A/N- Ok, I know I still have to post on Dreams Of Memories, and Search For
Laurel. At the moment, I'm cleaning all my previous fic up and writing this
one. It will be my highest body count to date. Character death, non-
explicit smut and adult topics are discussed here. You have been warned -
this is rated R for a reason.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Chapter 1
"Are you sure, love?" Ron asked her as he held her close. The final battle was to take place in only a few days, and both knew that there was a chance they may not escape unscathed.
"Yes, I'm sure. If we die, I want to know that I did all I could to live. Make love to me, Ron." Hermione's voice was quiet, but certain. Lovingly, she drew him down to her.
Ron moaned, trying desperately not to rampage into her. He'd wanted her for so long, loved her for so long, that it was hard not to just take. But he knew that this time, the first time, he needed to be cautious. He lowered himself onto her, and both were quickly consumed by life's greatest act.
* The battle raged on all around them. Harry was up front, battling his way towards Voldemort. Ginny had been bitten earlier in the action and was already up in the hospital wing of the castle, battling for life against the venom working its way through her system. Ron and Hermione fought back to back, and both flat out refused to leave the other even as they defended their friend. Hermione's face was blood streaked, and Ron was covered in burns, but neither was willing to leave the field.
Bodies littered the ground like so much refuse, making the task even grimmer as they fought for survival. Slowly, the Death Eater forces were being overwhelmed. The toll was higher then any of them had hoped to pay.
Ron stumbled slightly as he twisted away from a curse. Hermione looked up in alarm as he fell, and was at his side helping him up before anyone noticed him go down. He stood with her, breathing heavily and obviously trying not to let pain show.
"What happened?" she asked him desperately, shooting off curses to cover them as she tried to lead him off the battlefield.
"Nothing, I'm fine," he said as he shook it off. His father. His dad, laying next to Percy on the ground. It hurt so much that he didn't even notice the shooting pain travelling up his leg. Not like it would have mattered, anyway. Ron knew he had to struggle back up. They couldn't leave Harry undefended when there was so much carnage. Fighting off the nausea, he allowed Hermione to pull him back into the fray. They were just in time, and Harry was finishing off Voldemort with a final curse even as they re- entered the battle. With a final scream of despair, Voldemort's essence was banished into limbo and his body became ash on the ground. Hermione grabbed Ron's hand, and tried to pull him over to Harry, to celebrate and take their exhausted friend up to the hospital wing. Ron was a pale and sickly green, and Hermione had a moment of sickening recognition to figure out what had happened before he fell to the ground. He was still breathing weakly, but it came in shallow, frequent gasps. Ginny had felt the bite, and they were still probably too late to save her.
Ron would never know that pumping his own anti venom into his sister had saved her life, because it would cost him his own.
As Hermione held him, his breath became slower, and his heart rate became irregular. She could see the life fade slowly from him, and it was cold comfort to know that Voldemort would not be able to absorb his life force. As her tears rained on him and her desperate pleas flooded his ears, he could think of only one thing.
"I love you, Hermione."
Hermione sat on the ground, cradling his body as night fell. She cried to the fates for taking him away from her, she cried to the goddess for forcing him to leave, she cried to the god she was raised with in her muggle childhood, and they were all deaf to her pleas. When Harry, Bill, and Charlie found her, she was still crying, and Ron was cold to the touch.
Harry, exhausted beyond measure and horrified at the sight in front of him, tried to pick Hermione up. He didn't have the strength left to carry his petite best friend- Ron had always done that. Charlie had one arm in a sling, so Bill carefully pried the girl from his baby brother's corpse. He lifted her into his arms, and carried her away from the field of destruction. Hermione was too overwrought to put up an effective fight, and tears had been running so long her cheeks had become raw. Charlie marked the spot with Ron's wand after casting a containment spell on it, and the four of them made their way back into Hogwarts Castle.
Harry became lost in memories of his schooldays during the trek back into the school. If he hung back a bit, he could almost believe that it was Ron carrying Hermione, as he loved to do.
* "Hermione, I think we've done ENOUGH revision for today," Ron complained exasperatedly. "I know the NEWTS are important, but they aren't for another month!" He didn't have much hope in getting her to shorten the study period, though, when he had already convinced her to let them take their books outside.
