Warnings: (Whole Story) Adultery/Infidelity, Angst, Violence, Swearing, references to male/male sexual acts.
Total Word Count: 21,180 (This Chapter: 350)
Disclaimer: All characters and settings remain the intellectual property of JK Rowling.
Author's Note: Thank you so much to everyone for all the lovely reviews and favouriting. It means a great deal to me that you are enjoying this story. The last chapter was another stupidly short one, so I'm posting this one at the same time. This one isn't exactly long, either. The next one is also tiny, but the one after that is more like a decent length!
Chapter Eleven
"Is it happening again?" Hermione Weasley asked her husband, as he stared into space at breakfast time.
He looked startled, then glanced round to where Hugo had been sitting, shovelling cocopops into his mouth. There was no nine year-old at the table.
"I sent him to get dressed ten minutes ago," Hermione explained.
She was probably exaggerating a bit, but it was still worrying.
"Tell me, Ron. Is it happening again?" She looked so serious.
He thought he knew what she meant, but he asked anyway, "Is what happening?"
"You were like this: distant, absent. Before. Last time. At school. Are you going down again? I don't know how I'll cope if you go down like that again. I mean, all the way. Not just the little depressions you get from time to time. I'm worried that this is going to be another big one."
He looked at his plate rather than answer her. He was surprised to see a whole uneaten sausage there, with half an egg and most of a piece of toast. He thought he'd finished eating. "Um. I was just thinking about something." He had been trying to figure out how to tell her. For days he had been trying to work up a strategy and enough courage to put it into practice. "What are we doing today?"
"It's Sunday. Hugo's got Quidditch training this afternoon, but I can stick him in front of a DVD now if you need to talk."
Perhaps he should have resented her assumption that he didn't know what day of the week it was. He wasn't that far gone. But he was close, so he just nodded. While Hermione went to get out the old Doctor Who box set her parents had got their son hooked on ("Come on, Dad, you have to watch this bit where the twelfth doctor regenerates into the thirteenth doctor ...") Ron wondered whether he was going to be able to talk. He idly finished up his breakfast.
Then he made them a cup of tea each. Casting the spell to heat the kettle reminded him so forcefully of making tea for Draco, of all the feelings stirred up by that little meeting, that he knew that he did, after all, want to have this talk. There were things that Hermione had never known about. He needed to talk to her. And after the talking there were actions which he needed to take. No amount of cunning was going to make this easy for her, and anyway, he'd never had a subtle mind. It just had to be stated. Deep breath then Truth.
His wife sat down across from him at their clean, beige-topped kitchen table and he began:
"Hermione, there are things which I probably should have told you a long time ago. I wasn't myself, as you know, for a long time. I've been trying to forget. For a long time I didn't think that I ought to tell you about this. I've changed my mind." He took in that deep breath; she stared into his face anxiously. "In that last year at school - that half-year I spent not getting any N.E.W.T.s – something happened."
Hermione interrupted to ask, "Is the same thing happening now?"
"Kind of. I don't know. Listen."
She didn't listen, of course. She hardly ever did. "I knew you weren't all there. For weeks before you fell apart completely, you wandered around in a daze. You never went to lessons, we hardly saw you and when we did you didn't join in with conversations; it was like your mind was somewhere else. And then there was the big depression, which lasted years." She looked very scared. "I've never been sure that you would have married me if you'd been, as they say, of sound mind." Hermione didn't often look scared.
Ron wasn't sure whether to answer the question which she had almost asked. He didn't know exactly what the true answer was, so he continued. "Listen. Before I went down, before the big one, something happened. Someone happened."
"Oh." Hermione let out a tiny, sad noise.
"When I was in that phase that you just called 'absent', it wasn't the start of the depression. I let you think that. Well, I didn't stop you from thinking that, but it's not true."
"You were preoccupied? With someone else?"
Ron nodded.
"Were you in love?"
Ron nodded again. He looked into his teacup, at the spoon circling round and round in it. Pointlessly. He'd given up having sugar in his tea more than a decade before.
"Was your heart broken?"
"Yes. Badly. Completely."
"That was what made you so low? Not the war, not anything I could have helped you to cope with?" Hermione sighed. "It destroyed you. You retreated. I took advantage of that and I pushed you into marriage."
"I needed somebody. You've been brilliant, 'Mione."
"Have I? I wonder." She paused. They both drowned in their own thoughts for a little while, not looking at each other. "But I've never been 'the one', have I? For you? I sort of knew it. I was never the other half that completed you."
"I guess. Though I don't think I'd describe him that way, either. It wasn't just passion. We were the whole world, the everything, to each other. For a short while. I wanted forever, but he finished things, threw me out of his life so completely – what?" He had just noticed the way his wife was staring at him: incredulously, as though she didn't know who she was looking at.
"A man?" she asked with hardly any breath.
"Oh. Yes." Had he said that? Did it matter? That wasn't the point was it?
"You're gay?"
"Gay? No. I suppose, if we have to put names to things then bisexual. Is this important?"
She sat back in her chair, her face composing, her features beginning to harden into a self-protective mask. "Go on."
"What?"
"Now you've started you'd better give me the whole story, though I don't know why you're suddenly telling me now. So what if some man screwed you and dumped you a long time ago?" She shrugged petulantly.
"I met him again. Recently. And it turns out that, well, when he said then that he didn't love me, he was lying. To protect me."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah. Actually."
"You're having an affair with him?" Her eyes were filling up and her lip wobbled.
"No. Actually."
"Then why are you telling me?" She stood and snatched up their teacups, although his was still half full, and took them to the sink.
It made it easier that she wasn't looking at him when he replied, "Because I gave up too easily last time. I'm not going to let him out of my life again. I can't be happy without him and I've made up my mind to do my utmost to get him to leave his wife-"
"- Wife? It gets worse! -"
"— and live with me and love me. I'm sorry, Hermione."
She spun round, her bushy brown hair all over the place. "Did you ever fancy me at all, Ron Weasley?"
"Of course I did! I do! You're an attractive woman and you're one of my best friends. I thought it would work out. It's been all right. Hasn't it?"
"Did you love me?" She turned back to stare into the sink. "Ever?"
"I do love you. It's different. I want us to stay friends, 'Mione."
She snorted. The room froze over with silence.
Finally Hermione asked. "He was someone from school? Someone I know?" She looked round to watch him answer her.
"Oh, yeah." Ron swallowed. He took a deep breath. "Draco Malfoy."
Hermione's expression fell into one of disgust and disdain, but before she could speak, Hugo was opening the kitchen door, saying, "Dad, Dad, you have to come and see this! It's the regeneration. You keep missing it. I've paused it. You have to come and see the Doctor regenerating!"
