Ending the Darkness

Title: Ending the Darkness
Email: KAYKEL1207@msn.com
Site: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/The_Keeper_Pairings
Author: Kayla
Disclaimer: JK Rowling owns all. I am just a poor writer having a bit of fun.
Distribution: MerryWizards, inkstained fingers, fanfiction.net (if I find them worthy... lol) , ask anywhere else.
Spoilers: Through Book Five
Summary: After losing virtually everything- Ron Weasley is lost in pain and sorrow. Charlie Weasley and Oliver Wood don\'t know what they can do. Yet maybe one of those responsible for his losses can.
Pairings: Ron x Severus, Oliver x Charlie
Author Note: Written for the Merrywizards Secret Santa challenge 2003. #25
Requested: Severus x Ron(delivered) Oliver x Charlie (Delivered) Romance/Dark (Delivered) added to a bit of angst which is just my thing.

Merry Christmas and I hope you enjoy!

- - - - - - - - - - - - -
The pain was virtually ceaseless in dreams, so sanctuary in sleep was near impossible. Being awake but isolated in his mind was the only way to survive in a world where they would not let him die. Charlie for one called suicide \"unthinkable for a new world of peace.\"

Ron knew somewhere, inside the unbearable and hollow emptiness that Charlie did care if he lived or died. With his lover pregnant, Charlie had at least some personal reason to believe that there were salvageable ruins inside of the dead wizarding world. Yet, Ron had nothing to hold on to anymore. His parents were dead... Percy was evil... No proof had been given to that final statement, but when the Ministry turned itself over to Dumbledore, Percy had indeed disappeared. Rumors spread from the mouths of convicted Death Eaters also. No body was found either. Ron did not think of any of them anymore. They had fought for no reason, so maybe Percy was right all along about the path of good being shamed. It was whatever was strongest, was it not?

Every Gryffindor from their year at Hogwarts, had perished save himself and the frightened, almost gone mousy, Lavender Brown. He was not really sure where her family had escaped to, but they had ran as far away as possible. He himself was safe because of a singular fact- Hermione had decided to die for him.

She had told him that evening, the one of her death, that she had loved him further than any friend could. They weren\'t silly kids anymore, and they knew that their friendship was stronger than anything. Then she was taken down by a killing curse meant for his body. He would never forget her blank stare, not ever. He was not even sure, that in death he could lose that image. She had fallen into his arms, ending his life with her own.

Then Harry had finished the war - the final battle. He\'d been above them, only a seventeen year old, yet a boy destined to fight the ultimate evil.

Harry and he had spoken that day. Harry said he could feel it coming, through Voldemort\'s rage. He said that he was going to die and that Ron would be alone in surviving. Ron had not denied the hopelessness, as he said softly the words, \"not you too.\" Harry said to him, almost prophetically that everyone would build the new world around the old one, and he would likely be part of it. He had not understood a word of Harry\'s proclamation and had only fought that final battle to protect Hermione\'s memory. He remembered the way Harry looked as he took down Voldemort for the final time, his strong resistant mind never breaking the contact as he ended Voldemort for good. Ron himself had seen the Dark Lord fall... a historic moment he supposed.

Then Harry had been ambushed by loyal followers of the Dark Lord, and that was it. The Boy-Who-Lived lived no longer. Harry\'s prophecy for himself came true, and Ron\'s last thread of sanity tore.

After the war issues had cleared up it broke into thousands of mental pieces. People that had been missing for years were located; corpses mostly. It had been found out that Ron\'s brother Bill had been imprisoned, and his body had been found in the dungeon of one of the Death Eater\'s western hideouts. Fred and George had died in the last battle, along with Ginny. Charlie and he were all that remained, unless you counted unfound Percy.

In the days following the war there erupted a home for all of those who were war broken, and lost. Charlie and his lover, whom had been pregnant during the final days, and still waited for the baby, had placed Ron there out of what they called love. Charlie\'s lover Oliver, had lost both of his parents in the times, and wanted to protect Ron as much as was possible. Charlie agreed. Ron did not object to being sent to a \"mentally disabled war vetrans facility.\" It was fitting, as he had no capacity left in his mind, or so it felt to him when he went to the blankness.

