He had always wanted to try Firewhiskey. He supposed as a younger man that it had an allure of adventure, of being grown up.
Now, it was a source for the oblivion he craved.
Betrayed, betrayed by everyone who I thought loved me.
He hates Dumbledore for enabling them to play the little heroes. He hates his family for not stopping him from going with Harry. He hates himself for hating his family, because deep down he knows he still loves them. The only people he doesn't hate are the two people that left him twenty-seven months ago.
It was ironic that he left them so long ago and now they've left him. He tried to be mad about it, but truth be told he's secretly glad for the time alone. Neither Harry nor Hermione would allow him to drink his pain away like this.
Pained.
That was the one word that summed up his existence. Everything was tainted and tinged with pain. His brother was dead. His other brother was a ghost. His girlfriend or whatever the hell Hermione is to him finally, finally kisses him and all seems right with the world….then turns around and offers her life to his best friend. This all happening of course after three years of being at war, the last year of which had been spent surviving one run in with death after another.
It just wasn't fucking right. None of it was. Where did anyone get off letting them do half the shit they had done?
He takes another deep swig. His head is warm and swimming. Its close, it won't be long until blessed blackness overcomes him. It's the only sleep he gets nowadays. Before, when he had managed sleep, he had relived it all over and over again: Fred's ghostly smile, Hermione's screams as he beats on the basement door, Lavender Brown's bleeding neck, the Room of Requirement in flames, Harry's lifeless body in Hagrid's arms….
I'll go with you
That had been it, he knows now, that had been the moment when he just snapped. The final straw that broke his back. Maybe, maybe before that he comes out alright even after everything else that happened….but the double blow of (he thought) losing Harry and (he knew) losing Hermione was just too much. Of course, she denied everything. They had gone around and around the subject in the subsequent weeks. Exhausting every jot and tittle. She swore up and down that it had nothing to do with any romantic feelings for Harry. He knew better. He had known them for too damn long not to put all the pieces together in that one moment: the two idiots loved each other and the worst part was they didn't even know it yet. Exactly how they didn't know after everything they'd been through was entirely beyond his ability to comprehend.
He stumbles his way over to the door, swaying gently as he does so. He hasn't moved the tent in days, though he doesn't remember exactly where he is. As he unzips the door he's greeted with gently falling snow. Strangely, he doesn't feel cold as he steps out into the ankle deep snow.
Russia
So that's where the hell he was. The memory suddenly dawned on him of crossing the border from some country he couldn't pronounce a few weeks ago. Had to confund to border guards 'cause he couldn't understand a word they said. He takes a few stumbling steps towards a fallen tree before settling roughly upon it, the nearly empty bottle of whiskey hanging limply between his legs.
Why? That was his biggest question. Why hadn't somebody, anybody tried to stop them. His mother had sent him a fucking howler for stealing the car, but drop out of school and become a fugitive and not a single word. Never once had she brought it up. A pale face and tear rimmed eyes had been the best he had gotten out of his mother all that year. His father at least had the dignity to whisper "I'm sorry son" every time he had seen him. A letter had come from him, years ago, and he kept it folded up on his bedside table. A reminder that if the pain ever stopped he had a home to return to.
The only one he genuinely felt sorry for, apart from George, was Ginny. The poor girl had suffered what many a soldier's lover has suffered since the beginning of time: the boy she watched leave never came back. Somewhere amongst all the horror, Harry's love for Ginny became hollow, a clinging on to a sense of normalcy that was long gone and never coming back. At least he had had the sense to tell her, it was about the gentlest he could have let her down. The poor girl had still taken it hard. She would have finished Hogwarts long ago. He wondered how she had handled it. A number of her friends had been killed; Gryffindor tower had surely been a bit emptier than it should have been.
Kids, fucking school kids and they died fighting a war. Where was the justice in that? He had a good reckoning how many wizards lived in Britain….how few of them were Death Eaters? How had it come down to teenagers to do the work of killing the worst dark wizard the world had ever seen?
Poor Harry. Ron hadn't seen or heard from him since he left. Harry had been different after the battle: cold, distant, with eyes that looked hollow. Ron remembered standing with his mouth hung open stupidly as Harry explained that his whole life had been planned around the fact that he would have to die. Ron had been furious. It was the only time he had ever wanted to use an Unforgivable. If Dumbledore had been alive, Ron might have done Voldemort's job for him. The man who had once been the paragon of wisdom in his mind had forever given up the pedestal that he had lived upon in Ron's mind. He now occupied a space little better than Voldemort. With a chuckle, Ron thought that at least Voldemort had been honest about his desire to kill Harry.
He took another swig.
Shit, I've got to stop living in my head. Who am I? Hermione?
Thinking of Hermione sent a small lurch to his stomach, making him retch into the snow. He loved the girl, loved her more than he loved himself. Something deep inside of him told him that there was something toxic about that, but he had never really given himself time to think about it. It had broken his heart to watch her offer to go with Harry, even if she had been with him, Ron, ever since. Not just because of what it said about how Hermione felt about Harry, but because deep down he knew that he never would have offered to go himself.
It wasn't that he didn't care about Harry. He loved Harry, but he knew Harry never would have let them go with him. Never. Harry wasn't like that. Besides, he had told himself, years before, that if it came down to it he would stay with Hermione. He loved her too much to let her go and secretly he imagined himself taking care of her. Harry had even communicated that to Ron over Hemione's shoulder on the staircase. Take care of her. There hadn't been a need to say it, it was a simple understanding shared between two friends with a simple look.
But as he stood by himself watching Harry and Hermione cling to each other he had known right then and there that they had something that he was never going to be able to touch. Hermione had told Ron after the battle that he was the love of her life. He certainly felt that way about her. But he knew now that Harry and Hermione were soulmates. They just had an understanding of one another. Harry knew more about Hermione without trying than Ron would ever know with years of study and practice.
Why was it that nothing in his life was fair? His brothers had all been so bloody perfect. Percy the model citizen, Bill the height of cool, Charlie the great quidditch player, Fred and George the wildly popular pranksters, and Ginny the beautiful girl ever boy wanted. Where had there ever been any room for Ickle Ronniekins? Harry had been a hero from the cradle, Hermione was the most brilliant witch of the age and of course they were secretly and stupidly in love with one another.
"Where the fuck do I fit in?" he shouted into the cold, hearing his voice die once it hit the magical barriers around the tent. He felt a single hot tear steak down his face, the contrast to the cold around him suddenly alerting himself to the fact that he was nowhere near dressed appropriately for snow.
He stood up and managed to take two wobbly steps before he pitched forward face first into the snow, blissful oblivion finally overtaking him.