13th January, 2000. 11:43 p.m.
Severus was leaning over to pull closed Hermione’s door, which she had left open when she had finally fallen asleep amongst her books and research, when Draco touched his arm lightly.
“She okay?” he asked gently, nodding into the darkened room.
Severus nodded and pulled a non-committal face. “She agreed to take the potion.”
“Ah, yes. That potion that only I’ve been working on recently?” Draco asked, a tone of jest in his voice making light of the situation. “I know I’m not as brilliant as either of you two,” the laughter and smug smile were almost palpable in his voice as he finished, “but I think I did okay.”
Severus pulled the door closed quietly before he continued the conversation. “Well, we’ll find out soon enough. We both took it,” he said lightly, although he knew that it would be something of a revelation to Draco. He didn’t want to make a ‘big deal’ over it. He didn’t want to remember that he had often toyed with the idea during the War—during both of them actually—and then been too afraid of losing control, of not knowing precisely where it would take him or who it would turn him into.
Now, Draco actually looked shocked. He had been expecting Hermione to take the potion after some persuading from Snape—he was usually the only one who could reason with her—but for the man to take the potion himself… “Really? You thought that you—”
“We needed a control group,” Severus interrupted silkily. Although neither of them was fooled by that rationale, the tone Snape had used was utterly familiar to Draco: the steely tone of his father brooking no argument, permitting no response but pure acceptance.
Draco just nodded dumbly in response and then tentatively tried a related topic. “Do you think… I mean, if there are side-effects… It would be good to have <i>one</i> of you fully functioning in our current situation. And by that, I obviously mean you!” he added with an abrupt laugh.
Severus gave a tight smile. “Yes. Thank you for reminding me. We’d better hope that you didn’t screw up then, hadn’t we?”
Draco still looked a little concerned. “I <i>didn’t</i> screw up, but this is <i>experimental!</i>”
“Don’t worry. I have what I needed from Potter. We’re almost through this.”
“What did he—”
Severus pre-empted Draco’s question by extracting from the pocket of his long jacket the quill that he had received from Harry earlier. Although he had only briefly hinted of his plan to Draco, he had every faith that his fellow Slytherin and extremely bright employee would come to the correct conclusion about the quill’s purpose.
Draco looked at him with a frown for a moment or two—Snape could almost see the cogs turning—and then his frown cleared. “You know that is…”
“Devilishly, fiendishly brilliant?” Severus asked with a hint of sarcasm.
“Disturbing,” Draco replied with a shake of his head. He didn’t even bother to ask how his boss could be so light-hearted at such a moment. He had seen the same thing during the War. Everyone needed a little light relief. Still, there was the hope that it was the potion and this was—no! Draco put that thought out of his mind. Hoping for a pleasanter, happier, funnier Snape? That was not a good idea. “Have you sent the letter yet?” he asked curiously, returning to the topic at hand.
“No. Not yet. Too suspicious,” Snape said dismissively.
Draco gave a wry smile. “Of course.”
“I’ll write it tomorrow morning and have it go with the morning post.”
Severus gave his employee one last smile and moved past him towards the staircase. As he took the first step, Draco called out after him, “Are we… Is this the right thing to do?” he demanded. They could laugh and quip as much as they wanted, but still, this was an ethical dilemma, something which Slytherins were rarely faced with. And they had been endeavouring to make their lives <i>simpler</i> for a long time now. A dilemma was <i>not</i> what they needed.
Severus turned, and his expression, which had been lingering on that conspiratorial smile, now sobered. “We wouldn’t be wondering if it weren’t,” he replied seriously before turning his back again and hurrying down the stairs. Ah. Yes. There was the Snape Draco knew. He put all thoughts of potential changes wrought by the potion firmly out of his head. Maybe it had been a failure? Maybe Snape had been telling the truth when he’d said ‘control group’? They would all have to wait until the second and third doses tomorrow to find out.
***
13th January, 2000. 6:32 p.m.
