Summersmut Mod (summersmutmod) wrote in hp_summersmut, @ 2009-08-13 00:00:00 |
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Entry tags: | 2009, fic |
[FIC] Broken :: Blaise/Theodore/Ron | gift for gala_apples
Title: Broken
Author:
Recipient: gala_apples
Pairing: Blaise/Theodore/Ron, past Harry/Hermione/Ron
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 5840
Warnings: AU from HBP onwards, implied character death
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters herein are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement is intended.
Summary: Lost in a city he doesn't know and lost in a mind no longer working like it's supposed to, Ron Weasley is rescued by two of the least likely people he'd ever expect to put him back together.
Author’s Notes: I've incorporated some elements of Deathly Hallows canon into this story, but please keep in mind that it is definitely AU. It is also fairly dark. gala_apples, I hope you enjoy it. Thank you to my beta and to the mod for your infinite supplies of patience.
He is lost in a sea of people, desperate and drowning in the blur of faces and bodies that seem to swim in front of his eyes like runny paint. They give him a wide berth, but he somehow still manages to collide with too many of them, their bodies twitching away from him in horror. Sometimes he grasps at their clothes, wanting to beg them for something, but he can't remember what it is he's supposed to say, and the language in which they shout at him to get away sounds so foreign to him. This whole place is foreign, like an alien city full of people masquerading as human but devoted solely to either ignoring him or making his life hell.
Sure enough, someone shoves him out of their way, pushing him into an alley filled with trash. He knows that he should be retching, that in the before time the smell would be the most revolting thing to him, but now the smell is only an afterthought, subsumed by the odours of his own unwashed body and the screaming voices of the city. He falls to his knees and his hand brushes against an old shoe. It reminds him of something, something that he knows he's forgotten but shouldn't have, and he clasps it to his chest.
He remembers the sensation of being tugged from his stomach, that somehow a shoe pulled him from one place to another, from some terrible dark place to this city of strange noise. He remembers the cold echo of running footsteps in halls of stone, resounding in a room with some kind of fluttering cloth in the center. He remembers the feeling of his heart pounding so hard it seemed it would escape his body and fly away. Most of all he remembers the screaming, screaming from all directions, some of it hers but the majority of it his own.
"Tais-toi!" yells a passer-by at the mouth of the alley, and he realizes belatedly that he is screaming again, rocking back and forth with the shoe pressing into his chest.
"He'll come for you too!" he cries, not knowing who he means but only sure that he has to warn them all. "He's killing them all, he won't stop with Britain, he won't stop at Hogwarts, you've got to believe me!"
Several more people are screaming at him now, jabbering away in words he doesn't understand, and finally he bolts out of the alley, head down and barrelling through the crowds. The shoe slips from his grasp somewhere along the way, but the loss registers only dimly in the back of his mind. It is more important to reach inside the inner pocket of his tattered robes, to clutch at the cold lump of metal he finds there, to make sure it's still there. He doesn't remember why it's important, only that it is. As he scrabbles in his pocket, he loses his balance and trips, hitting the paved ground hard and scraping his face. He can't understand why he's here, why no one will help him at all, and he wishes so much that he could remember where he came from or how he got here, or even his name.
"I say, Blaise, is that a Weasley?"
Weasley. The word is like a beacon to him and he swings his head wildly, looking for the source of the voice that speaks a language he knows, a word he recognizes. Blood trickles down from a cut on his forehead, gumming up his eyes and obscuring the world around him.
"Merlin, I think it. Isn't it the one that always followed Potter around?"
"Ronald, I think."
Ronald? Ron. That is his name, he knows it. The sound of it strikes inside of him like a chime, and he hears the name echoed by her voice.
"Oh God, they're coming, Ron. Run!"
"Help me, Ron!"
He clutches at his head as the voice floods him and he screams, babbling every word he can think of to drown out the sound of it. Then, suddenly, his voice is gone from him, and his body locks in place and falls to the ground.
