Too bad, Ron thinks. He deserved every minute of it.
The weather fits the earth like a pall, snug and thick and dark. Ron hasn't seen blue sky for three years, not since the day no one remembers, not since the day he can't forget. He doesn't remember the colour, can hardly distinguish between blue and red and yellow and violet and orange. He doesn't want to.
But he remembers black.
And he remembers green.
He doesn't remember much.
They ask the same question, over and over, and Ron will never understand.
They shake his hand and he shakes his head, and they tell him it's going to be all right, and he tells them he doesn't know. He doesn't know who is reassuring whom, if that's even what they're doing.
He scrubs his hands clean in scalding water and burning soap, and doesn't know whose fingerprints they are he wants gone.
"How do you feel?" they ask, and sometimes Ron says, "fine," and sometimes he says, "better," but mostly he says, "I don't."
And he doesn't, because he was taught not to.
"Some day," Harry promised, "some day it's all going to be over, and it's just going to be you and me and nothing else."
"Nothing else," Ron repeated, but there already was nothing.
Rain on the moors and rain in the city and rain at the coast and rain, rain everywhere, soaking into parched landscape and parched mouths. The first time Harry kissed him Ron apologised, not for the kiss, not for the tongue and not for the action, but for everything it was meant to replace.
"I didn't know," said Harry, and Ron didn't blame him.
Ron didn't blame him for any of it.
"How do you remember him?" they ask, and Ron doesn't, so he says, "I can't." There is a Harry-shaped gap in his memory, and he doesn't miss it. He can't remember that there's anything to miss.
"I'm sorry," they say.
He isn't.
The epitaph still reads "The Boy Who Lived", even though he didn't, and the obituary had Ron's name in it.
Best friend, it said. Most loyal, it said. To the end, it said.
Fame from failing to die is hardly worth the price, Ron thinks, but at least he got what he wanted.