12/18/03

You remember the night you peeled back Ron's Dark Mark. The War was over. Snape still had his. Wore it like the badge of honor it had become, but Ron wanted it out, and you knew a spell to remove things like that. It wasn't like it was ink tattooed into skin or a brand. What Voldemort did was call up your blood into the cells of your skin, force the corpuscles into the endothelium and trap them there, so they couldn't get back to your heart, and the Dark Mark would linger underneath your skin longer than any tattoo or brand would. Blood had iron in it, after all, and if you protected iron from oxygen, it would last forever.

Harry helped you hold Ron down against the bench while you cut the skin off his arm and then sewed it back on again after you had washed it in unicorn water mixed with asphodel. It was a grim sort of job, particulalry since Ron had borne the Mark from Voldemort's hands himself, and he bled a good bit more than he should have. Harry had been covered in it up to his elbows, with a spray across his face from when Ron went into convulsions right as you dipped the edge of the skin into water.

Hiss. Smoke. The edge of Ron's skin had curled back from the water, and you could still smell the smoke that came off the water, sour and stale in the air even now that it was over. Harry long gone back to his room to sleep, and you looked across the way at Ron who still had his shirt off and his head propped up against the wall, sweating spots onto the wallpaper with the criss-cross lines from Pettigrew's hand all across his chest and down his arms, the curious crick in his collarbone from when it was broken by the Hurling Hex that his mother put on him when she was old and in the last grip of senility. Ron had been the one to nurse her through it, from the early stages of forgetfulness to when she would forget her children's names and the names of things. To the very last bits, when she forgot even how to breathe and swallow and just lay where-ever she was put.

Your fingers stung from the asphodel, and you would have tiny little abrasions on your fingers from the unicorn water burning the Mark-blood off your hands. Harry had kissed your cheek as he left, and you could feel the beginnings of a migraine starting at your temple an inch or so above that.

You looked at Ron for a little while longer, watching him lie limp against the wall, mouth open so he wouldn't have to move too much to breathe. And you said, "That's not why you took the Mark, is it? You didn't do it for Harry."

And Ron manged to look as his right arm where the Mark was fading minute by minute into his blood where it had come from, at the broad, lion's heart stitches that were holding his skin in place, and he said, before he let his head drop back against, his eyes closing and voice stumbling over the words, as if he'd forgotten how to talk. "No, it's not."