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lomonaaerenTitle: Liar’s Mask
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Harry/Ginny, Ron/Hermione, Draco/Astoria
Warnings: Infidelity, angst, violence. Epilogue-compliant.
Rating: R
Wordcount: 19,000
Summary: Ron is the one who goes through Harry’s private possessions after his death, because that’s what a best friend should do. And what he finds shakes his belief in Harry to the foundations.
Author’s Notes: Some parts of this fic are in letter form, and it is highly angsty, with deliberate infidelity.
Liar’s Mask
Ron stepped, at last, into Harry’s study.
The walls were painted a dusky red that would have reminded Ron of the Gryffindor common room a few weeks ago and now only reminded him of Harry’s exposed heart in the center of his chest. Who would have thought a Blasting Curse could be used that way, to tear open someone’s flesh and—
Ron didn’t have to finish the thought, it had worn itself so deeply into his mind. Hermione said that the more often you thought and did certain things, the more attached you became to them, and they literally carved pathways in your brain, so that it was easier to think and do them again. Ron had never more than half-believed her until this month since Harry’s murder.
He stood in the doorway, hands braced against the frame, and looked around slowly. There were shelves everywhere, books on tracking and stealth and disguises and famous cases that Harry had bought during Auror training and never got rid of. Ron shook his head with a smile that wouldn’t come. That was Harry, all right, stolid all the way through and not much interested in anything outside his family and his friends and his career.
His desk sat in the center of things, pointed right at a large window, so Harry could look out and watch his children playing in the garden. The lattice on the window still shimmered softly with wards and charms. Ron nodded. That made sense. After all that assassination attempts—
And the one that got through—
Again, Ron let the thought trail off, because it was so busy carving a pathway for itself that it might as well spill along it, and then he turned and reached for the desk. The top was still scattered with paper, but not as much as it had been all the times that Ron had come to visit Harry here. By now, a month after his death, all the files for cases he’d been working on had been turned over to others, and Ginny had taken the photographs of the children, the madly waving one of his parents with baby Harry, their wedding picture.
Ron stacked up the inscrutable notes on cases Harry had left, and the doodles of people who all looked like Umbridge. There were a few half-written letters, too, and some old Daily Prophets. Ron shook his head when he noticed that Harry had cut out Rita Skeeter’s name from the articles she’d written, but not the articles themselves. Apparently he’d been keeping these for clues on the criminals he was hunting or just for information purposes.
Ron waved his wand to put the piles of notes off to the sides and then hesitated, looking at the drawers. He could go through them much faster with charms. Just a few whisks and a few chants, and they would all be done and neat, near the door, and he could leave. For that matter, he could have cleared the desk that way, too.
But he had gone through the papers on the desk slowly, with his hands, for a reason, and he wanted to do the same with the drawers. He put his wand on the newly-cleaned and shining cherry surface, and opened the top drawer.
It turned out to be filled with sweets. Ron stared, then snickered. Ginny had told Harry not to keep those in the kitchen because they would tempt the children, but there was no reason to stop Harry from hiding them in his private sanctum.
Off to the right was a package of sherbet lemons. Ron reached down, wanting one in celebration of Harry and Dumbledore and because the sting of sour candy on his lips would give him something else to think about.
His hand rebounded. Ron blinked, then tried to reach them again. He was imagining things. Not surprising, with all the sleepless nights since Harry’s death.
No. There was a ward around the packet of sherbet lemons, one that kept stinging Ron as he touched it. He leaned back on the chair, Harry’s old seat with its Muggle swivel and thick, dusty red cushion, and shook his head. Were the ants or the sneaking little hands that might reach into the drawer that persistent?
However, it ought to be a simple matter to disperse the ward. Ron didn’t really have to, but damn it, he wanted a sherbet lemon. It was a new thought in the middle of all the clustering old ones, a new path.
“Finite Incantatem,” he said, and tapped his wand towards the ward without touching it.
The ward spat, and shimmered, and grew. Now an iron bowl enclosed the sherbet lemons from sight, and Ron could feel stronger magic behind the sleek metal surface. He shivered. Harry had used some common Auror spells in here, too, it seemed; the sensation of watching eyes pried at the back of Ron’s neck.
“Seeing things,” Ron said, and cast the Finite again.
The iron bowl firmed, the sheen of the metal growing to the point that Ron had to shield his eyes and look away. And the glow on the bowl was echoed, he noticed now, from several other points in the room, as though shimmering flakes of dust clung to the books and the shelves, and grew brighter in sympathy with the ward he was disturbing.
Ron took a deep breath. You shouldn’t disturb the secrets of the dead, went one old pathway through his mind. It was one reason he had never pressed Harry to tell him everything about Dumbledore’s past and motives.
But there were things missing from the documents and Harry’s personal possessions, said the thought that was a month old, and it would soothe Ginny and the children to have them. Ron took a step back and closed his eyes for a second.
He could call up more magical strength, when he wanted to. It was just that it took time, so it wasn’t much use in the cut-and-take of battle, and as he grew older and out of some of the more dangerous Auror fieldwork, there was less need for it than ever before. Hermione knew, because she knew everything, but she mostly liked watching him cast complex spells she’d told him about from old books.
Ron breathed steadily now, feeling the magic that would ordinarily power three or four spells rise up in him, like a heat shimmer from pavement. Then he aimed his wand at the iron bowl and hissed, “Finite Incantatem, fucker.”
The ward blew apart, making Ron stagger and have to slap out a minor fire on the drawer’s rim. Other wards chattered now, from the direction of the shelves. Ron smiled as he murmured the incantation for Muffliato and dimmed the sounds by the hissing in his own ears. At least Harry had made sure that no one could sneak in here and sneak out again undetected even if they managed to break the ward.
All his caution hadn’t been enough to save him, in the end.
Ron swallowed back the queasy feeling rising up his throat and reached down to scoop up the packet of sherbet lemons that the cracking of the ward had revealed. Except that his fingers met paper, and he stared as the last shreds of magic fell from his eyes and he realized that some of them had maintained an illusion.
There was a small, thick pile of letters behind the ward, wrapped with a pale green ribbon that Ron thought had faded from some richer color. He picked them up and turned them around. No names were visible, but Ron could make out some of the letters through the paper. Someone had pressed the ink into the parchment with vicious scratches.
He sat down on the chair, wondering as he went if he should look at them. These might be love letters from Harry to Ginny, or the other way around. It made sense that Harry would keep them, sentimental old thing that he was.
But the ribbon and the scratches of ink he could see made Ron’s fingers twitch. It didn’t seem like a great idea to him to show these letters to Ginny until he was sure what they were. He slid the top one out from under the ribbon and unfolded it. The writing, firm and dark though it was, was easy enough to read.
*
Dear wanker,
You can’t possibly think that I’m going to consent to anything like that? We’ve talked and talked about this, if you remember. Your “plan” for me to abandon my family and join you is as stupid as any other that you’ve ever come up with.
Think with your big head and not your little one. When I used to propose that kind of thing, you would laugh at me and point out, rightly, that I was stupid to even be thinking of it. What changed your mind?
Harry.
*
Ron sat there with the letter for a long time after he finished reading it. His fingers rested on the parchment below the second paragraph, and all he could do was read the sentences over and over again, while indignation rose like scalding water inside him.
Harry had written to a bloke.
And it sounded as though it was a bloke he had been prepared to abandon Ginny and the kids for, at one point in time.
Ron closed his eyes and sat there while new thoughts cut through the old ones. It wasn’t as much of a relief as he had hoped it would be a little while ago, when he would have given a lot for something to distract him from his grief. These new thoughts made him rethink the past, but not the old memories that had comforted him so much during the last month, the thoughts of Hogwarts and the way he and Harry had been Aurors together, and the times when he had watched Harry play with Lily and run with Al on his shoulders and talk snakes with Jamie, the only one of his children who had inherited his Parseltongue.
That past was false. That past was a lie.
No, it’s not, Ron thought stubbornly a moment later, when he became aware of how his mind was tending. No, it’s not, just because Harry wrote to someone else. These letters look really old. And how did he get all of them, if he sent them to someone else? He must have asked for them back, and that means he got angry and embarrassed at himself and took them back and rededicated himself to Ginny and their marriage.
That thought lay in Ron’s mind, glittering and bright as a silver knife, for only a few moments before it tarnished. So, if Harry had got the letters back so his unknown correspondent wouldn’t use them against him, and he regretted their existence, why hadn’t he destroyed them? Why keep them under a powerful ward?
Why not confess everything to Ginny, make a clean breast of it? The man Ron thought he knew would have.
Maybe he did. Maybe these letters would be old news to her.
Ron opened his eyes, and shivered. The flecks of light on the bookshelves had died, and Ron didn’t think he could find them again. Besides, maybe they were only meant as part of the ward, and didn’t signify anything more than that.
Hoping harder than he had since the end of the war, Ron stood up and left the study, tucking the letters under his cloak. He was going to show them to Hermione, and then she would study them and give him a wise answer that would explain everything that was troubling him, and everything would be all right again.
*
Ron waited until he heard Hermione’s breathing go soft and quiet beside him, and then he stood up, cast a Lumos that he shielded with his hand cupped around the end of his wand, and made his stealthy way out of their bedroom and into his own study, where he had put the letters.
Ron had never thought he’d want an office outside the Ministry, but the library in their house was Hermione’s place, dominated by books bristling with folded sheets of paper and notes pinned to the covers with abbreviations such as Check H. C.! and What about dragons’ eyes? Ron couldn’t work there. And they no longer had Rose and Hugo with them and running shrieking up and down the stairs all the time. It was possible to find quiet in the house. Ron had chosen to take over a room that Hermione had used as storage for extra books.
