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Neville would be okay, though he might have slight brain damage. As for the rest...
They had only been gone for a half hour at the most. Ron is sure of that because Hermione, laughing, curls bouncing goldred in the sunlight, had told him that the fish would be ready to come off the grill at 15 past 3, and she wanted her beer at 3 on the dot, and he remarked as Harry, Draco and he staggered under the weight of their alcoholic purchases, hopping from cobblestone to cobblestone as they made their way around the side yard to where the girls and Neville sat filling the pool and grilling, that they had made it with two minutes to spare.
“Oi, puddle Harry,” he had shouted with annoyance as the full backyard of his little cottage came into view and the booze haul slipped through his friend’s numb fingers and into the seven inches of water that had pooled there. Oh my god, is that Neville what the hell happened?
And in his haste to get to the man, who was lying half on, half off the concrete porch, sheetwhite with his eyes closed and surrounded by the remnants of a fallen lattice and their outdoor flat screen television, he trips over something in the puddle the discarded but still flowing hose has caused, and reaches down to see what it is.
It’s the back of his sister’s head. And her torso. He had somehow failed to notice, in his haste, her pale, skinny legs sticking out from the edge of the puddle, and so he pulls hard, forgetting all magic, to flip her over and cradle her to his chest, and as he sees that she’s pale as ice, blue lips sciatic and head wound no longer bleeding, he hears the baritone that’s become the blonde Malfoy’s adult voice ring out in a panic, “Ron, where’s your wife?!”
The paramedics come, and then the Mediwizards come, and wipe the paramedics’ minds to send them off, and Neville is Disapparated away on a stretcher by two men in robes, but the two sheet covered corpses linger longer because there’s no rush; not even magic can bring back the dead. A forensics-based Sequence of Events spell, a creation of Hermione herself some months back and as a matter of fact it earned them the down payment on this house, this hateful house, reveals what happened. The Daily Prophet will call it a freak accident. Neville, in a misstep of clumsiness he had long since grown out of in his adult years, came down hard on a rake which reared up and whacked him, sending him ass over head into the lattice structure Ron and Hermione had painstakingly put together the weekend before in preparation of having company over to try out their new pool and muggle television. It topped the whole thing, knocking both the women down and pinning Ginny, who had the hose turned on full blast to splash Hermione with it, giggling. His wife had been knocked out instantly by a chunk of a column plaster and cement, and went face first in the back yard’s downslope, which quickly began collecting water from the hose that Ginny was unable to turn off before she, too, sunk below consciousness. The ground in their new neighborhood was apparently not too soluble, and the puddle had grown from there. Ron hadn’t known before that you could drown in seven inches of water.
They had only been gone 30 minutes. Neville would be okay, though he might have slight brain damage. His sister and his wife would not be okay, because they were both dead.
Once the mediwizards take the bodies away, Ron leaves a stunned Harry and Draco in the yard and goes upstairs. Utterly numb, he climbs into the bed he had, just this morning, made love to his wife in. He marvels for an instant that Hermione will not be happy about the dried flakes of mud he’d dragged into their bed, and when forcing down a hysterical laughter, decids it doesn't much matter anymore. This is where Harry and Draco find him, curled up in their, no, his feather duvet. Without a word, the two men climb in with him, mud and all, and flank him all night as he sits awake and stares into empty space.
In the morning, Harry and Draco get up and go to work, and there Ron sits, breathing in and out. It's like his brain has shorted. Whole thoughts do't come. In the evening, Harry and Draco return, showered, hand in hand and wearing twin worried expressions. Harry leaves the bedroom to make some calls on his mobile and Draco pulls Ron off the bed, stripping him down impersonally and efficiently and shoving him into the shower. Ron stands there until the water no longer runs brown, and cools to the touch, and only then does Draco come back in, looking ancient, to escort the other man back out of the shower, not bothering to towel him off and instead dropping a thick bathrobe over the red head’s shoulders. They sit him down on the couch in the living room.
“We need to plan the funeral,” Harry whispers.
“Do you know what Hermione would have preferred?” Draco asks.
Ron takes a deep breath, intending to say, Yes, she has a will, we both do. He exhales slowly and says nothing. They wait.
Instead, he shifts his eyes to the desk at the corner, piled high with parchment and printer paper and quills and muggle pens. “Accio, Hermione’s last will and testament?” Draco hazards quietly. Harry perceptively flinches. Sure enough, a parchment at the bottom of the massive pile stirs, disrupting some of the work piled on top. It flies into Draco’s open hand, and he and Harry hunch into it, reading.