Harry had been back around twenty minutes now. After going to the Post Office, he had wandered somewhat aimlessly. He couldn’t quite believe that he had done what Severus had asked, that he was now an aider and abettor. But every time his conscious called for him to think about his family, about Ginny, all he could see was that twisted look on her face as she recounted turning Hermione away, and a surge of righteous anger flooded his veins, sending him back to the top of the spiral of doubt and certainty. It was strange that when that anger hit him, he felt more sure that what he was doing was morally right than he had been during the last… three, maybe four years of the War.
Still, he had returned to The Burrow with some trepidation. He hadn’t wanted to face Ginny again, and relief had seeped through his body when he had opened the front door to find the kitchen empty. He had poured himself a glass of water to steady himself and awaited the sound of her bounding down the stairs and beginning to berate him. But that hadn’t come. He could hear her upstairs, creaking the floorboards. He could hear her voice and what he could only assume was Lavender’s, although he couldn’t make out any of the words, just the faint feminine murmurs.
He scanned the kitchen eagerly, seeking the piece of parchment he would sure he was going to find scrawled with Ron’s handwriting, which only he would know was a fraud. There was nothing on the table or any of the counters…
<i>Maybe Ginny has it upstairs?</i> he wondered to himself. But then surely there would be other people here. Surely Ginny would have contacted everyone? They’d be having some kind of party-cum-brainstorming meeting. He paced the room for a moment. Where <i>was</i> it? It was going to come, wasn’t it? Surely Snape hadn’t lied to him? What would be the point of that? What other use could he possibly have had for Ron’s quill?
No! He stopped still and shook his head firmly. He hadn’t lied. The letter was coming. He was (almost) sure of it.
That still left him with his angry wife to deal with. Still, for the time being she seemed to be busy upstairs. Determined to neither sit around waiting for Snape’s letter nor sit around waiting for Ginny to come downstairs, he reached beneath the table for his briefcase and slid into a chair, ready to bury himself in Ministry paperwork.
He had barely had a chance to spread his parchments out in front of him before the thumping of feet on the stairs that he had been so anxiously expecting ten minutes ago assaulted his ears.
“I’m about to cook dinner, so don’t even think about taking up all the space with your ‘work’!” Harry could almost hear the quotation marks in her voice as she snarled at him without even looking into his face. He frowned but bit his tongue and began to pull his parchments into one big bundle again. “Lavender and Padma are here, so there’ll be four of us,” she added. “Why don’t you go check on your <i>son</i> while <i>I’m</i> busy cooking?” she added snappishly.
Not trusting himself to respond, Harry rose from his chair, shoving the parchments back into his briefcase haphazardly, not caring that many of them were creased and crumpled by his carelessness, and left the room, just glad that the first contact was over.
***
13th January, 2000. 7:20 p.m.
“Can you pay <i>some</i> attention, Harry?” Ginny snapped at him when she saw him gazing out the window for what felt like the twentieth time since they’d sat down to eat dinner.
“Sorry,” he muttered insincerely and dragged his gaze back to his now-cold pasta. Everyone else seemed to have finished, but he couldn’t bring himself to eat any more, and so he pushed his chair back and rose to his feet. “I have some work to do, but I’ll take Xander to bed first, okay?”
“How can you <i>work</i> at a time like this?” Lavender retorted in a voice not too far away from a wail. Out of the corner of his eye, Harry saw Padma place a hand on her friend’s arm, and he heard her begin to mutter some reassuring words, but he had no interest in what they were. Anything to just shut Lavender up would be fine by him. He knew that he should feel sympathy for her, but… Well, it was hard to do so when she was making <i>him</i> feel so much worse with her every whine.
“Good night, you three,” he said quietly as he pulled Xander into his arms and left the room, clutching his son to him like a comfort blanket.
***
13th January, 2000. 8:45 p.m.
“Padma and I finally persuaded Lavender to go home for the night,” Ginny said softly, leaning in the doorway to the bedroom she shared with her husband and watching him pretend to read a long scroll of parchment.
“Do you think that was a good idea?” he asked sincerely, looking up over the parchment and the rims of his glasses so that although he was looking at her, he could barely make out the fine details that would show him her expression.
“I thought she was getting to you?”
“She’s upset,” Harry replied with a long-suffering sigh.