His chair was more comfortable than Harry’s, his desk smaller, his bookshelves less expensive. Ron sat down and picked up the upside-down bowl on his desktop. The nice thing about marrying someone who was so much less interested in cooking than his mum was that she didn’t notice when the dishes were carried out of the kitchen, either. And of course they didn’t have house-elves to do it for them.
Ron played with the bowl for a second, and wondered why he hadn’t chosen a ward like Harry’s. But that was a new thought that died under the claws of an old one. Because he couldn’t bear to keep anything from Hermione after fifteen years of marriage, not really, and if she had come into the room, noticed the bowl, and turned it over, then the secret would be out and the decision made—the one he couldn’t make after all.
“I haven’t made it yet,” Ron whispered, and undid the ribbon, letting the letters fall apart. Even then, the creases and the folds were crisp enough that they mostly stayed together. Ron wondered if there was any significance to the order, and unfolded two of them to peer at their tops. They weren’t dated. Maybe Harry had just put them in the order he’d received them.
And then Ron sat there some more, because he wasn’t twelve anymore and wouldn’t jump down the entrance to the legendary Chamber of Secrets if it opened in front of him. And this silent pile of letters scared him more than the Chamber ever had.
It doesn’t destroy him. It doesn’t make him evil. It just means there’s a shadow to the face he showed me and his family and Hermione and all the rest of them. Another side.
That, he had to admit, reassured him only a little. Harry had always seemed so sharp and clear-cut, in full sunshine, without shadows. Since the war, he didn’t even lie to the press. He just refused to talk about things that he didn’t want to talk about, and they were the ones who spun the rumors out of fine air.
Ron wondered, now, why he’d never thought it was weird that Harry didn’t cast shadows. Everyone had them. Him and his jealousy of his brothers and the way he had left Harry and Hermione during the war, which they never talked about, even though he knew Hermione had forgiven him for it long ago. The way Hermione had Memory Charmed her parents; their relationship with her was never right again after that, even though she had managed to find them and give their memories back.
But not Harry. He always shone.
But the brightest light cast the deepest shadows.
Ron spent several minutes trying to remember which of Hermione’s books he’d read that in, and then gave up and unfolded the second letter in the pile, the one right beneath Harry’s that talked about how stupid the other person was.
And he found confirmation right away, confirmation that shattered the neat mirror of Harry’s life into a thousand shivering pieces.
*
Dearest, stupidest Potter,
You can’t imagine that I’d ask you to abandon. The very word has a tinge of the musty about it, a tinge of that mad old house with my mad old ancestors that you spend so much time complaining about.
There is no reason and no right to abandon them. But I have the reason and the right to ask for more than you are giving me. You know what I agreed to, and you know how you and not I changed the agreement. I do demand that you pay back what you have taken from me.
Or does a Gryffindor not pay his debts?
Draco.
*
Ron sat there, and only shock, he knew, had prevented him from closing his fingers so that they crumpled and tore the letter he held.
What? What? What?
The words echoed down the corridors of his mind, and found no answer. This was a completely new thought, yes. So new it made Ron sick, as he sat there and tried to contemplate how Harry could have been—fucking, or at least writing like he was fucking, Draco Malfoy.
I’m jumping to conclusions, though. Maybe it was some negotiation to try and get Malfoy back to the light, gone wrong.
That made little sense when Ron thought about it, though, because for the last twenty-two years, Malfoy had been boringly respectable. Ron had to use the memories of the blood feud and how poorly Malfoy’s ancestors had treated his to keep his old hatred alive and warn his kids away from Malfoy’s. It didn’t help that apparently Scorpius and Rose had a friendly rivalry over marks and Scorpius had helped Lily through her first year, the past year.
So why was he writing to him?
Ron decided, slowly, that it still couldn’t be what he thought. Harry had his shadows, sure, and maybe he was better at keeping them out of sight than Ron had thought, but what he wasn’t was a good liar. If he was cheating on Ginny, then the truth would have come out eventually.
And Ginny would have left him, and his children might have felt betrayed enough never to see him again. They would have been bitter and angry beyond words. I don’t even want to think what it would have done to our family.
Ron shook his head and turned the first letter over to look at it again. Was that one of the things Harry had meant? He couldn’t abandon his family by telling them the truth? So he was going to keep it secret no matter what Malfoy wanted him to do?
But that only led back to the question of how he had managed to keep it secret. Ron just didn’t think it was in Harry.
Maybe Malfoy had threatened him. The reference to debts in his letter made Ron wonder if Malfoy had started the correspondence in the first place by asking for it as payment. Harry owed him a life-debt from the war, and owed Mrs. Malfoy one. Malfoy could have encroached on Harry’s life in that way, and made more and more of a place for himself.
But that ran into another objection, another carved mask of Harry that Ron had hanging up in the corridors of his mind. Harry didn’t lie down for anyone, after the war. He could smile and bend if he had to, the way he did to senior Ministry officials, and smile as he refused someone a favor, but he didn’t yield to stupid people the way that Ron was imagining him doing to Malfoy. Most of the time, he found something else that the person asking the favor was happy to accept in trade, and they went on their way not even knowing what Harry had gained in return.
Why would he give in to Malfoy, of all people? Ron had asked him once if he thought they could be friends with Malfoy, and Harry had rolled his eyes.
“Someone like him wouldn’t accept something like friendship,” Harry had said, looking over his shoulder to make sure that their instructors wouldn’t hear them. They weren’t supposed to be talking about anything but Auror work during this phase of their training. “He would want something more. All or nothing. Probably for us to grovel at his feet.”
All or nothing.
Ron looked at the letters, and swallowed.
Then he reached for the next one, the third one, beneath the letter that Malfoy had sent to Harry.
*
You pitiless wanker,
Don’t you think this is the best compromise I can make? If I were really paying my debts, I would have fobbed you off with that promotion you wanted me to get for you once, and fobbed your mother off with a necklace or a pardon for your dad. And you would have done something to pay me back for pulling you from a fire, which, please notice, you have never actually done. And you change the subject whenever I want to discuss it, too.
But the arrangement we have has worked well for years. If you want something more than that, you know what I’ve invited you to do more than once.
Harry.
*
“An arrangement of cheating?” Ron said aloud. “Is that what you thought about it, Harry?”
“Ron? What are you talking about?”
Ron started and turned around. Hermione didn’t usually miss him during the night if he left the bed—which he sometimes did, just because the old thoughts were best soothed by Auror training exercises—but now she clung to the doorframe of the library and rubbed sleep from and into her eyes. She was yawning. Ron shoved the letters back together under the bowl and stood up, shielding them from sight.
Well, there’s my decision about whether or not to tell Hermione right now made, he thought, and had to shake his head.
“There are some things that I’m discovering about the way Harry gambled with those blokes down at the pub that are disturbing to me,” Ron said, surprised by how easily the lie came to him. He wondered if Harry had been better than Ron thought at lies of omission, just not mentioning the subject or turning away from it when someone’s conversation could lead there. Ron had to do the opposite, because someone always seemed to overhear him. “I don’t—I thought I could handle it better. It’s been a month.”
Hermione’s face softened, and she opened her arms to him. “It’s never enough time,” she whispered into Ron’s ear, as their heads came to rest together and Ron tasted her breath, more familiar to him than his own. “And I’m sure it’s nothing too bad. Harry could never do anything too bad.”
Ron shut his eyes, and held her, and wished that he still agreed.
*
The letters went with Ron to work the next day, burning against his side like guilt. He had cast a glamour on the packet so that no one looking at his robe from the outside could notice the square shape, and then had felt stupid enough to keep his wand hovering near the glamour all the way through the Floo trip and the ride up the lift.
But not stupid enough to actually remove it.
Ron sat down at his desk and locked the door with a quick charm. He still didn’t have another partner now that Harry was—gone, and anyone who tried to come in and found the door locked would be understanding.
Ron paused as he thought about that. It triggered something else in him, another old thought that fell like an apple from a tree, and he had to wait before he understood what the memory was.
Times the office door was locked when he came back from lunch. He always took a longer lunch than Harry because he would usually meet Hermione and, when they were still at home, Rosie and Hugo, and they’d talk. So when he came back and the door was locked, Ron had assumed Harry was absorbed in a case, or a talk with one of the higher-level Ministry functionaries who only wanted to chat to the Boy-Who-Lived, and go for a walk.
Maybe it wasn’t that. Harry had never explained, just nodded when Ron said something about it and murmured that he was grateful to Ron for staying out.
What had been happening there?
Ron glared at the letters. Stupid things. He ought to have burned them the minute he found them, or at least when he realized they weren’t from Harry to Ginny. Now he had to go back over his best friend’s whole life and wonder what else he had missed, what shadows were hiding there under the grinning mask.
And still he ran into trouble believing it, despite the evidence in parchment and ink. Harry wasn’t a good liar. He wasn’t someone who would cheat on his wife. He didn’t hate his kids. Ron was sure, utterly sure, from the way he had seen Harry watching Ginny when they were at family gatherings, that Harry hadn’t been in love with someone else and using Ginny as a convenient substitute.
Which left a whole lot of questions about who they had really buried a month ago.
Ron sighed, and pulled out the letter that, by its position in the pack, should be one from Malfoy. They were obviously in the middle of a conversation, but he was a trained Auror. He should be able to pick up things like what their little references to different events meant.
What’s going to give me more trouble than anything else is accepting those clues, not spotting them.
*
Harry,
I’m not going to divorce Astoria.
