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sarkaSo, I was playing around with things like tags and stuff yesterday, and I was looking at my My Fic tag and thought, "Hang on a sec, that doesn't look right. Isn't there a fic missing?"
Um. After some extensive searching, turned out there was. Back in MARCH (I am an idiot) there was the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
triatha_ron, for which I wrote a Gen fic about Ron.
It's... not one of the my favourites of the things that I've written, mostly because I ran out of time at the end and didn't quite manage to write as much as I wanted. Maybe one day if I have a dearth of plotbunnies (HAHA LIKELY) I will go back and fix it.
But anyways, here for your reading pleasure:
Story title: Cold Comfort
Author name: Šárka,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sarka
Rating: R for violence. No smut.
Pairings/Characters: Ron Weasley, two original characters, no pairings.
Warnings: Lots of people are already dead. And the story focuses on a murder investigation, so there is a murder, and a graphic description of a spell.
Length: 7115 words.
Disclaimer: The world of Harry Potter belongs to J.K.Rowling and her publishers, as well as Warner Bros. The following story is for my own and other's entertainment; no money is being made.
Author notes: Thanks, as always, tohildigunnur, for being a sounding board, and to salixbabylon for cleaning up my comma-sprees, curtailing overuse of adjectives and otherwise making my writing readable.
Summary: Decades after Voldemort's downfall, a young journalist out for a story discovers that the only comfort available to Ron Weasley is of the cold variety.
The wind was bitingly cold and seeped through her warmest coat as if it were made of gauze. The weather in this stupid country was completely impossible, she decided, as she ducked beneath the police ribbon that surrounded the tiny house. How could it be this cold, when the sky was a brilliant blue and the sunshine reflecting on the snow made her eyes hurt?
"I thought it was supposed to warm up today?" she said pitifully to the young police officer outside the door, as she handed him the cup of coffee she'd gone to fetch, clutching her own for warmth.
"It has, Em," he said cheerfully accepting the cup. "It's almost five degrees warmer today than it was yesterday. 'S why we've got wind," he smiled. He wasn't wearing a hat, nor a scarf, nor mittens. She couldn't figure out how he hadn't died of hypothermia, just getting out of the car.
"What have you got in there?" she asked, rather than comment on his lack of proper accoutrements for the temperature.
"Oh, murder," he said, grinning from ear to ear. "Pretty grisly, from what I could tell."
"Why aren't you in there, then?" she asked, gesturing with her coffee cup.
"Boss wanted someone out here to make sure you didn't get in."
"Oh, and you volunteered for the job or something?"
"Nah," he said, grin widening. "I was the only one with a coat."
His name was Grettir, or something equally impossible to pronounce, and in the time she'd been there, she'd not seen him frown, not even once. He'd announced the 'pretty grisly murder' with the sort of air most people reserve for driver's licence photographs. Emily hadn't figured out if he was some sort of manic unable to stop being cheerful, or if he was so apathetic that he figured he might as well smile because everything was going to hell in a handbasket anyway.
"What am I doing here?" she mumbled into her coffee cup, shaking her head. Coming here had seemed like a good idea at the time, but ever since she'd arrived and found out that things weren't as easy as she'd thought...
"What are you doing here?" barked Ron Weasley as he opened the door and saw her. She didn't have time for a witty response, because he turned towards Grettir and asked him to call the chief and ask for someone whose name was a string of incomprehensible syllables to her, to be sent down.
He gave her a last look of utter disgust before he stalked into the building and slammed the door behind him, and Emily wondered if she could still tell the Prophet that her information was wrong, she hadn't found him and he was probably living the easy life of an ex-war-hero somewhere else than in this frozen, desolate country. And the answer was the same as it was the last time she wondered; she couldn't do that and still have a job. So she stayed.
Her dad, bless him, had warned her when she'd told him why he'd need to feed her cat for a few weeks. "Leave the man alone, Em," he'd said. "Hasn't he done enough?"
"How can we know?" she'd replied. "Nobody knows exactly what happened, anymore. He's the only person left who can tell the entire story."
"And what sort of story do you think you'll get from him?" he'd asked. "Turning 'round stones and looking at what's beneath – a lot of people aren’t going to be happy to have the light of day shined on 'em."
"All the more reason to do just that," she'd said, and her dad had shaken his head and told her the war had been over for a long, long time.
Ron had told her essentially the same thing, with ruder words, when she'd approached him the first time; that the war was over, and that was the only thing he'd say about it, and if she imagined she'd be getting a heart-to-heart for the Prophet, she could think again.
And then he'd slammed the door in her face.
+++
The ambulance had left, a great deal of specialists had traipsed in and out of the house, and the streetlamps had been turned on by the time Ron emerged again from the house. In the fading daylight his face looked wan and tired and Emily wondered if he'd slept at all. The vague guilt which manifested somewhere deep in her stomach every time she hounded a story like this, regardless of the people it would affect, made itself known, and she couldn't help but worry that her coming out here, finding him, was causing him heartache.
She didn't know if anybody else at the Prophet ever felt guilty for what they did – she never asked – but she doubted that the more successful journalists had any such concerns.
Emily was just about to climb into Grettir's police cruiser to tag along to the station when someone hollered her name.
"Creevey! You! Idiot girl! In here!" Turning around she was surprised to see that Ron was standing next to his unmarked detective's car and glaring at her with more than his usual intensity – but he'd said 'in here', so she had to assume that he actually wanted her to ride with him.
"Mr. Weasley?" she asked, carefully walking to his car, stepping over banks of ice which made her itch to transfigure her sensible walking boots into ice-skates.
"You are a right nuisance," he said, clearly irritated. "Don't be slow on top of it. In."
She climbed into the front seat and fastened the seatbelt, while Ron walked around the car and got behind the wheel.
"You are causing me trouble. Seems someone at the station noticed 'my little shadow' and got annoyed enough to complain. They told me to deal with you. Since I've no idea how to make you go away – no idea that would be legal, in any case – here's the deal." He fell silent and Emily held her breath, waiting for him to continue.
"You follow me. You're not to speak unless spoken to. You take no pictures, you ask no questions. If you can make your goddamn story out of it, all the better. I'm not planning to reminisce with you. Got it?"
"Yeah," she whispered. "Thanks."
"Oh, don't be thanking me yet," he replied sarcastically. "If it was up to me, I'd have you deported."
+++
They stopped in front of a small white house, not very far from the crime scene, and even as they pulled up to the curb in front of it, Emily could feel the wards thrumming around it.
"Wow," she whispered, more to herself than Ron, but somehow this elicited a smile on his face.
"Man doesn't like to be bothered. Can't say I blame him. You wait here, and don't be getting any silly ideas like talking to the neighbours in his case. You don't want to fuck with this one, he doesn't take it lightly. I'm going to go put my ear to the ground."
She nodded mutely and watched him walk up the snowy drive towards the house until suddenly he disappeared. Static wards, she supposed – made things look the same, no matter what went on inside.
Maybe she could work with this. If she was to follow him around over the next few days, she'd have plenty of opportunities to just observe. She might not be able to write the article she'd been planning, when she discovered where Ron had been hiding all these years, but a proper article about Ron Weasley was bound to cause a stir, anyway.
Emily wasn't stupid, but she often admitted to herself that she was frequently somewhat naive, which had to be considered a remarkable trait for a former Slytherin. For instance, she realized now that her first reaction to having just discovered where the most wanted man in Wizarddom was hiding had been completely unreasonable.
First of all, she never should have told her editor that she might have found him. Absolutely, under no circumstances, no. If she could have managed to get the interview she'd dreamed of, they would have created the space for it in the paper.
Secondly, she shouldn't have come out to Iceland in a rush. She barely had enough underwear to last her a week, and with the weather being what it was, she'd had to blow a significant amount of money just to keep herself from ending up as an imitation ice sculpture.
Third, approaching Ron the way she did had been a monumentally stupid thing to do. It was all right to introduce herself as a journalist, but she should have expected the door slammed on her nose, not entertained rosy visions of Ron finally opening up about his horrid experiences during the war.
And she shouldn't, not ever, have said that the “public had a right to know.” The problem, as she saw it, was that she'd grown up like any other child of the post-war generation; lulled to sleep by epic tales of heroism and bravery, fooled into thinking that the contrast between the shades of grey was deeper than it actually was.
Ron's reaction to her statement had been a bitter slice of reality, and it had forced her to re-evaluate a number of things she had always taken for granted.