“She was getting to <i>me</i>. And I think maybe I’ve been getting to you,” Ginny added, advancing into the room now. Harry lifted his head so that his glasses were once again focusing his vision. “I’m sorry, Harry,” Ginny let out when he didn’t respond, only looked at her. “I should have told you about that thing with Hermione. I know that you must think I’m crazy…” She paused here, as if sure he would interrupt, but he didn’t. The somewhat stony, impassive look on his face worried her, and she hurried on with a quaver in her voice. “It’s just… it’s been so hard, you know, since the War. Of course you know, what am I saying?” she muttered to herself, shaking her head before trying again. “I respect your position. I respect you—I <i>love</i> you—because you’re such a good man. Always fair. Always honest. Always true. And I wish that I could uphold those same virtues, but I just <i>can’t</i>. I don’t care if I’ve been unfair to Hermione. Life’s been unfair to me! Please don’t hate me for it?”
“I don’t hate you, Ginny,” Harry said at long last. “But you should have told us. It wasn’t for you to make the choice about whether or not we wanted to see her. It wasn’t for you to decide she was guilty.”
“But she <i>was</i> guilty. She still <i>is</i> guilty. And I know she’s hiding something from us!”
“I’m sure she’s hiding lots of things. Hiding that she misses us. Hiding how hurt she is. Hiding how much she’s struggling to rebuild a life for herself.”
“Hiding where Ron is and what’s happened to him! Who knows, maybe she <i>has</i> killed him. Felt like offing another one of my family!”
“<i>Our</i> family,” Harry snapped back sharply.
“No, Harry. <i>My</i> family,” Ginny retorted. “They’re only your family if you care about them the way that I do. And apparently you <i>don’t</i>!”
“How dare you?” Harry yelled back. “Ron w—is one of my closest friends! I love you, your brothers, your parents, <i>our son</i>!” Harry continued, catching his slip into the past tense just in time.
“But you wanted to let that <i>bitch</i> back into our lives?”
“I’m not going to argue with you about Hermione, Ginny,” Harry insisted. “I know you’re angry, but… I don’t want to argue with you about this,” he repeated doggedly.
“I don’t—”
“I <i>don’t</i> want to argue with you,” Harry said a third time, now with a distinct tone of finality. “I have work to do, and this argument isn’t going to help us.” He gave her one final glare and then diverted his gaze back to the parchment. In his peripheral vision, he saw her leave.
***
14th January, 2000. 1:04 a.m.
She was back at Hogwarts. She felt a wave of calm spread over her and knew that she was perhaps in her fourth… fifth year? Before things had gotten <i>really</i> bad. Before the War had intruded upon even <i>her</i> consciousness.
She had her bag on her shoulder, and the familiar weight added to her comfort. She was on her way to a class, and after a moment or two of paying close attention to the walls and paintings, she knew where she was heading. Divination. Her favourite class.
Still, something felt wrong. Very, very wrong. Lavender picked up her pace a little and looked around her as she did so. There wasn’t anyone else going to class with her, which was odd. Why would she be walking alone? Maybe she was late. She’d probably had to go to the bathroom and was late. She moved faster.
She reached the trap door and hurried up and in with practiced ease. Turning to face the room, she was astonished to see that there was no one there. No one there except Professor Trelawney, who was sitting at a round table with a pot of tea to her left, a parchment and quill to her right, and a crystal ball right in the middle of the table.
“Ah, come in, my darling girl, my protégée.” Lavender stepped forward, clutching her bag anxiously and tightly. Something was off. What was she doing here if she didn’t have a class? “You have the gift, my dear,” Professor Trelawney was continuing. “The gift. Come, look into the crystal ball and see the past, the present and the future,” she continued in her surprisingly compelling voice, sharpness hidden beneath the breathy, floaty quality.
“But… we haven’t done crystal balls yet…” Lavender managed to get out in something not much louder than a hoarse whisper. She knew it was a lie, but she felt that she wanted to flee, knew that she <i>didn’t</i> want to look into that ball, no matter what. Yet her feet were taking her toward it, and she couldn’t stop them.
“Yes. Come closer. Come and look,” the older woman insisted.
“I don’t want to!” Lavender cried out now, even as she felt her body being pulled and bent so that it could slide into the chair opposite the professor.