\"We love you,\" Charlie said to him, words that made little sense. \"I love you, and as your brother it is my duty- I am bound to protect you. This will help you, I promise.\"

So here he was, safe and protected inside of four safe walls. Charlie\'s promise was not broken... and he was barely allowed to drift off into the land where nobody left, died or changed. It was ironic that the pain would capture him deeper owing to someone\'s love for him.

- - - - -

\"I worry about him, love,\" Oliver said one day, as Charlie sat at the edge of their living room thinking deeply. \"You\'re brother is in pain. It is much like the way I began to feel- when they died. You feel it too, I know you do... after all you lost...\"

\"I know it,\" Charlie replied looking up harshly before Oliver could speak of his parents and his family. Such a large family torn to the remnants of two lives was humanly wrong. How Oliver always managed to see into his thoughts was a miracle. They had met in battle, became lovers in battle, and made a child in the midst of a battle. It had to be destined for Oliver to read his mind, and to be the only reason he had left to survive after he lost fivblinblings and the parents who loved him. Why be alive, if not for Oliver and their beloved baby? \"I know it, but isn\'t Ron too far gone? To watch Harry die like that... after losing his family too... gosh it\'s been so long Oliver!\" Tears started to leak at the corner\'s of his deep green eyes. Oliver felt the tearing feeling in his heart once again, when he knew Charlie was thinking of other tragedy also. He knew his lover\'s weakness- the longing to be whole again, alongside his family.

\"Potter\'s death was a loss,\" Oliver replied his hand touching gently to Charlie\'s arm, the strain of moving so harshly on his pregnant body, \"your family also. I do not know if a hospital is going to be right for him. He lost everything but you... I have hope, so do you... that is our child... but your brother does not.\"

\"I\'m worried all right!\" Charlie snapped, his dark eyes flaring with a deep rooted anger; a fire Oliver had seen several times when he had battled the evil. His eyes then softened back to their green loveliness, \"I\'m sorry love, I\'m just so upset. Do not let me upset your baby.\"

\"I will think of something...\" Oliver promised, his lips grazing the skin of his lover\'s face, as he leaned forward towards his baby\'s father, the love of his life. \"I\'m going to go, so I will see you in a few hours.\"

- - - - -

\"I do not desire to go to some insanity hospital!\" Severus Snape protested feverishly, his eyes lighting up at the Headmaster\'s request. He shook his head violently at the elderly man who looked ready to restrain him. He fought with all his will, these charges that he needed to visit a mental facility. He may have hurt but he hid his pain and it did not need prodding. Yet he owed Albus for saving him from sure imprisonment... for all he\'d done for evil, while working against it.

\"Severus, Hogwarts will be returning in the next year tnormnormal term, and I will be meeting my end soon. My time is so near. This school needs a new Headmaster, a brave soul who possesses the heart to become a spy in Voldemort\'s legions. I want you to take over the school. It is my fullest intentions to leave Hogwarts to you... but you are indeed mentally unstable Severus.\"

\"I am not,\" he said softly, but wanted to weep as the words exited him. Albus saw through the shields he often threw up, to protect others... and himself from viewing the pain he\'d suffered through. No, his mind protested as he fought down the deep and tiring views. He would rather die before sleep and dream, so maybe... maybe Albus was right. The images of watching Lord Voldemort murder friends and colleagues stung, a raging burn rising inside of his blood.

\"I see the things you have suffered,\" was the soft, almost musical reply. \"The dark mark has become more of a possession than ever. You feel slave to the things you have been forced to do... in order to keep up a charade I ordered of you. You have tortured, caused many lives their ruin, and helped to end the sanity of millions including yourself. You are a brilliant man who needs the therapy. I trust you to lead Hogwarts, but I also trust you to get some help. You are my greatest friend- and the most respectable, but wounded man. I am sorry for what I have done to you.\" The last line was meant to touch him the way it did, and Severus knew it. He would be strong, and he would do what the Headmaster requested despite the desire to die he had inside of him. Albus was that way...