"The Wizarding public has a right to know??" he'd shouted. "Would that be the same Wizarding public that left the disposal of the largest threat in wizard history up to three teenagers? The Wizarding public which barely tolerated Hermione due to her ancestry? The Wizarding public which got annoyed when it took Harry too long to get rid of Voldemort? That Wizarding public?" He'd had to take a pause to breathe at this point, and glare at his subordinates who had stopped to stare at their boss' outburst. "I don't owe anything to the Wizarding public, Miss. I paid my dues to the Wizarding world... We all did. And most paid more than me."
He hadn't had a door between them, to slam in her face, but the look in his eyes was as good as a punch in the stomach.
It had been the closest thing to an answer she'd gotten out of him yet, and it had prompted some scrupulous self-reflection and a research endeavour into the bowels of the Daily Prophet archives. She'd been surprised by his rudeness at first, but she hadn't been too surprised to discover that he'd been right. The articles and stories in the Daily Prophet from the time before You-Know-Who had been defeated were unbelievable.
Considering how much she'd wanted answers at first, she now found herself wondering what would actually happen if he were to give them. Would all of them be so gruesome? Would the Wizarding world even like reading an honest interview with Ron Weasley, if this was the past he'd be talking about?
Even if she really wanted to get answers to the big questions, she was starting to realize that perhaps her world was better off without them. And that if the articles she'd discovered from before the Fall of Voldemort were any indication, the main reason why the Wizarding world today didn't know the answers was because they hadn't been so concerned about the questions back then. Nobody had worried about how to kill Voldemort and who would suffer in the pursuit, as long as they themselves didn't have to be involved. And when the death toll rose frighteningly high, the families of the afflicted had blamed their hero rather than the villain – Harry Potter had been marked as Voldemort's downfall since he was a baby, so why didn't he perform the public service he was destined for?
Then the war had ended, at a terrible cost, and the Prophet had been filled with obituaries, speculation and news of absolute chaos all over the Wizarding world. By the time the dust settled, people suddenly realized that Harry Potter was dead, Hermione Granger was a patient of the long-term St. Mungo's ward for those afflicted from Cruciatus, and Ron Weasley was nowhere to be found.
Over time, the story of how Voldemort was killed became nothing more than that: a story. A number of people had seen the start of the battle, and many of them could tell that Harry had faced down Voldemort. The most reliable information anybody could provide was that Harry, with Ron at his back, had cast a spell and then all hell broke loose.
She'd always known that a lot of the stories that surfaced afterward were lies, or at best, exaggerations. Her dad had never made any secret of what he knew, and even if it wasn't a lot, it was enough for her to know that all the people who said they'd been there that day couldn't possibly all be telling the truth. The only people they could be sure about, these days, were the people who had lost their lives.
Maybe her curiosity wasn't worth fulfilling, she mused to herself. What was the Muggle saying? Let a sleeping dog lie?
She checked her watch again, wondering how long it would take Ron to get the information he needed. The car was rapidly cooling down and her warming charms weren't up to par. Besides, despite the relaxed attitude towards magic around here, she wasn't really happy with the idea of waving her wand around while sitting inside a car where anybody could see her.
She was gazing out the window, wondering whether to try a surreptitious charm or if the risk of setting the car on fire was too great, when Ron appeared out of the darkness in front of the house. He wordlessly got into the car, and it wasn't until they were five minutes away when he finally spoke.
"It was a magical murder. In those cases we usually put together a task force of wizard policemen to deal with it."
Emily waited for him to go on, but when nothing more seemed forthcoming, she decided to venture a question.
"Usually?"
"It's not common. The reason the police force is mixed is because we get relatively low magical crime rates here. But every now and then, someone shows up thinking that because Iceland is more tolerant of Dark Magic than most other places in the world, it means we don't mind a few gruesome murders. There's a difference between people being ambivalent about the line between Dark and Light Magic, and being okay with Dark Magic being used for Dark purposes."
"Yeah, I can see that."
They drove the rest of the way to police headquarters in silence, and although Ron allowed her into the conference room where they discussed the crime, he didn't speak another word to her for the rest of the day.
+++
It was still dark when she woke up the next morning, and she sighed and burrowed under the covers for a while, wondering how anyone in this country ever made it out of bed when the sun didn't rise until just before noon.
Her magic-compatible cellphone made a series of bleeps as she was brushing her teeth. She had to rush out into the hostel bedroom to get it before it shut down, and she listened, toothbrush forgotten in one of her hands when Grettir, his voice still smiling, clearly established that while others might have problems waking up, evil most assuredly never slept.
She Apparated, mildly apprehensive, to the coordinates he'd given her for the new crime scene.
It took her about ten minutes to turn from mildly apprehensive to extremely apprehensive and then to full on petrified. And this time it had nothing to do with Ron Weasley shutting her out. Ever since she'd arrived she'd been granted full observing privileges. That meant that she had a relatively free run of the crime scene (so long as she didn't mess anything up) and its surroundings, as long as she tried to not interfere.
And it was some crime scene, that was for sure. She had, actually, been a working journalist for the Prophet for a while. She'd believed that she'd seen some pretty hideous things. Not so much, she now realized. None of the tableaux she'd witnessed as a reporter could even compare to the sheer horror of the vista she'd taken in once she'd been ushered inside the door.
The living room of the small apartment smelled metallic, and no wonder; if someone had told her a human body could eject this much blood she would have argued against it as exaggeration. As it was, she watched the wizards go about their business, feeling as if she was stuck in a nightmare. The sickly soft smell didn't even register with her at first, although it was also very faint.
"Mr. Weasley," she murmured the next time he walked past her. "I smell burning… have you noticed?"
To her surprise, he actually stopped and breathed the air for a bit. "Now that you mention it…" he said. Later on, she heard him instruct his people to search for remains of igniting spells.
It made her wonder… but no, she was happy as a journalist. It had been what she'd wanted to do. That's why she was here, after all, following a story. It didn't matter what she told herself, though – the rest of her day was filled with unease.
+++
"Tell me what you've got, people," Ron shouted over the conversation in the conference room. Four people turned towards him but the silence was almost deafening.
Finally Grettir cleared his throat and said, "Nothing, sir. Nothing worth reporting."
Emily had known that. Now that Ron was allowing her access, she didn't have to ask so many questions, especially since Grettir evidently saw it as his responsibility to fill her in on what they were thinking. She hadn't needed it, that day. It didn't take a genius to figure out that the mood in the conference room was sombre; even Grettir wasn't his usual chipper self. She'd been surprised to see him on the all-magical task force at first, but he was a wizard through and through, albeit one who liked Muggles and Muggle technologies.
It had been three days from the report of the second murder until the third, and that was just because the third victim had been a loner who had lived in an isolated house. He'd been dead for two days when he was found. It made everyone nervous and edgy – was there a fourth murder that was still unreported? Was a fifth murder perhaps taking place right now?
The frustrating thing was that apart from the methods of the murderer, the murders seemed to have very little in common. The victims had nothing in common, the locations of the crime scenes were all distinctly different, and since the crime was magical the usual sort of evidence associated with Muggle crimes was absent. Wizards who killed could do so with relatively little trouble, if they were powerful enough to harm another human being.
Ron sighed and threw himself into the only empty chair at the table. "Okay, let's go over what we do know one more time," he said, clearly frustrated but not enough to take it out on someone. Except possibly Emily, if she was stupid enough to draw his attention to herself. "How about their links to the magical community? Why are they being killed by a wizard?"
The conversation turned technical, a discussion of methods, spells and motives in terms that nobody who didn't have any background in law enforcement could understand. Emily suspected that it was being done on purpose to confuse her, but she wasn't eager to tell them that their ploy wasn't working. To begin with, she'd have to explain how come she could understand every word of what they were saying, and she also suspected that they'd attempt to shut her out more if they realized that she had no problem following the technicalities. Grettir was the only one who was consistently nice to her and tried to make sure she knew what was going on.
The coroner's report on the third victim – a pretty young woman who had turned out to be a squib – was being passed around the table, most of the team just flicking it open and shaking their heads. "Between the coroner and Grettir here, we've figured out most of the spells used," Ron was saying. "Except for the one the murderer uses to kill them."
Grettir took over. "The magical residue it leaves is something I've never seen before. And the effects, well you've all seen what the victims look like. It's like they've been split open and turned inside out somehow. I've never even heard of a spell that can do that."
"I've seen the effect before," Ron murmured. "But I've never known what spell caused it. It could be an important clue, if it's a very rare spell. Is there no way to reconstruct it, Grettir?"