“Look!” commanded Professor Trelawney, her eyes staring into Lavender’s, blazing despite the obscuring quality of the foggy, uncleaned glasses she was wearing. Feeling that she was going to be sick, Lavender tried to close her eyes, but they were inexorably drawn downwards, downwards and into the depths of the ball.
A scene began to crystallise. Colours came first, which she knew was logically what ought to happen, but there was something sickening and dizzying about them. She tried to blink, pull back, but she couldn’t, and she knew that she was lowering her head to peer more closely into the ball, lowering her head until she was almost touching it with her nose—
And then she fell in. And onto the floor. Sprawled against a somewhat gritty carpet, she took a deep breath to refill her lungs after the fall. Taking another breath, she pushed herself up onto her knees and lifted her head.
And screamed. In anger and terror and confusion. On the floor, right next to the couch, no less, on this disgusting carpet was Ron <i>fucking</i> Hermione. That bitch was straddling her man, both of them naked and flushed with passion as she rocked back and forth. Another scream came from Lavender’s lips as she pushed herself to her feet with the intention of launching herself at the oblivious couple.
She found that she couldn’t take a step, however. She was completely stuck in place, and before her eyes the scene changed. No longer was Ron’s face twisted in ecstasy and Hermione’s hands entwined in his hair. Instead, his face was angrily red, and her hands were wrapped around his neck, instead.
Lavender attempted to launch herself towards them again, and a second time she failed. It was as if there were a physical but invisible barrier between her and them. She threw herself at it again and fell to her knees as Ron began to splutter, his legs kicking up and down, jolting Hermione’s still-naked body back and forth.
An inarticulate scream flung itself from Lavender’s lips at the same time as a disgusting, part-ecstatic, part-pained groan spewed from Ron’s lips, and then his legs ceased to move, and his head rolled back, and Lavender woke up screaming.
***
14th January, 2000. 1:35 a.m.
“She killed him! I saw it! She killed him! She strangled him!” Lavender sobbed out. Harry rubbed his temples wearily and watched as his wife stroked the other woman’s back gently and mumbled something presumably intended to soothe.
Turning away, he felt nauseous. He had thought it would be <i>over</i>, but no letter had come, and now there was this <i>dream</i>. Lavender and Ginny would never give up now, would never be taken in by the letter. He was becoming more and more implicated in a crime that was more and more likely to be found out.
“Harry, we have to do something,” Ginny hissed at his turned back as Lavender sobbed wholeheartedly.
“What do you want me to <i>do</i>?” Harry exploded, spinning back to glare at the two women before him. “He’s barely been gone any time at all, and you’re screaming blue murder because of a fucking <i>dream</i>? I knew you went in for Divination, and I always thought it was a bit daft at the time, but come <i>on</i>, Lavender!”
“Harry!” Ginny interjected furiously.
“<i>You</i> of all people should know the truth about prophecies, Harry! How can Divination mean nothing to <i>you</i>?” Lavender demanded through tears and a runny nose, glaring at him.
Harry had no answer to that, and he frowned angrily at the women before him. “There’s a difference between a <i>dream</i> and a prophecy. You saw them having sex, too, didn’t you? Do you think <i>that’s</i> real?”
Lavender glared and sniffled before replying, “Dream interpretation is not an exact science!”
“It’s not a <i>science</i> at all!”
“Harry! Ron has been gone too long. There <i>must</i> be something going on. Is it any wonder Lavender’s thinking the worst, particularly after the way <i>you’ve</i> been behaving toward <i>that woman</i> recently!” Ginny broke in, apparently thinking she was playing the voice of reason.
“He hasn’t been gone ‘too long’,” Harry argued back. “No offence, Lavender, but Ginny’s his sister, and I’m his best friend. If anyone should be having weird psychic feelings, it’s one of us!”
He felt awful that he was crushing Lavender’s ideas, particularly when he knew they were true, but there was no way he could <i>tell</i> either of the two women the truth. He only hoped that soon enough Snape would uphold his end of the bargain and make this whole thing <i>go away</i>. Merlin, he’d only ever wanted a peaceful life. How had he gotten stuck with a life like this?