\"You wish for me to go to a mental facility, Albus?\" he said weakly, feeling submissive and weak. There was nothing he could do but take orders, as he always did....

\"Yes, honestly I do. Please Severus, you will thank me when you have found a way to forgive yourself. All it takes is a purpose to see out your time...\"

\"I will take that as an answer Headmaster. I will also do it.\" \'Another chance to be a blind animal,\' his mind said inside, but he ignored it. He was good\'s slave now, not evil\'s.

- - - -

\"I assure you that your time here will be well spent,\" the stern but kindly faced mediwitch whispered to him, as if it were in her job to talk down to people. He nodded, placing his possesions where she instructed. He was a good sheep, an expert at following orders blindly. He would do -anything- when insructed- as was obvious. He would make anyone suffer for his own life. He would let all suffer, wishing their torture contorted faces were his own.

To be killed would have been better than to face this endless torture. Even for Voldemort to make his death slow and painful would have been better than this, slow and painful death anyway.

\"Feel free to move about,\" she said as he gazed around the whitewall room. \"As you seem quite of a right mind, you are free to visit some of the other patients. They would probably enjoy some quality company, as- they have no families mostly. Never in my life did I expect the war to have such effects... never...” She walked away muttered under her breath.

He watched as she left, walking stiffly with a brusque swing to her. She, a sideline nurse did not know the mental effects of killing, torturing, or watching friends tortured and killed. He did not know what to do. If being completely idle was supposed to help him... then he was incurable. Silence just extended to more pain. He would imagine the faces of those he killed for a greater good. The children he\'d tortured just for their muggle lineage. He decided to walk around the bleak hospital.

He passed many strangers, and many familiar faces. Too many familliar faces for his own good really... friend, enemy, it did not matter. All were insane in their own rights. Several of the insane victims looked in his direction, recognition and friendliness etched onto their blank faces. He darted past them, until he reached a room where he heard a noise. The soft whimpers of extreme pain... they echoed of everything he had heard aloud in the yea year. Victims, struggling with the insanity inside. Pitiful, weakly and sad. He treaded cautiously into the patient\'s room. Weasley, his mind screamed as he saw the still young child at a corner, shaking with silent tears running down his face.

He had seen the boy\'s parents executed. Also he had taken part in the attack that ended his brothers. He knew the young child\'s story. He wanted to pass the room, more than he desired anything in the entire world. Yet his eyes were stuck on the child in the corner of the room. Had not every member of the Weasley family died?

He was confused beyond belief to why his feet dragged him across the grounds of the hospital floor. The stone echoed with his footsteps and the child looked up with a blank, obviously insane stare. Much less than Potter\'s once cheerful and good best friend. Of course he himself was much less than a cruel Potions teacher. He could care less about students anymore.

His face was so dark... looked just like his father\'s, before the torture ended and he was finally killed.

Severus remembered seeing the parents die clearly. Friends, fellow members of the Order of the Phoenix, and they had been some of the most painful deaths. He had watched them scream in agony, begging for Voldemort just to kill them. The woman sobbed about her children, and how they needed their mother to be there. He had been standing there at his Master\'s side , stone faced and quiet. During her speech pleading for their life, he had met her eyes for just an instant. She was a smart woman- she had known what he was doing there.

He wanted to cry, but he never cried, not anymore. Not even when he heard the boy call names of phantom people, dead ones, ones gone to different places. Like the boy\'s own blood... an older brother Snape had remembered well. The only Gryffindor he had no excuse to give poor marks. A traitor, falling to evil as soon as it seemed the easiest way out. He had stood by and helped in the murder of her parents who cried to him to turn back and protect his siblings. Heartless boy.

He entered the room, and not surprisingly the boy did not look up.

He approached the boy, more closely then he would ever near a human being in a normal state of mind. It was just so intrenching, this desperation and sadness. Desperate tears fell from a boy that looked too unintelligent to cry. \"Dad...\" the boy said in a low, absent voice and began to chant a long list of low dead names. Severus cringed at the sheer amount of loss.