They started talking about the reverse engineering of spells, and Emily more or less tuned it out. Something Grettir had said was bugging her. Something important.
She coughed and interrupted Ron mid-lecture, asking, "Could I see the report?" Ron glared at her, but slid the file across the table.
The reason they'd shuddered and closed the file turned out to be the fact that a detailed picture was affixed to the front page. Emily tried to ignore it and turned back towards the list of spells. There were two unknowns, one seemingly designed for torture and the eventual killing spell.
"The last blow seems to be a combination of a flaying and a splitting spell. It also causes the joints of the victims to simply fall apart, so that the victim's bones will go in all directions…"
Emily swallowed hard. Then she tried to focus. Combination of a flaying and splitting spell. Something that made the bones of the victims suddenly not want to belong to the victims anymore… She suddenly realized where Ron must've seen the effect before and shuddered. She was almost certain that she'd seen this before, somewhere, sometime…
Words from the report jumped out at her. Fills the lungs with fluid. Unimaginable pain. Several applications of the Cruciatus curse.
The room swam before her eyes, and she stood up abruptly. "Excuse me," she whispered and fled.
She was sitting in a heap on the floor of the ladies' bathroom when she remembered. She'd been writing a report, years ago. It had been something she'd found in one of her research forays into the older parts of the library, where more than half the books were written by hand and one of a kind.
Ron smirked at her when she opened the door to the conference room, fifteen minutes later. "Did you have a big breakfast?" he asked innocently.
"The spell you're looking for, Mr. Weasley," she said in a cold tone, "Is called Diffindis. It is a version of Diffindo, specifically designed for use on human beings. It was developed in the seventeenth century and there exists only one record of it."
Ron stared at her, open mouthed. His team were looking at her in various states of shock. Grettir was the first one to recover.
"And where is that record?" he asked.
"In the Hermione Granger Research Library," she said, and took almost a perverse pleasure in Ron's obvious flinch. "It used to belong to the Malfoy family library, until it was confiscated by the British Ministry of Magic," she added, and watched Ron jump again. "You're looking for someone who, at some point, was involved with the English Auror program."
"And how would you know that?" Ron snapped.
"Why, Mr. Weasley, I graduated from there four years ago. Top of my class, even."
The silence following that statement was finally broken when Ron's telephone rang. Emily could see instantly on his face that the news wasn't good.
"We've got another murder," he said, snapping his telephone closed.
+++
"Figuring out that spell, Em," Grettir said, "That was good work. Don't take it so hard if Weasley cuts you into ribbons later. I haven't seen him this frustrated since, well, in a while."
They were standing outside the fourth murder scene, shivering in the cold wind. "Since when?" she asked, more to keep the conversation going rather than anything else.
"There were murders, not dissimilar from these, a few years back. I was just a rookie, assigned to the team to be educated. He was in a fearsome temper; I was frightened out of my mind half the time."
Emily smirked. "I thought he was in a fearsome temper all the time."
Grettir shook his head. "Nah. But he doesn't talk about the past at all, not ever. If he's in a snit with you, it's because you remind him of it. I saw him jump when you were talking about how you knew that spell – we all know he fought in that war back then. I don't suppose he likes the memories."
They stood in silence for a while, watching one of the streetlamps flicker off and on. They were both exhausted, Grettir probably worse – he'd been working on magical residue of the scene for hours.
He broke the silence with a sigh, then said, "I shouldn't tell you this, but the reason he took those old murders so bad was because they were personal. The murderer was someone from his past, and he pretty much drove Weasley nuts with reminders from the war."
That was new. Emily knew that there were still warrants out for some of the old Death Eaters and You-Know-Who's supporters – some of them had never been caught. "How did it end?" she asked.
"We had him trapped, or so we believed. He cursed one of our team and was getting away, and Ron killed him."
"Killed him?" she whispered, stunned.
"Oh, I don't think he was too broken up about it. Anyways, like I said, he's always had a bad reaction to any mentions of the past and the war. Someone in the narcotics department once asked if he'd known Harry Potter at all. We all thought the guy wouldn't survive."
"Wait, what? He asked him if he'd known Harry Potter? Don't you know that…"
Grettir held up a hand. "Stop. If he doesn't want me to know, I don't want to know. He's my boss and we all rather like him. We don't know anything about the war, except that the good guys won, and we don't really care. So don't tell me, Em, okay?" Then he turned around and went back into the house, and Emily stood and stared after him, completely shocked – and somehow entirely unsurprised.
+++
It was two days later when Emily walked into the restaurant across the road from the police station and saw Ron Weasley sitting in the corner, nursing an almost-finished pint, the remains of a hamburger on the table in front of him, as well as a stack of files.
She wasn't sure whether to ignore him or not. He'd never mentioned the Diffindis spell again but Emily knew from Grettir that they were already looking for people who'd attended the Auror Academy at some point. In addition, she wasn't exactly seeking to spark his ire, since he'd lost his temper at the world in general in the conference room that afternoon and thrown a coffee cup into the wall.
There'd been a fifth murder, that morning, and they still had no idea who was doing this.
Eventually she decided to sit somewhere else, but she ordered him another pint when her server came. She was immersed in a copy of the preliminary crime scene report for the fifth murder, which she'd wrangled out of Grettir, when she realized that someone was standing next to her.
"A civilian, reading our preliminaries. I'm not sure if I like that," Ron said, sliding into the seat opposite her.
"I… er, I…" she tried.
"You've not leaked anything yet. So I won’t take it from you. That's rather uncharacteristic of you as a journalist, though, isn't it? One would have thought your colleagues in the press would've gotten wind of some of this by now. Thanks for the beer, by the way," he said, changing the subject.
"Um, er… No problem. You looked like you could use it," she said, hoping that ignoring that jibe about leaking was the right thing to do.
"So I can, but are you sure you're not trying to get me drunk to get something out of me?" He said it dispassionately, almost resigned.
"With the price of alcohol in this country? Not likely. Torture is way cheaper," Emily quipped, then froze.
To her surprise and relief Ron actually laughed. "You're not stupid. That much has been obvious from the beginning." He picked out a file from the stack he'd put down on her table and slid it across to her. It had her name typed across the front.
"You… how… how did you get a hold of my Auror file?"
"I am not entirely devoid of contacts in Britain."
Curiosity overcame her reservations. She opened her file and flicked through it. It was as she expected: her transcript of records from the Academy, her employment contract, her dismissal letter…
"They fired you for following a gut instinct, rather than your superior's orders, despite the fact that your gut instinct was correct."
Emily didn't know what to say, so she said nothing and tried to match Ron's intent stare instead.
"What do you think about these murders?" he asked. Emily almost jumped out of her chair in shock.
"I… well. They're all gruesome. The only spell that is consistent throughout is the Diffindis, otherwise the murderer just seems to play with torturing his victims. His victims have nothing in common, either. He's murdering with some frequency. I think…" she hesitated, and decided to jump into the deep end of the pool. "I think your killer is probably someone who's new in this country. He's done his first few murders somewhere else. He's angry, he's unhinged, and he's unpredictable. Probably young, but very smart. Doesn't leave anything behind."
"Except a little bit of ash, which you realized when you said you smelled smoke," Ron said and sighed. "Which shows traces of an Incendio, but resists all attempts to be reconstituted into what it originally was, probably because it was more than one ingredient that he burned. We don't get it."
"Still no suspects? Nobody who looked suspicious? Nothing?"
"We have five people we know of in Iceland who have been involved in the Auror program. We've taken them all in for questioning. Except for you and me, obviously. Three of them had alibis. The other two… Well, one of them had some pureblood arrogance thing going on, and the other one was so painstakingly normal… And we haven't got any evidence that can be matched. Apparently, the funky thing about the magical signature that Grettir has been noticing is because the killer has used different wands every time."
"So nothing."
"Yeah. Except for little piles of ash."
They fell silent, while Emily let her mind wander. What could little piles of ash mean, especially when the burned things hadn't been just paper, like an address slip or something?
She stared into space, wondering. She'd smelled smoke on every crime scene she'd been to. Something sweet, cloying… incense? Something to calm the victims? What the hell?
"Have you had the ash analyzed?" she asked.
"We've done every spell test on it we've thought of," Ron replied.
Something was niggling at the back of her mind. Something important. Ash. Something about ash. And then suddenly it struck her and she sat bolt upright, startling Ron so much that he inhaled the beer he was trying to drink.