Ginny was soothing Lavender again now, who had burst into a second flood of hysterical sobs. “Harry’s just stressed too, Lavender. We’re all worried about Ron. He’s also right, although he’s being a prick. We don’t know that anything’s happened. We shouldn’t be imagining the worst. Please, stay here tonight. It’s just being alone in the house that’s scaring you. I promise…”
Harry could barely suppress a snort, and he thought it best to leave the room.
***
14th January, 2000. 8:56 a.m.
“How are you feeling?” Severus asked lightly, but with only thinly veiled concern, as Hermione entered the kitchen. She looked a little bleary-eyed, but that could be attributed to the potion he had given her to help her sleep. Maybe. He hoped.
“Rested. A little reluctant to get out of bed. I left the curtains open last night, and the sun today—why is it sunny all of a sudden when it’s been so cold and grey?—just warms the bed up and… Well, it was lovely. But I’m hungry. I was eventually forced to get up.”
“You <i>are</i> a witch, aren’t you? I’m sure if it were <i>that</i> lovely you’d have conjured something up to sustain you,” Severus replied wryly as he lifted his mug of coffee to his lips. Unlike Hermione, he hadn’t gotten almost nine hours of sleep. He’d managed around five. That was only because he’d gotten himself so worked up in his research after speaking to Draco last night, and then he’d had to get up early in order to get the letter ‘from Ron’ into the morning post. Still, he wasn’t feeling the need for quite as much coffee as usual, which was a nice change. He was almost beginning to allow himself hope for improvements with this new potion, although he’d started taking it just to make Hermione less anxious about her own dosages. Yes, that was his reason, and he was sticking to it.
“You know that there are some things magic just doesn’t do best, Severus Snape?” she retorted as she made her way over to the teapot and found it empty. She looked up at him questioningly, and he shrugged.
“Draco had an urgent errand to run. You may have to make your <i>own</i> tea this morning.”
“Veronique?” Hermione asked casually as she began the procedure, spilling only a few tea leaves on the counter in the process. It always amused Severus how a woman who loved tea so much and had such a talent for potions brewing could also be something of a klutz when it came to anything more complicated than those things she called… tea-sacks.
“We have been neglecting our research, he has been neglecting his… lady friend.”
“Speak for yourself, Severus Snape. I’ve been making some headway with my research!” she laughed lightly at him.
Suddenly glancing up at the clock, Severus started, then rose from his chair and strode toward her, extracting two small vials from his trouser pocket. “Here,” he said, pouring one of them into her waiting teacup. There was a tense moment as they stood side-by-side, both of them looking down at the silvery-blue liquid, and Severus felt that although last night’s persuasion had been a breakthrough, this morning’s dosage was a more fraught affair. She might reject the potion now after a full night’s sleep and time to think on it. He looked into her eyes, and he could sense that she was thinking the same thing. Suddenly, he stepped away and began to speak, saying anything to hurry past the moment of hesitant doubt. “Any side-effects as of yet?” he demanded. “Anything that you think is going to need improving?” he added as he turned his back to her and hurried to his own mug, pouring the contents of the second vial into it and then raising the mug to his lips without even bothering to stir.
He glugged the remnants of his coffee and potion down as the teapot next to Hermione began to almost shriek. When he turned back to her, her eyes were firmly focused on the earthenware vessel, but her voice was light and even. “Of <i>course</i> there will be improvements. I’m not sure about them yet, though. It might be making me more tired—I usually only sleep six or seven hours a night, but then you <i>did</i> spike me with other things too,” she remarked teasingly, raising her eyes bashfully and hesitantly to his.
Severus nodded back, but didn’t say anything. The look on her face told him that she was thinking of something she wanted to say; he had seen the look in his classroom and his laboratory and valued her precision of speech.
“I wanted to thank you,” she said at long last. “For persuading me. I do feel a lot better, although maybe you don’t believe it. I have only had one dose, I know, and maybe it’s all psychological at this point, but I do <i>feel</i> better.”
Severus didn’t bother to remark that depression itself was mainly psychological. Instead he gave her a gentle smile and said, “I, too, feel better, although not quite so much better as you. Perhaps you have an advantage.”
“Why? Because I’m younger?”
“Because you have less time to counteract,” he corrected her.
