Title: Fine Gossip for Witches
Author: MelWil
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: JKR’s not mine
Feedback: Delightful - lina_wilson@hotmail.com
Summary: Somethings don’t change even after death.
Author’s Note: A Tearstains Universe story. Yes, Ron has a thing for fingernails.

~*~

His fingernails were dirty.

He collected grit and mess now, the way he used to collect chocolate frog cards. Sometimes he wondered if there were dirt collecting albums, a place where he could preserve his dirt for all time.

He saw a lot of dirt.

His colleagues (when they bothered with each other at all) commented on the way Ronald Weasley would fearlessly go into places where vermin feared to tread.

If anyone would bother to ask him he would say it was just a consequence of thorough training and extensive experience. A result. That was all.

But they didn’t ask him, and logical explanations wouldn’t have stopped the gossip anyway. And famous people, people who had spent time in the spotlight since they were eleven years old, were legitimate targets for gossip.

Ron Weasley made damn fine gossip.

They said he had been quite the man in his younger days. He was, they said, in love with Hermione Granger, and she seemed to love him in return. They said that there was a time when things had been good: when he had been surrounded by friends and family and Voldemort was vanquished and he had been a better man.

And then everything began to crumble.

She left him. His job got difficult. His older brother returned unexpectedly. His best friend died.

He began to walk with a limp, began to glare at anyone he passed, began to complain about pain in his left arm.

Someone said that a posse of derobed Death Eaters got him, that they burnt the Dark Mark into his arm while he was obliviated by alcohol.

Another person said that he had tried to kill himself.

His fingernails were dirty.

Ginny hated dirty fingernails. She’d roll her eyes at them, wrinkle up her nose, make loud noises about how disgusting they were.

“Ronald Weasley,” she admonished after Harry and Ron returned from a ministry sponsored jaunt. “Your fingernails are absolutely disgusting. Didn’t your mother ever give you the basic lessons in cleaning up?”

He smiled and kissed his little sister on her cheek. “Mum has always taught me the best and nothing but the best. Unfortunately I was traumatised after Fred and George swapped the soap for frog spawn.”

“It’s no excuse.” But she smiled and turned to Harry, trying to put his hair into some kind of manageable fashion.

Now . . .

Ginny was in hiding. The Ministry had put her in safe houses and had refused to tell any of them where she was.

And Harry was dead.

And Ron, his best friend, had been holding him when he died.

Everyone thought it was just a routine inspection, just a normal raid with no surprises. They would be in, out, and back home before they knew it. And Ginny would complain about the state of his fingernails.

His fingernails were dirty. He noticed it as he clutched a ragged quill. As he tried to put words into a coherent order.

He wrote to his nephew almost every day.

Half the time, the letters found the bottom of his fireplace before he even signed his name.

He decided that there were another bunch of letters that were destroyed, or hidden, by Ginny before his nephew even had the chance to read them.

He still wrote them every day.

And his fingernails were still dirty.

The End