Finally Draco sighs, and Harry turns away, rubbing his temples. They look a thousand years old in that moment. They’re 26.
“This will help,” Draco murmurs. Ron takes a deep breath, intending to say, Yeah, it should. We all had them written out during the war. He exhales slowly and says nothing.
Draco and Harry sit down close to each other in the loveseat facing Ron, spreading out pen and paper on the coffee table. Occasionally they ask for clarification, feedback or affirmation on some of Hermione's instructions, but mostly they write and plan, making lists and putting together a schedule. Hermione had been meticulous, of course, so most of the details were already ironed out. Harry points out that revisions have been made to the document in the nine years since the war, and Ron takes a deep breath, intending to say, Of course there have, you know how Hermione iswas, carefully planning out details others overlook. He exhales slowly and says nothing, and Harry gets up and heads to the kitchen to cook some bereavement meals so that Ron will eat, and Draco steps outside to make calls on his mobile and set things in order. Ron sits.
They bury her on a Wednesday and Ron marvels at how fast this whole process works. Just Saturday he left her having a water fight with his sister, and at that though a wave of grief threatens to overwhelm the persistent state of shutdown he’s entered into to cope, but nope, he pushes it down, one thing at a time, he certainly can’t process both their deaths at the same time. He knows the pain will kill him.
He throws soil in the hole where the tree is planted. Hermione wanted a trendy modern muggle green burial, and that’s what she gets, her body feeding the life of a sapling. May it grow tall and strong, and once its lifespan is almost over, may it be cut down and used to make books. Hermione would like that, Ron thinks, and then a raindrop falls on his hand, and then another, but the sun is shining, and it’s not raining, and suddenly he can no longer stand, and he is falling to his knees, screaming his pain, his disbelief, she’s gone, she’s gone, we were going to make a life together and she was mine and I was hers. The grief is a maw, he feels like he cannot contain it, it’s going to rip through his veins, burst his capillaries, bleed into his insides and swell him up until his skin bursts too and it all comes rushing out of him, torn to shreds here on top of her grave and he thinks that at least then the pain will end.
That doesn’t happen though. Eventually the grief recedes enough that he can see more than just hazy red through his swollen eyes, snot running out his nose and down his face and he looks around for the first time, and sees his mom, and Hermione’s parents, and Harry and looking shattered and he thinks, Oh, this is worse, this is so much worse...this is an open wound.
That is what it’s like. He feels like he’s missing his dermis on one side of his body, torn raw, nerves completely exposed and throbbing with every movement he makes. He cannot breathe without pain. He cannot think without pain. He knows for certain that he will never, never heal from this.
He lives like this for the better part of 18 months. He neglects his appearance and his home. He doesn’t sleep. His job is understanding at first, but eventually has no choice but to let him go. He barely moves, and is unable to acknowledge the near constant streams of visitors he has that coax him to eat, to shower, to function. Harry wonders aloud one night if he’s skipped right over three stages of grief to settle right into depression, and Ron privately agrees. He was an excitable child once but in his adult years prided himself on being sensible. Quality traits he picked up from his wife, actually, and that thought stabs through his eyes and his gut with a thousand tiny needles, worse than yesterday when he found her sock behind the couch, worse than the day before when he found her favorite dish in the fridge, molded over and spoiled. He knows that denial is useless and bargaining won’t bring her back.
He’s content to wallow, and rightfully so, in depression, haunting the house that had once held all their hopes and dreams and now is cursed. He is a ghost. Until the day the dam breaks, and he goes into a violent rage. Ah, anger, finally. He smashes the furniture, seeing red. He sets the bed afire with a cold burning spell. He tears up the back yard in his rage, shattering the damn rake that caused the whole mess down to the atomic level with a powerful reducto. He sends the pool water in a hurricane fury that tears up the grass, rips the shingles off the roof. It gets so bad that the neighbors contemplate calling the police or the local news station, concerned about the freak weather.
When Draco and Harry find him later that evening, he’s breaking dishes in the kitchen. Draco sighs, and leaves. Harry stills Ron’s hand, and Ron feels the anger drain out of him. He’s now crushingly hollow, so hollow his teeth rattle with the emptiness of it all, and he’s exhausted. He goes to bed in his bathroom tub.
Upon waking in the morning (and it’s an instant process, unconscious to wide awake, feeling like a thousand volts are running live, under his skin) he discovers that Harry has cleaned his house, using magic and some spells of questionable legality. There is still extensive damage to the walls, but the floor is cleared and usable. That night, Draco shows up, and without a word, deposits a tool kit and the unassembled pieces of some rich, expensive pieces of hard oak furniture. He cocks a blonde eyebrow at Ron, and disapparates.