"Oh my God! You've done every spell test. You're all wizards, and all wizard raised!"
"What's that got to do with anything?" Ron asked breathlessly, still coughing.
"Did you approach the crime scenes mostly magically? I mean, apart from fingerprinting, you stuck to trying to figure out the magical signature because that's the best way to nail a wizard, right?"
Ron nodded, looking unsure.
"Ash! He was smoking!"
"Almost no wizards smoke, Emily," Ron pointed out. "Or they smoke pipes, not cigarettes."
"Precisely," she said, just as Ron seemed to realize what he'd said. "And if there was a cigarette, there might be a cigarette butt, and where there's a cigarette butt, there might be… "
"DNA," Ron breathed. They stared at each other in astonishment, and then Ron jumped up and ran out and across the road.
Emily contemplated the relative merits of running after him, but in the end she figured she'd be in the way, so she finished his beer instead.
+++
"Ron always takes this week of the year off, Em, and since you solved the case, he decided to keep with tradition. He's not here." Grettir smiled at her.
"A week? I was going to show him my final article. And say goodbye," She sighed and wondered if she should just leave the damn thing in Ron's mailbox. She'd finally sent in her finished product last night and although it wasn't what her editor had expected, it would be in the edition of the Prophet that always came out on the anniversary of You-Know-Who's defeat.
Grettir looked at her thoughtfully, then smirked. "I didn't tell you this, but he's probably in the restaurant opposite. He goes there a lot."
"Oh," she said. "Okay, thanks, I'll go see if he's there."
She was walking away when he called her name. "Emily? Keep in touch, okay?"
She smiled back at him over her shoulder and nodded. The truth was, she was sorrier than she could say that she had to leave. There was a reporter's job waiting for her in England, but somehow it didn't seem so appealing anymore. Still, she had bills to pay, and a cat that was driving her dad crazy.
Ron turned out to be sitting at the same table as the last time she'd been in the restaurant. This time he was just having a drink, something that looked like whiskey. He didn't frown at her, so she walked over and gave him the folder with the article in it.
"I thought you might like to see this. I submitted it yesterday," she said.
He took the file and flipped it open, saying, "Have a seat. Actually, have a drink if you want one; there was something I wanted to talk with you about."
She went and got a beer at the bar. By the time she was back he'd closed the file and put it on the table. Nodding his head in its direction he smirked and said, "That was an excellent piece of fiction, Miss Creevey."
She sighed. "I know, wasn't it? I'm just glad I got it in before deadline. And before my editor put a price on my head."
"What," he said, still smiling. "You didn't tell her you were busy solving crimes?" Smiling rather suited him, she thought. It took years off his age.
"Hah, fat chance she'd be sympathetic to that, even if there are no rules at the Prophet about journalists not creating the news themselves…"
"Believe me, that’s been the case since before you were born." Ron’s smile turned grim for a moment. "Turns out you solved an international crime," he added, changing the subject.
"Oh?"
"He committed murders in Ireland before he came over here. Five of them, as a matter of fact."
Emily shuddered.
"Insane, isn't it?" Ron added. "Man gets kicked out of the Auror Academy for cruelty to a suspect, then goes on a killing spree?"
"Did he ever give a reason?"
"He said he saw the spell in a book and really wanted to try it."
"Cripes," Emily said. "What's this world coming to?"
"I don't know," Ron shrugged. "Give me spectres from my past who are hell-bent on revenge any day of the week, rather than people who are just insane and revelling in it."
Emily hesitated, then decided she had nothing to lose. "Grettir mentioned something about that. A past case."
Ron looked at her and lifted an eyebrow. "Are you sure you're a Slytherin, Emily? Jumping in, heedless of the danger is a Gryffindor trait."
Emily blushed and looked down. "Sorry." There was a long silence.
"It was someone from the war. I don't know why he came here to begin with, but once he realized who was investigating his crimes he started taunting me."
Emily raised her head and stared at him.
"I got to kill him," he continued. "It was… good. Cold comfort, though. That's the story of my life."
"What do you mean?"
"I ended up here about ten years ago. I was chasing someone who came here, and then I sort of never left. Nobody knows my name here, and even if they do, they just don't care."
"Yeah, I noticed," Emily muttered.
Ron smiled, but it was a sad smile. "He roomed with me for six years in the Gryffindor dormitory. Six years. He knew everything there was to know about me and Harry. He'd seen us shower and brush our teeth every morning for six years. Can you imagine living with someone for six years and then betraying them?"
Emily shook her head mutely.
"He showed up one day towards the end of the war, said he wanted to help. We trusted him, so we took him to headquarters, helped him out, gave him stuff to do. He was eager to help, and very good at charms. He and Hermione were working on a spell to finally get rid of Voldemort, while me and Harry looked for… certain elements that had to be ready and done with so that Voldemort could be killed."
+++
"I have to go," Hermione had said. "I owe her that much, Ron. I have to at least go to her funeral."
"Yeah," he'd replied. "I can understand that. You sure you don't want us with you?"
"You two don’t have any reason to be at Madam Pince's funeral. Keep working on destroying the cup; I'll see you afterwards. Seamus says he has a new theory about the spell, so I'm just going to pop by his place to see him, then I'll come straight home and help you."
"I just… I can't believe she's dead. There are so many dead, Hermione."
"I know. At least it's almost over. The cup is the last."
"That doesn't raise the dead."
"No, it doesn't," she'd said sadly, and Apparated away.
She never came back. They'd found her in Seamus' apartment, which looked like a small contained hurricane had raged in there. There had been blood everywhere, but Hermione had been more or less in one piece. Except her mind. The Aurors told them she'd been subjected to Cruciatus no less than twenty-five times.
"At least she's alive," a healer had said when they visited her in St. Mungo's. "Maybe there'll be a cure someday."
Neville had looked at her, stone-faced, and said simply, "I've been hearing that for almost twenty seven years, ma'am."
They'd searched frantically for Seamus. His blood had coated the walls, as well as Hermione's, and two days later, a horribly burned, unrecognizable body of someone matching his description had turned up in Sussex.
Six days after that, Harry had taken what had existed of the spell when Hermione was attacked and gone to find Voldemort. The problem with the spell had never been that it didn't work – rather that it exacted too much energy from the caster. At that point, Harry hadn't cared, and while he'd succeeded in defeating Voldemort, he'd died on the battlefield in Ron's arms.
Ron remembered Harry's eyes, the last time they were open. The battle had raged on all around them, but the two of them had just lain there, alone in their own world, at the very centre of it. "At least he's dead," Harry had said. "For good this time."
And Ron had thought that yes, maybe, but the price had been too high. He'd watched Harry fade away in desperation, and then he'd joined the battle again.
After the battle, someone had told him 'at least you got to say goodbye'. He'd hexed the person, and run. He'd never really stopped running after that.
+++
Emily stared across the table at Ron. "But…" she whispered, "you said Finnegan had died?"
"Yeah," Ron said. "That's what I thought until he suddenly turned up here, two years after I made detective. He'd faked it. He was the one who attacked Hermione, and he as good as killed Harry. He'd sided with Voldemort the entire time, passing him information. It was nothing but sheer luck that we didn't tell him about anything specific we were doing. The man was a sadist. The scenes he left were even more grotesque than the ones you just witnessed. He loved the fact that I was the one chasing him. Left me all sorts of clues and mementoes."
"At least…" Emily started to say, then thought better of it.
"Smart girl," Ron said, smiling tiredly at her. "You wouldn't consider applying those smarts to something other than making up stories about ex-war-heroes?"
"Uh," she said, caught off balance. "What?"
"You did graduate top of your class from the Auror Academy. At some point you must've wanted to be in law enforcement. You had plenty of curiosity to inherit, true, but I think you make a better detective than journalist."
"You're offering me a job?" she asked.
"Think about it," he suggested, smirk back in place. "Let me know. And say hi to your dad the next time you talk to him. I better get going. I'll hear from you." He stood up, gave her a curt nod and left.
Emily finished her beer, thinking about it. She heard the bell above the door clang but didn't look up until a shadow fell over her table. Grettir slid into the seat opposite her.
"You found him?" he asked.
"Yeah. I'm still a little dumbfounded."
"Why?"
"Well, he told me everything I wanted to know and then he offered me a job," she sighed.
Grettir gave her a brilliant smile. "Well I'll be damned. Welcome to the team."
"I, er…" she hesitated. Finally she smiled back. "Thanks. Want a drink to celebrate?"