All of a sudden the boy collapsed towards him. He gasped, repelling himself, until the boy began to spiral down into his arms. He knelt down to the ground, pressed by the weight. He was so stunned, when the boy stopped crying, or really doing anything. Scared and using both of his arms, he lifted the boy back into a sitting position. Looking at the boy now, from this position, told Severus that he would die soon from this desperation. Then again, why didn\'t they let him? Dying was so much better than this.

He felt such pity, that it overwhelmed him.

Tiredly, he liftee boe boy into his arms. His weight was nothing, making Severus wonder if the boy was just going to waste away and die. Such frailty was sad, even in a once hated young man. Hopelessness was the true end, not death. Severus himself wished sometimes that he would have revealed himself a traitor and taken execution. Gently, he placed the frail, seemingly lifeless body onto the bed in the center of the room.

Then suddenly, the child cried out frantically, thrashing his arms about wildly as if fighting of some enemy deep inside of him. \"No... you won\'t take me,\" he said angrily, with a fighting passion he no longer possessed in waking life. \"No! No! You cannot kill her! She can\'t be dead... no...\" his voice trailed off. Did the child not know? Reinacting deaths only brought them back a million times worse. He held out a hand comfortingly, as the boy had now began to tremble viciously.

\"I\'m sure it will be just fine,\" Severus mumbled to the air, and the unconscious boy. Then the boy began to fight his hand, fight him as if he were one of the invisible enemies in his mind. \"No, not Harry! You lost, you cannot have him too! You lose, good won! It cannot happen this way! No!\"

This was the second viewing he\'d had to this scene. He had been there on the final night, and had seen Potter and Voldemort both go down in a wave of spells. Weasley had, after momentarily holding Potter\'s corpse, fought with Voldemort\'s dead body as if there were still any of him left to destroy. He felt the boy\'s grip tighten around his arm, almost to a painful extent. Where were the kindly, strict nurses now? \"Calm down,\" he commanded to the child, who almost obediently slumped down onto the bed. Then his eyes opened very widely.

\"You,\" he said softly, the focus coming back to his mentally gone eyes. He could see Snape. All he associated with Snape was the fact that he\'d been a traitor as far as Ron knew. He was there when Hermione and Harry died. He was probably part of his parents murder too! He struggled and fought. \"Traitor!\" he screamed violently, as Snape\'s figure swayed in his head.

Severus restrained the young man, and looked down to him. \"The war is over,\" he whispered strongly, the accusations stinging his betrayer\'s heart deeply. \"I was a spy, but now I am just as...” He wasn\'t really as they were. He was insane now, but they were innocents.

\"You were there when they died!\" Ron accused, hitting the ex Professor hard, even as his vision darkened, blurred and fell in and out of focus. \"I saw you laughing behind him, when they killed Hermione.\"

\"That I did,\" Severus stated not allowing his face to show any form of emotions. \"Yet now, here I am, in a mental hospital.\"

\"You should die, for her, for Harry and for all of them! Get out of this room before I kill you.\"

Some redeeming words in Snape\'s mind, told him that if he left, the murders that haunted him most would haunt him forever. He had to confess to being able to save the ones he did not. \"I am sorry,\" he said coldly, as the boy bolted to his feet.

\"Who else did you kill, torture, or send to this place?\" Ron asked strongly. The world spun around him, and he could barely focus on the demon before him.

\"Your parents...\"

Ron suddenly felt a hollow void in his chest, ae dre dropped to the floor in a dead faint. When he awoke, he was lying face up on the stony floor, and Snape was kneeling beside him, touching to his head. \"What?\" Ron said, sitting up and lashing out. \"Trying to see if you knocked me off too?\"

\"I was not the killer-\" Snape said softly, \"but I may as well have been.\"

Ron stared at him blankly, wondering on the hysteric fact that Snape had been finally, very blunt with him. Then all of a sudden, Ron stopped as the blurriness, and nausea had left him suddenly. It was all so clear, this man\'s face, every emotion riddled into it like it was written on parchment. \"What are you trying to say to me?\" he asked, stunned by the clarity of his vision.