"Merlin, thank you. He was driving me insane with all that noise. Come along, Theo, let's go."
A cool hand brushes Ron's forehead then, and after a whispered word the blood and grime is gone from his eyes. A pale, narrow face gazes down at him, and Ron recognizes it. His heart leaps into his throat at the thought that finally, finally, he has found something that he remembers.
"We can't just leave him here," says the face, looking back at someone that Ron cannot see. Theo, the other voice called him. Theodore Nott. Ron is sure that is the name of the man above him, someone that he knew from a long time ago. "I mean, look at the state of him."
The other voice lets out a sigh, and then another man draws close to look down at Ron as well. This face is darker than the first, and the name Zabini pops into Ron's mind as he sees it. Hogwarts. They're from Hogwarts, whatever that was.
"What exactly do you propose we do for him?" Zabini asks, looking down at Ron with an expression that would frighten Thestrals. "He's obviously some kind of transient now. Probably lost what little brains he had. It's not our responsibility, Theodore."
Nott kneels down next to Ron and looks him in the eye. Dirty Slytherin, Ron thinks suddenly, shying away, and then he wonders what a Slytherin is. "I'm going to take the Silencing charm and Body Bind off you," Nott says. "I'll put them right back if you cause any trouble, understand?" He waves his wand – his wand, Ron thinks, elated at seeing one – over Ron's head, and then he can move again. "What are you doing in Paris, Weasley?"
Paris. So it was French that everyone had been screaming at him in. No wonder it had sounded so alien. "He'll come for you too," Ron whispers.
"Weasley!" Nott's voice is sharp. "What are you doing here?"
Ron whimpers at the harsh sound of the voice, wrapping his arms around himself. He doesn't know, he doesn't want to know, he knows too much already.
"What is the point of all this?" asks Zabini, picking at his nails and casting glances up the alley.
Nott casts an exasperated glance at him. "He's the first person from Britain we've seen in over a year, and I'm not about to just walk away and leave him lying in the gutter. Think of all the things he knows about what's happening back at home."
"I don't care about what's happening there."
"Liar."
They glare at each other, and Ron is terrified that they're going to vanish then, that it will turn out that all this has just been some kind of fever dream his mind has created. Even if it's just a dream, it's been so long since anyone has spoken to him, has said words that he understands, has known who he is, that he'd rather have the dream than go back to wandering the streets alone.
"Please don't go," he whispers, and he reaches out to grasp at Nott's shirt sleeve. Nott looks at him and his face softens a little.
Zabini scoffs. "So what, then? You want to take him back to our room and nurse him back to health? Play Healer and patient, feel good about yourself? How very Gryffindor of you, Theodore."
"Come on, Blaise, you know it'll be worth it. We've been running for so long now, we need to know what's happening back there. He can tell us. It would be foolish to just ignore this opportunity."
For a long moment, Zabini glares down at Ron, tapping his wand against his arm. "Fine," he grinds out through his teeth, "but he's not sleeping in our bed. My sense of charity extends only so far."
Nott laughs and hoists Ron to his feet. "You're a saint, Blaise Zabini. I'll take him in side-along then?"
The words side-along ring a bell in Ron's mind, and then he feels a tingling rush engulf his body. At first he wants to sob in relief as he feels the magic surround him again, to rejoice at remembering that yes, he was a wizard, that he too once could do this. Then he realizes, as he is pulled through space, that this is like it was with the shoe, being thrown from one place to another, and he is abandoning her again. He doesn't want to, it was an accident, grabbing the shoe, and now he can't go back for her and he's the worst kind of coward.
"Fucking hell, shut up!"
Zabini is shaking him, slapping him across the face, but Ron pushes past him and rushes towards the door he sees now that the world has taken shape around him again. He's got to get back there, got to make up for it, got to –
"Stupefy!"
The world goes dark.