Who Killed Ronald Weasley?

Caught.
Hermiones confession
By Lightgoddess

Caught. Bloody fucking caught. Where did I go wrong? I’m too smart to get caught!

Kingsley and, of all people, Vincent Crabbe are escorting me to my holding cell at the Ministry. Kingsley is my superior, the Head of the Dark Wizard department. He just keeps looking at me and shaking his head. Crabbe, always a man of few words, follows Kingsley’s lead and refrains from speaking to me. When we finally reach the cell, they all but push me in. I turn and look into the regretful eyes of my boss. “You had so much potential, Hermione. I still don’t understand why you would throw everything away.”

I know better than to open my mouth, so I just shrug and go sit on my bed. I know what comes next, after they have left. Kingsley and Boadicea will come in, tie me down, and dose me with veritaserum. They’ll ask me a bunch of questions and cart me off to Azkaban. This will be fodder for the Prophet for months.

I sigh and lean back on the bed. There’s really nothing else I can do until they retrieve me.

No sooner than I finish that thought, Boadicea walks in flanked by Kingsley and Vince. She looks livid. “Hermione what in the hell? Get up! We’re going to the Observation Room.”

I smile wryly. The Observation Room is what we Aurors call the holding cell used before the guilty are sent to Azkaban. “Lead the way, Madame,” I reply coolly.

We make it to the room and, as I suspected, I am tied down. I don’t bother trying to fight. There’s no point, so, I stick my tongue out, and they administer three drops of veritaserum. It begins to work immediately.

“What is your name?” Kingsley asks.

“Hermione Jane Granger,” I reply, not bothering to try to fight this potent poison.

“Did you kill Ronald Weasley?” Boadicea asks.

“Yes,” I reply honestly. “He was almost dead when I tied the rope around his neck, anyway.”

“Why?” Kingsley asks disbelief evident in his voice.

“He deserved it.”

Boadicea sighs. “Kingsley, I hate to say it, but it might not have been such a good idea to dose her with veritaserum. We could go all night long without finding specifically why she killed him.”

The big Auror winks at her. “Can you tell me in graphic detail what Ron Weasley did to you to make you hate him and want to kill him?”

“Which time?” I ask, again not bothering to fight the potion.

This earns a raised eyebrow from all three Aurors in the room. “This could be interesting,” Crabbe whispers.

“Indeed it could,” Boadicea replies. “What was the first thing Ronald did to make you want to kill him?”

My eyes are glassy, the potion still working its magic as I begin to speak. “The first time I wanted to do Ron bodily harm was the time he came into my flat high on speed and tried to rape me in my sleep.”

“Did he succeed,” Boadicea asks unemotionally.

“No,” I reply.

“Did you begin formulating a plan then?” Kingsley chimes in.

“No.”

The questioning goes on for what seems like hours until finally the fog in my brain begins to clear. I have been unemotional and answered every question in monotone, but now, I look at Boadicea and smile.

“The potion’s wearing off,” I say. “I’ll tell you ‘in graphic detail’ what made me decide to kill him, since your questions were so off the mark, besides, he was already almost dead when I finished the deed.”

Crabbe smirks, remembering that I was always the first to come out of the stupor of that particular truth potion while we were in training. “That didn’t take long, Hermione,” he says.

“It never does,” I reply before looking at Kingsley and Boadicea.

“Before I finish telling you what happened, I want to say this to you both, Kingsley and Boadicea. I never intended on getting caught, but then I was almost sure it was hopeless when I saw they put you on the case. Yes, I murdered Ron, and I’d do it again if given the chance. He was a festering boil on the arse of society. He was a thief, a drug dealer, a murderer, and a rapist. Were it three years ago, he could have been a death eater.

“Having said that, he was also my best friend and fiancé. I tried to do everything that I could to get him away from the drugs. I’ve been doing some reading on methamphetamine, and I discovered that one of the reasons he was constantly looking for sex, and it didn’t matter who with, is because speed will do that.

“There were nights that he came into my flat rock hard and rubbing himself. He would even tell me that he’d just gotten done shagging someone, but that he was hard for me. When I realized that it was just the drugs, I stopped having sex with him. He wouldn’t tell me who he was shagging, only that he was.”

I stop here and reflect on my relationship with Ron. It was rocky to say the least, but I did truly love him at one point. Kingsley clears his throat. “Why didn’t you ever tell anyone this, Hermione? I’ve known you both since you were fifteen. We could have gone together and gotten him help. You and I both know that Harry would have helped, too, if we asked him.”

With a sigh I answer him. “Would you have believed that Ronald Weasley was addicted to drugs, always drinking or drunk, prone to sexual violence, and taking it up the arse from everyone but Snape whom he was poling up the arse when he could get it?”

The black Auror scratches his bald head and tugs on his earring. “I see your point, but you could have either told me or Boadicea.”

“You haven’t heard the best part,” I say with an ironic smile. “I still haven’t told you why I did it, specifically.”