Severus looked down on the boy. Where had the impulse to tell the complete truth to this child come from? The crying... the general suffering? What had forced him to face his fears? There, that was it, he was facing the demons that haunted him. The ones he watched die. \"Voldemort killed your parents,\" he said in a very detached manner. \"I was in the very room.\"

This made the child\'s heart stop; he could see that much clearly in the boy\'s face. Severus waited to be asked, why he did not stop them, but no... the boy was smarter than that. \"They trusted you, did you know that?\" Ron said shrugging as though it figured he killed them.

\"What are you doing?\"

Ron smiled and laughed as the blurriness fell over his eyes again, a shade of dark insanity where he could not comprehend anything. \"What am I doing? I\'m asking you if you realize how much my mother especially admired you?\"

\"Does it matter?\"

\"Yes it does. I hated you, hated you for all of those years at school. My mother said that you were a strong, noble person to be admired or some lie like that. I hated you, and she admired you. Even more in your last years working with her. I think Dad was hooked by your trick too. They both admired your bravery in the face of Voldemort. Then you saw them die! It figures doesn\'t it...\"

\"Yes it does \'figure\',\" Severus whispered, wondering once again what he was doing in that room, with that insane little child. \"Everything in this war was irony. All of the children I had to see die, because of their parentage. All the -friends- I killed.\"

\"We are all mental in this world,\" Ron said softly, the cloud lowering with even more thickness. \"Even my brother, my only living family member mind you, who thinks life irth rth living. A child mad a boyfriend are all Charlie needs to live, or so he says.\"

\"Coming from a man who agrees with you,\" Severus said, inclining his head towards the boy. \"I\'d have to say that there is no redoing the war, so we might as well make way for new people who have not seen it.\"

Ron agreed. The shock it gave his heart was terrible, like a jolt of electricity stronger than any spell lepta through his veins. He and this man, evil and good, were in the same group now. They both wanted to give up and let go for a new generation of people. Victims of something stronger... something more purposeful then their pitiful lives. \"You did not wish my parents dead?\" Ron asked, a bitter but knowing tone to his voice as the waves of understanding swirled around him in blue and purple visuals.

\"I wish the war had never made me become the double agent,\" Severus replied, his eyes meeting the boy\'s and nearly boring holes into them. \"I wish a lot of things Mister Weasley, as I see you do. Nothing is going to change.\"

He was right. It had happened. The only people that could live through this and refuse to admit to the pain were in denial, or so says the man that no longer believes. The connection between himself and the other man was very strong, making Ron feel weak and tired under the connecting of eyes. Snape\'s eyes were dark, as deep and dim as his future was. \"Is there hope?\" he asked, not to the man, but to the eyes of despair he was falling into.

Severus choked before he could answer. Is there hope? Was there even a trace of hope left for any of them? Albus Dumbledore\'s reconstructing Hogwarts... children being born even in this year ... romances...
\"Hope could come, but damage is still there.\"

\"I believe that I am damaged,\" Ron said vaguely, \"I believe you are.\"

Severus agreed, knowing that he and the child both were damaged products of the war. It felt oddly in a way, to relate to someone, when in fact he had never related with another human being, not in his entire life. He sighed, and faltered a bit in his emotions, as he sat down beside the boy. All of a sudden, the boy was driven by a minor fit, and tears began to come from him again. \"I am insane,\" the child said softly, looking away from him. \"I know that... every now and then I see them die in my head and I cannot focus on real life.\"

\"It is all right.\"

Ron had never heard such sweet words in his life. No, \" you are going to get better\". No, \"that will end soon\" . No, \"I\'m sorry you lost them\". Just \"It is all right.\" It was undeniably the most perfect answer any living person had given to him. Insanity was just a variation of what was normal. He followed that voice, and found himself clinging to the voice, and the man in which it came from.