The only answer he got from his complaint was a bit of a grunt and an unladylike snore.
"Hey, Harry, look at this instead of my sister, will you?" Ron was still a bit tetchy with the idea of his best mate dating his little sister, and so the comment had a bit of a barb to it.
Harry glanced, and had to smother a laugh. Hermione, Head Girl and resident slave driver, had fallen asleep in the grass, her latest text acting as her pillow. He looked up at the sky, and what had begun as a beautiful spring day was quickly becoming nasty.
"Seems a shame to wake her," Ron said with a bit of a blush.
"It's OK, I'll just levitate her up to the dorms." Ginny, as always, had an answer ready.
"NO! I mean, um, she's afraid of. um..heights. She can't be levitated. I'll carry her." Ron's ears were turning an interesting shade of red as he reasoned everything out.
Harry and Ginny were fighting back smiles.
"You two will have to carry her books, though. I can't do that," Ron said with a smirk of his own. With their arms full of books, they couldn't hold hands or do any of the other stupid little things they liked to do to piss him off.
"Oh, no need, Ron. Professor Flitwick's been teaching the Translocation charm in class, and I think I've got it down. See? Oicca textbooks." The textbooks disappeared, and Ron was torn between his little sister's brilliance and the death of his plan. "We'll see if they're where they should be when we get up there," he said, annoyed.
"We'll all be soaked unless we go now. C'mon. Last one in gets to handle Filtch!" Ginny shouted mischievously.
Ron scooped up the sleeping Hermione, and carried her into the school.
*
"We need to get her upstairs to a dorm. Are any open?" Bill asked quietly. Hermione had fallen into an exhausted sleep in his arms, and the last thing any of them wanted to do was wake her up. Sleep, at least, could numb the pain for a while.
Bill wasn't sure why he felt so protective. Probably, he thought, it was because she was a link to Ron, and since he would never see Ron again, he felt a need to keep her near. Or maybe it was because he saw her as another baby sister to cherish and tease, he didn't know. All he knew was that it was crucially important to find her a quiet space to sleep and mourn in private.
He looked at Harry as he tapped a knot at the base of the girl's Gryffindor dorms. He turned, and carried Hermione up the stairs to her old room. Harry was too tired to figure out why, exactly, this didn't feel right. Then he smiled. Bill had found the knot to turn off the Klaxon that sounded when boys tried to get up the stairs. He and Ron had.
A fresh wave of pain assaulted him. He and Ron and found it by accident one day, and Ron had threatened him with bodily harm if he ever used it to visit his sister. Judging from the dexterity that Bill managed it with a girl in his arms, Harry and Ron weren't the only ones to use it. Ron had never told Harry exactly what he got up to on the occasions a cloak was borrowed, and Harry hadn't asked. Now he almost wished he had- that conversation would have been a memory to cherish.
Bill carried his baby brother's fiancé up the stairs, wishing like hell that he had noticed Ron go down. Hermione may have escaped into sleep for now, but when she woke she would have to face Ron's death all over again. He was preparing himself for the blow when she woke up enough to look at him.
"Ron. I knew you couldn't be dead," she whispered quietly as she drifted off again.
"Hold me. Don't ever let me go." Bill could only do as she asked, feeling like the worst kind of cad. Both Harry and Charlie nodded at him, and Harry looked at her finally peaceful form.
"She shouldn't be alone. I can stay with her, if you want." Bill just shook his head. "She saw me and thought I was Ron. I can't leave her, Harry."
"Be careful. When she wakes up, you'll want to have a shield up," Harry advised, too tired to argue.
Bill nodded, his exhaustion taking over. As Harry and Charlie left the room, Bill nodded off as well. Sleep was the only escape from the horrific happenings of the day.
*
The sun shone into the windows, its brightness a vulgar insult to the suffering being endured inside. Bill woke slowly, his arm having gone numb from cradling Hermione. She was no longer beside him, and he felt a strange mix of relief and disappointment as he realised that she had gotten up. The adjoining bathroom was still steamy, telling him that he'd slept heavier then he'd thought. He still felt drained and wrung out. He hauled himself out of the bed, and could not believe that even though almost half his family had been wiped out, the sun was still shining. It was obscene.
