HP Fanfiction - "Broken"
Title: Broken
Author: mr_mercutio
Pairing: Blaise/Theodore/Ron, past Harry/Hermione/Ron
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 5840
Warnings: AU from HBP onwards, implied character death
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters herein are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement is intended.
Summary: Lost in a city he doesn't know and lost in a mind no longer working like it's supposed to, Ron Weasley is rescued by two of the least likely people he'd ever expect to put him back together.
Author’s Notes: This was written for the 2009 hp_summersmut exchange, found here. I've incorporated some elements of Deathly Hallows canon into this story, but please keep in mind that it is definitely AU. It is also fairly dark.
Broken
He is lost in a sea of people, desperate and drowning in the blur of faces and bodies that seem to swim in front of his eyes like runny paint. They give him a wide berth, but he somehow still manages to collide with too many of them, their bodies twitching away from him in horror. Sometimes he grasps at their clothes, wanting to beg them for something, but he can't remember what it is he's supposed to say, and the language in which they shout at him to get away sounds so foreign to him. This whole place is foreign, like an alien city full of people masquerading as human but devoted solely to either ignoring him or making his life hell.
Sure enough, someone shoves him out of their way, pushing him into an alley filled with trash. He knows that he should be retching, that in the before time the smell would be the most revolting thing to him, but now the smell is only an afterthought, subsumed by the odours of his own unwashed body and the screaming voices of the city. He falls to his knees and his hand brushes against an old shoe. It reminds him of something, something that he knows he's forgotten but shouldn't have, and he clasps it to his chest.
He remembers the sensation of being tugged from his stomach, that somehow a shoe pulled him from one place to another, from some terrible dark place to this city of strange noise. He remembers the cold echo of running footsteps in halls of stone, resounding in a room with some kind of fluttering cloth in the center. He remembers the feeling of his heart pounding so hard it seemed it would escape his body and fly away. Most of all he remembers the screaming, screaming from all directions, some of it hers but the majority of it his own.
"Tais-toi!" yells a passer-by at the mouth of the alley, and he realizes belatedly that he is screaming again, rocking back and forth with the shoe pressing into his chest.
"He'll come for you too!" he cries, not knowing who he means but only sure that he has to warn them all. "He's killing them all, he won't stop with Britain, he won't stop at Hogwarts, you've got to believe me!"
Several more people are screaming at him now, jabbering away in words he doesn't understand, and finally he bolts out of the alley, head down and barrelling through the crowds. The shoe slips from his grasp somewhere along the way, but the loss registers only dimly in the back of his mind. It is more important to reach inside the inner pocket of his tattered robes, to clutch at the cold lump of metal he finds there, to make sure it's still there. He doesn't remember why it's important, only that it is. As he scrabbles in his pocket, he loses his balance and trips, hitting the paved ground hard and scraping his face. He can't understand why he's here, why no one will help him at all, and he wishes so much that he could remember where he came from or how he got here, or even his name.
"I say, Blaise, is that a Weasley?"
Weasley. The word is like a beacon to him and he swings his head wildly, looking for the source of the voice that speaks a language he knows, a word he recognizes. Blood trickles down from a cut on his forehead, gumming up his eyes and obscuring the world around him.
"Merlin, I think it. Isn't it the one that always followed Potter around?"
"Ronald, I think."
Ronald? Ron. That is his name, he knows it. The sound of it strikes inside of him like a chime, and he hears the name echoed by her voice.
"Oh God, they're coming, Ron. Run!"
"Help me, Ron!"
He clutches at his head as the voice floods him and he screams, babbling every word he can think of to drown out the sound of it. Then, suddenly, his voice is gone from him, and his body locks in place and falls to the ground.
"Merlin, thank you. He was driving me insane with all that noise. Come along, Theo, let's go."
A cool hand brushes Ron's forehead then, and after a whispered word the blood and grime is gone from his eyes. A pale, narrow face gazes down at him, and Ron recognizes it. His heart leaps into his throat at the thought that finally, finally, he has found something that he remembers.
"We can't just leave him here," says the face, looking back at someone that Ron cannot see. Theo, the other voice called him. Theodore Nott. Ron is sure that is the name of the man above him, someone that he knew from a long time ago. "I mean, look at the state of him."
The other voice lets out a sigh, and then another man draws close to look down at Ron as well. This face is darker than the first, and the name Zabini pops into Ron's mind as he sees it. Hogwarts. They're from Hogwarts, whatever that was.
"What exactly do you propose we do for him?" Zabini asks, looking down at Ron with an expression that would frighten Thestrals. "He's obviously some kind of transient now. Probably lost what little brains he had. It's not our responsibility, Theodore."
Nott kneels down next to Ron and looks him in the eye. Dirty Slytherin, Ron thinks suddenly, shying away, and then he wonders what a Slytherin is. "I'm going to take the Silencing charm and Body Bind off you," Nott says. "I'll put them right back if you cause any trouble, understand?" He waves his wand - his wand, Ron thinks, elated at seeing one - over Ron's head, and then he can move again. "What are you doing in Paris, Weasley?"
Paris. So it was French that everyone had been screaming at him in. No wonder it had sounded so alien. "He'll come for you too," Ron whispers.
"Weasley!" Nott's voice is sharp. "What are you doing here?"
Ron whimpers at the harsh sound of the voice, wrapping his arms around himself. He doesn't know, he doesn't want to know, he knows too much already.
"What is the point of all this?" asks Zabini, picking at his nails and casting glances up the alley.
Nott casts an exasperated glance at him. "He's the first person from Britain we've seen in over a year, and I'm not about to just walk away and leave him lying in the gutter. Think of all the things he knows about what's happening back at home."
"I don't care about what's happening there."
"Liar."
They glare at each other, and Ron is terrified that they're going to vanish then, that it will turn out that all this has just been some kind of fever dream his mind has created. Even if it's just a dream, it's been so long since anyone has spoken to him, has said words that he understands, has known who he is, that he'd rather have the dream than go back to wandering the streets alone.
"Please don't go," he whispers, and he reaches out to grasp at Nott's shirt sleeve. Nott looks at him and his face softens a little.
Zabini scoffs. "So what, then? You want to take him back to our room and nurse him back to health? Play Healer and patient, feel good about yourself? How very Gryffindor of you, Theodore."
"Come on, Blaise, you know it'll be worth it. We've been running for so long now, we need to know what's happening back there. He can tell us. It would be foolish to just ignore this opportunity."
For a long moment, Zabini glares down at Ron, tapping his wand against his arm. "Fine," he grinds out through his teeth, "but he's not sleeping in our bed. My sense of charity extends only so far."