You don’t understand. The problems in my marriage aren’t the same as the ones in yours. Your wife knows part of you, but not the whole, and would feel betrayed to know you were concealing the rest. My wife simply doesn’t care.
We work very well together. We’re sexually compatible, we care about some of the same things—enough to have interesting dinner table conversations—and we both adore Scorpius and money. That doesn’t mean we have to be passionate lovers. I find it unreasonable that you say I should leave my wife, and then you’ll leave yours.
We both know that won’t happen. There’s only one reason you would leave her, and that would be because you wanted to.
We’re edging nearer to that, aren’t we? I know the look I saw in your eyes at Closecopse.
Draco.
*
Ron sat back. “Closecopse,” he whispered. He remembered the name of the tiny wizarding village that was somewhere in Wales, near the Welsh border, he thought, but he knew he and Harry had never investigated a case there. Every village or town or city where they had was marked in his mind with a red stain.
The biggest red stain of all was on the London street off Diagon Alley where Harry had died.
“Why would Harry and Malfoy go to Closecopse?” Ron asked aloud, since he thought better that way, and Hermione wasn’t around to overhear him. “It would be easier to stay behind their wards, probably at Malfoy Manor.”
Which means I’ve accepted that Harry was fucking Malfoy.
Ron sighed slowly, in and out, and then shook his head. Maybe he had, but that didn’t answer the question. And the letter only confirmed that, yes, it was divorcing Astoria that Harry had hinted Malfoy should do, and that Malfoy was an utter wanker.
Not if Harry was with him.
Ron scrubbed briskly at his face. It was bad enough when Hermione put horrible images of house-elf sex in his head—she was currently fighting for their right to “choose their own mates”—or when Rosie talked cheerfully at the dinner table about the animal dissections she was interested in. Now he was doing it to himself.
But it gave him a tangible term, and Ron found that he couldn’t face the other letters right now, not now that he had a clue. Of course he could have gone and asked Malfoy, but that wasn’t right. What was he going to say? “How dare you bang my best friend and encourage him to cheat on his wife?”
Because it might have started with repaying a life-debt—but Ron didn’t really think so anymore—but Malfoy could never have bound Harry to something like this against Harry’s own free will. Ron had that much trust in Harry’s strength and the way Harry knew his own mind since the war.
Even if I don’t have much trust in anything else, anymore.
*
Ron appeared with a pop on Closecopse’s Apparition point and took a moment to look around. The village was a cluster of ten or twenty houses, all of them built of brick and stone, all of them with sharply-peaked roofs with wards gleaming around them that Ron would have expected to see in the more sensitive areas of Gringotts.
First mystery, then. Ron wandered towards the outskirts of the village as though out to sightsee or admire the scrubby groups of oaks, trying to recall what Malfoy did. Worked in finance or something, he thought. There could have been a mystery near here, an Auror case that prompted everyone to guard their houses, but that was still no reason for Malfoy to come along.
He listened quietly, but could hear only a few conversations, and a sound like sheep bleating. Maybe it really was sheep, for all he knew. Ron had to admit he knew very little about life in wizarding villages this isolated. Ottery St. Catchpole was a lot bigger, and there was no way that you could compare it to something like Diagon Alley or Hogsmeade.
He paused when someone came around the corner of a house and stopped dead at seeing him. The person was a witch with straggling blonde hair that looked as if it had fallen out of a much more elaborate hairstyle and a basket over her arm. She aimed her wand at him as Ron watched.
Ron took a step back and raised a Shield Charm in front of himself. The woman didn’t seem to have recognized his Auror robes, which was more confirmation that something had happened here. Or maybe someone dressed in Auror robes had committed a crime.
It had better not have been Harry.
How strange, now, that he had leaped automatically to assuming Harry could, when for so long he would have assumed the opposite.
“Who are you?” the woman asked. She had gone a little more relaxed at the sight of Ron’s Shield Charm, maybe just because it was defensive instead of offensive.
“My name is Ron Weasley,” Ron said. “Auror,” he added after a moment. “My partner was Harry Potter, and—”
He stopped, because the woman had started and stepped back from him, even though her eyes had also lit up. Ron swallowed. “What?” he asked. “Did—did someone come here and hurt you under that name?”
The woman surveyed him for a moment more. Two children peered out of the house behind her, but didn’t run towards her, and didn’t seem afraid. Ron had already decided that the situation in Closecopse was a lot more complex than he had thought it was.
And then it became more complex still, a tangle of knots that writhed all around Ron and bound him.
“No,” the witch said. “But Harry Potter was here, and you weren’t his partner.”
*
“It was the blond one. The one who called himself Draco. I never heard Auror Potter call him anything else.”
Ron sat over the steaming cup of tea that Margaret Dovecote had been kind enough to make for him, and shook his head. Dovecote sniffed and took the chair across from him, moving carefully. Her whole house was crowded with toys, clothes, sewing baskets, and knickknacks, including some Muggle objects that Ron knew his dad would have loved to get his hands on.
“You don’t have to believe me,” Dovecote told Ron in a steely voice. “But I know what I saw, and nothing is going to make me lie.”
“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” Ron said quietly, and sipped some more tea. It was good, hot, with a taste of oranges. “It’s that I didn’t know about this. I didn’t know anything about this. I was Harry’s Auror partner.”
Dovecote looked at him, a look that seemed familiar from somewhere in the gallery of masks that Ron had hanging in his mind. A moment later, he did know it. It was the kind of look he could imagine giving Ginny if she had said that she didn’t know Harry was cheating on her.
Ron sat up. “No, really,” he said. “For years, ever since we started training together. We were best friends. We were never split up, not even when the Ministry wanted us to pair with other people because it would mean we got more experience.”
He stopped, suddenly, face flushing as he realized what kinds of things he was babbling to Dovecote. But she had smiled and nodded. “I can believe that,” she said. “You should see your face when you mention Auror Potter.”
Ron looked away, more than a little embarrassed. “All right,” he said. “But—do you know why Malfoy was with him?”
“Draco,” Dovecote corrected fussily. “I never heard Auror Potter call him anything but Draco. I don’t know he was this Malfoy.”
Ron had to smile. Who knew he’d find someone as logical as Hermione in this little place? “All right. Why were they here?” Probably right to begin there, he told himself, in the best tradition of Auror investigative techniques. Just because he wanted most of all to know why Harry and Malfoy were in Closecopse together didn’t mean that Dovecote knew, or that he would get all the information he needed if he stuck to those questions.
Dovecote nodded, her face tightening. “We’d had a series of murders around here. The bodies were ravaged as though a werewolf had attacked them, but the attacks kept happening during the new moon, not the full one. And Auror Potter said that even a werewolf who had a lot of animalistic traits, like Fenrir Greyback, wouldn’t be able to savage them this badly.”
Ron blinked. “You’ve heard of Fenrir Greyback?” was all he could come up with.
“We do get the wireless, you know,” said Dovecote, and looked at him sideways. “We’re even connected to the Floo network.” She waved one hand at the large stone fireplace that Ron would have said dominated the room, except it was dominated itself by all the wooden carvings of dogs frolicking around the mantle.
Ron muttered an apology and drank his tea.
“So Auror Potter and this Draco came to investigate,” Dovecote said. “It happened no more than an hour or two after we alerted the Ministry. They spent most of the time arguing about what kind of creature it could be. Auror Potter was saying that there was no reason it couldn’t be a new werewolf—and no, I don’t know what he meant by that—and this Draco kept saying that he thought it was something else.”
Ron smiled wanly. At least “this Draco” sounded sufficiently disapproving, even if Dovecote wouldn’t agree that it was Malfoy.
“They argued for a day and spent a lot of time sleeping outside.” Dovecote shuddered a little. “I know, the thing could open doors, but that doesn’t mean that it was safe to sleep outside.”
Ron, who had seen Harry on several night hunts of more human predators, grunted in response, and thought sleeping hadn’t been what he was doing.
“On the third night,” Dovecote said, lowering her voice, “it wasn’t the new moon, but it was a lot darker than it had been, because there was a big storm that afternoon and the clouds were still around. And I heard Auror Potter scream.”
Ron sat up. There hadn’t been much that could make Harry scream, not after the war, except that time Al had been hit and injured by a Muggle car. “Could you make out what he was saying?” he asked.
“Not saying anything,” Dovecote said firmly. “Just screaming. The kind of scream that a baby does when it’s being burned.” Her face darkened.
Ron decided not to ask how she knew that. “But how do you know it was Harry who was screaming?” he insisted. “Why not Mal—Draco?”
“Because the screaming was still going on when I heard this Draco’s voice rising,” Dovecote said simply. “He was chanting a spell I don’t know. Then something else started screaming, and the first scream stopped, and I heard them both casting at once. And then all the screams stopped.”
Ron exhaled slowly, hard. “Did you see what it was they’d killed?” he asked.
“Something like a wolf, but shorter and uglier than any wolf I ever saw a picture of,” Dovecote said promptly. “With this flat, pushed-in muzzle, and long black legs all as long as each other, and—but why should I try to describe it?” she added, and jumped up, pushing some photographs around. She turned at last, just one in her hand, and offered it to Ron.
Ron took it and stared at it in silence. Yes, there was Harry, leaning back with a grin on his face and his arm around Malfoy’s shoulders. Ron avoided looking at the Slytherin’s smirk and instead focused on the way that Harry looked.
He looked tense, but happy. The way that Ron didn’t usually see him look around Ginny and the kids, where he was relaxed. And he looked continually sideways at Malfoy, as if that was an excuse. Ron had to swallow back indignation. Harry could look at Malfoy however he wanted to look, really, especially if Malfoy had saved his life.