He grabbed a fast shower himself, and then transfigured himself some clean clothes. When he got down to the common room, he found Harry and Hermione huddled together in the corner, and Ginny not sitting far from them as she lay bundled on the couch.
Hermione appeared to have stopped weeping, though her eyes were still red and puffy. Her usually rosy cheeks were still pale white, and Harry was holding her as she said nothing. Ginny was looking better, if no less upset. Her eyes were turning brown instead of the horrid lurid green of the venom stricken. It looked as though the baby of family would make it.
Bill left them like that, and went to go find his mother and remaining brothers. He hadn't seen Fred or George since the battle started, and he hated the idea that either or both of his joker brothers would have suffered as well. There was already too much death in the family.
He found his mother, and pulled her close as she cried for Ron, for Percy, and most of all for Arthur. It didn't seem to matter to her that when Percy had died he had been wearing a Dark Mark. He was still her son, and he was still forever beyond her reach. Her husband, her anchor through these troubled times being gone at the same time was almost too much for her to bear. And Ron, always so strong was wiped away too. Bill arrived just in time to help Charlie catch their mother as she fell. They tucked her into bed, and Fred and George both emerged from the adjoining room.
"She out for the count?" Fred asked, his eyes red.
"I think so. It's all too much." Charlie murmured.
"How did Blaze fair?" George asked his elder brother suddenly, as if just noticing his older brother's wife was nowhere to be seen.
"I don't know yet." Charlie said shortly.
"Angelina's gone." Fred said quietly, his own eyes still full of pain.
Bill shook his head. It wasn't fair. First Fleur and her parents were slaughtered when she had gone home for a visit. Now Angelina, whom he knew Fred had planned on proposing to, and perhaps Blaze as well.
"I guess the Weasley good luck finally wore off, huh?" George said bitterly. "I'm off to check on the kids."
Bill, Fred and Charlie watched him go. George needed to know that Harry, Ginny and Hermione were at least alive, if not whole.
At that moment, Molly started to scream in her sleep. Charlie went to tend her, and Bill gathered Fred up into a hug like neither of them had shared since they were children. Coolness, what was 'correct' didn't matter any more. Only comfort.
They would be forced to move on, to get on with their lives. None of them wanted to think of that yet.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Chapter 1
"Are you sure, love?" Ron asked her as he held her close. The final battle was to take place in only a few days, and both knew that there was a chance they may not escape unscathed.
"Yes, I'm sure. If we die, I want to know that I did all I could to live. Make love to me, Ron." Hermione's voice was quiet, but certain. Lovingly, she drew him down to her.
Ron moaned, trying desperately not to rampage into her. He'd wanted her for so long, loved her for so long, that it was hard not to just take. But he knew that this time, the first time, he needed to be cautious. He lowered himself onto her, and both were quickly consumed by life's greatest act.
* The battle raged on all around them. Harry was up front, battling his way towards Voldemort. Ginny had been bitten earlier in the action and was already up in the hospital wing of the castle, battling for life against the venom working its way through her system. Ron and Hermione fought back to back, and both flat out refused to leave the other even as they defended their friend. Hermione's face was blood streaked, and Ron was covered in burns, but neither was willing to leave the field.
Bodies littered the ground like so much refuse, making the task even grimmer as they fought for survival. Slowly, the Death Eater forces were being overwhelmed. The toll was higher then any of them had hoped to pay.
Ron stumbled slightly as he twisted away from a curse. Hermione looked up in alarm as he fell, and was at his side helping him up before anyone noticed him go down. He stood with her, breathing heavily and obviously trying not to let pain show.
"What happened?" she asked him desperately, shooting off curses to cover them as she tried to lead him off the battlefield.
"Nothing, I'm fine," he said as he shook it off. His father. His dad, laying next to Percy on the ground. It hurt so much that he didn't even notice the shooting pain travelling up his leg. Not like it would have mattered, anyway. Ron knew he had to struggle back up. They couldn't leave Harry undefended when there was so much carnage. Fighting off the nausea, he allowed Hermione to pull him back into the fray. They were just in time, and Harry was finishing off Voldemort with a final curse even as they re- entered the battle. With a final scream of despair, Voldemort's essence was banished into limbo and his body became ash on the ground. Hermione grabbed Ron's hand, and tried to pull him over to Harry, to celebrate and take their exhausted friend up to the hospital wing. Ron was a pale and sickly green, and Hermione had a moment of sickening recognition to figure out what had happened before he fell to the ground. He was still breathing weakly, but it came in shallow, frequent gasps. Ginny had felt the bite, and they were still probably too late to save her.