Nott laughs and hoists Ron to his feet. "You're a saint, Blaise Zabini. I'll take him in side-along then?"
The words side-along ring a bell in Ron's mind, and then he feels a tingling rush engulf his body. At first he wants to sob in relief as he feels the magic surround him again, to rejoice at remembering that yes, he was a wizard, that he too once could do this. Then he realizes, as he is pulled through space, that this is like it was with the shoe, being thrown from one place to another, and he is abandoning her again. He doesn't want to, it was an accident, grabbing the shoe, and now he can't go back for her and he's the worst kind of coward.
"Fucking hell, shut up!"
Zabini is shaking him, slapping him across the face, but Ron pushes past him and rushes towards the door he sees now that the world has taken shape around him again. He's got to get back there, got to make up for it, got to -
"Stupefy!"
The world goes dark.
~
Ron returns to the world in blissfully slow stages. The first is a vague awareness that he is awake and not asleep or dead, accompanied only by the dimmest lightening of the black that he was swimming in before. The second is the realization that he once again remembers next to nothing. He knows that the memories are there, hovering on the edges of his mind, and that if he were to scrabble for them he might be able to piece them together. He won't, and it doesn't seem to matter so much at the moment.
The third stage happens when he opens his eyes to see a dark face in the air above him, gazing down at him. Zabini, Ron remembers, then he registers dimly that he is clean again for the first time in ages, and that he is naked but for a sheet.
"He's awake, Theo," Zabini says, and Nott appears next to him. They stare down at him.
"Why am I naked?" Ron asks, feeling like he should be clutching the sheet up to his neck to protect his virtue. He doesn't move though, instead revelling in the tingling warmth that is infusing his body.
Nott smirks at him as Zabini rolls his eyes. "That's a more Gryffindor response, so I guess you're feeling a bit better. The Cheering Charm is working, then?"
Ron supposes that it must be, and he stretches beneath the sheet. "Guess so," he says. "Still doesn't explain why I'm naked."
"Because we had our wicked way with you while you were unconscious," sneers Zabini.
Ron ponders this for a moment, and thinks he should deck Zabini and head for the door again. "Oh well," he says instead.
Nott chuckles. "It's because I put you in the bath," he says. "You were the filthiest thing I've ever seen, and Blaise wasn't going to have you ruining the furniture."
"Where are my clothes then?"
Nott nods over at a small pile of rags in the corner. Relief washes away a small knot of fear that Ron didn't know was clutching at his heart until now.
"Do you feel good enough to answer some questions now, Weasley?"
"I'm hungry," Ron says. Nott looks over his shoulder at Zabini, who growls but summons a plate with some bread and fruit on it. The sight of food, of real food not picked out of a dumpster or thrown at him, makes Ron's stomach cackle with glee, and then he is tearing into the meal.
"Well this looks familiar," remarks Zabini, throwing himself into a chair. "A Weasley stuffing his face like there's no tomorrow."
"Shove it, Zabini," mumbles Ron through a mouthful of bread.
"And that sounds familiar too," says Nott. "Now listen, Weasley. What are you doing in Paris?"
Ron shrugs, keeping his eyes on the plate.
"How did you get here?"
He shrugs again.
"When did you come?"
A third time, he shrugs. The questions are worrying at that place in his mind where the truth is hiding, and he knows that if he dwells on them too long that the answers will come and drain away the simple goodness of the moment.
Nott sighs. "Listen Weasley, you've got to understand. We haven't seen anyone from home in over a year. You're the first. No one can get in or out of Britain anymore, not that we know of, so no one has any idea of what's going on there. You need to tell us."
"Nothing to tell," Ron mutters. "Don't know anything."
"This is pointless," snaps Zabini. "He doesn't want to tell us."
"Come on, you must know something," Nott says, wheedling. "Last I heard you were out with Potter and Granger, hiding from the Death Eaters. What were you doing?"
"I'm leaving," says Harry, shoving his things into one of the bags Hermione's charmed to be bigger on the inside.
Hermione shakes her head. "No, Harry, you can't. You need us!"
"Don't you understand that it's me he's following?" Harry snaps. "That's how they keep finding us. If I go, the two of you stand a better chance. You can keep looking for the Horcruxes, we'll meet up again later, but I've got to go now."
"Harry, don't!"
"Weasley?"
Ron realizes that his hand is shaking atop the plate, rattling it against the table. He clutches at it with his other hand to make it stop. "I don't remember," he whispers. "Don't make me remember."
Nott gives him a level look, and then summons a small vial to him. "Alright, I won't push you," he says quietly. "Drink this."
"What is it?"
"Dreamless Sleep."
Ron clutches the vial like a priceless treasure and drinks the potion down, careful not to spill a single drop. He sighs happily as the magic soothes away the burning memory, brings him back to that warmth he felt before, and the last thing he sees before he shuts his eyes is Nott and Zabini sharing a look.
~
"There's something wrong with his mind, Blaise. He clearly knows what happened to him, but he's blocked it all out. It's like he's gone insane."
"If one can argue that any of the Weasleys were ever all that sane in the first place."
"Don't be snide. I went and asked a few of the vagrants around where we found him, and they say that he's been here for months, wandering around babbling about being chased and about people dying. I know enough healing magic to know that his body is fine. Physically there's nothing wrong with him besides being starved and dirty, so the problem is in his mind."
"I know what you're asking, and the answer is no."
"Blaise."
"No, Theo."
"Don't be stubborn. I'm not going to just throw him back out on the streets when we can get something from him. Besides, didn't you learn from your mother that honey draws flies better than poison?"
"For the last time, don't bring my mother into this."
"Blaise, you've at least had some training in Legilimency. I haven't. I need you to do it."
"I'm not a Mind Healer."
"Please. I won't let it go, you know."
"Fine. But I won't be able to do anything until he's out of the Dreamless Sleep. However shall we pass the time?"
~
When Ron awakens, the room is only dimly lit by candles, and he can see the lights of the city shining in through the single window. It had been so good to just sleep, to lie in darkness without dreaming for the first time in ages. He stretches languidly with a moan, and then realizes that the moan wasn't his own.
"Quiet, Blaise, you'll wake him." Nott's voice is a harsh whisper.
"He's already awake."
Ron turns his head and sees Zabini and Nott on the bed across the room. Nott is lying on his stomach and Zabini is atop him, and they are both as naked as Ron. Ron watches, his mouth open in shock, as Zabini thrusts in and out of Nott's raised arse, his dark hands digging furrows into Nott's hips as they rut against each other.
