looked when he had brought Harry up out of the Bottomless Pit, and Ron had pushed Harry towards her, and then turned away while they embraced. His face in that prison cell under Slytherin's castle, and she wondered again what he had been about to tell her. Her eyes went to his left hand where the hilt of the sword had burned its cross-shaped mark. I want to hate him, she thought, but I can't, any more than Ginny can. He's part of me, my own blood and bone. My childhood.
'Of course I love you,' she said. 'And you love me. And you love Harry, and he…he loves you.'
Ron winced. 'Don't,' he said.
Hermione ignored him. 'And you threw all that away. And for what?'
'I don't know.' His voice was fierce. 'I told you I don't know. I can't explain it. It's like I went mad for a while. It's like I was looking down from some high place, seeing myself do these things, and it seemed right and justified. And I loved you…' He looked away again. 'I never have loved anyone else.'
'You didn't love me. Whoever she was…that's who you loved.'
'She never existed,' Ron said. His voice was bitter. 'That's what I think.
There never was a girl I loved…just something evil that took the shape of what I wanted.'
'Like a demon?' Hermione asked, her mind suddenly flipping the pages of her DADA textbook. 'Like a succubus?'
Ron looked faintly exasperated. 'I told you I have no idea.'
'You spent all that time with her and you never — '
'I thought she was you!' he burst out. 'Maybe I'm a fool, and I just saw what I wanted to see, but she did a damn good impression of you, Hermione. She had your mannerisms down — the way you curl your hair around your finger when you're thinking. The way you bite your nails.
She had your clothes — '
'I know. I saw. My pajamas.' Hermione shook her head. 'Six years of friendship,' she said in an icy voice, 'and all it took to convince you was a little bit of nail-biting and a pair of stolen pajamas.'
Ron made a little gasping sound, as if she'd walloped him in the chest.
'Maybe I believed it because I wanted to believe it.'
'You wanted to believe I'd do that to Harry?'
'Not everything,' he said in a deadly cold voice, 'is about Harry.'
'Bollocks,' she shot back. 'This is all about Harry.'
Ron put a hand up, as if to ward off her rage. 'This — this is why I have to leave.'
'Why? Because I want you to face what you did? Because I want to know why?'
'Yes, because you want to know why. And there is no why.' His voice was flat with exhaustion. 'I don't have any answers.'
'You must know why you did it…'
'I don't. It seems like a fever dream.' His shoulders hunched, and he shoved his hands in his pockets, shivering. 'I close my eyes, I see her face.
Your face. I was sick all night, thinking about what I did. I've been sick all morning. I've been throwing up till there's nothing left to throw up, and then I throw up again.' His eyes were bleak. 'I touched her, I spent nights with her, hours and hours talking. It wasn't just sex, you know. We talked, we ate together, we did our Potions homework. And I don't even know who she was. She could have been anyone — anything.' He shook his head, and leaned back against the wall. 'So don't ask me why I did it — because it's what I've been asking myself, and I still don't know.'
'Don't try to tell me how much you're suffering.' She heard her own voice in her ears, and was shocked at its cruel tone. 'I doubt it could be enough.'
His mouth hardened. 'Let me ask you something, Hermione. If I'm so horrible, if I'm so awful… then why do you want me to stay?'
'Because — because I can't do this alone.' There, she had said it. 'I can't.'
'You can't do what alone?'
'Put Harry back together. I…' Ron looked at her blankly, and she bit her lip. 'I saw him tonight…just now, and he…'
A muscle spasmed next to Ron's mouth. 'How did… how did he seem?'
Hermione looked away. 'Broken,' she said.
Ron's blue eyes darkened, but when he spoke his voice was steady. 'He's been broken for a while now, Hermione,' he said. 'You never saw it because you didn't want to. That other Hermione…whoever was pretending to be you…she saw it.' He looked, then, at the photograph in his hand. Abruptly, he shoved it into his breast pocket. 'She saw it better than we did.'
She looked at him, then turned away quickly and went to the window. She put the palm of her hand against the cold glass, and looked out. The sky was heavy, leadenly gray, the clouds weighted with their freight of incipient snow. The only color in the white expanse of ground before the Forest was a cluster of moving black dots where some students were having a snowball fight. Hermione closed her eyes, remembering Ron's cold hand in hers, her other hand gripping Harry's. Promise me…that we'll always be friends.
'He can't be broken,' she said, not opening her eyes. 'I won't let him be.'
'And what'll you do if he won't let you fix him?'
'That doesn't matter,' she said, in the same remote voice. 'I'd do anything for Harry. Anything. Even if it made him hate me.'
'Would you leave him?'
That made her eyes fly open. She stared at Ron, who stared grimly back, his blue eyes steady. 'You mean if he wanted me to? If he — despises me now?'
'No,' said Ron. 'Not exactly.' He took a few steps towards her, and then, seemingly assured that she was not going to lunge at him and slap him, came to stand beside her. The gray light from the window cast a sickly pallor over his already pale skin. Hermione wished she had a Pepper-up Potion to give him. Then she tried not to wish it. She was, after all, still angry. 'Hermione…' He took a deep breath. 'I know you won't believe this, because you're too angry, and you — you have every right to be angry. But when I say I don't know why I did it, I mean it. It was like I went mad for those few hours every night. Pieces of my memories come back to me now and they seem like hallucinations — not like dreams, too real and vivid for that, but like waking nightmares. And yet they're memories of happy times. At least, I thought I was happy.'
'Ron…what are you trying to say?'
'That maybe I don't know why I did it because…because I wasn't in control of what I was doing. I know it sounds like an excuse, but I'm not making excuses. I blame myself, I do, but at the same time — at the same time, maybe you're right, and all this really is about Harry. After all, what better way to get at him than through you and me?'
'No.' Her nails dug into her hands. 'Don't say that.'
'It's true. You know it's true. They used us to get at him.'
'Who are 'they'?'
Ron spun away from her and stared at the wall. 'I don't know. But I know I'm right.'
'Is that why you're leaving?' she asked, in a small thread of a voice. 'To keep him safe?'
'Maybe. A little bit.' He covered his face with his hands. 'I don't know. I'd like to think so. But… I've spent all these months missing him, wondering where he'd gone, where we went. Us, our friendship. I blamed Malfoy for all of that being lost. But now I wonder.' He took his hands away from his face. The redness of his eyelids (so he had been crying) made his eyes look bluer, his face consequently even younger. 'I don't think it is Malfoy.
I think it's something inside Harry. There's something he's dreading, but he's obsessed with it, too. I just don't know what it is.' He looked at her, hard. 'Do you?'
After a long moment, she shook her head. 'No. And I still don't see how you can justify leaving him.'
'Leaving him?' Ron gave a short bark of almost-laughter. It was the most unhappy sound she had ever heard. 'How can I leave him? He's already gone.'
'You think…you really think…that I'm putting him in danger?' Hermione asked. 'I try…I try to protect him,