Severus found himself looking down at a small level of shock, when the boy attached himself to his body, clinging with all of him- and for some reason he knew what he had done. He had allowed the child to take his insanity, without making it wrong. It was not a disability and never would be for the child at least. He had made the boy accept himself. \"It\'s all right,\" he said softly, whispering now.

\"It is,\" the child said, looking up at him with green but misty eyes. \"It is, is it not? Nothing really matters. You say you basically murdered my parents, you probably were involved with my brothers and sr dyr dying, but you saved my life.\"

\"If you decide to put it into those words.\"

\"I do decide to put it in those words,\" Ron said looking up into the eyes of his former Professor. \"I hope you understand that I am falling in love with our bond.\"

That was what it was, that filled both of them so; a bond. They were both men who had seen the dark and light sides at their fullest power. They both wished to die, but would not will themselves to do even that.

He calmed the boy in his arms now, by throwing himself over him protectively. \"I have a question for you,\" he asked the boy, not even knowing if he could get a coherent answer. \"I am wanted to run Hogwarts...\"

\"Go for that goal,\" Ron said softly, before Snape could put out a position on it. \"That\'s a good goal, one for the future and stuff. \" He could hear the young, delicate voice, but could barely comprehend it\'s tired words.

\"But...\"

\"It\'s something to live for, isn\'t it? My brother told me to find the thing worth being alive for. This isn\'t it, but maybe someone like you... a traitor... could find that place at the new Hogwarts. Works for me.\"

It worked for him too, for this moment. Realization that Hogwarts was his safe place to put his mind into, slowly crept through his body. This child, in the darkness, had seen the light of his life.

“What about yourself?” he asked, a look on his face that clearly stated his thoughts. How could this boy, who looked without hope for his own life, instill hope into a hopeless man?

“Nothing.”

“Surely...”

“Nothing. I said nothing all right! I tried living, and loving way too many people. First I loved my parents. My Mum and Dad were the world\'s greatest people. You knew them almost as well as I did. It took little for me to love them, I mean they were my parents. We had fights... but I admired them. Then I think I cared for my sister first. I took my brothers for granted, they were just “the guys” after all. Then my baby sister was born and I got an important role. Loved her so much... you would not ever know...”

“I had a younger sister. I know.”

“You?” In Ron\'s youth, he never even imagined that Snape came from anywhere. He had always just assumed he\'d been born from some freak vampire related accident.

“Yes, I.” Ron watched as the former professor\'s eyes left him and seemed to for a moment travel from the room, to a far off land. “I had a little sister. My supposed comrades as a teenager killed her. I was as you called yourself in other words, a older brother. I let my sister die... at least you don\'t have that blame.”

“My sister\'s dead,” Ron snapped, dismissing the momentary shock of knowing the horror Snape had done. Why hadn\'t, he wondered, this man ever been punished for these terrible deads. “It doesn\'t matter how it came to be.”

“It does...”

Ron disregarded the words, not willing himself to prod the wounds the older man was suffering through at the moment. He sighed, “Loving them all was probably why their deaths hurt.”

\"True.\"

\"I mean- I know why you are guilty... but since nothing matters for real, why couldn\'t you get over it?\"

\"I suppose that things do matter more than I like to believe, Mister Weasley.\"

\"Then why are so many people in this little hopeless trap?\"

\"The war...\"

\"Good reason.\" Ron looked up at Snape. He realized now that his vision, which had become swirling and dark ever s the the war ended, was really unnaturally clear when Snape was standing beside him. He made a light mention to that.

\"I don\'t understand that,\" Severus said in reply to the boy\'s mentioning. He took away a child\'s insanity? It did not make sense.

\"I like this, because even hopelessness has a bit of light right here.\" Ron smiled at that fact; the darkness which had consumed his eyes was now just a faded symbol at the corner of his mind. Talking for maybe an hour was changing the black swirling abyss that was becoming the inside of his head. Suddenly, he thrust his head upward, catching the ex Professor off guard because he wanted the ends of the darkness in his eyes lifted. He kissed the older man, trying to remove the black, and fill it with the rest of the light. It felt like his eyes were opening for the very first time.

Severus nodded, as his eyes opened wide as well.