"Fuck, stop then, Blaise!" Nott tries to raise himself up and pull away from Zabini, but Zabini presses him down firmly into the bed and lays his whole body flat against him.
"No, I think I like fucking you while he stares at us." Zabini flicks his tongue along Nott's ear and then drags it along his neck to nip at his throat. Nott moans loudly and bucks back against him, all protest gone. Zabini snickers and sits back up, pulling Nott's hips to thrust more deeply into him, and then he looks directly at Ron. "What's the matter, Weasley?" he asks. "No protestations of your eyes being assaulted? No quips about filthy Slytherins? Why so silent?"
Ron sees Harry looming over him in the dark. "What about Hermione?" he asks Harry, reaching up to pull him down atop him.
Harry runs his hands through Ron's hair. "She's in the library, seeing if Sirius' mum had any books about Horcruxes. She'll be at it all night. Just the two of us." He kisses Ron then, and slowly he slides a hand down Ron's stomach and into the front of his pyjamas, grasping at him and laughing in delight into Ron's mouth.
"Or maybe he likes watching us as much as I like fucking you, Theodore," Zabini muses, a sly grin on his face as he looks across the room at Ron. Ron looks down to see a tent in the sheet over his hips, and his face burns in embarrassment.
Nott's eyes open again and fix on Ron as well, and a slow smile spreads across his face. "Looks like he does," he says, grunting a little as Zabini thrusts particularly deep.
Zabini reaches down to pull Nott's body up to rest against his knees and chest, and Ron see's Nott's cock jutting out sharply from his body, flushed and heavy looking. Zabini wraps his hand around it and slowly starts to stroke it. His fingers tease at the foreskin, rubbing the slick wetness around and Zabini draws them up to Nott's mouth, forcing them in. As Nott sucks eagerly at them, Zabini smirks at Ron again.
"He feels so good around my cock, Weasley. So tight and warm. Look at him sucking on my fingers. Theodore is ever so good with his mouth and his tongue. If I weren't already inside him, I'd want to have his mouth on my cock right now."
"Suck it Harry, please. Oh fucking Merlin's balls, suck it now!"
The sheet slips away as Ron's hand wraps around his own cock, making a tight sheath to thrust in as he watches Zabini fuck Nott. The two of them stare back at him as they buck against each other.
"Look how hard he is, Theodore," Zabini whispers in Nott's ear. "Seeing you stretched out over me like this. Wouldn't you like a taste of him? That's why you had us bring him back here, right, so you could wrap your pretty little lips around a big Weasley cock?" Nott looks torn between nodding and punching Zabini in the mouth, but he can't pull his eyes away from Ron. "Come on then, Weasley," hisses Zabini. "What are you waiting for?"
Ron stumbles to his feet and hurries over to the bed to stand in front of them. Zabini guides Nott's head down in front of Ron's cock, and Nott opens his mouth and licks at it. Ron groans happily, and Nott wraps his lips around it then, sucking him fiercely.
He watches as Hermione rides Harry and Harry sucks his cock, and then he leans in to kiss Hermione. It's amazing, the three of them like this, all inside each other in some way. He wishes it wouldn't end.
Zabini is kissing him, not a gentle or passionate kiss like Harry's or Hermione's, but something aggressive and dominating. Ron thinks for a moment about fighting it, but then he just lets himself give into it. It's easier to let Zabini control this, he thinks, to just be a willing part of it and not have to worry or think. As he gives into it, he orgasms with a cry into Zabini's mouth, and spills himself into Nott's. Zabini thrusts a final few times and then climaxes as well, stroking Nott's cock until he joins them.
They collapse into a heap on the bed, breathing heavily and shuddering. After a moment Ron starts to pull himself away, but Nott places a restraining hand on his shoulder. "It's alright," he whispers. "You can stay." Nott drapes an arm over Ron's waist and presses up against his back, and Zabini stretches out a tiny space away from his front. The familiar feeling of being in a bed with two others starts to lull Ron into sleep, and he closes his eyes under the watchful gaze of Zabini.
~
Ron dreams.
"Harry, don't!"
"I love you both and I'm not going to lead the Death Eaters right to you, you understand? Look, I've got an idea where to find the Cup, alright? I need you two to keep the locket safe and figure out what the last Horcrux is. I'll come find you when I'm done."
Harry kisses them both, and Ron wants to hold on to him and never let him leave, but then he's Disapparating, and it's just Hermione and himself left.
"Oh, how very touching. No wonder you weren't put off by Theodore and I. Still, this doesn't explain anything. There's still more. Show me."
"Where do you think he is?" Hermione asks Ron as they lay curled against each other in the dark.
"Dunno," Ron answers, not wanting to talk about Harry.
Hermione fidgets, her fingers grasping at Ron's to hold them more tightly. "We can't wait for him forever, Ron. He told us to keep looking for the Horcruxes, and that's what we need to do."
"Not without Harry."
She sighs. "Ron, I miss him too. But we're not going to help him by just waiting here, hoping he'll come back. You know that."
Fighting back tears, he nods against her back.
"I think there might be something in the Department of Mysteries that can help us destroy the locket. In that locked room that we found. I want to take the locket there tomorrow."
"A locket? Horcruxes? The Department of Mysteries? What else, Weasley? What else are you hiding?"
"How are supposed to open this door, Hermione? Harry's knife melted when he tried to unlock it, remember?"
She smiles at him. "Well, I don't know if it'll work Ron, but Dumbledore told Harry that the power in the room is... well... Love. So I thought, and it sounds very silly now that I'm going to say it out loud, I thought that it might be like the Room of Requirement, where it opens if you need it, and here, if you needed it to open for someone that you loved..."
Ron thinks about it for a moment and then smiles back at her. He takes her hand in his and places them both on the handle of the door. "For Harry," he says.
The door swings open and a warm light spills out, engulfing them both in its glow.
"And then? What happened next?"
Ron runs through the dark corridor, Hermione close on his heels. They've got to get back to the Veil Room, it's where they hid the Portkey, but the Department of Mysteries is even more like a maze than Ron remembered.
"Oh god, they're coming, Ron. Run!"
"No, go back to the room with the light. What happened there?"
Somehow Bellatrix Lestrange has found them, and Ron can hear her voice echoing through the gloom behind them. "Wait for me, little children! Silly little kittens, coming back to the scene of the crime. Should have known better."