But that didn’t give him an excuse to cheat on Ginny.
The beast hanging between them looked like the kind of wolf Ron would have assumed was a Halloween costume. The face was flat, like Dovecote said, and the legs so long that they looked ridiculous. It had a ropy tail, too, more like a lion’s than a wolf’s. Ron touched the photo, and shook his head. He had no idea what it was.
Hermione might know. But asking her would mean that Ron had to admit the existence of the letters to her, and he wasn’t ready to do that yet.
“Thank you,” he said, handing the picture back to Dovecote. “I suppose you wouldn’t lend me…?”
Dovecote just smiled at him, and pointed to the back of the photograph. When Ron turned it over, he saw two signatures. One was Harry’s—Harry’s darting, sprawling signature, from someone who never gave autographs.
And the other was the same soft, spiky writing that Ron had seen on half the letters that he had read so far.
Draco Malfoy had been hunting Dark beasts with Harry, yes. And he had done it in a way that made Harry happy—when no one else had noticed the intense happiness, or the wound that Harry must have taken, or even that he’d been missing for three days.
And Ron still didn’t know why. But this was almost harder to take than anything else. That Harry had been someone else’s partner, and someone else’s lover, and someone else’s friend.
What else were you that we didn’t know about, Harry? And why did you feel that you had to keep so much hidden?
*
Ron barely waited until Hermione snored this time to slip out of bed and make his way to the library. There he sat and stared at the unread letters, while his fingers flexed and tapped behind him, and the quiet clock on the wall whispered the time.
He didn’t want to go any further. He didn’t want to find out what Harry was hiding from him. Honestly, he didn’t.
“But it wasn’t just me he was hiding it from,” he whispered aloud now, and wondered if that would make a difference to anyone but Ron himself. Well, Hermione would want to know because she wanted to know everything, and Ginny deserved to know—
Does she? Does she, if it’s just going to hurt her?
Ron shook his head, frowning. He honestly didn’t know.
But he reached for the packet of letters, pushed aside the unbraided ribbon, and began to read the fifth one in the pile. Because he had come this far, and the memories that pulsed inside his head—two sets of memories of Harry, so different that they seemed like memories of two different people—talked in clashing voices over each other.
If no one else ever knew the real Harry, it seemed like Ron would be the one to do so.
*
Draco,
What happened at Closecopse is separate from all this. Ginny and I love each other. But I made the bargain with you in good faith. What I won’t do is give up everything for you and then find out that you won’t do the same for me. It’s ridiculous.
Stop dithering.
Harry.
*
Harry,
You’re a fine one to accuse anyone of dithering, when you’ve built a whole separate life from your friends and family and then never told them about any of it.
You told me first that you were keeping it secret because they would disapprove of you associating with someone they didn’t like, and they would also disapprove of what we do. Why, I don’t know. Isn’t it similar enough to what you did when you were young and reckless, the exploits that Granger and Weasley joined you in? Why would they object?
...Because they aren’t joining you in these. I think I may have answered my own question. I would strike out the lines in the letter, but I don’t change what I’ve written once I’ve written it, and that means I’ll simply ask you to disregard it. You’ll do almost anything I ask, won’t you? I remember you down on your knees that evening at Closecopse, and that evening at Dunkirk, and that bloodstained morning in Venice.
In the end, you’re the only one who can make your own decisions, and leave your wife, or not. You’ll accuse me of dithering to the end, but that’s to cover your own nervousness, your desire to let someone else make the choice. Pick, Harry. I don’t know the peril of a divided life myself, since I don’t lead one and I wouldn’t torment myself the way you do if I did, but I can see some of it in your eyes.
Choose. You’ll be the better for it.
Draco.
*
Ron closed his eyes and spent a lot of time massaging his forehead before he just gave up and Summoned a Headache Potion from the bathroom. Hermione wouldn’t fuss when she found it missing. She knew that Ron sometimes needed it simply to deal with his memories of what he had seen during his cases, so he could sleep. It was another of those hidden little things in their marriage that they didn’t need to discuss.
Ron was wishing now that they had dragged everything out into the sunlight, though, because that might have meant they would do the same to Harry, and they would have known.
They would have known that he was lovers with Draco Malfoy. That last letter made it clear. They would have known that he was hunting dangerous beasts with Malfoy, for some reason, and that Malfoy was pushing him towards abandoning his family.
Ron tried to consider Harry’s death in light of a suicide, for the first time. Could he have suffered too much from being stretched between Malfoy and his family, and just killed himself to escape it all?
But that made the presence of the murderer, bloodied knife still in hand beside Harry’s corpse, and the way his heart was exposed, make no sense at all. Ron reckoned there must be a spell that would make someone’s heart show through the blood like that. The murderer, though?
Unless he was a glamour.
Ron stood up and walked over to the hearth that graced the far side of the library, kneeling down and flinging in Floo powder without hesitation. “Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Prisoners’ Responsibilities Division,” he called out.
A witch’s face formed in the flames, looking tired and harassed. Ron disregarded that. People who worked in the processing of paperwork and confirming arrests always looked that way, especially when half the criminals were insisting that they didn’t need to be there or that they could bribe their way free with information, if only the Aurors would listen.
“Prisoners’ Responsibilities Division,” said the witch. “Oh. Auror Weasley.” She relaxed a little. She was used to Aurors firecalling her in the middle of the night. “What do you need?”
“I’d like you to look in on a prisoner for me if you could, Hazel,” Ron said as casually as he could, while his heart pounded. “Thompson.”
Although there might have been multiple people named Thompson in the holding cells at any one time, he knew Hazel wouldn’t need to ask who he meant. By now, everyone in the wizarding world must know that Eugene Thompson—long suspected in use of Dark magic but never quite pinned down—had killed Harry Potter.
Hazel gave him a long look, and then reached over and pulled a file from the nearest stack. “The wards on his cells are Type C,” she read in a flat voice. “He has guards day and night, inside and outside, just in case he tries to kill himself. He’s been asked every kind of question the guards can devise. Yes, he’s still here.”
Ron nodded, unwillingly. He could have pushed it further, could have asked Hazel to go and look in on Thompson and make sure he still existed, but that would have required higher authority than he had at the moment. It wasn’t as though he was attached to Harry’s case. He had been a witness, not a working Auror. And surely the guards would have come running in a moment if their prisoner had died or disappeared. “All right. Thanks.”
“We’ll let you know the minute something changes,” Hazel said, more gently. “You know that. The instant we figure out why he wanted to kill Auror Potter, then we’ll let you know.”
Ron thought he would hear it from the Prophet even faster than he would hear it from Hazel, but he managed to murmur a good-night and then shut down the Floo. That left him alone with the dimmed light of the ashes and the letters smoldering on the desk.
Ron stepped towards them, then hesitated. Maybe it would be better if he went to bed. Maybe everything would be clearer in the morning.
No. He wouldn’t be able to sleep now, anyway. It was too late. And he would think about the letters all night, the way he used to think about cases, and wake up with his sleep still ruined.
He sat down and picked up the next letter.
*
You do make a convincing case when you want to, Draco.
But it’s not even the tearing in two that makes me wish you would make the choice. You’re wrong if you think it is. I made the decision to live this way, and it would be weak for me to complain about it now.
It’s because I love being with both of you. I know you don’t want me to talk about Ginny, so I won’t. But I will say that she offers me more passion and happiness than I knew I could have, and so do my children. When I get an owl from Hogwarts, I want to sit around with it all day and read it over and over again. When we’ve spent an evening with the Weasleys, I can’t stop smiling.
What I have with you is…different.
I want to have both of those things, all at once. The problem is that one of them can’t coexist with the other. If you and Ginny both knew and neither minded, I could continue forever and it would be all right. But Ginny doesn’t know. And it would hurt her forever if she found out. Hell, it would hurt Ron and Hermione, too. I would lose everything I have with them, and I can’t face that.
But you make it sound damn tempting to throw one of them away and be with you all the time. Pity I can’t do that.
*
And that’s where you’re wrong, Harry.
I’ve seen again and again what you can do, at Closecopse and other places, the way that you burn through the barriers raised against you, the way that you make people regret what they’ve tried to put in your way, the way that you pick yourself up when you’re bleeding on the ground and continue walking the path. I’ve seen you turn me away, even when I invited you to the Manor for a weekend, because your youngest child was sick. And I’ve seen how you spurned your wife’s insistence that you rest from a wound on one of your Auror cases because you wanted to go hunting with me.
Weariness doesn’t stop you. Wounds don’t stop you. Fear of death doesn’t stop you. Love doesn’t stop you.
You’re a being of pure will, or at least the closest to one I’ve ever seen. If you make the decision to keep going, then you will. If you make the decision to choose one or the other of us, then I know you can do it and stick to it, no matter how much you might miss the other part of your life.
The point is that you have to choose. Someone else trying to force you into it wouldn’t work at all.
Draco.
*
Ron shook his head and tucked the letters back into the pile. He wanted to make sense of it, but the more letters he read, the less sense it seemed to make. If Malfoy was begging Harry to abandon Ginny and his children in order to join him, then he honestly had the worst way of begging that Ron had ever seen.
Ron paused, his fingers still on the letters.
Unless he knew that he could never convince Harry to leave them through trying to bully him into it. Unless he laid the path open and made it seem tempting that way, and then left the choice up to Harry.
Which Ron could classify as a kind of manipulation, though not manipulation the way that most people who had tried to use Harry understood the term.
Ron took a deep breath and pressed himself back from the table. He’d decided it wasn’t too late to get some sleep after all, especially because he thought he would need rest for what he planned tomorrow.
He would go see Malfoy tomorrow. And make a determination.