This whole time Boadicea has been eerily quiet. Most of the more sordid details of my love life I kept away from the Ministry. She finally looks me in the eyes. Hers are hard as steel and her voice like ice on my ear drums. “It doesn’t matter what he did to you, Hermione,” she spat my name, “You are an Auror, and not above the law. Nothing he could have done would justify murder.”

“Not any one thing, no,” I answer, the coolness in my voice belying my nervousness at knowing this interview is almost over. “There were several things he did to me in the final months that pushed me over the edge.”

Bodacia steps toward me, but Kingsley holds her back. “What happened?” he asked.

“The first incident was three months before we broke up. One night he was surprisingly sober, or at least he appeared to be, and he invited me over to this dingy little flat. One thing led to another, and he had me tied to his bed. I couldn’t move or banish the ropes, the silk ropes. The same ones found at the scene. He got really rough with me that night, and before he was done, he said, ‘I’ve always wondered what it was like to top someone with a tight, virgin hole,’ and then, he raped my arse.”

Tears well up in my eyes remembering that particularly violent episode. I have pushed it away for so long the anger and hurt I feel threaten to over flow inside of me. I have yet to face that I was raped so brutally. “All night he did this, over and over. He didn’t even have enough sense to prepare me like his male lovers would him. I was almost certain that I would die from blood loss from the tears in my anus. I had to wear complicated glamours to cover the bruising around my wrists and I preformed several healing spells on myself in the hopes that I wouldn’t catch some kind of an infection.”

Kingsley, always one to have a soft heart, pulled Boadicea to the corner of the room. “Madame, if her stories get worse, you know we could probably get her off of this murder charge. She was physically abused, apparently more than once, and no one here saw the signs.”

With a shake of her head, Boadicea replies, “I want to hear what she has to say before I come to that conclusion. I also want to question her again under the veritaserum after she finishes just to make sure that she is not exaggerating, lying, or embellishing anything.”

Agreeing, Kingsley steps back over to me. Vince has wiped my face clean of all of the tears and helped me blow my nose by now. I’ve calmed down and I look at two people who thought they knew me so well. “The second incident happened a week after that. He had a little money, so he dropped by the flat under the pretense of taking me out to dinner. Dinner never happened. He said he had to stop by Seamus’ house before we ate, and he ended up getting high with him, Dean, and Terry Boot.

“They were all high, so they started talking about sex. I was disgusted, honestly, when he told me what he wanted to see me do with the other three.” I take a deep breath. “When I refused, the four of them tied me down and Ron let Dean, Seamus, and Terry rape me.”

Vince cracks his knuckles and both Kingsley and Boadicea look shocked. “If that’s not humiliating enough, he moved a chair from the table into the room to get a good view and began wanking and moaning my name and all this other shit. He called me his good little slut and talked to the three of them like I wasn’t even there, and then he had the nerve to come all over my face.”

I’m crying again, humiliation evident by the redness of my face. Vince reaches over with a gentle hand and wipes a tear. “No one should have to go through that, Hermione,” he says.

With a sniffle I reply with a small, “Thank you,” and begin my tale again. “It was two weeks before he died that was the last straw. I was sent a bouquet of roses. The card was a portkey directly into Ron’s flat. When I arrived, he stupefied me and tied me to the bed with those damn silk ropes. I…there was a lot of mental torture that night. He stripped me naked and threatened me. He pulled a knife on me and tried to cut me. Then, he raped me again, over and over. He kept snorting that stuff and raping me. It went on all night.” My emotions finally get the best of me and I become hysterical, sobbing.

I feel like I can’t go on. Too much has happened to me and I just can’t handle it any more. “No one knew, but I lost a baby that night. I wasn’t supposed to even be able to get pregnant because of a curse I was hit with in the war, but I did, and he killed it. He knew I was pregnant, too. It wasn’t a week before that that he caught me leaving the mid-wife’s office for my check-up. He did it on purpose.”

By now, I can barely for coherent sentences. I take a deep breath and look up at my colleagues. “He caused me to truly never be able to have children when he caused my miscarriage. I couldn’t help but think of the age old wizard’s creed of ‘an eye for an eye’ when I discovered he’d killed my child.”

Vince and Kingsley both seem mortified while Boadicea is unmoved. “How far along were you, Hermione?” Vince asks gently as he pulls out his handkerchief and wipes my face.

I offer him a small smile. “I was six weeks along and elated. I always wanted one child and he took that away from me. He was a selfish prick throughout our whole relationship. I just lost it, I suppose, after that. All of the abuse and his attitude toward me were just too much.”

Kingsley pulls both Vincent and Boadicea to the other side of the room. “There’s almost no way we can get a conviction on this. If she admits this under veritaserum, then she’s almost assured to get off. It would be one thing had she done it in cold blood, but with the backing of an ancient wizard’s creed, we don’t have much of a leg to stand on.”

Boadicea shakes her head and walks back over to me. She leans down eye level with me and says, “You are a murderer, old law or no and you will spend your time in Azkaban. I’m sure the dementors will love the hell you have been through.”