He hears Hermione behind him, her breath heaving as she stumbles along. Their wands are the only light, and even the Lumos spells cannot penetrate the blackness much. The dark feels alive, like it is watching them, and just as they tumble into the Veil Room, the Dementors are upon them.
Ron starts to call his Patronus but he is too slow, and the words clump together on his tongue as the Dementors surround him. All the fiery conviction and love he had felt in the Room starts to seep away from him, pulled into eager maws. His wand slips from his fingers and clatters to the ground as he falls to his knees, unable to do anything but stare as a Dementor opens its mouth over his.
"Expecto Patronum!"
A silver otter knocks the cloaked things away from him, swimming in circles through the air around him. Hermione comes forward, her hair a wild cloud about her head illuminated by the light from her outstretched wand. She smiles reassuringly at him and stretches out her hand.
Bellatrix looms suddenly up behind her and points her wand at the back of Hermione's head. "Crucio!" she cries, and cackles as Hermione screams and falls forward, her wand falling from her hand and the otter dissipating into wisps of silver smoke. The Dementors fall upon her in a rush as Ron watches in horror, and he scrabbles on the ground for his own wand. "Oh no, my little bonny boy," says Bellatrix, kicking the wand away from him into the darkness. "I want you to watch while they eat your little Mudblood's soul."
"Help me, Ron!" Hermione screams, reaching out a hand for him. Bellatrix laughs again, and Ron bellows and tackles her legs, taking her to the ground. She loses grip of her wand then and claws at his face, her nails gouging trails of blood around his eyes and blinding him. He can hear Hermione screaming for him still, and he shoves Bellatrix away and lurches forward on his hands and knees, searching the floor for his wand and wiping furiously at his face.
Finally his hand closes around something, but as he lifts it up he knows it is far too big to be his wand. Too late he realizes that it is the old shoe that Hermione had enchanted into a Portkey, and he tries to throw it away from him. As the familiar tug in his stomach starts to draw him into nothing, he sees the Dementors in a writhing swarm over Hermione, and Bellatrix rising to her feet with her wand pointed at him. Dimly he hears her scream, "Confundo!" and then he is gone, tossed across the world.
He lands in a city that is constantly changing shape in front of him, appearing behind a dumpster and vomiting until his stomach is empty and he can only heave up air. The tendrils of Bellatrix's magic are rushing through his mind, blurring everything around him, stealing away their meaning. He rises to his feet and turns to start running, and standing there, looking shocked, is Zabini.
Ron's eyes open and he sees Zabini staring at him, his wand pressed to Ron's forehead. "You bastard!" Ron yells, and he punches Zabini in the face. "You fucking seduce me to get my guard down, and then you play in my mind like it's some kind of puzzle? Fuck you!" Zabini cries out, raising his hands to cover his face, and then Nott pulls Ron off of him.
"Weasley, leave him alone, I told him to do it!"
Ron rips himself from Nott's hands and propels himself over to a chair, pulling himself into a ball on it and letting out a heaving sob. Everything, he remembers everything now. The remaining clouds have faded away under the harsh light of Zabini's prying, and for the first time since he came to this blasted place, Ron doesn't feel broken. For the first time, Ron knows what he's been grieving for.
~
This time when Ron awakes he feels empty. The voices that had been screaming at him for so long, the half remembered snippets of his past that would rear their heads in his addled mind - all silenced. A blanket has been placed over him, and he looks up to see Nott and Zabini sitting on the sofa across from them. They've dressed, and Zabini is holding the tip of his wand to a slowly fading black eye. Saying nothing, Ron rises and goes over to the corner where his tattered clothes are.
"I Scourgified them," Nott says, and Ron just nods and puts them on. "You could borrow some from Blaise, if you wanted."
"No," Ron says.
"Alright." They're all quiet for a long moment, and then Nott leans forward. "Blaise told me everything he saw. What is a Horcrux?"
Ron considers saying nothing, but reflects that, though he's regained his memory, he's still alone and wandless in a city in France. So he sits back down in the chair and he tells them. Not everything, of course - he won't betray Harry's trust like that - but enough to explain the Dark Lord's immortality and how they had been working to stop him.
"So the locket…?"
Smiling bitterly, Ron pulls the lump of metal out of his pocket. He can barely make out the place where the S had been stylized on it. The terrible feeling of dread he used to get from just touching the locket was gone now, and he knows that, though he can't remember exactly what happened in the Room of Love, Hermione had found a way of draining the Horcrux's power away.
Nott reaches out a hand and takes the locket from him. "My father told me once about things you could keep your soul in," he says slowly, examining the locket carefully. "He said that only fools would ever attempt it, as the consequences far outweighed the benefits. You're saying that the Dark Lord made seven of these?"
Ron looks at him curiously. "Why do you ask?"
"Well I can tell you that most of the Purebloods who follow him certainly would think twice about it if they knew." Nott hands the locket back and brushes his hands on the sofa.
Hope surges through Ron's veins. "You think they'd turn against him?"
Nott shrugs. "Perhaps. At any rate, they wouldn't be so eager to support him. Don't know why you people didn't tell anyone." He holds up a hand to forestall Ron's protests. "It doesn't matter. What are you going to do now?"
Ron looks out the window at the lightening sky over Paris. "I should try to get back, I guess," he says. "Don't know how yet. But Harry is still out there, he's got to be. And… I owe it to them, to them both." He looks over at them. "You two could come with me, I reckon. Stop running, maybe? I could use your help."
Nott smiles softly. "I don't think so," he murmurs. "We left to get away from the war. I like you, Weasley, but I don't want to get in the middle of it. It's good to know what's been happening there, but it's not our fight."
"Maybe I could come get you then, when it's done?"
Nott shakes his head. "We won't be here."
Zabini pulls a long, thin box from beneath the sofa and passes it over to Ron. Inside is a wand of burnished mahogany, one that matches the wand that Ron saw Zabini using earlier. "It was my mother's," Zabini says simply, and Ron knows it's the closest thing to an apology Zabini will ever give him. He nods gratefully, feeling the thrum of magic in the wood as he takes it up. "I'll kill you if you break it," Zabini adds before rising to go stare out the window.
Ron laughs a little and considers trying to convince them, but decides to let it go. He grips the wand tightly and heads for the door. "Thanks," he says when he reaches it, not looking back at them. "For helping me remember, even if the way you did it was kind of awful. For giving me back myself."
"You're welcome," says Nott.
Ron rests his hand on the doorknob. It would be so easy to stay, to run away with these two and ignore the war. He'd done enough, certainly. Lost Hermione, maybe lost Harry, lived in squalor for months. No one would begrudge him it.
"Staying or going, Weasley?"