The shriek had reached its highest pitch now, and she turned back to the teapot and her teacup as she made her response. “Maybe that’s true, but… I don’t want to say that I’ve suffered more than you because that’s so obviously a lie that… Well, I just mean to say that sometimes, sometimes it was like the sky was falling in on me, you know?” she added in a hurried voice as she poured the hot tea into her cup quickly, almost splashing it over her hand. She placed the teapot down again with a more deliberate gesture and then lifted the cup and turned to face him, her eyes searching his face for a response.
He frowned slightly. How was he to respond to that? How was he to describe his own feeling about it, his own experience? All of his words suddenly caught up in an endless loop inside his head, he said only, “You should drink that. Soon. We both had double doses yesterday afternoon, but I think that a ‘breakfast-supper’ cycle would be better than ‘afternoon-midnight’.”
“Yes, of course,” was all Hermione said as she reached for her wand to place a slight Cooling Charm on her teacup.
Severus waited until he was out of the room to heave a sigh of relief.
***
14th January, 2000. 8:56 a.m.
“Good morning,” Harry said calmly as Ginny stalked into the room, Xander cradled in her arms. She curled her lip scornfully at him and hurried around his chair to the sink and the drying rack where some of Xander’s bottles were kept. “Where’s Lavender?” he asked, again in the same cool, indifferent tone of voice. He didn’t want to get into another argument with her.
“<i>Upstairs</i>,” Ginny snapped. “I had to <i>sedate</i> her!”
“She’s gotten herself all worked up over nothing,” Harry said decidedly, almost interrupting his wife.
“<i>Nothing?</i>” Ginny shrieked, but then Xander started to grizzle, and she had to lower her tone. She back up a few steps so that she was standing above Harry and could express her disdain for him with her face instead of her voice. Harry looked up at her and saw that her lips were pressed into a thin line and her eyes were narrowed furiously at him, squinting even more when she began to speak. “Ron is <i>missing</i>. He may have abandoned her. He <i>may</i> have been killed. We don’t know, and you have no proof to the contrary!”
“Oh, don’t tell me you believe that tosh!” Harry responded, doing his best to sound incredulous.
“Lavender is very sensitive. Divination <i>is</i> a real subject, despite what you and <i>she</i> might think!”
“I can form my own opinions, thank you very much. I never needed Hermione to tell me what to think. Since when did you need Lavender to decide for you what to worry about?”
Luckily for Xander, their budding shouting match was cut short by the scrape of their owl at the window.
Rising to his feet, Harry briskly moved past Ginny—he wouldn’t have put it past her to trip him, but she didn’t—and unfastened the latch on the window. Normally, they left it open in the morning, but the winter weather was so horrible that they tried to keep all window and door opening to a very strict minimum. The owl—the predecessor to Hermes, called Apollo, which Harry had always thought a bit silly, but had never had a choice about—hopped in enthusiastically, obviously just as bothered by the outside weather as they were.
Apollo jerked his leg and managed to detach the bundle of letters from his foot fairly easily. Harry gave him a gentle stroke before eagerly catching up the bundle and hurrying back to his seat at the table.
“Aren’t you even going to feed him?” Ginny muttered angrily at him as he passed her, but he paid no attention to her as he flicked through the letters. Two from the Ministry. One would undoubtedly be a notice ‘kindly’ noting that he was using up his leave for the year quite quickly in January. Another would probably be his pay statement, which usually came mid-month. Then there were two publications they had subscriptions for—<i>Quidditch World</i> and <i>Home Witch</i>—and what seemed to be a personal letter for Ginny.
<i>That must be it!</i> Harry thought, his heart giving a surprising leap of elation.
“Gin. Something for you,” he said casually, holding the letter up to his wife, who was in the middle of feeding Apollo while still trying to soothe Xander, who had been expecting his own food five minutes ago.
“I’m <i>busy</i>,” she snapped back. “Either put it down or open it yourself!”
Harry almost balked at that idea. He didn’t want to seem too implicated in the ‘story’ Snape was concocting, and reading the letter allowed to Ginny and Lavender felt like being implicated to him. But, then again, it would be odd if he suddenly became overly interested in not hearing what the letter had to say.
