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Ron'd not thought about That Night in years. Months, even. If he wanted to be honest with himself, Ron might even admit that it had been days.

Seven years had passed since Voldemort had been defeated and Harry died. It hurt to think about it, and the hurt only got worse over time. That was why Ron rarely allowed himself to think about it. When he did, he only got frustrated and upset. It hadn't made any sense. With Hermione's and his help, Harry had found all of the Horcruxes and destroyed them. This should have, they thought, weakened Voldemort to the point where his body wouldn't have been anything more than a barely-functioning vessel.

Ron didn't know how it had been possible, but Voldemort hadn't seemed to be affected by the destruction of the Horcruxes when Harry battled him for the last time. When all the dust had settled and the War was over, Order members theorised that Bellatrix Lestrange and Fenrir Grayback had transfused their magic - and, in Bellatrix's case, her soul - into Voldemort's body, enabling him to continue his fight against Harry. That didn't matter to Ron, though. He couldn't give a toss why Voldemort had still been able to fight Harry even after they'd gone and blasted those Horcruxes to bits. What mattered to Ron was that Voldemort was dead and Harry had gone missing. Keeping one eye on Harry while occupied duelling with a Death Eater of his own, Ron had missed the end of Harry's duel with Voldemort. One moment he'd been casting a Shield Charm and in the next he found himself groggily opening his eyes to look right up into Hermione's frantic, dirty face. It was Hermione who told him what had happened. While he slowly propped himself up on his elbows and took in the curiously dark red sky, Hermione told him that Harry had killed Voldemort, Death Eaters were being captured, and that there wasn't a trace of Harry. He'd started to whoop and holler when Hermione started in on Voldemort and looked around for Harry so that he could hug his best mate and tell him he was proud of him, that he could finally be Just Harry like he'd always wanted, but the jubilant noises cut off abruptly when Hermione said that Harry was gone. Harry couldn't be gone. He wouldn't leave Hermione or Ron. He just wouldn't. Hermione started crying when Ron insisted those things but Ron didn't think to comfort her; all he could think about was finding Harry and giving him an earful for taking the mickey out on them at a time like this. He'd stumbled to his feet and walked around, weaving in and out of Order members and Ministry officials who were investigating the scene, alternately calling Harry's name and cursing him for being a prat.

Ron searched for Harry for almost five months out on that countryside. He hadn't wanted to stop, either, but Hermione was worried about his health and his sanity, she said, so he did the only thing that made sense.

Ron left the countryside and headed to a place far away where he wouldn't constantly be reminded of Harry, where he could start over and try to heal. The States.

The flight over on the Muggle aeroplane had been dreadful. Before he'd got to Heathrow, Ron sort of knew what to expect - or so he thought - as his dad was absolutely barmy over them. His dad's dearest ambition was to find out how aeroplanes stayed up, and he had a load of Muggle aeroplane models out in his shed that he prodded around with his wand trying to work out how they did just that. But the real thing didn't look anything like his dad's models. The real thing looked more like a very large sardine tin than anything and Ron didn't think a tin can was a very smart thing to travel in.

During the flight he'd got stuck next to a dark-haired bloke about his age and that'd been hard. Every time Ron looked at him, he thought of Harry, and after the first hour he couldn't take it anymore and ordered a tonne of whisky from the trolley-Muggle. By the time the sardine tin had landed at Baltimore/Washington International Airport, Ron decided that he should have listened to his mum and taken a blasted Portkey and that he would never eat sardines again. Once he'd retrieved his trunk from the luggage carrel, Ron hailed a taxi to the Amtrak station and taken an express to somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania. He didn't know crap about the States, but that sounded like an all right one to him, so that's where he went. It took a bit for him to get accustomed to the States and living close to so many Muggles, but that was fine with him. He had all the time in the world to get used to the house he'd rented out in the country and his job in the village delivering Muggle post. The house reminded him of the Burrow, only the building wasn't quite in as much danger of toppling over as his mum and dad's house. It had a Floo, which wasn't surprising because he saw smoke billowing out of plenty of chimneys on the houses in the area. What was surprising, though, was that he'd found a sack of Floo Powder in the back of a cupboard shortly after he'd moved in. A wizard had once lived in his house, but Ron had pretty certain it wasn't his cantankerous old landlord. Although he left the Floo Powder be, Ron boarded up the Floo. He didn't want to think about life over the pond, and he didn't want to open himself up to the temptation of sticking his head in the fire and finding out what things were like over there now that Harry was dead. It was too hard.