He opens the door.
Author: mr_mercutio
Pairing: Blaise/Theodore/Ron, past Harry/Hermione/Ron
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 5840
Warnings: AU from HBP onwards, implied character death
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters herein are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement is intended.
Summary: Lost in a city he doesn't know and lost in a mind no longer working like it's supposed to, Ron Weasley is rescued by two of the least likely people he'd ever expect to put him back together.
Author’s Notes: This was written for the 2009 hp_summersmut exchange, found here. I've incorporated some elements of Deathly Hallows canon into this story, but please keep in mind that it is definitely AU. It is also fairly dark.
Broken
He is lost in a sea of people, desperate and drowning in the blur of faces and bodies that seem to swim in front of his eyes like runny paint. They give him a wide berth, but he somehow still manages to collide with too many of them, their bodies twitching away from him in horror. Sometimes he grasps at their clothes, wanting to beg them for something, but he can't remember what it is he's supposed to say, and the language in which they shout at him to get away sounds so foreign to him. This whole place is foreign, like an alien city full of people masquerading as human but devoted solely to either ignoring him or making his life hell.
Sure enough, someone shoves him out of their way, pushing him into an alley filled with trash. He knows that he should be retching, that in the before time the smell would be the most revolting thing to him, but now the smell is only an afterthought, subsumed by the odours of his own unwashed body and the screaming voices of the city. He falls to his knees and his hand brushes against an old shoe. It reminds him of something, something that he knows he's forgotten but shouldn't have, and he clasps it to his chest.
He remembers the sensation of being tugged from his stomach, that somehow a shoe pulled him from one place to another, from some terrible dark place to this city of strange noise. He remembers the cold echo of running footsteps in halls of stone, resounding in a room with some kind of fluttering cloth in the center. He remembers the feeling of his heart pounding so hard it seemed it would escape his body and fly away. Most of all he remembers the screaming, screaming from all directions, some of it hers but the majority of it his own.
"Tais-toi!" yells a passer-by at the mouth of the alley, and he realizes belatedly that he is screaming again, rocking back and forth with the shoe pressing into his chest.
"He'll come for you too!" he cries, not knowing who he means but only sure that he has to warn them all. "He's killing them all, he won't stop with Britain, he won't stop at Hogwarts, you've got to believe me!"
Several more people are screaming at him now, jabbering away in words he doesn't understand, and finally he bolts out of the alley, head down and barrelling through the crowds. The shoe slips from his grasp somewhere along the way, but the loss registers only dimly in the back of his mind. It is more important to reach inside the inner pocket of his tattered robes, to clutch at the cold lump of metal he finds there, to make sure it's still there. He doesn't remember why it's important, only that it is. As he scrabbles in his pocket, he loses his balance and trips, hitting the paved ground hard and scraping his face. He can't understand why he's here, why no one will help him at all, and he wishes so much that he could remember where he came from or how he got here, or even his name.
"I say, Blaise, is that a Weasley?"
Weasley. The word is like a beacon to him and he swings his head wildly, looking for the source of the voice that speaks a language he knows, a word he recognizes. Blood trickles down from a cut on his forehead, gumming up his eyes and obscuring the world around him.
"Merlin, I think it. Isn't it the one that always followed Potter around?"
"Ronald, I think."
Ronald? Ron. That is his name, he knows it. The sound of it strikes inside of him like a chime, and he hears the name echoed by her voice.
"Oh God, they're coming, Ron. Run!"
"Help me, Ron!"
He clutches at his head as the voice floods him and he screams, babbling every word he can think of to drown out the sound of it. Then, suddenly, his voice is gone from him, and his body locks in place and falls to the ground.
"Merlin, thank you. He was driving me insane with all that noise. Come along, Theo, let's go."
A cool hand brushes Ron's forehead then, and after a whispered word the blood and grime is gone from his eyes. A pale, narrow face gazes down at him, and Ron recognizes it. His heart leaps into his throat at the thought that finally, finally, he has found something that he remembers.
"We can't just leave him here," says the face, looking back at someone that Ron cannot see. Theo, the other voice called him. Theodore Nott. Ron is sure that is the name of the man above him, someone that he knew from a long time ago. "I mean, look at the state of him."
The other voice lets out a sigh, and then another man draws close to look down at Ron as well. This face is darker than the first, and the name Zabini pops into Ron's mind as he sees it. Hogwarts. They're from Hogwarts, whatever that was.
"What exactly do you propose we do for him?" Zabini asks, looking down at Ron with an expression that would frighten Thestrals. "He's obviously some kind of transient now. Probably lost what little brains he had. It's not our responsibility, Theodore."
Nott kneels down next to Ron and looks him in the eye. Dirty Slytherin, Ron thinks suddenly, shying away, and then he wonders what a Slytherin is. "I'm going to take the Silencing charm and Body Bind off you," Nott says. "I'll put them right back if you cause any trouble, understand?" He waves his wand - his wand, Ron thinks, elated at seeing one - over Ron's head, and then he can move again. "What are you doing in Paris, Weasley?"
Paris. So it was French that everyone had been screaming at him in. No wonder it had sounded so alien. "He'll come for you too," Ron whispers.
"Weasley!" Nott's voice is sharp. "What are you doing here?"
Ron whimpers at the harsh sound of the voice, wrapping his arms around himself. He doesn't know, he doesn't want to know, he knows too much already.
"What is the point of all this?" asks Zabini, picking at his nails and casting glances up the alley.
Nott casts an exasperated glance at him. "He's the first person from Britain we've seen in over a year, and I'm not about to just walk away and leave him lying in the gutter. Think of all the things he knows about what's happening back at home."
"I don't care about what's happening there."
"Liar."
They glare at each other, and Ron is terrified that they're going to vanish then, that it will turn out that all this has just been some kind of fever dream his mind has created. Even if it's just a dream, it's been so long since anyone has spoken to him, has said words that he understands, has known who he is, that he'd rather have the dream than go back to wandering the streets alone.
"Please don't go," he whispers, and he reaches out to grasp at Nott's shirt sleeve. Nott looks at him and his face softens a little.
Zabini scoffs. "So what, then? You want to take him back to our room and nurse him back to health? Play Healer and patient, feel good about yourself? How very Gryffindor of you, Theodore."
"Come on, Blaise, you know it'll be worth it. We've been running for so long now, we need to know what's happening back there. He can tell us. It would be foolish to just ignore this opportunity."
For a long moment, Zabini glares down at Ron, tapping his wand against his arm. "Fine," he grinds out through his teeth, "but he's not sleeping in our bed. My sense of charity extends only so far."
