InsaneJournal

Characters: Ron Weasley
Setting: Obscurus Books in Diagon Alley, 10 November 2003, 2:30pm
Rating: General Public
Summary: Ron goes to Obscurus Books to talk to Penelope about her dead brother but does not find her.

Ron usually wasn't the one chosen for this sort of thing, so he wasn't really sure how to approach this. He'd been along before, sure, but he'd never been a lead investigator before so he felt like he was out of his league. But maybe Penelope would feel more comfortable with him (because he was Percy's brother?) and not feel like this was so formal. He knew from experience that talking to Aurors was usually pretty uncomfortable for people, even when it was just giving them information about something. They had a way of making people nervous, even if it was someone like Ron; he never thought he would be the type to make people nervous yet slap that Auror title on him and people didn't want to look him in the eye. This is why he had suggested talking to Penelope somewhere else besides the Ministry, because taking people to the Auror office was a sure-fire way to get them in a state of forgetting things. Being at the Ministry made people nervous, no matter if they did something wrong or not. He knew the feeling, even if he hadn't ever had to go there for anything himself (besides breaking in when he was on the run with Harry their seventh year). Ron entered Obscurus Books and asked someone to point him to Penelope's office upstairs. He hoped that he would be smart enough for all this. Usually he had Harry and Hermione to bounce ideas off. And even when he became an Auror he had still had Harry with him so he was still in that familiar territory. Now he was alone without either and he wasn't sure how he was going to do on his own. It's not like he was an idiot but it was a familiar comfort he was not used to doing without and what if he mucked up without that? It was bad enough that his first real first day back had been met with someone pulling a prank on him and making him want to turn tail and crawl back into his hole again. He just hoped that he could do this because maybe this would be what proved that he could actually make it without Harry being there and that scared him because if he mucked it up, didn't that prove he wasn't worth a damn without him? He knocked on Penelope's office door and shook his head, trying to dislodge all of this from his mind and focus on what he already knew of her situation. He needed to focus on her and not himself.