Part Two.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Harry/Ginny, Ron/Hermione, Draco/Astoria
Warnings: Infidelity, angst, violence. Epilogue-compliant.
Rating: R
Wordcount: 19,000
Summary: Ron is the one who goes through Harry’s private possessions after his death, because that’s what a best friend should do. And what he finds shakes his belief in Harry to the foundations.
Author’s Notes: Some parts of this fic are in letter form, and it is highly angsty, with deliberate infidelity.
Liar’s Mask
Ron stepped, at last, into Harry’s study.
The walls were painted a dusky red that would have reminded Ron of the Gryffindor common room a few weeks ago and now only reminded him of Harry’s exposed heart in the center of his chest. Who would have thought a Blasting Curse could be used that way, to tear open someone’s flesh and—
Ron didn’t have to finish the thought, it had worn itself so deeply into his mind. Hermione said that the more often you thought and did certain things, the more attached you became to them, and they literally carved pathways in your brain, so that it was easier to think and do them again. Ron had never more than half-believed her until this month since Harry’s murder.
He stood in the doorway, hands braced against the frame, and looked around slowly. There were shelves everywhere, books on tracking and stealth and disguises and famous cases that Harry had bought during Auror training and never got rid of. Ron shook his head with a smile that wouldn’t come. That was Harry, all right, stolid all the way through and not much interested in anything outside his family and his friends and his career.
His desk sat in the center of things, pointed right at a large window, so Harry could look out and watch his children playing in the garden. The lattice on the window still shimmered softly with wards and charms. Ron nodded. That made sense. After all that assassination attempts—
And the one that got through—
Again, Ron let the thought trail off, because it was so busy carving a pathway for itself that it might as well spill along it, and then he turned and reached for the desk. The top was still scattered with paper, but not as much as it had been all the times that Ron had come to visit Harry here. By now, a month after his death, all the files for cases he’d been working on had been turned over to others, and Ginny had taken the photographs of the children, the madly waving one of his parents with baby Harry, their wedding picture.
Ron stacked up the inscrutable notes on cases Harry had left, and the doodles of people who all looked like Umbridge. There were a few half-written letters, too, and some old Daily Prophets. Ron shook his head when he noticed that Harry had cut out Rita Skeeter’s name from the articles she’d written, but not the articles themselves. Apparently he’d been keeping these for clues on the criminals he was hunting or just for information purposes.
Ron waved his wand to put the piles of notes off to the sides and then hesitated, looking at the drawers. He could go through them much faster with charms. Just a few whisks and a few chants, and they would all be done and neat, near the door, and he could leave. For that matter, he could have cleared the desk that way, too.
But he had gone through the papers on the desk slowly, with his hands, for a reason, and he wanted to do the same with the drawers. He put his wand on the newly-cleaned and shining cherry surface, and opened the top drawer.
It turned out to be filled with sweets. Ron stared, then snickered. Ginny had told Harry not to keep those in the kitchen because they would tempt the children, but there was no reason to stop Harry from hiding them in his private sanctum.
Off to the right was a package of sherbet lemons. Ron reached down, wanting one in celebration of Harry and Dumbledore and because the sting of sour candy on his lips would give him something else to think about.
His hand rebounded. Ron blinked, then tried to reach them again. He was imagining things. Not surprising, with all the sleepless nights since Harry’s death.
No. There was a ward around the packet of sherbet lemons, one that kept stinging Ron as he touched it. He leaned back on the chair, Harry’s old seat with its Muggle swivel and thick, dusty red cushion, and shook his head. Were the ants or the sneaking little hands that might reach into the drawer that persistent?
However, it ought to be a simple matter to disperse the ward. Ron didn’t really have to, but damn it, he wanted a sherbet lemon. It was a new thought in the middle of all the clustering old ones, a new path.
“Finite Incantatem,” he said, and tapped his wand towards the ward without touching it.
The ward spat, and shimmered, and grew. Now an iron bowl enclosed the sherbet lemons from sight, and Ron could feel stronger magic behind the sleek metal surface. He shivered. Harry had used some common Auror spells in here, too, it seemed; the sensation of watching eyes pried at the back of Ron’s neck.
“Seeing things,” Ron said, and cast the Finite again.
The iron bowl firmed, the sheen of the metal growing to the point that Ron had to shield his eyes and look away. And the glow on the bowl was echoed, he noticed now, from several other points in the room, as though shimmering flakes of dust clung to the books and the shelves, and grew brighter in sympathy with the ward he was disturbing.
Ron took a deep breath. You shouldn’t disturb the secrets of the dead, went one old pathway through his mind. It was one reason he had never pressed Harry to tell him everything about Dumbledore’s past and motives.
But there were things missing from the documents and Harry’s personal possessions, said the thought that was a month old, and it would soothe Ginny and the children to have them. Ron took a step back and closed his eyes for a second.
He could call up more magical strength, when he wanted to. It was just that it took time, so it wasn’t much use in the cut-and-take of battle, and as he grew older and out of some of the more dangerous Auror fieldwork, there was less need for it than ever before. Hermione knew, because she knew everything, but she mostly liked watching him cast complex spells she’d told him about from old books.
Ron breathed steadily now, feeling the magic that would ordinarily power three or four spells rise up in him, like a heat shimmer from pavement. Then he aimed his wand at the iron bowl and hissed, “Finite Incantatem, fucker.”
The ward blew apart, making Ron stagger and have to slap out a minor fire on the drawer’s rim. Other wards chattered now, from the direction of the shelves. Ron smiled as he murmured the incantation for Muffliato and dimmed the sounds by the hissing in his own ears. At least Harry had made sure that no one could sneak in here and sneak out again undetected even if they managed to break the ward.
All his caution hadn’t been enough to save him, in the end.
Ron swallowed back the queasy feeling rising up his throat and reached down to scoop up the packet of sherbet lemons that the cracking of the ward had revealed. Except that his fingers met paper, and he stared as the last shreds of magic fell from his eyes and he realized that some of them had maintained an illusion.
There was a small, thick pile of letters behind the ward, wrapped with a pale green ribbon that Ron thought had faded from some richer color. He picked them up and turned them around. No names were visible, but Ron could make out some of the letters through the paper. Someone had pressed the ink into the parchment with vicious scratches.
He sat down on the chair, wondering as he went if he should look at them. These might be love letters from Harry to Ginny, or the other way around. It made sense that Harry would keep them, sentimental old thing that he was.
But the ribbon and the scratches of ink he could see made Ron’s fingers twitch. It didn’t seem like a great idea to him to show these letters to Ginny until he was sure what they were. He slid the top one out from under the ribbon and unfolded it. The writing, firm and dark though it was, was easy enough to read.
*
Dear wanker,
You can’t possibly think that I’m going to consent to anything like that? We’ve talked and talked about this, if you remember. Your “plan” for me to abandon my family and join you is as stupid as any other that you’ve ever come up with.
Think with your big head and not your little one. When I used to propose that kind of thing, you would laugh at me and point out, rightly, that I was stupid to even be thinking of it. What changed your mind?
Harry.
*
Ron sat there with the letter for a long time after he finished reading it. His fingers rested on the parchment below the second paragraph, and all he could do was read the sentences over and over again, while indignation rose like scalding water inside him.
Harry had written to a bloke.
And it sounded as though it was a bloke he had been prepared to abandon Ginny and the kids for, at one point in time.
Ron closed his eyes and sat there while new thoughts cut through the old ones. It wasn’t as much of a relief as he had hoped it would be a little while ago, when he would have given a lot for something to distract him from his grief. These new thoughts made him rethink the past, but not the old memories that had comforted him so much during the last month, the thoughts of Hogwarts and the way he and Harry had been Aurors together, and the times when he had watched Harry play with Lily and run with Al on his shoulders and talk snakes with Jamie, the only one of his children who had inherited his Parseltongue.
That past was false. That past was a lie.
No, it’s not, Ron thought stubbornly a moment later, when he became aware of how his mind was tending. No, it’s not, just because Harry wrote to someone else. These letters look really old. And how did he get all of them, if he sent them to someone else? He must have asked for them back, and that means he got angry and embarrassed at himself and took them back and rededicated himself to Ginny and their marriage.
That thought lay in Ron’s mind, glittering and bright as a silver knife, for only a few moments before it tarnished. So, if Harry had got the letters back so his unknown correspondent wouldn’t use them against him, and he regretted their existence, why hadn’t he destroyed them? Why keep them under a powerful ward?
Why not confess everything to Ginny, make a clean breast of it? The man Ron thought he knew would have.
Maybe he did. Maybe these letters would be old news to her.
Ron opened his eyes, and shivered. The flecks of light on the bookshelves had died, and Ron didn’t think he could find them again. Besides, maybe they were only meant as part of the ward, and didn’t signify anything more than that.
Hoping harder than he had since the end of the war, Ron stood up and left the study, tucking the letters under his cloak. He was going to show them to Hermione, and then she would study them and give him a wise answer that would explain everything that was troubling him, and everything would be all right again.
*
Ron waited until he heard Hermione’s breathing go soft and quiet beside him, and then he stood up, cast a Lumos that he shielded with his hand cupped around the end of his wand, and made his stealthy way out of their bedroom and into his own study, where he had put the letters.
Ron had never thought he’d want an office outside the Ministry, but the library in their house was Hermione’s place, dominated by books bristling with folded sheets of paper and notes pinned to the covers with abbreviations such as Check H. C.! and What about dragons’ eyes? Ron couldn’t work there. And they no longer had Rose and Hugo with them and running shrieking up and down the stairs all the time. It was possible to find quiet in the house. Ron had chosen to take over a room that Hermione had used as storage for extra books.