Nott laughs and hoists Ron to his feet. "You're a saint, Blaise Zabini. I'll take him in side-along then?"
The words side-along ring a bell in Ron's mind, and then he feels a tingling rush engulf his body. At first he wants to sob in relief as he feels the magic surround him again, to rejoice at remembering that yes, he was a wizard, that he too once could do this. Then he realizes, as he is pulled through space, that this is like it was with the shoe, being thrown from one place to another, and he is abandoning her again. He doesn't want to, it was an accident, grabbing the shoe, and now he can't go back for her and he's the worst kind of coward.
"Fucking hell, shut up!"
Zabini is shaking him, slapping him across the face, but Ron pushes past him and rushes towards the door he sees now that the world has taken shape around him again. He's got to get back there, got to make up for it, got to -
"Stupefy!"
The world goes dark.
~
Ron returns to the world in blissfully slow stages. The first is a vague awareness that he is awake and not asleep or dead, accompanied only by the dimmest lightening of the black that he was swimming in before. The second is the realization that he once again remembers next to nothing. He knows that the memories are there, hovering on the edges of his mind, and that if he were to scrabble for them he might be able to piece them together. He won't, and it doesn't seem to matter so much at the moment.
The third stage happens when he opens his eyes to see a dark face in the air above him, gazing down at him. Zabini, Ron remembers, then he registers dimly that he is clean again for the first time in ages, and that he is naked but for a sheet.
"He's awake, Theo," Zabini says, and Nott appears next to him. They stare down at him.
"Why am I naked?" Ron asks, feeling like he should be clutching the sheet up to his neck to protect his virtue. He doesn't move though, instead revelling in the tingling warmth that is infusing his body.
Nott smirks at him as Zabini rolls his eyes. "That's a more Gryffindor response, so I guess you're feeling a bit better. The Cheering Charm is working, then?"
Ron supposes that it must be, and he stretches beneath the sheet. "Guess so," he says. "Still doesn't explain why I'm naked."
"Because we had our wicked way with you while you were unconscious," sneers Zabini.
Ron ponders this for a moment, and thinks he should deck Zabini and head for the door again. "Oh well," he says instead.
Nott chuckles. "It's because I put you in the bath," he says. "You were the filthiest thing I've ever seen, and Blaise wasn't going to have you ruining the furniture."
"Where are my clothes then?"
Nott nods over at a small pile of rags in the corner. Relief washes away a small knot of fear that Ron didn't know was clutching at his heart until now.
"Do you feel good enough to answer some questions now, Weasley?"
"I'm hungry," Ron says. Nott looks over his shoulder at Zabini, who growls but summons a plate with some bread and fruit on it. The sight of food, of real food not picked out of a dumpster or thrown at him, makes Ron's stomach cackle with glee, and then he is tearing into the meal.
"Well this looks familiar," remarks Zabini, throwing himself into a chair. "A Weasley stuffing his face like there's no tomorrow."
"Shove it, Zabini," mumbles Ron through a mouthful of bread.
"And that sounds familiar too," says Nott. "Now listen, Weasley. What are you doing in Paris?"
Ron shrugs, keeping his eyes on the plate.
"How did you get here?"
He shrugs again.
"When did you come?"
A third time, he shrugs. The questions are worrying at that place in his mind where the truth is hiding, and he knows that if he dwells on them too long that the answers will come and drain away the simple goodness of the moment.
Nott sighs. "Listen Weasley, you've got to understand. We haven't seen anyone from home in over a year. You're the first. No one can get in or out of Britain anymore, not that we know of, so no one has any idea of what's going on there. You need to tell us."
"Nothing to tell," Ron mutters. "Don't know anything."
"This is pointless," snaps Zabini. "He doesn't want to tell us."
"Come on, you must know something," Nott says, wheedling. "Last I heard you were out with Potter and Granger, hiding from the Death Eaters. What were you doing?"
"I'm leaving," says Harry, shoving his things into one of the bags Hermione's charmed to be bigger on the inside.
Hermione shakes her head. "No, Harry, you can't. You need us!"
"Don't you understand that it's me he's following?" Harry snaps. "That's how they keep finding us. If I go, the two of you stand a better chance. You can keep looking for the Horcruxes, we'll meet up again later, but I've got to go now."
"Harry, don't!"
"Weasley?"
Ron realizes that his hand is shaking atop the plate, rattling it against the table. He clutches at it with his other hand to make it stop. "I don't remember," he whispers. "Don't make me remember."
Nott gives him a level look, and then summons a small vial to him. "Alright, I won't push you," he says quietly. "Drink this."
"What is it?"
"Dreamless Sleep."
Ron clutches the vial like a priceless treasure and drinks the potion down, careful not to spill a single drop. He sighs happily as the magic soothes away the burning memory, brings him back to that warmth he felt before, and the last thing he sees before he shuts his eyes is Nott and Zabini sharing a look.
~
"There's something wrong with his mind, Blaise. He clearly knows what happened to him, but he's blocked it all out. It's like he's gone insane."
"If one can argue that any of the Weasleys were ever all that sane in the first place."
"Don't be snide. I went and asked a few of the vagrants around where we found him, and they say that he's been here for months, wandering around babbling about being chased and about people dying. I know enough healing magic to know that his body is fine. Physically there's nothing wrong with him besides being starved and dirty, so the problem is in his mind."
"I know what you're asking, and the answer is no."
"Blaise."
"No, Theo."
"Don't be stubborn. I'm not going to just throw him back out on the streets when we can get something from him. Besides, didn't you learn from your mother that honey draws flies better than poison?"
"For the last time, don't bring my mother into this."
"Blaise, you've at least had some training in Legilimency. I haven't. I need you to do it."
"I'm not a Mind Healer."
"Please. I won't let it go, you know."
"Fine. But I won't be able to do anything until he's out of the Dreamless Sleep. However shall we pass the time?"
~
When Ron awakens, the room is only dimly lit by candles, and he can see the lights of the city shining in through the single window. It had been so good to just sleep, to lie in darkness without dreaming for the first time in ages. He stretches languidly with a moan, and then realizes that the moan wasn't his own.
"Quiet, Blaise, you'll wake him." Nott's voice is a harsh whisper.
"He's already awake."
Ron turns his head and sees Zabini and Nott on the bed across the room. Nott is lying on his stomach and Zabini is atop him, and they are both as naked as Ron. Ron watches, his mouth open in shock, as Zabini thrusts in and out of Nott's raised arse, his dark hands digging furrows into Nott's hips as they rut against each other.
