Eyes Open Wide

This is a oneshot, the premise for which I came up while listening to the song 'Through Her Eyes' by DreamTheater.

Near silence ruled the day, broken by occasional bird call and the gentle patter of rain on grass and dirt, tree and stone. The day was hot and muggy, the air thick and suffocating as one tried to draw breath, under the heavy overcast sky. Weather that fit this day, this place, perfectly for those who found meaning in this place and time. For most, it was just another July 12th. But for some, it was a day of remembrance, a day of sadness and death, a day that brought about changes that left the magical society of Britain shattered for months afterward.

But now, eighty seven years after that bright and sunny July day, most have forgotten the events that changed a society forever and remember it only in the memories of those that lived through it, in the pages of a book, or on tattered and yellowed newspaper clippings.

For one person standing beneath the bows of a spindly, half dead tree, that day's events, and the events of the weeks that followed, are forever burned into his memory. A heavy rattling breath carried thin wisps of fowl smelling greenish blue smoke that curled up into the sky from a cigarette clasped between his chapped lips. He took a long drag from the cigarette only to find his breath suddenly hitch in his chest, causing him to break into a fit of coughing. With a disgusting hack, he spat cigarette and a wad of phlegm onto the ground and trod into the damp grass with a thick soled boot before pulling a hip flask from a pocket of his cloak and taking a long pull from it. You really should give up those bloody things, Ronald Weasley… he thought to himself. It had long ago become an unspoken, but not always held, tradition for him to be in this spot on July 12th.

As the contents of the flask burned like liquid fire down his throat, two people suddenly appeared outside the open wrought iron gate that stood a few dozen meters away. He knew they were aware of his presence though neither had glanced his way. A sigh escaped him as he ran a hand through his hair that was now mostly gray with a few flecks of the red from his youth as he watched the two slowly walk down the gravel path between rows of hewn and polished slabs of granite and marble.

The two, clad in black from head to toe, had once been his best friends, two of the closest people in his life. But the hotheaded temper he had in his youth had caused him to leave them during their quest for Voldemort's Horcruxes. It was a time when he was needed most by his friends and he had abandoned them. It wasn't the first time his hot headedness had caused a rift between himself, Harry, and Hermione, and it wasn't the last. He had eventually returned and rejoined them in their quest. And, for a while, they had been friends again. But the damage to their friendship had been done and eventually lead to them parting ways for good a few years later when he found out, and couldn't accept, their being in love with each other. And it hadn't helped matters when Hermione told him, in no uncertain terms, that even if she wasn't in love with Harry she would never have gone out with him. The shock of catching them in bed and her blunt, to the point, words had been the final crack in the mortar that brought down the wall of their friendship. Now they were strangers in all but the ghosts of remembrance.

Ron took another pull from his hipflask as he watched Harry Potter and Hermione Potter nee Granger turn off the gravel path and stop.

Harry pulled Hermione against him with one arm, her head of bushy hair, now gray with only a few streaks of the brown it once was, falling comfortably against his shoulder, as the other held two white roses. They stared at the flowers in the gently falling rain for several long moments before Harry lay them atop the polished gray granite stone before them. Without a word he kissed his fingertips and pressed them against the cool damp stone as Hermione buried her face against his shoulder. Minutes passed in silence as they stood there before the stone before, with a brief glance at the man under the tree, Harry and Hermione vanished back to wherever it was they had come from with nary a sound.

Ron pushed off the tree and slowly made his way between the rows of headstones until he stood where those that had once been his best friends had been moments before. The corner of his mouth ticked as he pulled a single red rose from a pocket and laid it beside the two atop the stone as his eyes moved to the polished bronze plaque affixed to granite headstone, the metal seemed to gleam even in the dim overcast morning light.

The words engraved upon the plague tugged at his heart, the corners of his eyes prickling for what his friends had been through, every time he read them. Ron couldn't imagine what it'd be like to lose one of his children. He hadn't been there when the Potter's little girl had been born; his friendship with Harry and Hermione had been over for nearly three years by that time. He hadn't even known that the two had been married until he saw the headline splashed across the front page of every newspaper he came across. It had surprised him at the time that anger and jealousy of not being invited to their wedding didn't rear up at the headline even though the news swept through Magical Britain little more than a week after he had caught them in bed.