Ron would never know that pumping his own anti venom into his sister had saved her life, because it would cost him his own.
As Hermione held him, his breath became slower, and his heart rate became irregular. She could see the life fade slowly from him, and it was cold comfort to know that Voldemort would not be able to absorb his life force. As her tears rained on him and her desperate pleas flooded his ears, he could think of only one thing.
"I love you, Hermione."
Hermione sat on the ground, cradling his body as night fell. She cried to the fates for taking him away from her, she cried to the goddess for forcing him to leave, she cried to the god she was raised with in her muggle childhood, and they were all deaf to her pleas. When Harry, Bill, and Charlie found her, she was still crying, and Ron was cold to the touch.
Harry, exhausted beyond measure and horrified at the sight in front of him, tried to pick Hermione up. He didn't have the strength left to carry his petite best friend- Ron had always done that. Charlie had one arm in a sling, so Bill carefully pried the girl from his baby brother's corpse. He lifted her into his arms, and carried her away from the field of destruction. Hermione was too overwrought to put up an effective fight, and tears had been running so long her cheeks had become raw. Charlie marked the spot with Ron's wand after casting a containment spell on it, and the four of them made their way back into Hogwarts Castle.
Harry became lost in memories of his schooldays during the trek back into the school. If he hung back a bit, he could almost believe that it was Ron carrying Hermione, as he loved to do.
* "Hermione, I think we've done ENOUGH revision for today," Ron complained exasperatedly. "I know the NEWTS are important, but they aren't for another month!" He didn't have much hope in getting her to shorten the study period, though, when he had already convinced her to let them take their books outside.
The only answer he got from his complaint was a bit of a grunt and an unladylike snore.
"Hey, Harry, look at this instead of my sister, will you?" Ron was still a bit tetchy with the idea of his best mate dating his little sister, and so the comment had a bit of a barb to it.
Harry glanced, and had to smother a laugh. Hermione, Head Girl and resident slave driver, had fallen asleep in the grass, her latest text acting as her pillow. He looked up at the sky, and what had begun as a beautiful spring day was quickly becoming nasty.
"Seems a shame to wake her," Ron said with a bit of a blush.
"It's OK, I'll just levitate her up to the dorms." Ginny, as always, had an answer ready.
"NO! I mean, um, she's afraid of. um..heights. She can't be levitated. I'll carry her." Ron's ears were turning an interesting shade of red as he reasoned everything out.
Harry and Ginny were fighting back smiles.
"You two will have to carry her books, though. I can't do that," Ron said with a smirk of his own. With their arms full of books, they couldn't hold hands or do any of the other stupid little things they liked to do to piss him off.
"Oh, no need, Ron. Professor Flitwick's been teaching the Translocation charm in class, and I think I've got it down. See? Oicca textbooks." The textbooks disappeared, and Ron was torn between his little sister's brilliance and the death of his plan. "We'll see if they're where they should be when we get up there," he said, annoyed.
"We'll all be soaked unless we go now. C'mon. Last one in gets to handle Filtch!" Ginny shouted mischievously.
Ron scooped up the sleeping Hermione, and carried her into the school.
*
"We need to get her upstairs to a dorm. Are any open?" Bill asked quietly. Hermione had fallen into an exhausted sleep in his arms, and the last thing any of them wanted to do was wake her up. Sleep, at least, could numb the pain for a while.
Bill wasn't sure why he felt so protective. Probably, he thought, it was because she was a link to Ron, and since he would never see Ron again, he felt a need to keep her near. Or maybe it was because he saw her as another baby sister to cherish and tease, he didn't know. All he knew was that it was crucially important to find her a quiet space to sleep and mourn in private.