"Fuck, stop then, Blaise!" Nott tries to raise himself up and pull away from Zabini, but Zabini presses him down firmly into the bed and lays his whole body flat against him.
"No, I think I like fucking you while he stares at us." Zabini flicks his tongue along Nott's ear and then drags it along his neck to nip at his throat. Nott moans loudly and bucks back against him, all protest gone. Zabini snickers and sits back up, pulling Nott's hips to thrust more deeply into him, and then he looks directly at Ron. "What's the matter, Weasley?" he asks. "No protestations of your eyes being assaulted? No quips about filthy Slytherins? Why so silent?"
Ron sees Harry looming over him in the dark. "What about Hermione?" he asks Harry, reaching up to pull him down atop him.
Harry runs his hands through Ron's hair. "She's in the library, seeing if Sirius' mum had any books about Horcruxes. She'll be at it all night. Just the two of us." He kisses Ron then, and slowly he slides a hand down Ron's stomach and into the front of his pyjamas, grasping at him and laughing in delight into Ron's mouth.
"Or maybe he likes watching us as much as I like fucking you, Theodore," Zabini muses, a sly grin on his face as he looks across the room at Ron. Ron looks down to see a tent in the sheet over his hips, and his face burns in embarrassment.
Nott's eyes open again and fix on Ron as well, and a slow smile spreads across his face. "Looks like he does," he says, grunting a little as Zabini thrusts particularly deep.
Zabini reaches down to pull Nott's body up to rest against his knees and chest, and Ron see's Nott's cock jutting out sharply from his body, flushed and heavy looking. Zabini wraps his hand around it and slowly starts to stroke it. His fingers tease at the foreskin, rubbing the slick wetness around and Zabini draws them up to Nott's mouth, forcing them in. As Nott sucks eagerly at them, Zabini smirks at Ron again.
"He feels so good around my cock, Weasley. So tight and warm. Look at him sucking on my fingers. Theodore is ever so good with his mouth and his tongue. If I weren't already inside him, I'd want to have his mouth on my cock right now."
"Suck it Harry, please. Oh fucking Merlin's balls, suck it now!"
The sheet slips away as Ron's hand wraps around his own cock, making a tight sheath to thrust in as he watches Zabini fuck Nott. The two of them stare back at him as they buck against each other.
"Look how hard he is, Theodore," Zabini whispers in Nott's ear. "Seeing you stretched out over me like this. Wouldn't you like a taste of him? That's why you had us bring him back here, right, so you could wrap your pretty little lips around a big Weasley cock?" Nott looks torn between nodding and punching Zabini in the mouth, but he can't pull his eyes away from Ron. "Come on then, Weasley," hisses Zabini. "What are you waiting for?"
Ron stumbles to his feet and hurries over to the bed to stand in front of them. Zabini guides Nott's head down in front of Ron's cock, and Nott opens his mouth and licks at it. Ron groans happily, and Nott wraps his lips around it then, sucking him fiercely.
He watches as Hermione rides Harry and Harry sucks his cock, and then he leans in to kiss Hermione. It's amazing, the three of them like this, all inside each other in some way. He wishes it wouldn't end.
Zabini is kissing him, not a gentle or passionate kiss like Harry's or Hermione's, but something aggressive and dominating. Ron thinks for a moment about fighting it, but then he just lets himself give into it. It's easier to let Zabini control this, he thinks, to just be a willing part of it and not have to worry or think. As he gives into it, he orgasms with a cry into Zabini's mouth, and spills himself into Nott's. Zabini thrusts a final few times and then climaxes as well, stroking Nott's cock until he joins them.
They collapse into a heap on the bed, breathing heavily and shuddering. After a moment Ron starts to pull himself away, but Nott places a restraining hand on his shoulder. "It's alright," he whispers. "You can stay." Nott drapes an arm over Ron's waist and presses up against his back, and Zabini stretches out a tiny space away from his front. The familiar feeling of being in a bed with two others starts to lull Ron into sleep, and he closes his eyes under the watchful gaze of Zabini.
~
Ron dreams.
"Harry, don't!"
"I love you both and I'm not going to lead the Death Eaters right to you, you understand? Look, I've got an idea where to find the Cup, alright? I need you two to keep the locket safe and figure out what the last Horcrux is. I'll come find you when I'm done."
Harry kisses them both, and Ron wants to hold on to him and never let him leave, but then he's Disapparating, and it's just Hermione and himself left.
"Oh, how very touching. No wonder you weren't put off by Theodore and I. Still, this doesn't explain anything. There's still more. Show me."
"Where do you think he is?" Hermione asks Ron as they lay curled against each other in the dark.
"Dunno," Ron answers, not wanting to talk about Harry.
Hermione fidgets, her fingers grasping at Ron's to hold them more tightly. "We can't wait for him forever, Ron. He told us to keep looking for the Horcruxes, and that's what we need to do."
"Not without Harry."
She sighs. "Ron, I miss him too. But we're not going to help him by just waiting here, hoping he'll come back. You know that."
Fighting back tears, he nods against her back.
"I think there might be something in the Department of Mysteries that can help us destroy the locket. In that locked room that we found. I want to take the locket there tomorrow."
"A locket? Horcruxes? The Department of Mysteries? What else, Weasley? What else are you hiding?"
"How are supposed to open this door, Hermione? Harry's knife melted when he tried to unlock it, remember?"
She smiles at him. "Well, I don't know if it'll work Ron, but Dumbledore told Harry that the power in the room is... well... Love. So I thought, and it sounds very silly now that I'm going to say it out loud, I thought that it might be like the Room of Requirement, where it opens if you need it, and here, if you needed it to open for someone that you loved..."
Ron thinks about it for a moment and then smiles back at her. He takes her hand in his and places them both on the handle of the door. "For Harry," he says.
The door swings open and a warm light spills out, engulfing them both in its glow.
"And then? What happened next?"
Ron runs through the dark corridor, Hermione close on his heels. They've got to get back to the Veil Room, it's where they hid the Portkey, but the Department of Mysteries is even more like a maze than Ron remembered.
"Oh god, they're coming, Ron. Run!"
"No, go back to the room with the light. What happened there?"
Somehow Bellatrix Lestrange has found them, and Ron can hear her voice echoing through the gloom behind them. "Wait for me, little children! Silly little kittens, coming back to the scene of the crime. Should have known better."
He hears Hermione behind him, her breath heaving as she stumbles along. Their wands are the only light, and even the Lumos spells cannot penetrate the blackness much. The dark feels alive, like it is watching them, and just as they tumble into the Veil Room, the Dementors are upon them.