-fin
Um. After some extensive searching, turned out there was. Back in MARCH (I am an idiot) there was the
triatha_ron, for which I wrote a Gen fic about Ron. It's... not one of the my favourites of the things that I've written, mostly because I ran out of time at the end and didn't quite manage to write as much as I wanted. Maybe one day if I have a dearth of plotbunnies (HAHA LIKELY) I will go back and fix it.
But anyways, here for your reading pleasure:
Story title: Cold Comfort
Author name: Šárka,
sarkaRating: R for violence. No smut.
Pairings/Characters: Ron Weasley, two original characters, no pairings.
Warnings: Lots of people are already dead. And the story focuses on a murder investigation, so there is a murder, and a graphic description of a spell.
Length: 7115 words.
Disclaimer: The world of Harry Potter belongs to J.K.Rowling and her publishers, as well as Warner Bros. The following story is for my own and other's entertainment; no money is being made.
Author notes: Thanks, as always, to
hildigunnur, for being a sounding board, and to salixbabylon for cleaning up my comma-sprees, curtailing overuse of adjectives and otherwise making my writing readable. Summary: Decades after Voldemort's downfall, a young journalist out for a story discovers that the only comfort available to Ron Weasley is of the cold variety.
The wind was bitingly cold and seeped through her warmest coat as if it were made of gauze. The weather in this stupid country was completely impossible, she decided, as she ducked beneath the police ribbon that surrounded the tiny house. How could it be this cold, when the sky was a brilliant blue and the sunshine reflecting on the snow made her eyes hurt?
"I thought it was supposed to warm up today?" she said pitifully to the young police officer outside the door, as she handed him the cup of coffee she'd gone to fetch, clutching her own for warmth.
"It has, Em," he said cheerfully accepting the cup. "It's almost five degrees warmer today than it was yesterday. 'S why we've got wind," he smiled. He wasn't wearing a hat, nor a scarf, nor mittens. She couldn't figure out how he hadn't died of hypothermia, just getting out of the car.
"What have you got in there?" she asked, rather than comment on his lack of proper accoutrements for the temperature.
"Oh, murder," he said, grinning from ear to ear. "Pretty grisly, from what I could tell."
"Why aren't you in there, then?" she asked, gesturing with her coffee cup.
"Boss wanted someone out here to make sure you didn't get in."
"Oh, and you volunteered for the job or something?"
"Nah," he said, grin widening. "I was the only one with a coat."
His name was Grettir, or something equally impossible to pronounce, and in the time she'd been there, she'd not seen him frown, not even once. He'd announced the 'pretty grisly murder' with the sort of air most people reserve for driver's licence photographs. Emily hadn't figured out if he was some sort of manic unable to stop being cheerful, or if he was so apathetic that he figured he might as well smile because everything was going to hell in a handbasket anyway.
"What am I doing here?" she mumbled into her coffee cup, shaking her head. Coming here had seemed like a good idea at the time, but ever since she'd arrived and found out that things weren't as easy as she'd thought...
"What are you doing here?" barked Ron Weasley as he opened the door and saw her. She didn't have time for a witty response, because he turned towards Grettir and asked him to call the chief and ask for someone whose name was a string of incomprehensible syllables to her, to be sent down.
He gave her a last look of utter disgust before he stalked into the building and slammed the door behind him, and Emily wondered if she could still tell the Prophet that her information was wrong, she hadn't found him and he was probably living the easy life of an ex-war-hero somewhere else than in this frozen, desolate country. And the answer was the same as it was the last time she wondered; she couldn't do that and still have a job. So she stayed.
Her dad, bless him, had warned her when she'd told him why he'd need to feed her cat for a few weeks. "Leave the man alone, Em," he'd said. "Hasn't he done enough?"
"How can we know?" she'd replied. "Nobody knows exactly what happened, anymore. He's the only person left who can tell the entire story."
"And what sort of story do you think you'll get from him?" he'd asked. "Turning 'round stones and looking at what's beneath – a lot of people aren’t going to be happy to have the light of day shined on 'em."
"All the more reason to do just that," she'd said, and her dad had shaken his head and told her the war had been over for a long, long time.
Ron had told her essentially the same thing, with ruder words, when she'd approached him the first time; that the war was over, and that was the only thing he'd say about it, and if she imagined she'd be getting a heart-to-heart for the Prophet, she could think again.
And then he'd slammed the door in her face.
+++
The ambulance had left, a great deal of specialists had traipsed in and out of the house, and the streetlamps had been turned on by the time Ron emerged again from the house. In the fading daylight his face looked wan and tired and Emily wondered if he'd slept at all. The vague guilt which manifested somewhere deep in her stomach every time she hounded a story like this, regardless of the people it would affect, made itself known, and she couldn't help but worry that her coming out here, finding him, was causing him heartache.
She didn't know if anybody else at the Prophet ever felt guilty for what they did – she never asked – but she doubted that the more successful journalists had any such concerns.
Emily was just about to climb into Grettir's police cruiser to tag along to the station when someone hollered her name.
"Creevey! You! Idiot girl! In here!" Turning around she was surprised to see that Ron was standing next to his unmarked detective's car and glaring at her with more than his usual intensity – but he'd said 'in here', so she had to assume that he actually wanted her to ride with him.
"Mr. Weasley?" she asked, carefully walking to his car, stepping over banks of ice which made her itch to transfigure her sensible walking boots into ice-skates.
"You are a right nuisance," he said, clearly irritated. "Don't be slow on top of it. In."
She climbed into the front seat and fastened the seatbelt, while Ron walked around the car and got behind the wheel.
"You are causing me trouble. Seems someone at the station noticed 'my little shadow' and got annoyed enough to complain. They told me to deal with you. Since I've no idea how to make you go away – no idea that would be legal, in any case – here's the deal." He fell silent and Emily held her breath, waiting for him to continue.
"You follow me. You're not to speak unless spoken to. You take no pictures, you ask no questions. If you can make your goddamn story out of it, all the better. I'm not planning to reminisce with you. Got it?"
"Yeah," she whispered. "Thanks."
"Oh, don't be thanking me yet," he replied sarcastically. "If it was up to me, I'd have you deported."
+++
They stopped in front of a small white house, not very far from the crime scene, and even as they pulled up to the curb in front of it, Emily could feel the wards thrumming around it.
"Wow," she whispered, more to herself than Ron, but somehow this elicited a smile on his face.
"Man doesn't like to be bothered. Can't say I blame him. You wait here, and don't be getting any silly ideas like talking to the neighbours in his case. You don't want to fuck with this one, he doesn't take it lightly. I'm going to go put my ear to the ground."
She nodded mutely and watched him walk up the snowy drive towards the house until suddenly he disappeared. Static wards, she supposed – made things look the same, no matter what went on inside.
Maybe she could work with this. If she was to follow him around over the next few days, she'd have plenty of opportunities to just observe. She might not be able to write the article she'd been planning, when she discovered where Ron had been hiding all these years, but a proper article about Ron Weasley was bound to cause a stir, anyway.
Emily wasn't stupid, but she often admitted to herself that she was frequently somewhat naive, which had to be considered a remarkable trait for a former Slytherin. For instance, she realized now that her first reaction to having just discovered where the most wanted man in Wizarddom was hiding had been completely unreasonable.
First of all, she never should have told her editor that she might have found him. Absolutely, under no circumstances, no. If she could have managed to get the interview she'd dreamed of, they would have created the space for it in the paper.
Secondly, she shouldn't have come out to Iceland in a rush. She barely had enough underwear to last her a week, and with the weather being what it was, she'd had to blow a significant amount of money just to keep herself from ending up as an imitation ice sculpture.
Third, approaching Ron the way she did had been a monumentally stupid thing to do. It was all right to introduce herself as a journalist, but she should have expected the door slammed on her nose, not entertained rosy visions of Ron finally opening up about his horrid experiences during the war.
And she shouldn't, not ever, have said that the “public had a right to know.” The problem, as she saw it, was that she'd grown up like any other child of the post-war generation; lulled to sleep by epic tales of heroism and bravery, fooled into thinking that the contrast between the shades of grey was deeper than it actually was.
Ron's reaction to her statement had been a bitter slice of reality, and it had forced her to re-evaluate a number of things she had always taken for granted.
"The Wizarding public has a right to know??" he'd shouted. "Would that be the same Wizarding public that left the disposal of the largest threat in wizard history up to three teenagers? The Wizarding public which barely tolerated Hermione due to her ancestry? The Wizarding public which got annoyed when it took Harry too long to get rid of Voldemort? That Wizarding public?" He'd had to take a pause to breathe at this point, and glare at his subordinates who had stopped to stare at their boss' outburst. "I don't owe anything to the Wizarding public, Miss. I paid my dues to the Wizarding world... We all did. And most paid more than me."