With a reluctant thumb, he began to tear the top of the envelope. There was a single sheet of parchment inside, as he’d been expecting. It would undoubtedly be a terse and functional missive, and a little part of his brain was interested in the academic question of how <i>Snape</i> would manage to write like <i>Ron</i>.
He extracted the single sheet and then looked up at his wife. “Want me to read it aloud?” he asked casually.
“There wouldn’t be much point in you opening it if you didn’t tell me what it said, would there?” Ginny responded, still with her back to him as she had finally moved on to making Xander’s breakfast, and the little boy was now squealing excitedly and trying to jump up and down while still sitting firmly on her hip.
Harry gave an anxious swallow and composed himself for a second. He would have to act this and be <i>genuine</i>. With much trepidation, he unfolded the parchment, gave a small pause, and then said in what he hoped was an excited and yet anxious voice, “Gin! It’s from <i>Ron</i>!”
“What?” she squawked, stopping in the middle of screwing the top onto Xander’s bottle. She spun around to face her husband, and Xander gave a dejected moan, knowing that his food was once again some minutes away. “There, there, love,” she mumbled to him, stroking his hair. “What does it say?” she then demanded sharply.
Taking a deep breath, Harry began to read.
<center><i>Dear Gin, Harry, and most of all my Lav,</center>
Huh. Snape actually seems to have done a</i> good<i> job,</i> Harry thought to himself.
“Yes?” Ginny prompted, and Harry continued.
<i><center>I’m so sorry I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to you all. It was just I needed to get away from it all for a bit. Seeing ‘Mione again, well, it just made me feel sick to my stomach how we’re all still living in the shadow of Vold—.</i></center>
“That’s what he says,” Harry said with a tone of amusement. His statement was just vague enough that he himself didn’t know if the ‘he’ was ‘Ron’ or Snape. “Just ‘Vold’ and then a line.” He gave a little chuckle and then met the stern eyes of his wife and went back to reading the letter.
<i><center>I do love you all, but every time I see you, Gin, or Xander, or Harry, I can’t help but think about Charlie and Kingsley and all the others. I haven’t decided where I’m going to go yet. When I do decide, I’ll write another letter and tell you, but I don’t think I’ll be coming home any time soon. I know you must be worried about me, and I know how much this’ll upset you, but I hope you can see it my way.
Lavender, I’m so very sorry. I do love you. A lot. It’s just… Well, I can’t explain it. But it’s not meant to be. I’m so, so sorry.
Hope you all can forgive me for bailing out on you like this,
Ron</i></center>
“What?” a screech from the doorway let them know that Lavender had stumbled into the recital somewhere in the middle of it. “What does he mean ‘It’s not meant to be’?” she shrieked again, and in response to her shrill tones, a hungry Xander began to bawl. Exasperated, Ginny turned back to his bottle, giving Harry a look that clearly said Lavender was his responsibility.
“Look, Lavender, I know it must be hard,” Harry began, rising from his chair and moving towards her.
“He wouldn’t leave me!” she insisted tearfully.
<i>You thought he’d left you for Hermione not so long ago,</I> Harry thought to himself, but he held his tongue.
“He <i>wouldn’t</i>,” she insisted, perhaps catching something sceptical in his gaze. “Show me that!” she demanded in a high-pitched voice, gesturing to the parchment on the table.
Ginny, who had by now managed to give Xander his bottle, turned toward Lavender and with the hand not holding Xander reached out for the parchment on the table. She scanned over it briefly and then laid it back down again.
“It’s Ron’s handwriting, Lavender,” she said in a somewhat undecided voice, as if she hadn’t yet chosen which was ‘better’, that Ron was dead or that Ron had abandoned them.
“Lavender,” Harry said with more force in his voice than his wife had managed, “it’s from him. I know it hurts, but—”
“Give it to me!” she yelled and sped past Harry to whip the parchment up from the tabletop. She scanned over it briefly and then burst into sobs. “It’s not from him. I just know it. It’s not from him. He’s dead, just like I said he was! He wouldn’t leave me!”
Harry would have scoffed scornfully at her delusions if they hadn’t led her quite so close to the mark. As it was, he only moved to her side and embraced her in an awkward hug.