no longer just Harry Potter's shadow but a hero in his own right. It was Ronald Weasley who had rescued a group of teenage witches and wizards from Death Eaters who were using them as bait; it was Ronald Weasley who took out Bellatrix Lestrange on the lonely Yorkshire moors somewhere between Ravenscar and Whitby; it was Ronald Weasley who, in the heat of battle, lost two fingers to the Death Eater McNair and still came out victorious.

It was Ron who stood at Harry Potter's back when, in killing Voldemort, Harry ended his own life. Ron who watched with ashen horror as his best friend fell into the cold muck of the battlefield beside their enemy to stare glassy-eyed at the grey sky above, familiar laugh forever silenced. How ironic, then, that until that moment Ron had not known that he was in love with Harry Potter, that at that moment he was simultaneously hollowed by disbelief and shattered inside by grief too great to bear. He fell to his knees and simply stopped breathing, unable to take it in, before a low groan of pain escaped his choked throat and hero Ronald Weasley, Order of Merlin First Class, Order of the Phoenix, survivor of a hundred battles, curled up into a ball whilst spells flickered past overhead in deadly arrays to keen wretchedly over the body of a person he had not known was his world.

By the time everything came to an end and the last pockets of resistance were cleared up, Ronald Weasley was one of the biggest names in the newspapers, his face on every front page, day after day, week after week until he was sick of it. Everyone wanted a piece of him, to take their hunk of flesh by hook or by crook, and he was hunted all the more avidly for refusing any interaction with the media. Ron was too busy nursing his wounds, getting used to his enchanted prosthetic fingers and the gaping hole in his chest where Harry had unwittingly been. At night, when all the lights were off in his house and there was no external noise to remind him of where and when he was, Ron could feel Harry's breath on the back of his neck in warm ephemeral puffs like he had back in the poky tent they'd shared during The War, could almost imagine the weight of his presence solid behind him and sometimes, when he really tried, the feel of an arm around his waist holding them close together like spoons in a drawer. Ron jerked off alone in the dead hours of the night with tears on his face, fast and brutal and crushing.

Every so often Hermione would pop in to see him, a smile on her face and a casserole or a pie from his mother in her ink-stained hands. Chattering brightly to Ron about the people they had been to school with she pottered around his kitchen making tea as though he needed taking care of, but her eyes were stark and she never knew what to say to him any more. Ron's house was small and almost devoid of furnishings every time she came, because he didn't think she'd leave it be if she saw Harry's things everywhere. A tapestry he had liked on the wall opposite his bed, or his glasses on the mantelpiece, one of the nose-rests bent out of shape where Harry had fallen on them that last day when Ron was still whole. Ron took the food, smiled and nodded and said the right things in the right places as their long-standing friendship required, but secretly he wished she would leave him alone to his grief and his torpor.

In the witching hour Ron writhed on his bed with the stars outside watching as Harry's finger slid inside him and rubbed him to orgasm.

The small muggle supermarket Ron shopped in was bland and cheap; the magazine covers showed puzzles and eckeletric goods, along with muggles Ron didn't recognise, the absence of his own face making up for the lack of the sweets he remembered from his childhood. Ron could walk up the meat aisle for some lamb and through the vegetable section for some potatoes and sprouts without it being the next day's headline, and when the surly check-out girl stared at his two wooden fingers before looking away all she was thinking was 'freak'. Ron couldn't stop thinking that Harry would have known which offers were the best ones, and which cuts of meat were the choicest, but it didn't help to think about it so he pushed that thought away and paid in muggle pounds just like everyone else.

At night, Harry teased him about this display of domesticity while making Ron beg him to keep doing what he was doing with those beautiful hands, scarred by battle but perfect still.

When the Aurors offered Ron a job he took it, because he knew he was qualified for it - albeit in experience rather than NEWTs - and it got him out of the house and under the legal umbrella the Ministry used to shelter its lawmen from the media. He went through training quickly, more often showing that he could do things than actually learning them, although the legal side of things was very different from the way things had been done during The War. They paired Ron up with an older Auror called Adrian Bluestone, who stopped him from slamming people into walls when they wouldn't cooperate and reminded him that the Unforgiveable curses were Unforgiveable again. Towards the end, when everything had been going to hell in a handbasket, the 'good' side had done what they had to to win. Morals or no morals, and on their own souls be it so long as their enemies went to Hell first.

Ron felt heavy sometimes, as though he were dying in slow motion.

After a few months Ron had tracked down, captured and brought in more dark wizards than any other Auror, and Bluestone asked to be assigned a different partner. The papers raved over Ronald Weasley, ecstatically billing him as the sort of Auror everyone had been waiting for. He could do no wrong. In a tiny column that was hidden somewhere in the middle of the Daily Prophet between a recipe for pumpkin pie and an advert for de-warting potion Adrian Bluestone was reported to have said that Ron was suicidal, working himself too hard and taking stupid risks for the slightest chance of an arrest. When Ron read those few lines he leant back in his armchair and laughed, a chuckle that soon turned into something nearly hysterical as he found that he couldn't stop the tears leaking from the corners of his eyes. 'Auror Weasley is deliberately putting himself in the way of danger,' Adrian had said, no doubt puffing on one of those horrible cigars he toted around with him all the time and blowing smoke rings into the October sky. 'He needs help, but I'm not the one to give it to him.'

Harry smiled at Ron across the hearth and said, "I think the world of you, you know that?"

By the time Ron had been working as an Auror for a year the papers had elevated him to the status almost of a martyr, though he wasn't yet dead. The great War Hero Ron Weasley, putting his life on the line for the good of his people, the Wizards of Britain. Making the world a better place, one cabal at a time. Fighting injustice wherever he found it.

"You're falling to pieces, Ron," Harry said with a small frown as he petted Ron's hair, ruffling his fingers through it like a hint of a breeze, barely there at all. "Are you sure you're alright to keep living this way?"

Ron just shook his head and said, "I don't want to lose you, Harry."

His friend's smile was infinitely sad. "You already did. Don't you remember?"

Ron remembered that Harry was dead when he was out of the house. He remembered when he was at the Ministry, at his desk, in the street asking questions, following leads, at quidditch matches, shopping for food, visiting Hermione and Viktor in their little London flat somewhere in Ealing. But when he got back to the house Harry was always waiting for him, there in every room and smiling.

Always smiling.

Sometimes Ron would have dreams where he'd remember things he maybe hadn't before, things he had seen and done and said during The War that had until now evaded his waking mind. The scent of blood in a damp cave, the flash of green light that told him another of his comrades had been killed, the sting of a burning curse he had only just evaded scraping along the side of his face.

The small smile on Harry's face when he collapsed, his brave heart no longer beating. The day he remembered that, Ron cried for the first time in two years.

The next day, when his work colleagues came to see why Auror Weasley, pride of the Ministry, had not turned up to work, concerned that perhaps one of his enemies had caught up with him at last, they found only a pile of ash and charred wood and grotesque, melted things that might have been his possessions where once his house had stood. By the garden gate, at the head of the path that had led to his front door, now so much charcoal, Ron Weasley sat crumpled on cold, damp stone with ash coating his hands and cried until his tear ducts burned and his throat constricted beyond speech as his love wisped away on the wind like so much smoke.