His chair was more comfortable than Harry’s, his desk smaller, his bookshelves less expensive. Ron sat down and picked up the upside-down bowl on his desktop. The nice thing about marrying someone who was so much less interested in cooking than his mum was that she didn’t notice when the dishes were carried out of the kitchen, either. And of course they didn’t have house-elves to do it for them.
Ron played with the bowl for a second, and wondered why he hadn’t chosen a ward like Harry’s. But that was a new thought that died under the claws of an old one. Because he couldn’t bear to keep anything from Hermione after fifteen years of marriage, not really, and if she had come into the room, noticed the bowl, and turned it over, then the secret would be out and the decision made—the one he couldn’t make after all.
“I haven’t made it yet,” Ron whispered, and undid the ribbon, letting the letters fall apart. Even then, the creases and the folds were crisp enough that they mostly stayed together. Ron wondered if there was any significance to the order, and unfolded two of them to peer at their tops. They weren’t dated. Maybe Harry had just put them in the order he’d received them.
And then Ron sat there some more, because he wasn’t twelve anymore and wouldn’t jump down the entrance to the legendary Chamber of Secrets if it opened in front of him. And this silent pile of letters scared him more than the Chamber ever had.
It doesn’t destroy him. It doesn’t make him evil. It just means there’s a shadow to the face he showed me and his family and Hermione and all the rest of them. Another side.
That, he had to admit, reassured him only a little. Harry had always seemed so sharp and clear-cut, in full sunshine, without shadows. Since the war, he didn’t even lie to the press. He just refused to talk about things that he didn’t want to talk about, and they were the ones who spun the rumors out of fine air.
Ron wondered, now, why he’d never thought it was weird that Harry didn’t cast shadows. Everyone had them. Him and his jealousy of his brothers and the way he had left Harry and Hermione during the war, which they never talked about, even though he knew Hermione had forgiven him for it long ago. The way Hermione had Memory Charmed her parents; their relationship with her was never right again after that, even though she had managed to find them and give their memories back.
But not Harry. He always shone.
But the brightest light cast the deepest shadows.
Ron spent several minutes trying to remember which of Hermione’s books he’d read that in, and then gave up and unfolded the second letter in the pile, the one right beneath Harry’s that talked about how stupid the other person was.
And he found confirmation right away, confirmation that shattered the neat mirror of Harry’s life into a thousand shivering pieces.
*
Dearest, stupidest Potter,
You can’t imagine that I’d ask you to abandon. The very word has a tinge of the musty about it, a tinge of that mad old house with my mad old ancestors that you spend so much time complaining about.
There is no reason and no right to abandon them. But I have the reason and the right to ask for more than you are giving me. You know what I agreed to, and you know how you and not I changed the agreement. I do demand that you pay back what you have taken from me.
Or does a Gryffindor not pay his debts?
Draco.
*
Ron sat there, and only shock, he knew, had prevented him from closing his fingers so that they crumpled and tore the letter he held.
What? What? What?
The words echoed down the corridors of his mind, and found no answer. This was a completely new thought, yes. So new it made Ron sick, as he sat there and tried to contemplate how Harry could have been—fucking, or at least writing like he was fucking, Draco Malfoy.
I’m jumping to conclusions, though. Maybe it was some negotiation to try and get Malfoy back to the light, gone wrong.
That made little sense when Ron thought about it, though, because for the last twenty-two years, Malfoy had been boringly respectable. Ron had to use the memories of the blood feud and how poorly Malfoy’s ancestors had treated his to keep his old hatred alive and warn his kids away from Malfoy’s. It didn’t help that apparently Scorpius and Rose had a friendly rivalry over marks and Scorpius had helped Lily through her first year, the past year.
So why was he writing to him?
Ron decided, slowly, that it still couldn’t be what he thought. Harry had his shadows, sure, and maybe he was better at keeping them out of sight than Ron had thought, but what he wasn’t was a good liar. If he was cheating on Ginny, then the truth would have come out eventually.
And Ginny would have left him, and his children might have felt betrayed enough never to see him again. They would have been bitter and angry beyond words. I don’t even want to think what it would have done to our family.
Ron shook his head and turned the first letter over to look at it again. Was that one of the things Harry had meant? He couldn’t abandon his family by telling them the truth? So he was going to keep it secret no matter what Malfoy wanted him to do?
But that only led back to the question of how he had managed to keep it secret. Ron just didn’t think it was in Harry.
Maybe Malfoy had threatened him. The reference to debts in his letter made Ron wonder if Malfoy had started the correspondence in the first place by asking for it as payment. Harry owed him a life-debt from the war, and owed Mrs. Malfoy one. Malfoy could have encroached on Harry’s life in that way, and made more and more of a place for himself.
But that ran into another objection, another carved mask of Harry that Ron had hanging up in the corridors of his mind. Harry didn’t lie down for anyone, after the war. He could smile and bend if he had to, the way he did to senior Ministry officials, and smile as he refused someone a favor, but he didn’t yield to stupid people the way that Ron was imagining him doing to Malfoy. Most of the time, he found something else that the person asking the favor was happy to accept in trade, and they went on their way not even knowing what Harry had gained in return.
Why would he give in to Malfoy, of all people? Ron had asked him once if he thought they could be friends with Malfoy, and Harry had rolled his eyes.
“Someone like him wouldn’t accept something like friendship,” Harry had said, looking over his shoulder to make sure that their instructors wouldn’t hear them. They weren’t supposed to be talking about anything but Auror work during this phase of their training. “He would want something more. All or nothing. Probably for us to grovel at his feet.”
All or nothing.
Ron looked at the letters, and swallowed.
Then he reached for the next one, the third one, beneath the letter that Malfoy had sent to Harry.
*
You pitiless wanker,
Don’t you think this is the best compromise I can make? If I were really paying my debts, I would have fobbed you off with that promotion you wanted me to get for you once, and fobbed your mother off with a necklace or a pardon for your dad. And you would have done something to pay me back for pulling you from a fire, which, please notice, you have never actually done. And you change the subject whenever I want to discuss it, too.
But the arrangement we have has worked well for years. If you want something more than that, you know what I’ve invited you to do more than once.
Harry.
*
“An arrangement of cheating?” Ron said aloud. “Is that what you thought about it, Harry?”
“Ron? What are you talking about?”
Ron started and turned around. Hermione didn’t usually miss him during the night if he left the bed—which he sometimes did, just because the old thoughts were best soothed by Auror training exercises—but now she clung to the doorframe of the library and rubbed sleep from and into her eyes. She was yawning. Ron shoved the letters back together under the bowl and stood up, shielding them from sight.
Well, there’s my decision about whether or not to tell Hermione right now made, he thought, and had to shake his head.
“There are some things that I’m discovering about the way Harry gambled with those blokes down at the pub that are disturbing to me,” Ron said, surprised by how easily the lie came to him. He wondered if Harry had been better than Ron thought at lies of omission, just not mentioning the subject or turning away from it when someone’s conversation could lead there. Ron had to do the opposite, because someone always seemed to overhear him. “I don’t—I thought I could handle it better. It’s been a month.”
Hermione’s face softened, and she opened her arms to him. “It’s never enough time,” she whispered into Ron’s ear, as their heads came to rest together and Ron tasted her breath, more familiar to him than his own. “And I’m sure it’s nothing too bad. Harry could never do anything too bad.”
Ron shut his eyes, and held her, and wished that he still agreed.
*
The letters went with Ron to work the next day, burning against his side like guilt. He had cast a glamour on the packet so that no one looking at his robe from the outside could notice the square shape, and then had felt stupid enough to keep his wand hovering near the glamour all the way through the Floo trip and the ride up the lift.
But not stupid enough to actually remove it.
Ron sat down at his desk and locked the door with a quick charm. He still didn’t have another partner now that Harry was—gone, and anyone who tried to come in and found the door locked would be understanding.
Ron paused as he thought about that. It triggered something else in him, another old thought that fell like an apple from a tree, and he had to wait before he understood what the memory was.
Times the office door was locked when he came back from lunch. He always took a longer lunch than Harry because he would usually meet Hermione and, when they were still at home, Rosie and Hugo, and they’d talk. So when he came back and the door was locked, Ron had assumed Harry was absorbed in a case, or a talk with one of the higher-level Ministry functionaries who only wanted to chat to the Boy-Who-Lived, and go for a walk.
Maybe it wasn’t that. Harry had never explained, just nodded when Ron said something about it and murmured that he was grateful to Ron for staying out.
What had been happening there?
Ron glared at the letters. Stupid things. He ought to have burned them the minute he found them, or at least when he realized they weren’t from Harry to Ginny. Now he had to go back over his best friend’s whole life and wonder what else he had missed, what shadows were hiding there under the grinning mask.
And still he ran into trouble believing it, despite the evidence in parchment and ink. Harry wasn’t a good liar. He wasn’t someone who would cheat on his wife. He didn’t hate his kids. Ron was sure, utterly sure, from the way he had seen Harry watching Ginny when they were at family gatherings, that Harry hadn’t been in love with someone else and using Ginny as a convenient substitute.
Which left a whole lot of questions about who they had really buried a month ago.
Ron sighed, and pulled out the letter that, by its position in the pack, should be one from Malfoy. They were obviously in the middle of a conversation, but he was a trained Auror. He should be able to pick up things like what their little references to different events meant.
What’s going to give me more trouble than anything else is accepting those clues, not spotting them.
*
Harry,
I’m not going to divorce Astoria.