Ron starts to call his Patronus but he is too slow, and the words clump together on his tongue as the Dementors surround him. All the fiery conviction and love he had felt in the Room starts to seep away from him, pulled into eager maws. His wand slips from his fingers and clatters to the ground as he falls to his knees, unable to do anything but stare as a Dementor opens its mouth over his.
"Expecto Patronum!"
A silver otter knocks the cloaked things away from him, swimming in circles through the air around him. Hermione comes forward, her hair a wild cloud about her head illuminated by the light from her outstretched wand. She smiles reassuringly at him and stretches out her hand.
Bellatrix looms suddenly up behind her and points her wand at the back of Hermione's head. "Crucio!" she cries, and cackles as Hermione screams and falls forward, her wand falling from her hand and the otter dissipating into wisps of silver smoke. The Dementors fall upon her in a rush as Ron watches in horror, and he scrabbles on the ground for his own wand. "Oh no, my little bonny boy," says Bellatrix, kicking the wand away from him into the darkness. "I want you to watch while they eat your little Mudblood's soul."
"Help me, Ron!" Hermione screams, reaching out a hand for him. Bellatrix laughs again, and Ron bellows and tackles her legs, taking her to the ground. She loses grip of her wand then and claws at his face, her nails gouging trails of blood around his eyes and blinding him. He can hear Hermione screaming for him still, and he shoves Bellatrix away and lurches forward on his hands and knees, searching the floor for his wand and wiping furiously at his face.
Finally his hand closes around something, but as he lifts it up he knows it is far too big to be his wand. Too late he realizes that it is the old shoe that Hermione had enchanted into a Portkey, and he tries to throw it away from him. As the familiar tug in his stomach starts to draw him into nothing, he sees the Dementors in a writhing swarm over Hermione, and Bellatrix rising to her feet with her wand pointed at him. Dimly he hears her scream, "Confundo!" and then he is gone, tossed across the world.
He lands in a city that is constantly changing shape in front of him, appearing behind a dumpster and vomiting until his stomach is empty and he can only heave up air. The tendrils of Bellatrix's magic are rushing through his mind, blurring everything around him, stealing away their meaning. He rises to his feet and turns to start running, and standing there, looking shocked, is Zabini.
Ron's eyes open and he sees Zabini staring at him, his wand pressed to Ron's forehead. "You bastard!" Ron yells, and he punches Zabini in the face. "You fucking seduce me to get my guard down, and then you play in my mind like it's some kind of puzzle? Fuck you!" Zabini cries out, raising his hands to cover his face, and then Nott pulls Ron off of him.
"Weasley, leave him alone, I told him to do it!"
Ron rips himself from Nott's hands and propels himself over to a chair, pulling himself into a ball on it and letting out a heaving sob. Everything, he remembers everything now. The remaining clouds have faded away under the harsh light of Zabini's prying, and for the first time since he came to this blasted place, Ron doesn't feel broken. For the first time, Ron knows what he's been grieving for.
~
This time when Ron awakes he feels empty. The voices that had been screaming at him for so long, the half remembered snippets of his past that would rear their heads in his addled mind - all silenced. A blanket has been placed over him, and he looks up to see Nott and Zabini sitting on the sofa across from them. They've dressed, and Zabini is holding the tip of his wand to a slowly fading black eye. Saying nothing, Ron rises and goes over to the corner where his tattered clothes are.
"I Scourgified them," Nott says, and Ron just nods and puts them on. "You could borrow some from Blaise, if you wanted."
"No," Ron says.
"Alright." They're all quiet for a long moment, and then Nott leans forward. "Blaise told me everything he saw. What is a Horcrux?"
Ron considers saying nothing, but reflects that, though he's regained his memory, he's still alone and wandless in a city in France. So he sits back down in the chair and he tells them. Not everything, of course - he won't betray Harry's trust like that - but enough to explain the Dark Lord's immortality and how they had been working to stop him.
"So the locket…?"
Smiling bitterly, Ron pulls the lump of metal out of his pocket. He can barely make out the place where the S had been stylized on it. The terrible feeling of dread he used to get from just touching the locket was gone now, and he knows that, though he can't remember exactly what happened in the Room of Love, Hermione had found a way of draining the Horcrux's power away.
Nott reaches out a hand and takes the locket from him. "My father told me once about things you could keep your soul in," he says slowly, examining the locket carefully. "He said that only fools would ever attempt it, as the consequences far outweighed the benefits. You're saying that the Dark Lord made seven of these?"
Ron looks at him curiously. "Why do you ask?"
"Well I can tell you that most of the Purebloods who follow him certainly would think twice about it if they knew." Nott hands the locket back and brushes his hands on the sofa.
Hope surges through Ron's veins. "You think they'd turn against him?"
Nott shrugs. "Perhaps. At any rate, they wouldn't be so eager to support him. Don't know why you people didn't tell anyone." He holds up a hand to forestall Ron's protests. "It doesn't matter. What are you going to do now?"
Ron looks out the window at the lightening sky over Paris. "I should try to get back, I guess," he says. "Don't know how yet. But Harry is still out there, he's got to be. And… I owe it to them, to them both." He looks over at them. "You two could come with me, I reckon. Stop running, maybe? I could use your help."
Nott smiles softly. "I don't think so," he murmurs. "We left to get away from the war. I like you, Weasley, but I don't want to get in the middle of it. It's good to know what's been happening there, but it's not our fight."
"Maybe I could come get you then, when it's done?"
Nott shakes his head. "We won't be here."
Zabini pulls a long, thin box from beneath the sofa and passes it over to Ron. Inside is a wand of burnished mahogany, one that matches the wand that Ron saw Zabini using earlier. "It was my mother's," Zabini says simply, and Ron knows it's the closest thing to an apology Zabini will ever give him. He nods gratefully, feeling the thrum of magic in the wood as he takes it up. "I'll kill you if you break it," Zabini adds before rising to go stare out the window.
Ron laughs a little and considers trying to convince them, but decides to let it go. He grips the wand tightly and heads for the door. "Thanks," he says when he reaches it, not looking back at them. "For helping me remember, even if the way you did it was kind of awful. For giving me back myself."
"You're welcome," says Nott.
Ron rests his hand on the doorknob. It would be so easy to stay, to run away with these two and ignore the war. He'd done enough, certainly. Lost Hermione, maybe lost Harry, lived in squalor for months. No one would begrudge him it.
"Staying or going, Weasley?"
He opens the door.