The Adventures of Roonil Wazlib part 1

The Locket

Ron Weasley was not a happy camper. Sitting in the entrance to the tent he currently shared with his girlfriend Hermione and his best friend Harry, he was cold, bored, anxious, and angry. He could hear Hermione & Harry talking inside. Not the specific words, but a general ebb & flow of conversation, which had been going on for over an hour now. He couldn't help but feel that they liked each other more than either of them liked him. His mind wandered to a scenario that he had been trying to ban from his mind, an image of his two friends bonding with each other & shutting him out. It was just a matter of time, he felt, until Hermione realized she had made a big mistake in beginning a relationship with him, a clumsy ginger with a big nose who was not terribly intelligent. Why would she choose him over The Boy Who Lived, handsome, charming, famous, rich? It was just a matter of time.

'Stop that,' he told himself as he had so many times in the past weeks, 'you know better than that. They wouldn't do that.' But sometimes his mind and his heart disagreed, and usually the heart won the argument. The sixth of seven children, Ron was used to being overlooked. He knew he was loved by his family, he never questioned that, but he'd always felt that there was nothing particularly special about himself. He was defined more by the people around him, less by anything inherent.

As he thought these things, his heart filling with the poison of insecurity, he absentmindedly fingered the oval locket he was currently guarding. It usually hung on its chain around his neck, but he'd often find it in his hands, with no conscious memory of taking it off. He hated it, despite its elegant, understated beauty. It held a piece of a dark lord's soul, the worst dark lord in any magical person's memory. Lord Voldemort. The three of them were traveling around the British Isles in an insane game of Keep-Away From Voldemort. They had to figure out how to destroy the damn thing before Voldemort discovered that they had it. So far they'd had zero luck, despite several attempts. It couldn't be blasted, burned, transfigured, or vanished. They had run through every idea that they could conjure (and Hermione had quite a few ideas more than he and Harry had). Ron had even tried the Killing Curse, Avada Kedavra, which caused the locket to glow a weak green for a few seconds but nothing more. Ron was despondent with this failure; he'd been hoping against all hope that he could make a real contribution to their efforts with that one. When it didn't work Harry had consoled him with the idea that Ron's inability to pull off a proper killing curse only said good things about Ron's character. That thought comforted Ron a bit, but only a bit.

Ron's reverie was interrupted by Hermione's voice. "Ron, can you come in here? Harry & I want to talk to you." 'Oh, great,' he thought, 'they finally bring me into the conversation. They've probably already decided what we do next and didn't feel a need to include me in the conversation.' He stood up, feeling every joint in his body creak from cold & disuse. Sitting on the ground in front of a tent will do quite a job on a guy's back, it turned out.

It was much warmer in the tent, which had been magically expanded to the size of a decent 2 bedroom apartment. From the outside it looked like a pup tent that would barely fit 2 people lying down. It was far from having all the comforts of home (Ron came from a very comfortable home, filled with wonderful smells from his mother's excellent cooking, and people coming and going constantly), but it was more than adequate to keep the three of them warm & dry. It even had a small stove, though Ron observed bitterly that they didn't get many chances to use it. Food had been an ongoing problem for the three.

As Ron approached his friends, he noticed a small tremor of apprehension pass between the two. Hermione's eyes snapped to his chest, where the locket should be hanging. "Ronald, where's the locket?" she said with an anxious look. He held it up for her to see. As she reached for it, Ron had a brief moment of hostility. 'She doesn't trust me with it,' the dark voice in his head said. His lips briefly curled into a snarl as he handed it over.

Immediately, he felt his hostility drop by half. It was a bit of relief to be done with his shift guarding it. He didn't notice Hermione's brow furrowing as he handed it over.

"We need to decide where we're going next," said Harry. "I think we should go somewhere close to Godric's Hollow, so we can check it out. Hermione thinks we should stay far away from there. What do you think?"

"I dunno, what ever, it doesn't seem to matter, does it?"

"Ron, don't you even care?" said Hermione in a small voice. There was a twinge on the left side of Harry's jaw as he steeled himself for the coming confrontation.

"It does matter, Ron. You know the stakes as well as we do. If we're found, we'll be brought straight to the nearest death eater, and that'll be the end for us. You-know-who will get the locket back & there'll be no chance of stopping him. We must keep that from happening."

"Yeah, but don't you feel like we're just spinning our wheels waiting until that happens? We haven't got a chance, and you know it. You both know it. We have at least three more of these horcrux things we need to find, and we've gotten nowhere near destroying this one."

"Yeah, well, we had an idea about that," said Harry. "If we can get our hands on the sword of Gryffindor, we should be able to do it. Hermione says that the sword might work, seeing as it would have absorbed basilisk venom from the Chamber of Secrets. It's one of the few things that could damage the locket beyond magical repair. It's worth a shot, don't you think?"

DEAR READERS: Thanks for checking out my very first attempt at fanfic! Please leave comments on what you like, what you don't like, and where you'd like to see this go. I have a general idea how the story will end, not much of a clue how I'm going to get there. Your input would be most appreciated.