***

Currently, Ron was curled up in his bed under a warm blanket and even warmer duvet. His sleep was restless; rain, hard and heavy, slammed against his window and the wind positively howled, rattling the thin pane of glass in its frame. It didn't help that he kept dreaming about That Night, either. Although he had woken several times during the night, the dream kept coming back, playing on some mad, vindictive loop.

A rather large crack of thunder sounded. Ron awoke with a start and sat up, groaning as he watched lightning flash outside his window.

"This is mental," he mumbled to himself, slipping out of bed. Maybe if he drew the blinds, he could at least block some of that annoying light out and try for sleep again. He tugged on the cord of the Venetian blinds and cursed when one side rose while the other side slipped down several inches. Determined to even them out and lower them, he pulled gently on the cord. Nothing happened, so he yanked, figuring that more pressure ought to do the trick.

That hadn't been a wise idea.

He must have used too much force, as the blinds fell off the track and one end bounced off his forehead before the whole unit crashed to the floor.

"Sodding-- bloody-- damned--" No words were adequate enough to express his frustration, so Ron just screamed and then stomped down the stairs. He was awake and the prospect of sleep seemed very dim, so it made perfect sense to put the kettle on.

Fixing himself a nice cuppa, he pulled yesterday's issue of The Daily Item off the top of the rubbish bin, and tucked into his chair at the kitchen table. An article entitled "Making Metal Magic" caught his eye despite himself and he'd just unfolded the paper properly when he heard a noise at the front door. Although it sounded very much like someone was knocking, Ron knew that was daft - it was the middle of the night! - and that it likely was a branch from a tree tapping against the house in the windy storm.

The noise didn't let up and, although Ron tried to ignore it to drink his tea and read his daily, it got on his nerves and under his skin. Scowling, Ron headed out to the front room, stopping in the corridor to remove his wand from the top right desk drawer (he kept it there only for emergencies and hadn't used it in a few months, not since a fox had wandered onto his property and killed a few chickens). The wand felt strange in his hands after such a long absence, but he didn't take time to dwell on it. He'd use a Severing Charm on the branch to end the racket and maybe, because he desperately wanted to sleep, go through his trunk in the basement to get his old Herbology muffs before crawling under covers and duvets again.

All thoughts of Severing Charms and old Herbology muffs flew right out of his head when he opened the front door.

He felt as though he'd just taken a Bludger to the chest and had the wind knocked right out of him.

"Harry?" Ron croaked, gripping his wand so tightly that his knuckles turned white.

Pictures from the past flashed in his mind - Harry, with his wand slashing frantically through the air while Voldemort dodged and deflected effortlessly, the look in Hermione's eyes when she had told Ron that Harry was gone, the depressing countryside that Ron had explored for months searching for Harry - and Ron moaned, falling to his knees. This couldn't be happening. It couldn't be real. Harry was gone. He'd died. It had taken Ron a long damned time to accept that Harry had left Hermione and him, and this was a joke. It had to be. It was a joke.

Or a trap.

The bloke standing on his porch in the middle of the night in the worst storm in years stared down at him, and Ron almost couldn't bear to look at him in the face. He didn't say anything to Ron, just looked at him like he couldn't believe what was happening. He shifted his weight and lifted a hand toward his cloak. That was when Ron decided that he had to take care of this. He had to be careful, because Harry was dead and this was a trap.

"Petrificus Totalus!"

The hex came back to him so easily that, under more pleasant circumstances, Ron would have been pleased with himself. Levitating the bloke inside and propping him against the wall, Ron shut the door and pulled up a chair. Taking a seat, he stared long and hard at his unexpected guest.

"Nice try," he said coldly, "but I'm not daft." The bloke stared back at him with wide, unblinking eyes, unable to answer because of the hex. Ron stared at him in long silence, wondering just who this was and why the hell he'd come to his house in the middle of Fuck-all in the ruddy States. He especially wondered why he'd Polyjuiced himself to look like Harry; what sort of information did this bloke want from him? Ron hadn't really been in touch with anyone save for his family and Hermione in over six years, and even then the correspondence was cordial at best. Ron refused to talk about Harry in the post and he forbade them from visiting him, reassuring them that he would return when he felt the time was right, that he'd moved on and would be able to come back to England.

Hermione.

With her Ministry job and friendliness with some of the ex-Order members, maybe Hermione could find out who this bloke was and what he wanted.

Giving the bloke a hard look, Ron ran into the den and blasted the board from the hearth, opening up the Floo. Adrenaline rushing, he dashed to the cupboard and dragged the sack over to the fireplace. A quick pinch and toss of powder into the empty grate sent up emerald flames. Swallowing hard, suddenly a bit anxious as the idea of seeing Hermione after so long, he stuck his face in the fire and cried out, "Number 411, Otram Road, Wellington!" There was an awful spinning sensation and it stopped almost as quickly as it had started. Ron looked left and right but didn't see Hermione anywhere. All he could see was a desk piled with a mountain of parchment and paperwork. "Hermione!" he yelled, willing her to appear with all his might. "Hermione!"