You don’t understand. The problems in my marriage aren’t the same as the ones in yours. Your wife knows part of you, but not the whole, and would feel betrayed to know you were concealing the rest. My wife simply doesn’t care.
We work very well together. We’re sexually compatible, we care about some of the same things—enough to have interesting dinner table conversations—and we both adore Scorpius and money. That doesn’t mean we have to be passionate lovers. I find it unreasonable that you say I should leave my wife, and then you’ll leave yours.
We both know that won’t happen. There’s only one reason you would leave her, and that would be because you wanted to.
We’re edging nearer to that, aren’t we? I know the look I saw in your eyes at Closecopse.
Draco.
*
Ron sat back. “Closecopse,” he whispered. He remembered the name of the tiny wizarding village that was somewhere in Wales, near the Welsh border, he thought, but he knew he and Harry had never investigated a case there. Every village or town or city where they had was marked in his mind with a red stain.
The biggest red stain of all was on the London street off Diagon Alley where Harry had died.
“Why would Harry and Malfoy go to Closecopse?” Ron asked aloud, since he thought better that way, and Hermione wasn’t around to overhear him. “It would be easier to stay behind their wards, probably at Malfoy Manor.”
Which means I’ve accepted that Harry was fucking Malfoy.
Ron sighed slowly, in and out, and then shook his head. Maybe he had, but that didn’t answer the question. And the letter only confirmed that, yes, it was divorcing Astoria that Harry had hinted Malfoy should do, and that Malfoy was an utter wanker.
Not if Harry was with him.
Ron scrubbed briskly at his face. It was bad enough when Hermione put horrible images of house-elf sex in his head—she was currently fighting for their right to “choose their own mates”—or when Rosie talked cheerfully at the dinner table about the animal dissections she was interested in. Now he was doing it to himself.
But it gave him a tangible term, and Ron found that he couldn’t face the other letters right now, not now that he had a clue. Of course he could have gone and asked Malfoy, but that wasn’t right. What was he going to say? “How dare you bang my best friend and encourage him to cheat on his wife?”
Because it might have started with repaying a life-debt—but Ron didn’t really think so anymore—but Malfoy could never have bound Harry to something like this against Harry’s own free will. Ron had that much trust in Harry’s strength and the way Harry knew his own mind since the war.
Even if I don’t have much trust in anything else, anymore.
*
Ron appeared with a pop on Closecopse’s Apparition point and took a moment to look around. The village was a cluster of ten or twenty houses, all of them built of brick and stone, all of them with sharply-peaked roofs with wards gleaming around them that Ron would have expected to see in the more sensitive areas of Gringotts.
First mystery, then. Ron wandered towards the outskirts of the village as though out to sightsee or admire the scrubby groups of oaks, trying to recall what Malfoy did. Worked in finance or something, he thought. There could have been a mystery near here, an Auror case that prompted everyone to guard their houses, but that was still no reason for Malfoy to come along.
He listened quietly, but could hear only a few conversations, and a sound like sheep bleating. Maybe it really was sheep, for all he knew. Ron had to admit he knew very little about life in wizarding villages this isolated. Ottery St. Catchpole was a lot bigger, and there was no way that you could compare it to something like Diagon Alley or Hogsmeade.
He paused when someone came around the corner of a house and stopped dead at seeing him. The person was a witch with straggling blonde hair that looked as if it had fallen out of a much more elaborate hairstyle and a basket over her arm. She aimed her wand at him as Ron watched.
Ron took a step back and raised a Shield Charm in front of himself. The woman didn’t seem to have recognized his Auror robes, which was more confirmation that something had happened here. Or maybe someone dressed in Auror robes had committed a crime.
It had better not have been Harry.
How strange, now, that he had leaped automatically to assuming Harry could, when for so long he would have assumed the opposite.
“Who are you?” the woman asked. She had gone a little more relaxed at the sight of Ron’s Shield Charm, maybe just because it was defensive instead of offensive.
“My name is Ron Weasley,” Ron said. “Auror,” he added after a moment. “My partner was Harry Potter, and—”
He stopped, because the woman had started and stepped back from him, even though her eyes had also lit up. Ron swallowed. “What?” he asked. “Did—did someone come here and hurt you under that name?”
The woman surveyed him for a moment more. Two children peered out of the house behind her, but didn’t run towards her, and didn’t seem afraid. Ron had already decided that the situation in Closecopse was a lot more complex than he had thought it was.
And then it became more complex still, a tangle of knots that writhed all around Ron and bound him.
“No,” the witch said. “But Harry Potter was here, and you weren’t his partner.”
*
“It was the blond one. The one who called himself Draco. I never heard Auror Potter call him anything else.”
Ron sat over the steaming cup of tea that Margaret Dovecote had been kind enough to make for him, and shook his head. Dovecote sniffed and took the chair across from him, moving carefully. Her whole house was crowded with toys, clothes, sewing baskets, and knickknacks, including some Muggle objects that Ron knew his dad would have loved to get his hands on.
“You don’t have to believe me,” Dovecote told Ron in a steely voice. “But I know what I saw, and nothing is going to make me lie.”
“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” Ron said quietly, and sipped some more tea. It was good, hot, with a taste of oranges. “It’s that I didn’t know about this. I didn’t know anything about this. I was Harry’s Auror partner.”
Dovecote looked at him, a look that seemed familiar from somewhere in the gallery of masks that Ron had hanging in his mind. A moment later, he did know it. It was the kind of look he could imagine giving Ginny if she had said that she didn’t know Harry was cheating on her.
Ron sat up. “No, really,” he said. “For years, ever since we started training together. We were best friends. We were never split up, not even when the Ministry wanted us to pair with other people because it would mean we got more experience.”
He stopped, suddenly, face flushing as he realized what kinds of things he was babbling to Dovecote. But she had smiled and nodded. “I can believe that,” she said. “You should see your face when you mention Auror Potter.”
Ron looked away, more than a little embarrassed. “All right,” he said. “But—do you know why Malfoy was with him?”
“Draco,” Dovecote corrected fussily. “I never heard Auror Potter call him anything but Draco. I don’t know he was this Malfoy.”
Ron had to smile. Who knew he’d find someone as logical as Hermione in this little place? “All right. Why were they here?” Probably right to begin there, he told himself, in the best tradition of Auror investigative techniques. Just because he wanted most of all to know why Harry and Malfoy were in Closecopse together didn’t mean that Dovecote knew, or that he would get all the information he needed if he stuck to those questions.
Dovecote nodded, her face tightening. “We’d had a series of murders around here. The bodies were ravaged as though a werewolf had attacked them, but the attacks kept happening during the new moon, not the full one. And Auror Potter said that even a werewolf who had a lot of animalistic traits, like Fenrir Greyback, wouldn’t be able to savage them this badly.”
Ron blinked. “You’ve heard of Fenrir Greyback?” was all he could come up with.
“We do get the wireless, you know,” said Dovecote, and looked at him sideways. “We’re even connected to the Floo network.” She waved one hand at the large stone fireplace that Ron would have said dominated the room, except it was dominated itself by all the wooden carvings of dogs frolicking around the mantle.
Ron muttered an apology and drank his tea.
“So Auror Potter and this Draco came to investigate,” Dovecote said. “It happened no more than an hour or two after we alerted the Ministry. They spent most of the time arguing about what kind of creature it could be. Auror Potter was saying that there was no reason it couldn’t be a new werewolf—and no, I don’t know what he meant by that—and this Draco kept saying that he thought it was something else.”
Ron smiled wanly. At least “this Draco” sounded sufficiently disapproving, even if Dovecote wouldn’t agree that it was Malfoy.
“They argued for a day and spent a lot of time sleeping outside.” Dovecote shuddered a little. “I know, the thing could open doors, but that doesn’t mean that it was safe to sleep outside.”
Ron, who had seen Harry on several night hunts of more human predators, grunted in response, and thought sleeping hadn’t been what he was doing.
“On the third night,” Dovecote said, lowering her voice, “it wasn’t the new moon, but it was a lot darker than it had been, because there was a big storm that afternoon and the clouds were still around. And I heard Auror Potter scream.”
Ron sat up. There hadn’t been much that could make Harry scream, not after the war, except that time Al had been hit and injured by a Muggle car. “Could you make out what he was saying?” he asked.
“Not saying anything,” Dovecote said firmly. “Just screaming. The kind of scream that a baby does when it’s being burned.” Her face darkened.
Ron decided not to ask how she knew that. “But how do you know it was Harry who was screaming?” he insisted. “Why not Mal—Draco?”
“Because the screaming was still going on when I heard this Draco’s voice rising,” Dovecote said simply. “He was chanting a spell I don’t know. Then something else started screaming, and the first scream stopped, and I heard them both casting at once. And then all the screams stopped.”
Ron exhaled slowly, hard. “Did you see what it was they’d killed?” he asked.
“Something like a wolf, but shorter and uglier than any wolf I ever saw a picture of,” Dovecote said promptly. “With this flat, pushed-in muzzle, and long black legs all as long as each other, and—but why should I try to describe it?” she added, and jumped up, pushing some photographs around. She turned at last, just one in her hand, and offered it to Ron.
Ron took it and stared at it in silence. Yes, there was Harry, leaning back with a grin on his face and his arm around Malfoy’s shoulders. Ron avoided looking at the Slytherin’s smirk and instead focused on the way that Harry looked.
He looked tense, but happy. The way that Ron didn’t usually see him look around Ginny and the kids, where he was relaxed. And he looked continually sideways at Malfoy, as if that was an excuse. Ron had to swallow back indignation. Harry could look at Malfoy however he wanted to look, really, especially if Malfoy had saved his life.
But that didn’t give him an excuse to cheat on Ginny.