He hadn't had a door between them, to slam in her face, but the look in his eyes was as good as a punch in the stomach.
It had been the closest thing to an answer she'd gotten out of him yet, and it had prompted some scrupulous self-reflection and a research endeavour into the bowels of the Daily Prophet archives. She'd been surprised by his rudeness at first, but she hadn't been too surprised to discover that he'd been right. The articles and stories in the Daily Prophet from the time before You-Know-Who had been defeated were unbelievable.
Considering how much she'd wanted answers at first, she now found herself wondering what would actually happen if he were to give them. Would all of them be so gruesome? Would the Wizarding world even like reading an honest interview with Ron Weasley, if this was the past he'd be talking about?
Even if she really wanted to get answers to the big questions, she was starting to realize that perhaps her world was better off without them. And that if the articles she'd discovered from before the Fall of Voldemort were any indication, the main reason why the Wizarding world today didn't know the answers was because they hadn't been so concerned about the questions back then. Nobody had worried about how to kill Voldemort and who would suffer in the pursuit, as long as they themselves didn't have to be involved. And when the death toll rose frighteningly high, the families of the afflicted had blamed their hero rather than the villain – Harry Potter had been marked as Voldemort's downfall since he was a baby, so why didn't he perform the public service he was destined for?
Then the war had ended, at a terrible cost, and the Prophet had been filled with obituaries, speculation and news of absolute chaos all over the Wizarding world. By the time the dust settled, people suddenly realized that Harry Potter was dead, Hermione Granger was a patient of the long-term St. Mungo's ward for those afflicted from Cruciatus, and Ron Weasley was nowhere to be found.
Over time, the story of how Voldemort was killed became nothing more than that: a story. A number of people had seen the start of the battle, and many of them could tell that Harry had faced down Voldemort. The most reliable information anybody could provide was that Harry, with Ron at his back, had cast a spell and then all hell broke loose.
She'd always known that a lot of the stories that surfaced afterward were lies, or at best, exaggerations. Her dad had never made any secret of what he knew, and even if it wasn't a lot, it was enough for her to know that all the people who said they'd been there that day couldn't possibly all be telling the truth. The only people they could be sure about, these days, were the people who had lost their lives.
Maybe her curiosity wasn't worth fulfilling, she mused to herself. What was the Muggle saying? Let a sleeping dog lie?
She checked her watch again, wondering how long it would take Ron to get the information he needed. The car was rapidly cooling down and her warming charms weren't up to par. Besides, despite the relaxed attitude towards magic around here, she wasn't really happy with the idea of waving her wand around while sitting inside a car where anybody could see her.
She was gazing out the window, wondering whether to try a surreptitious charm or if the risk of setting the car on fire was too great, when Ron appeared out of the darkness in front of the house. He wordlessly got into the car, and it wasn't until they were five minutes away when he finally spoke.
"It was a magical murder. In those cases we usually put together a task force of wizard policemen to deal with it."
Emily waited for him to go on, but when nothing more seemed forthcoming, she decided to venture a question.
"Usually?"
"It's not common. The reason the police force is mixed is because we get relatively low magical crime rates here. But every now and then, someone shows up thinking that because Iceland is more tolerant of Dark Magic than most other places in the world, it means we don't mind a few gruesome murders. There's a difference between people being ambivalent about the line between Dark and Light Magic, and being okay with Dark Magic being used for Dark purposes."
"Yeah, I can see that."
They drove the rest of the way to police headquarters in silence, and although Ron allowed her into the conference room where they discussed the crime, he didn't speak another word to her for the rest of the day.
+++
It was still dark when she woke up the next morning, and she sighed and burrowed under the covers for a while, wondering how anyone in this country ever made it out of bed when the sun didn't rise until just before noon.
Her magic-compatible cellphone made a series of bleeps as she was brushing her teeth. She had to rush out into the hostel bedroom to get it before it shut down, and she listened, toothbrush forgotten in one of her hands when Grettir, his voice still smiling, clearly established that while others might have problems waking up, evil most assuredly never slept.
She Apparated, mildly apprehensive, to the coordinates he'd given her for the new crime scene.
It took her about ten minutes to turn from mildly apprehensive to extremely apprehensive and then to full on petrified. And this time it had nothing to do with Ron Weasley shutting her out. Ever since she'd arrived she'd been granted full observing privileges. That meant that she had a relatively free run of the crime scene (so long as she didn't mess anything up) and its surroundings, as long as she tried to not interfere.
And it was some crime scene, that was for sure. She had, actually, been a working journalist for the Prophet for a while. She'd believed that she'd seen some pretty hideous things. Not so much, she now realized. None of the tableaux she'd witnessed as a reporter could even compare to the sheer horror of the vista she'd taken in once she'd been ushered inside the door.
The living room of the small apartment smelled metallic, and no wonder; if someone had told her a human body could eject this much blood she would have argued against it as exaggeration. As it was, she watched the wizards go about their business, feeling as if she was stuck in a nightmare. The sickly soft smell didn't even register with her at first, although it was also very faint.
"Mr. Weasley," she murmured the next time he walked past her. "I smell burning… have you noticed?"
To her surprise, he actually stopped and breathed the air for a bit. "Now that you mention it…" he said. Later on, she heard him instruct his people to search for remains of igniting spells.
It made her wonder… but no, she was happy as a journalist. It had been what she'd wanted to do. That's why she was here, after all, following a story. It didn't matter what she told herself, though – the rest of her day was filled with unease.
+++
"Tell me what you've got, people," Ron shouted over the conversation in the conference room. Four people turned towards him but the silence was almost deafening.
Finally Grettir cleared his throat and said, "Nothing, sir. Nothing worth reporting."
Emily had known that. Now that Ron was allowing her access, she didn't have to ask so many questions, especially since Grettir evidently saw it as his responsibility to fill her in on what they were thinking. She hadn't needed it, that day. It didn't take a genius to figure out that the mood in the conference room was sombre; even Grettir wasn't his usual chipper self. She'd been surprised to see him on the all-magical task force at first, but he was a wizard through and through, albeit one who liked Muggles and Muggle technologies.
It had been three days from the report of the second murder until the third, and that was just because the third victim had been a loner who had lived in an isolated house. He'd been dead for two days when he was found. It made everyone nervous and edgy – was there a fourth murder that was still unreported? Was a fifth murder perhaps taking place right now?
The frustrating thing was that apart from the methods of the murderer, the murders seemed to have very little in common. The victims had nothing in common, the locations of the crime scenes were all distinctly different, and since the crime was magical the usual sort of evidence associated with Muggle crimes was absent. Wizards who killed could do so with relatively little trouble, if they were powerful enough to harm another human being.
Ron sighed and threw himself into the only empty chair at the table. "Okay, let's go over what we do know one more time," he said, clearly frustrated but not enough to take it out on someone. Except possibly Emily, if she was stupid enough to draw his attention to herself. "How about their links to the magical community? Why are they being killed by a wizard?"
The conversation turned technical, a discussion of methods, spells and motives in terms that nobody who didn't have any background in law enforcement could understand. Emily suspected that it was being done on purpose to confuse her, but she wasn't eager to tell them that their ploy wasn't working. To begin with, she'd have to explain how come she could understand every word of what they were saying, and she also suspected that they'd attempt to shut her out more if they realized that she had no problem following the technicalities. Grettir was the only one who was consistently nice to her and tried to make sure she knew what was going on.
The coroner's report on the third victim – a pretty young woman who had turned out to be a squib – was being passed around the table, most of the team just flicking it open and shaking their heads. "Between the coroner and Grettir here, we've figured out most of the spells used," Ron was saying. "Except for the one the murderer uses to kill them."
Grettir took over. "The magical residue it leaves is something I've never seen before. And the effects, well you've all seen what the victims look like. It's like they've been split open and turned inside out somehow. I've never even heard of a spell that can do that."
"I've seen the effect before," Ron murmured. "But I've never known what spell caused it. It could be an important clue, if it's a very rare spell. Is there no way to reconstruct it, Grettir?"
They started talking about the reverse engineering of spells, and Emily more or less tuned it out. Something Grettir had said was bugging her. Something important.
She coughed and interrupted Ron mid-lecture, asking, "Could I see the report?" Ron glared at her, but slid the file across the table.