He called her name a few more times before deciding that she might actually be out. Ron tried the Burrow, her office at the Ministry, Ginny and Neville's flat in Manchester, and even Flourish and Blott's, but it was no use.

"SHITE!"

Ron righted himself out of the Floo, banging his head on the mantle as he straighted. Rubbing at the back of his head, he stalked back into the front room and stood toe-to-toe with the Harry imposter. "You're a right bastard," Ron said in a low voice, "and I'm going to make you wish you'd never done this, mate."

He poked the tip of his wand hard into the bloke's chest and plopped down in his chair. "The way I figure," Ron continued, "you've got about three-quarters of an hour left, if that - cos I don't know how long you were on my damned porch - and I'm gonna wait you out. Then you'll talk...and I might hex you again."

It was so odd to see Harry again, even though Ron knew it really wasn't him. It kind of...it hurt, actually. When Hermione had told him that Harry had gone, Ron went mad, had refused to believe it. Harry was his best mate in the whole world, and he'd always figured that he'd just know if something bad had happened to Harry. But he didn't even have a tiny inkling, not even a little quelling feeling in the pit of his stomach. That was why he'd clung on to hope for as long as he did, why he'd searched every last bit of that countryside ten times over. Ron hadn't been able to shake the feeling that he knew Harry better than to believe he'd really be gone. Hermione had accepted it more readily than he had, and it was only because of her concern and her heart-to-heart that let him think that maybe he was just crap and Harry really was dead. Ron wasn't over Harry's death, not by a long shot. He'd been and he still was devastated by the loss of his best mate, and it made him absolutely sick to think that someone would be so low as to exploit Harry, especially so many years after his death. His blood boiled the more that he thought about it, and he swore on his memory of Harry that he'd make it clear to this bloke that he would never again do something so horrid or else face Ron's temper.

Ron didn't realise it at first, but after the sixth chime he realised that it was the second time since he'd resumed his seat in front of the imposter that he'd heard the clock in the den chime the hour. That meant that over an hour had passed and the bloke still looked like Harry. Polyjuice Potion wore off after an hour and obviously this wizard didn't have the opportunity to drink another goblet of it.... In that moment, Ron wished that he'd paid better attention in Potions; he didn't think there was a potion that was similar to Polyjuice or a version of Polyjuice that lasted longer, but he couldn't be sure. Or maybe it wasn't Polyjuice. Could this wizard be a Metamorphmagus? There was only one way to find out.

Ron used the Binding Charm to wrap the bloke up in ropes and removed Petrificus Totalus so the wizard could talk.

He gasped the moment Ron removed the charm. "'m sorry!" Pink tinged the man's cheeks and Ron scowled.

"You're bloody well going to be," Ron promised him. "What d'you want?" He waved his wand warningly. "And don't lie."

"Ron..."

Ron shivered; it sounded so much like Harry that it made his insides ache. He couldn't let the imposter get to him. Of course he sounded like Harry; he'd somehow taken on his likeness!

"Don't," Ron spat, narrowing his eyes. "I don't want to hear any excuses. Just tell me why, all right?"

The bloke stared back at him, eyes large and brilliantly green and shining behind the thin lenses of his glasses. "It's me," he said finally, slowly.

"Me who?" Ron asked irritably, transferring the wand to his other hand, fingers clenching around the hilt.

"Harry," breathed the bloke.

"SHUT UP," Ron roared, propelling himself out of his chair and slamming into the bound wizard. They both toppled to the floor, Ron landing on top of the imposter's bound form. "Don't try and play me for an arse, all right? Don't do it!"

"Ron...mate..."

The 'mate' did it. This bloke thought it was all right to parade about as Harry and call him mate like they were mates?

Ron grabbed hold of a fistful of ropes on the bloke's chest and hauled him to a sitting position, yanking him to Ron's chest. He got so close to Harry's imposter that their noses brushed and he could feel the wizard's breath warm against his skin. "You git. You absolute--"

"RON!"

Hermione's voice, worried and shrill, rang through the flat.

The Floo.

Releasing his hold on the wizard, Ron scrambled to his feet and rushed into the other room. Sure enough, there was Hermione's face in the fireplace, worry lines creasing around her eyes.

"Hermione!" Ron said breathlessly, sliding across the floor on his knees, coming to a stop just in front of her face.