He looked at Harry as he tapped a knot at the base of the girl's Gryffindor dorms. He turned, and carried Hermione up the stairs to her old room. Harry was too tired to figure out why, exactly, this didn't feel right. Then he smiled. Bill had found the knot to turn off the Klaxon that sounded when boys tried to get up the stairs. He and Ron had.
A fresh wave of pain assaulted him. He and Ron and found it by accident one day, and Ron had threatened him with bodily harm if he ever used it to visit his sister. Judging from the dexterity that Bill managed it with a girl in his arms, Harry and Ron weren't the only ones to use it. Ron had never told Harry exactly what he got up to on the occasions a cloak was borrowed, and Harry hadn't asked. Now he almost wished he had- that conversation would have been a memory to cherish.
Bill carried his baby brother's fiancé up the stairs, wishing like hell that he had noticed Ron go down. Hermione may have escaped into sleep for now, but when she woke she would have to face Ron's death all over again. He was preparing himself for the blow when she woke up enough to look at him.
"Ron. I knew you couldn't be dead," she whispered quietly as she drifted off again.
"Hold me. Don't ever let me go." Bill could only do as she asked, feeling like the worst kind of cad. Both Harry and Charlie nodded at him, and Harry looked at her finally peaceful form.
"She shouldn't be alone. I can stay with her, if you want." Bill just shook his head. "She saw me and thought I was Ron. I can't leave her, Harry."
"Be careful. When she wakes up, you'll want to have a shield up," Harry advised, too tired to argue.
Bill nodded, his exhaustion taking over. As Harry and Charlie left the room, Bill nodded off as well. Sleep was the only escape from the horrific happenings of the day.
*
The sun shone into the windows, its brightness a vulgar insult to the suffering being endured inside. Bill woke slowly, his arm having gone numb from cradling Hermione. She was no longer beside him, and he felt a strange mix of relief and disappointment as he realised that she had gotten up. The adjoining bathroom was still steamy, telling him that he'd slept heavier then he'd thought. He still felt drained and wrung out. He hauled himself out of the bed, and could not believe that even though almost half his family had been wiped out, the sun was still shining. It was obscene.
He grabbed a fast shower himself, and then transfigured himself some clean clothes. When he got down to the common room, he found Harry and Hermione huddled together in the corner, and Ginny not sitting far from them as she lay bundled on the couch.
Hermione appeared to have stopped weeping, though her eyes were still red and puffy. Her usually rosy cheeks were still pale white, and Harry was holding her as she said nothing. Ginny was looking better, if no less upset. Her eyes were turning brown instead of the horrid lurid green of the venom stricken. It looked as though the baby of family would make it.
Bill left them like that, and went to go find his mother and remaining brothers. He hadn't seen Fred or George since the battle started, and he hated the idea that either or both of his joker brothers would have suffered as well. There was already too much death in the family.
He found his mother, and pulled her close as she cried for Ron, for Percy, and most of all for Arthur. It didn't seem to matter to her that when Percy had died he had been wearing a Dark Mark. He was still her son, and he was still forever beyond her reach. Her husband, her anchor through these troubled times being gone at the same time was almost too much for her to bear. And Ron, always so strong was wiped away too. Bill arrived just in time to help Charlie catch their mother as she fell. They tucked her into bed, and Fred and George both emerged from the adjoining room.
"She out for the count?" Fred asked, his eyes red.
"I think so. It's all too much." Charlie murmured.
"How did Blaze fair?" George asked his elder brother suddenly, as if just noticing his older brother's wife was nowhere to be seen.
"I don't know yet." Charlie said shortly.
"Angelina's gone." Fred said quietly, his own eyes still full of pain.
Bill shook his head. It wasn't fair. First Fleur and her parents were slaughtered when she had gone home for a visit. Now Angelina, whom he knew Fred had planned on proposing to, and perhaps Blaze as well.
"I guess the Weasley good luck finally wore off, huh?" George said bitterly. "I'm off to check on the kids."
Bill, Fred and Charlie watched him go. George needed to know that Harry, Ginny and Hermione were at least alive, if not whole.
At that moment, Molly started to scream in her sleep. Charlie went to tend her, and Bill gathered Fred up into a hug like neither of them had shared since they were children. Coolness, what was 'correct' didn't matter any more. Only comfort.
They would be forced to move on, to get on with their lives. None of them wanted to think of that yet.