The reason they'd shuddered and closed the file turned out to be the fact that a detailed picture was affixed to the front page. Emily tried to ignore it and turned back towards the list of spells. There were two unknowns, one seemingly designed for torture and the eventual killing spell.
"The last blow seems to be a combination of a flaying and a splitting spell. It also causes the joints of the victims to simply fall apart, so that the victim's bones will go in all directions…"
Emily swallowed hard. Then she tried to focus. Combination of a flaying and splitting spell. Something that made the bones of the victims suddenly not want to belong to the victims anymore… She suddenly realized where Ron must've seen the effect before and shuddered. She was almost certain that she'd seen this before, somewhere, sometime…
Words from the report jumped out at her. Fills the lungs with fluid. Unimaginable pain. Several applications of the Cruciatus curse.
The room swam before her eyes, and she stood up abruptly. "Excuse me," she whispered and fled.
She was sitting in a heap on the floor of the ladies' bathroom when she remembered. She'd been writing a report, years ago. It had been something she'd found in one of her research forays into the older parts of the library, where more than half the books were written by hand and one of a kind.
Ron smirked at her when she opened the door to the conference room, fifteen minutes later. "Did you have a big breakfast?" he asked innocently.
"The spell you're looking for, Mr. Weasley," she said in a cold tone, "Is called Diffindis. It is a version of Diffindo, specifically designed for use on human beings. It was developed in the seventeenth century and there exists only one record of it."
Ron stared at her, open mouthed. His team were looking at her in various states of shock. Grettir was the first one to recover.
"And where is that record?" he asked.
"In the Hermione Granger Research Library," she said, and took almost a perverse pleasure in Ron's obvious flinch. "It used to belong to the Malfoy family library, until it was confiscated by the British Ministry of Magic," she added, and watched Ron jump again. "You're looking for someone who, at some point, was involved with the English Auror program."
"And how would you know that?" Ron snapped.
"Why, Mr. Weasley, I graduated from there four years ago. Top of my class, even."
The silence following that statement was finally broken when Ron's telephone rang. Emily could see instantly on his face that the news wasn't good.
"We've got another murder," he said, snapping his telephone closed.
+++
"Figuring out that spell, Em," Grettir said, "That was good work. Don't take it so hard if Weasley cuts you into ribbons later. I haven't seen him this frustrated since, well, in a while."
They were standing outside the fourth murder scene, shivering in the cold wind. "Since when?" she asked, more to keep the conversation going rather than anything else.
"There were murders, not dissimilar from these, a few years back. I was just a rookie, assigned to the team to be educated. He was in a fearsome temper; I was frightened out of my mind half the time."
Emily smirked. "I thought he was in a fearsome temper all the time."
Grettir shook his head. "Nah. But he doesn't talk about the past at all, not ever. If he's in a snit with you, it's because you remind him of it. I saw him jump when you were talking about how you knew that spell – we all know he fought in that war back then. I don't suppose he likes the memories."
They stood in silence for a while, watching one of the streetlamps flicker off and on. They were both exhausted, Grettir probably worse – he'd been working on magical residue of the scene for hours.
He broke the silence with a sigh, then said, "I shouldn't tell you this, but the reason he took those old murders so bad was because they were personal. The murderer was someone from his past, and he pretty much drove Weasley nuts with reminders from the war."
That was new. Emily knew that there were still warrants out for some of the old Death Eaters and You-Know-Who's supporters – some of them had never been caught. "How did it end?" she asked.
"We had him trapped, or so we believed. He cursed one of our team and was getting away, and Ron killed him."
"Killed him?" she whispered, stunned.
"Oh, I don't think he was too broken up about it. Anyways, like I said, he's always had a bad reaction to any mentions of the past and the war. Someone in the narcotics department once asked if he'd known Harry Potter at all. We all thought the guy wouldn't survive."
"Wait, what? He asked him if he'd known Harry Potter? Don't you know that…"
Grettir held up a hand. "Stop. If he doesn't want me to know, I don't want to know. He's my boss and we all rather like him. We don't know anything about the war, except that the good guys won, and we don't really care. So don't tell me, Em, okay?" Then he turned around and went back into the house, and Emily stood and stared after him, completely shocked – and somehow entirely unsurprised.
+++
It was two days later when Emily walked into the restaurant across the road from the police station and saw Ron Weasley sitting in the corner, nursing an almost-finished pint, the remains of a hamburger on the table in front of him, as well as a stack of files.
She wasn't sure whether to ignore him or not. He'd never mentioned the Diffindis spell again but Emily knew from Grettir that they were already looking for people who'd attended the Auror Academy at some point. In addition, she wasn't exactly seeking to spark his ire, since he'd lost his temper at the world in general in the conference room that afternoon and thrown a coffee cup into the wall.
There'd been a fifth murder, that morning, and they still had no idea who was doing this.
Eventually she decided to sit somewhere else, but she ordered him another pint when her server came. She was immersed in a copy of the preliminary crime scene report for the fifth murder, which she'd wrangled out of Grettir, when she realized that someone was standing next to her.
"A civilian, reading our preliminaries. I'm not sure if I like that," Ron said, sliding into the seat opposite her.
"I… er, I…" she tried.
"You've not leaked anything yet. So I won’t take it from you. That's rather uncharacteristic of you as a journalist, though, isn't it? One would have thought your colleagues in the press would've gotten wind of some of this by now. Thanks for the beer, by the way," he said, changing the subject.
"Um, er… No problem. You looked like you could use it," she said, hoping that ignoring that jibe about leaking was the right thing to do.
"So I can, but are you sure you're not trying to get me drunk to get something out of me?" He said it dispassionately, almost resigned.
"With the price of alcohol in this country? Not likely. Torture is way cheaper," Emily quipped, then froze.
To her surprise and relief Ron actually laughed. "You're not stupid. That much has been obvious from the beginning." He picked out a file from the stack he'd put down on her table and slid it across to her. It had her name typed across the front.
"You… how… how did you get a hold of my Auror file?"
"I am not entirely devoid of contacts in Britain."
Curiosity overcame her reservations. She opened her file and flicked through it. It was as she expected: her transcript of records from the Academy, her employment contract, her dismissal letter…
"They fired you for following a gut instinct, rather than your superior's orders, despite the fact that your gut instinct was correct."
Emily didn't know what to say, so she said nothing and tried to match Ron's intent stare instead.
"What do you think about these murders?" he asked. Emily almost jumped out of her chair in shock.
"I… well. They're all gruesome. The only spell that is consistent throughout is the Diffindis, otherwise the murderer just seems to play with torturing his victims. His victims have nothing in common, either. He's murdering with some frequency. I think…" she hesitated, and decided to jump into the deep end of the pool. "I think your killer is probably someone who's new in this country. He's done his first few murders somewhere else. He's angry, he's unhinged, and he's unpredictable. Probably young, but very smart. Doesn't leave anything behind."
"Except a little bit of ash, which you realized when you said you smelled smoke," Ron said and sighed. "Which shows traces of an Incendio, but resists all attempts to be reconstituted into what it originally was, probably because it was more than one ingredient that he burned. We don't get it."
"Still no suspects? Nobody who looked suspicious? Nothing?"
"We have five people we know of in Iceland who have been involved in the Auror program. We've taken them all in for questioning. Except for you and me, obviously. Three of them had alibis. The other two… Well, one of them had some pureblood arrogance thing going on, and the other one was so painstakingly normal… And we haven't got any evidence that can be matched. Apparently, the funky thing about the magical signature that Grettir has been noticing is because the killer has used different wands every time."
"So nothing."
"Yeah. Except for little piles of ash."
They fell silent, while Emily let her mind wander. What could little piles of ash mean, especially when the burned things hadn't been just paper, like an address slip or something?
She stared into space, wondering. She'd smelled smoke on every crime scene she'd been to. Something sweet, cloying… incense? Something to calm the victims? What the hell?
"Have you had the ash analyzed?" she asked.
"We've done every spell test on it we've thought of," Ron replied.
Something was niggling at the back of her mind. Something important. Ash. Something about ash. And then suddenly it struck her and she sat bolt upright, startling Ron so much that he inhaled the beer he was trying to drink.
"Oh my God! You've done every spell test. You're all wizards, and all wizard raised!"
"What's that got to do with anything?" Ron asked breathlessly, still coughing.
"Did you approach the crime scenes mostly magically? I mean, apart from fingerprinting, you stuck to trying to figure out the magical signature because that's the best way to nail a wizard, right?"