It had been until a few months after her birth, when he and his family had run into the Potters in Diagon Alley, that he first saw little Elizabeth Potter. And even now, after all these years, he could still clearly remember the little girl with a head of bushy black hair and some of the most expressive brown eyes he had ever seen.

The tragedy of the young girl's death had not really hit home until some time after it had happened. He had been at The Three Broomsticks, relaxing over a pint after a long day at work, when Harry had come in and dropped onto a stool a few from his own. He couldn't remember now how the conversation started, but they'd started talking and amongst bottles of this and shots of that he learned that his former best friends had tried for years to have a child and that, after a number of miscarriages, they had nearly given up when they had been blessed with little Elizabeth. From the brief encounter in the Alley and a few stories his friends and family had told him, he knew Harry and Hermione deeply loved their little girl and that, do to a combination of complications during Elizabeth's birth and spell damage Hermione had suffered during the final battle against Voldemort, they would never be able to have another child. His mother had shown him several pictures she had of the Potters; he had never seen his former friends so happy before.

But then, after six wonderful years, the unthinkable happened. The details they had were sketchy at best. But, from what they were able to piece together, on July 10th 2008 a few Death Eaters and Voldemort sympathizers that remained at large had managed to kidnap Elizabeth from her grandparents home while the Potters were visiting. Two days later Harry and Hermione had managed to track them down to the once great Malfoy Manor, the home a ruined burned out shell of its former glory, where they found their little girl dead. How she had died was never determined though it was most likely a killing curse that had taken her life.

While investigating, Ron and his fellow Aurors had found Harry and Hermione's magical signatures outside the home where they had torn apart the meager wards the occupants had put up so they knew the two had been there. But inside… Ron shuddered at the memory of what he had seen when they'd entered the home. Inside had been a scene like nothing Ron had seen before or since and left him physically ill for days. The scene made all the worse by the knowledge that it had all been done with knife, sword, or axe. It had taken them a week to recover and piece together the eight bodies of Elizabeth Potter's kidnapers. And even then it had taken pulling in a number of muggle crime scene investigators and medical examiners to figure who the eight had been. There had been a ninth body that was easy to identify, that of Draco Malfoy, stuck to the sitting room wall by means of long thin daggers through wrists and ankles. From what the muggle investigators were able to determine, Draco had not died along with the others but hours later, having finally succumbed to shock and blood loss, shortly before the Aurors had arrived on scene.

Harry and Hermione had vanished, seemingly abandoning magical Britain all together, after they had buried their little girl. But slowly, over the next several months, people started to turn up dead. The deaths reached every level of Wizarding society in Britain from a lowly beggar in Knockturn Alley to prominent businessmen and members of the Wizengamot. Some were found to have been Death Eaters, a few of which had never even been suspected, while others had been behind laws and bills passed or being considered that supported pureblooded bigotry that made it easy for those like Voldemort to come to power. While the deaths of some seemed to have no connection at all to the former Dark Lord and were suspected to be murders committed to hide them in the deaths of dozens of other people. In the end, over two hundred witches and wizards died and there had been no choice but to let new blood into positions that, a year ago, would have never been obtainable by halfbloods, let alone the muggleborns that now held many of them. The resulting power shift had seen many new laws passed and many old ones removed from the books. There had been much protesting by purebloods saying that this would be the downfall of their world only to have them eating crow when it turned out that magical Britain was now stronger and more alive than it had been in centuries.

Several years had passed after those gruesome months when Ron had found his friends coming here, to this graveyard, twice a year; on the day of Elizabeth's birth and on the day of her death. The rest of the time he had no idea where they lived. Though, if the rumors he had heard were accurate, they traveled the world, employing their skills and abilities to rid the world of some of the worst that inhabited it whether they be muggle or magical. But then, for all anyone in Britain knew, they could simply be living a quite life on some remote island, isolated mountain valley, or wide open plain far from the world that had cost them both so much before either had and real chance to live, to see the world with eyes open wide, to be anything more than The-Brightest-Witch-of-Her-Age or The-Boy-With-the-Scar.

Please review. I always like to know what those that read my fanfics think and I apologize for any errors in this fic.