"What is it? I always check the Floo when I wake up first thing and I saw that you-- you look awful."

Normally Ron might have been annoyed by that sort of comment and definitely would be feeling nervous about seeing Hermione like this after so long, but there were more important things to worry about right then.

"This bloke was on my patio and I..." Ron broke off, closing his eyes. He hadn't spoken of Harry to anyone in so long, not since right before he got on the sardine tin that brought him here. When he spoke again, his voice was much quieter and more subdued. "There's a bloke here and I've hexed him. He says...he says he's Harry, Hermione."

"Oh," Hermione breathed.

Ron blinked. "Oh?"

She averted her eyes and Ron saw a pink blossom in her cheeks. "I promised I wouldn't tell you," she whispered.

Ron felt his throat go dry. "What d'you mean?" he asked hoarsely, glancing over his shoulder towards where he'd left the bloke.

"Please don't be cross with me," she said, her eyes meeting his. "He made me promise not to tell you; he said he ought to be the one to do it, and I thought he was right."

He was going mad. That had to be it.

Ron grinned. "This is a joke, right? That's Fred or George out there, testing some mad 'Be The Chosen One For a Day' kit or something, yeah?"

"Oh honestly, Ron," Hermione said, the words lacking the usual annoyed edge, sounding more soft and concerned than anything else.

It felt as though someone had just doused him in cold water. "Are you--" Of course she was sure. Hermione never said anything in her life unless she meant it, and she definitely wouldn't joke about something like this. "Oh," Ron said softly, his eyes prickling all of a sudden. "Hermione, I have to--"

"Go on, Ron," Hermione interrupted. "You can Owl me or Firechat when you two catch up."

"Thanks," Ron said, getting to his feet. He couldn't run back into the other room fast enough.

"Finite Incantatum!" Ron cried, freeing Harry of his bonds. As soon as the ropes melted away, Ron tossed his wand aside and fell to his knees for the second time that night and stared down at his best mate.

"It's you," he said in an awed voice, eyes drinking in the site of his best mate. "Really you."

"It's really me," Harry said, grinning tentatively.

Ron met the grin and reached out, running his hands over Harry's face, glasses and all. "I can't believe it," he said slowly. The feel of Harry's skin, warm and soft and Harry under his hands was the best sensation in the world ever and he couldn't get enough of it. Harry was there and he was solid and real and Harry and Ron felt dizzy.

"Believe it," Harry said with a soft, tired laugh.

"How did you--"

"I'm not even sure," said Harry, closing his eyes, sitting up and scooting closer to Ron. "It's been-- there's a lot I don't remember, but I--"

"We can talk about that later," said Ron, his hands now patting Harry's shoulders and chest as though he were testing to see if he was really corporeal.

"Yeah," Harry agreed, opening his eyes and staring at Ron for half a second before pulling him close in a tight embrace.

"Oof." Ron gasped at the feel of his best mate close and alive after so long and rested his chin on Harry's shoulder, content to feel his chest rise and fall against his own.

"You smell like treacle tart," Harry said quietly.

"Yeah," Ron said absently. "Made some the other day."

"And woody, sort of. Like my Firebolt or something."

"I haven't thought about flying in a long time," Ron admitted.

"We'll have to go," Harry said, pulling back and smiling at him.

"Yeah, we will. I'd like that." Ron really would. It'd been a long time since he and Harry had flown their brooms together til all hours of the night, only touching down when their cheeks got too raw to be bearable. "Oi," he said as something else occurred to him. "I've got a kettle on. D'you want tea?"

"Yeah!" Harry nodded. "You make the best tea, save for your mum."

"C'mon then." Ron held a hand out to Harry and they got to their feet together.

"I've brought something for you," Harry said as they padded into the kitchen.

"What's that?"

"Portkey back home."

Ron paused by the stove. "Bet things are pretty mad over there right now, with you, well, alive and all that, mate."

Harry nodded and Ron could see his shoulders tense up. "Yeah."

"Thought so," Ron said, almost to himself. Shaking his head, he met Harry's eyes. "Home for me's where ever you are, mate."

"Then I figure we don't need this Portkey, at least until we want to visit and try to convince Hermione to come with us," Harry said, giving Ron a hopeful smile.

That was the best suggestion Ron had heard in years.

"Sounds brilliant, mate."

Ron fixed Harry his tea the way he liked it and they sat down, avoiding talking about the war and reminiscing about more light-hearted things.

As the morning sunlight shone in the kitchen window, Ron and Harry laughed and agreed that the best Quidditch commentator in the history of Hogwarts had been Luna Lovegood, and Ron felt more like himself than he had in seven long years.