Ron nodded, looking unsure.
"Ash! He was smoking!"
"Almost no wizards smoke, Emily," Ron pointed out. "Or they smoke pipes, not cigarettes."
"Precisely," she said, just as Ron seemed to realize what he'd said. "And if there was a cigarette, there might be a cigarette butt, and where there's a cigarette butt, there might be… "
"DNA," Ron breathed. They stared at each other in astonishment, and then Ron jumped up and ran out and across the road.
Emily contemplated the relative merits of running after him, but in the end she figured she'd be in the way, so she finished his beer instead.
+++
"Ron always takes this week of the year off, Em, and since you solved the case, he decided to keep with tradition. He's not here." Grettir smiled at her.
"A week? I was going to show him my final article. And say goodbye," She sighed and wondered if she should just leave the damn thing in Ron's mailbox. She'd finally sent in her finished product last night and although it wasn't what her editor had expected, it would be in the edition of the Prophet that always came out on the anniversary of You-Know-Who's defeat.
Grettir looked at her thoughtfully, then smirked. "I didn't tell you this, but he's probably in the restaurant opposite. He goes there a lot."
"Oh," she said. "Okay, thanks, I'll go see if he's there."
She was walking away when he called her name. "Emily? Keep in touch, okay?"
She smiled back at him over her shoulder and nodded. The truth was, she was sorrier than she could say that she had to leave. There was a reporter's job waiting for her in England, but somehow it didn't seem so appealing anymore. Still, she had bills to pay, and a cat that was driving her dad crazy.
Ron turned out to be sitting at the same table as the last time she'd been in the restaurant. This time he was just having a drink, something that looked like whiskey. He didn't frown at her, so she walked over and gave him the folder with the article in it.
"I thought you might like to see this. I submitted it yesterday," she said.
He took the file and flipped it open, saying, "Have a seat. Actually, have a drink if you want one; there was something I wanted to talk with you about."
She went and got a beer at the bar. By the time she was back he'd closed the file and put it on the table. Nodding his head in its direction he smirked and said, "That was an excellent piece of fiction, Miss Creevey."
She sighed. "I know, wasn't it? I'm just glad I got it in before deadline. And before my editor put a price on my head."
"What," he said, still smiling. "You didn't tell her you were busy solving crimes?" Smiling rather suited him, she thought. It took years off his age.
"Hah, fat chance she'd be sympathetic to that, even if there are no rules at the Prophet about journalists not creating the news themselves…"
"Believe me, that’s been the case since before you were born." Ron’s smile turned grim for a moment. "Turns out you solved an international crime," he added, changing the subject.
"Oh?"
"He committed murders in Ireland before he came over here. Five of them, as a matter of fact."
Emily shuddered.
"Insane, isn't it?" Ron added. "Man gets kicked out of the Auror Academy for cruelty to a suspect, then goes on a killing spree?"
"Did he ever give a reason?"
"He said he saw the spell in a book and really wanted to try it."
"Cripes," Emily said. "What's this world coming to?"
"I don't know," Ron shrugged. "Give me spectres from my past who are hell-bent on revenge any day of the week, rather than people who are just insane and revelling in it."
Emily hesitated, then decided she had nothing to lose. "Grettir mentioned something about that. A past case."
Ron looked at her and lifted an eyebrow. "Are you sure you're a Slytherin, Emily? Jumping in, heedless of the danger is a Gryffindor trait."
Emily blushed and looked down. "Sorry." There was a long silence.
"It was someone from the war. I don't know why he came here to begin with, but once he realized who was investigating his crimes he started taunting me."
Emily raised her head and stared at him.
"I got to kill him," he continued. "It was… good. Cold comfort, though. That's the story of my life."
"What do you mean?"
"I ended up here about ten years ago. I was chasing someone who came here, and then I sort of never left. Nobody knows my name here, and even if they do, they just don't care."
"Yeah, I noticed," Emily muttered.
Ron smiled, but it was a sad smile. "He roomed with me for six years in the Gryffindor dormitory. Six years. He knew everything there was to know about me and Harry. He'd seen us shower and brush our teeth every morning for six years. Can you imagine living with someone for six years and then betraying them?"
Emily shook her head mutely.
"He showed up one day towards the end of the war, said he wanted to help. We trusted him, so we took him to headquarters, helped him out, gave him stuff to do. He was eager to help, and very good at charms. He and Hermione were working on a spell to finally get rid of Voldemort, while me and Harry looked for… certain elements that had to be ready and done with so that Voldemort could be killed."
+++
"I have to go," Hermione had said. "I owe her that much, Ron. I have to at least go to her funeral."
"Yeah," he'd replied. "I can understand that. You sure you don't want us with you?"
"You two don’t have any reason to be at Madam Pince's funeral. Keep working on destroying the cup; I'll see you afterwards. Seamus says he has a new theory about the spell, so I'm just going to pop by his place to see him, then I'll come straight home and help you."
"I just… I can't believe she's dead. There are so many dead, Hermione."
"I know. At least it's almost over. The cup is the last."
"That doesn't raise the dead."
"No, it doesn't," she'd said sadly, and Apparated away.
She never came back. They'd found her in Seamus' apartment, which looked like a small contained hurricane had raged in there. There had been blood everywhere, but Hermione had been more or less in one piece. Except her mind. The Aurors told them she'd been subjected to Cruciatus no less than twenty-five times.
"At least she's alive," a healer had said when they visited her in St. Mungo's. "Maybe there'll be a cure someday."
Neville had looked at her, stone-faced, and said simply, "I've been hearing that for almost twenty seven years, ma'am."
They'd searched frantically for Seamus. His blood had coated the walls, as well as Hermione's, and two days later, a horribly burned, unrecognizable body of someone matching his description had turned up in Sussex.
Six days after that, Harry had taken what had existed of the spell when Hermione was attacked and gone to find Voldemort. The problem with the spell had never been that it didn't work – rather that it exacted too much energy from the caster. At that point, Harry hadn't cared, and while he'd succeeded in defeating Voldemort, he'd died on the battlefield in Ron's arms.
Ron remembered Harry's eyes, the last time they were open. The battle had raged on all around them, but the two of them had just lain there, alone in their own world, at the very centre of it. "At least he's dead," Harry had said. "For good this time."
And Ron had thought that yes, maybe, but the price had been too high. He'd watched Harry fade away in desperation, and then he'd joined the battle again.
After the battle, someone had told him 'at least you got to say goodbye'. He'd hexed the person, and run. He'd never really stopped running after that.
+++
Emily stared across the table at Ron. "But…" she whispered, "you said Finnegan had died?"
"Yeah," Ron said. "That's what I thought until he suddenly turned up here, two years after I made detective. He'd faked it. He was the one who attacked Hermione, and he as good as killed Harry. He'd sided with Voldemort the entire time, passing him information. It was nothing but sheer luck that we didn't tell him about anything specific we were doing. The man was a sadist. The scenes he left were even more grotesque than the ones you just witnessed. He loved the fact that I was the one chasing him. Left me all sorts of clues and mementoes."
"At least…" Emily started to say, then thought better of it.
"Smart girl," Ron said, smiling tiredly at her. "You wouldn't consider applying those smarts to something other than making up stories about ex-war-heroes?"
"Uh," she said, caught off balance. "What?"
"You did graduate top of your class from the Auror Academy. At some point you must've wanted to be in law enforcement. You had plenty of curiosity to inherit, true, but I think you make a better detective than journalist."
"You're offering me a job?" she asked.
"Think about it," he suggested, smirk back in place. "Let me know. And say hi to your dad the next time you talk to him. I better get going. I'll hear from you." He stood up, gave her a curt nod and left.
Emily finished her beer, thinking about it. She heard the bell above the door clang but didn't look up until a shadow fell over her table. Grettir slid into the seat opposite her.
"You found him?" he asked.
"Yeah. I'm still a little dumbfounded."
"Why?"
"Well, he told me everything I wanted to know and then he offered me a job," she sighed.
Grettir gave her a brilliant smile. "Well I'll be damned. Welcome to the team."
"I, er…" she hesitated. Finally she smiled back. "Thanks. Want a drink to celebrate?"
-fin
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-03 07:05 pm (UTC)LOL. No, what I always wanted to do was to wrap up the case more neatly. Allow Emily her moments of glory and such, show the killer, etc. But I had to downsize somewhere because I didn't have the time, and since the story was supposed to focus on Ron, it seemed like a good place.