The wood sits there for three days.
On the third day, one of the rare days when Ron is not feeling suicidal and merely weepy, he wanders out into his living room, bare sans the planks of wood and the tool kit, and plops down on the stained carpet. He picks up the instructions for assembly, wondering what Draco has brought him. His eyebrows rise into his unkept red hair. Of all the things...a desk? More specifically, a filing cabinet for a desk, one of the nice executive ones. And bookshelves.
Sighing with a shrug, he picks up a screw driver, and biting back the pain of the memory, tries to remember the lessons his wife taught him about assembling muggle furniture without magical assistance.
The first thing that hits him is the scent. New wood, rich, fragrant, it brings back memories of school, of the library, of her love of books, of falling for her in the first place. As he brings the shelves of the bookcase into alignment and struggles to screw the pieces together himself, he cannot help but think of her, and for the first time, it’s without crushing, overwhelming pain. He is slightly in awe, and wonders if Draco isn’t secretly a genius.
It takes him an entire day to assemble one of the bookshelves by himself. Once it’s built, he shoves it up against the wall, sans magic. It’s huge. It takes up the entire wall of his living room. Draco must have known it would. Ron falls asleep in front of it, not bothering to grab a blanket or pillow. He awakes the next morning to sun shining down through naked windows because some time ago he’d ripped the drapes, fixtures and all, straight out of the wall.
It’s for the first time that he really gets a good look at the wooden bookcase in the morning sunlight. It shines. It’s shot through with red, and looks like Hermione’s hair. For the first time since her death, this brings equal amounts of warmth and pain to his heart. He starts on the next piece of furniture.
By that Friday Ron is now the proud owner of two gigantic bookshelves and a massive executive file cabinet. And while the scent of the pieces, and the color, and okay, the sight and the texture bring back evocative and powerful memories of his love, he still doesn’t quite see the why behind Draco’s choice of gift. After all, Ron tore up his bed; he smashed his bowls; he destroyed his bedroom. He’s sleeping on a mattress on his bedroom floor, for bugger’s sake. But when Harry comes over that Saturday, he grasps Ron by the shoulders and marches him to the attic door.
“In your fit of rage, you did a lot of damage, mate. Draco and I tried our best to restore Hermione’s writings and books, but we could only do so much. You have a long way to go if you want to get it all organized. But we will help you if we can. Up you go.”
And he pulls the attic trap door down, and ushers Ron up the stairs.
There are books stacked to the ceiling. Hills and hills of papers and parchments, some quite stained, torn, and stepped on. Most appear intact, however, and he experiences such a headrush that had Harry not still had his hand on the back of the other man’s soulders, he might have tumbled right back down the attic stairs. A wave of relief at a thought he hadn’t even allowed himself to think in full, did I ruin it, did I destroy it all, her entire body of work and all her writings in my fit of rage washes over him and he basks in it, and falls to his knees and shakes, dried out, no more tears to shed. And when the shaking abides, he gets up, and without a word, methodically begins carrying the stacks downstairs. When Draco gets off of work, he joins them, and together they clean out the attic, bringing everything down and into the living room.
They order a pizza for dinner that night, and Ron brings himself to drink a beer for the first time in nearly two years, and from outside the cottage you can hear what might, just might, be the sound of quiet laughter.
Much of the next few weeks, Ron spends putting books away, organizing papers, filing away receipts and recipes and spell theories and rumancy equations, and many of the scraps of paper bring back memories, of shopping trips, and good natured bickering, of the love and challenges two people go through when building a life together. It also brings up some very pertinent questions for Ron, like who the hell has been making the house payments for him, and how the hell does he still have eckeltricity and water? Harry confesses over curry one night that Draco set it up through their joint account and Harry has been making the payments. Ron feel a wash of shame and embarrassment, but Harry gives him a look that says, really, mate, after all that we’ve been through together and Ron decides to try to put it out of mind and do better from now on. And he is doing better, will do better, because he has to; she would want him to and yes, she’s gone, but he’s not, he’s still here. He still lives. And it’s time to start living.
They’re sitting on the floor of his living room because there is no seating. He thinks he might be happy anyway. There is giggling in this house again, even if it’s just a little. There are smiles, even if they are directed at scraps of written information, captured in parchment and enjoyed briefly before they’re filed away in their place. And sometimes, just sometimes he thinks he can hear the tinkle of her laughter in the wind as it whispers by his windows and the sunlight streams down on polished, redbrown oak bookshelves.
Fin