The beast hanging between them looked like the kind of wolf Ron would have assumed was a Halloween costume. The face was flat, like Dovecote said, and the legs so long that they looked ridiculous. It had a ropy tail, too, more like a lion’s than a wolf’s. Ron touched the photo, and shook his head. He had no idea what it was.
Hermione might know. But asking her would mean that Ron had to admit the existence of the letters to her, and he wasn’t ready to do that yet.
“Thank you,” he said, handing the picture back to Dovecote. “I suppose you wouldn’t lend me…?”
Dovecote just smiled at him, and pointed to the back of the photograph. When Ron turned it over, he saw two signatures. One was Harry’s—Harry’s darting, sprawling signature, from someone who never gave autographs.
And the other was the same soft, spiky writing that Ron had seen on half the letters that he had read so far.
Draco Malfoy had been hunting Dark beasts with Harry, yes. And he had done it in a way that made Harry happy—when no one else had noticed the intense happiness, or the wound that Harry must have taken, or even that he’d been missing for three days.
And Ron still didn’t know why. But this was almost harder to take than anything else. That Harry had been someone else’s partner, and someone else’s lover, and someone else’s friend.
What else were you that we didn’t know about, Harry? And why did you feel that you had to keep so much hidden?
*
Ron barely waited until Hermione snored this time to slip out of bed and make his way to the library. There he sat and stared at the unread letters, while his fingers flexed and tapped behind him, and the quiet clock on the wall whispered the time.
He didn’t want to go any further. He didn’t want to find out what Harry was hiding from him. Honestly, he didn’t.
“But it wasn’t just me he was hiding it from,” he whispered aloud now, and wondered if that would make a difference to anyone but Ron himself. Well, Hermione would want to know because she wanted to know everything, and Ginny deserved to know—
Does she? Does she, if it’s just going to hurt her?
Ron shook his head, frowning. He honestly didn’t know.
But he reached for the packet of letters, pushed aside the unbraided ribbon, and began to read the fifth one in the pile. Because he had come this far, and the memories that pulsed inside his head—two sets of memories of Harry, so different that they seemed like memories of two different people—talked in clashing voices over each other.
If no one else ever knew the real Harry, it seemed like Ron would be the one to do so.
*
Draco,
What happened at Closecopse is separate from all this. Ginny and I love each other. But I made the bargain with you in good faith. What I won’t do is give up everything for you and then find out that you won’t do the same for me. It’s ridiculous.
Stop dithering.
Harry.
*
Harry,
You’re a fine one to accuse anyone of dithering, when you’ve built a whole separate life from your friends and family and then never told them about any of it.
You told me first that you were keeping it secret because they would disapprove of you associating with someone they didn’t like, and they would also disapprove of what we do. Why, I don’t know. Isn’t it similar enough to what you did when you were young and reckless, the exploits that Granger and Weasley joined you in? Why would they object?
...Because they aren’t joining you in these. I think I may have answered my own question. I would strike out the lines in the letter, but I don’t change what I’ve written once I’ve written it, and that means I’ll simply ask you to disregard it. You’ll do almost anything I ask, won’t you? I remember you down on your knees that evening at Closecopse, and that evening at Dunkirk, and that bloodstained morning in Venice.
In the end, you’re the only one who can make your own decisions, and leave your wife, or not. You’ll accuse me of dithering to the end, but that’s to cover your own nervousness, your desire to let someone else make the choice. Pick, Harry. I don’t know the peril of a divided life myself, since I don’t lead one and I wouldn’t torment myself the way you do if I did, but I can see some of it in your eyes.
Choose. You’ll be the better for it.
Draco.
*
Ron closed his eyes and spent a lot of time massaging his forehead before he just gave up and Summoned a Headache Potion from the bathroom. Hermione wouldn’t fuss when she found it missing. She knew that Ron sometimes needed it simply to deal with his memories of what he had seen during his cases, so he could sleep. It was another of those hidden little things in their marriage that they didn’t need to discuss.
Ron was wishing now that they had dragged everything out into the sunlight, though, because that might have meant they would do the same to Harry, and they would have known.
They would have known that he was lovers with Draco Malfoy. That last letter made it clear. They would have known that he was hunting dangerous beasts with Malfoy, for some reason, and that Malfoy was pushing him towards abandoning his family.
Ron tried to consider Harry’s death in light of a suicide, for the first time. Could he have suffered too much from being stretched between Malfoy and his family, and just killed himself to escape it all?
But that made the presence of the murderer, bloodied knife still in hand beside Harry’s corpse, and the way his heart was exposed, make no sense at all. Ron reckoned there must be a spell that would make someone’s heart show through the blood like that. The murderer, though?
Unless he was a glamour.
Ron stood up and walked over to the hearth that graced the far side of the library, kneeling down and flinging in Floo powder without hesitation. “Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Prisoners’ Responsibilities Division,” he called out.
A witch’s face formed in the flames, looking tired and harassed. Ron disregarded that. People who worked in the processing of paperwork and confirming arrests always looked that way, especially when half the criminals were insisting that they didn’t need to be there or that they could bribe their way free with information, if only the Aurors would listen.
“Prisoners’ Responsibilities Division,” said the witch. “Oh. Auror Weasley.” She relaxed a little. She was used to Aurors firecalling her in the middle of the night. “What do you need?”
“I’d like you to look in on a prisoner for me if you could, Hazel,” Ron said as casually as he could, while his heart pounded. “Thompson.”
Although there might have been multiple people named Thompson in the holding cells at any one time, he knew Hazel wouldn’t need to ask who he meant. By now, everyone in the wizarding world must know that Eugene Thompson—long suspected in use of Dark magic but never quite pinned down—had killed Harry Potter.
Hazel gave him a long look, and then reached over and pulled a file from the nearest stack. “The wards on his cells are Type C,” she read in a flat voice. “He has guards day and night, inside and outside, just in case he tries to kill himself. He’s been asked every kind of question the guards can devise. Yes, he’s still here.”
Ron nodded, unwillingly. He could have pushed it further, could have asked Hazel to go and look in on Thompson and make sure he still existed, but that would have required higher authority than he had at the moment. It wasn’t as though he was attached to Harry’s case. He had been a witness, not a working Auror. And surely the guards would have come running in a moment if their prisoner had died or disappeared. “All right. Thanks.”
“We’ll let you know the minute something changes,” Hazel said, more gently. “You know that. The instant we figure out why he wanted to kill Auror Potter, then we’ll let you know.”
Ron thought he would hear it from the Prophet even faster than he would hear it from Hazel, but he managed to murmur a good-night and then shut down the Floo. That left him alone with the dimmed light of the ashes and the letters smoldering on the desk.
Ron stepped towards them, then hesitated. Maybe it would be better if he went to bed. Maybe everything would be clearer in the morning.
No. He wouldn’t be able to sleep now, anyway. It was too late. And he would think about the letters all night, the way he used to think about cases, and wake up with his sleep still ruined.
He sat down and picked up the next letter.
*
You do make a convincing case when you want to, Draco.
But it’s not even the tearing in two that makes me wish you would make the choice. You’re wrong if you think it is. I made the decision to live this way, and it would be weak for me to complain about it now.
It’s because I love being with both of you. I know you don’t want me to talk about Ginny, so I won’t. But I will say that she offers me more passion and happiness than I knew I could have, and so do my children. When I get an owl from Hogwarts, I want to sit around with it all day and read it over and over again. When we’ve spent an evening with the Weasleys, I can’t stop smiling.
What I have with you is…different.
I want to have both of those things, all at once. The problem is that one of them can’t coexist with the other. If you and Ginny both knew and neither minded, I could continue forever and it would be all right. But Ginny doesn’t know. And it would hurt her forever if she found out. Hell, it would hurt Ron and Hermione, too. I would lose everything I have with them, and I can’t face that.
But you make it sound damn tempting to throw one of them away and be with you all the time. Pity I can’t do that.
*
And that’s where you’re wrong, Harry.
I’ve seen again and again what you can do, at Closecopse and other places, the way that you burn through the barriers raised against you, the way that you make people regret what they’ve tried to put in your way, the way that you pick yourself up when you’re bleeding on the ground and continue walking the path. I’ve seen you turn me away, even when I invited you to the Manor for a weekend, because your youngest child was sick. And I’ve seen how you spurned your wife’s insistence that you rest from a wound on one of your Auror cases because you wanted to go hunting with me.
Weariness doesn’t stop you. Wounds don’t stop you. Fear of death doesn’t stop you. Love doesn’t stop you.
You’re a being of pure will, or at least the closest to one I’ve ever seen. If you make the decision to keep going, then you will. If you make the decision to choose one or the other of us, then I know you can do it and stick to it, no matter how much you might miss the other part of your life.
The point is that you have to choose. Someone else trying to force you into it wouldn’t work at all.
Draco.
*
Ron shook his head and tucked the letters back into the pile. He wanted to make sense of it, but the more letters he read, the less sense it seemed to make. If Malfoy was begging Harry to abandon Ginny and his children in order to join him, then he honestly had the worst way of begging that Ron had ever seen.
Ron paused, his fingers still on the letters.
Unless he knew that he could never convince Harry to leave them through trying to bully him into it. Unless he laid the path open and made it seem tempting that way, and then left the choice up to Harry.
Which Ron could classify as a kind of manipulation, though not manipulation the way that most people who had tried to use Harry understood the term.
Ron took a deep breath and pressed himself back from the table. He’d decided it wasn’t too late to get some sleep after all, especially because he thought he would need rest for what he planned tomorrow.
He would go see Malfoy tomorrow. And make a determination.
Part Two.
