Author's Note: This was a totally random idea inspired by totally random things. This is my first attempt to write about the Weasleys, so I don't know if I'll be able to finish it or if it will have any plot whatsoever. The Sons of Thunder deals with our dear seven from Harry's generation, revealing some things I invented to have happen to them after the War to shake things up a bit.. Enjoy and review!

Augusta

Disclaimer: I don't own anything you recognize from Harry Potter or anywhere else besides my own head.

Chapter One: Kitchen Resolutions

Ron walked through the Burrow's narrow front door into the kitchen, half-asleep from exhaustion. Another long day at the office, slaving away so there would be bread on the table. He was beginning to understand why his father's hair had began to fall out so early in his life. "Hermione, I'm home!" he shouted. There was no answer. The house was unusually quiet. Even with everyone but him and Hermione and their kids gone, it shouldn't have been that quiet. " Hermione?" Old fears from the long years of the Second War tried to resurface, but he quelled them sternly. There were no Death Eaters left, making it impossible that one had murdered his wife and kids.

" Mum's not here," he heard a light, silvery voice say. Turning around, he saw his eldest daughter Helena standing in the door to the living room. God, I feel old, he found himself thinking irrelevantly. Lena'll go to Hogwarts next year.

" Where is she, then?" he asked.

" I don't know. She just...left. You know how Mum does sometimes, Dad. She'll start yelling about how she's not going to take it anymore and storm out and go to Uncle Harry's for a few days, then she'll come back and be Mum again." Helena said it as matter-of-factly as if she had said Hermione had gone to the store to buy bread and milk. There was something wrong with that, a child considering her mother walking out to be a perfectly normal occurance. " I took care of the others. They're okay. Nicky started crying when Mum didn't come when he called her, but I calmed him down. "

" She's got to stop doing this," he muttered, more to himself than Helena. Hermione did this every few months, this disappearing act of hers. The first time it had happened had been when she was suffering from postpartum depression after their second child, Chloe, was born, but more and more often she just seemed to snap. "I know you took care of them, baby," he told Helena tiredly. "You always do."

" Mum told me to give you this when you got home. I don't know what it says." she handed him a folded note, magically sealed. More than a little apprehensive, he tapped it with his wand and read the short message that his wife deigned to bestow on him:

My attorney will be in touch. I'm not going to do this anymore. I'll see you in court. Don't try to find me.

-Hermione

Ron buried his head in his hands. " Oh, shit," he muttered. " Oh, shit!" The short, choppy sentances were what convinced him that this time Hermione wasn't bluffing or just out of her head for a while. After eleven years and four kids, Hermione was actually walking out. For all he knew, she was getting the papers drawn up and organizing her arguments for the house, the kids, and the broomstick, making herself charts on how to get what little her soon-to-be ex-husband still had the same way she had made charts on what subjects to study what nights and how long to work with them. He'd married the first girl he ever kissed, so he didn't suppose it should really come as too much of a surprise that the marriage fell apart, but he wished it could have either done it before kids came into the picture at all or at the very least when there was only Lena and she was too little to understand what was going on. He found himself wishing desperately that this could be settled the way the early fights had been when they first became a couple and were first married-go to Harry when he wasn't neck deep in saving the world for ten minutes, shout and cry with him as the referee for a bit, then they would all just go have a drink to restore the uncomplicated affection that until quite recently had always been beween the three of them. He wished he didn't know that it wasn't going to work that way anymore, not least because he couldn't even remember the last time he'd seen Harry. "She's finally gone," he mumbled, only half-aware that he was vocalizing the thought.

" Mum'll come back, Dad," Helena said stubbornly. " She will. She always does."

" I don't think Mum's coming back this time, baby," he said. " Do you know what a divorce is, Lena?"

" Yes. That's what Uncle Harry and Aunt Ginny called it when they got un-married."

" Exactly. A divorce is where two people get un-married. That's what Mum wants to do."

" Why?"

" Damned if I know, sweetheart."

" You said a bad word, Daddy," Helena said reprovingly. " Mum doesn't let us say that word."

" I know, Lena. I'm sorry. I'm just upset because of Mum." Helena couldn't be his confessor. It just didn't work that way. Helena was a child-it was his job to protect her from this whole mess as much as humanely possible. She was going to catch the brunt of it anyway, being the only one who was old enough to understand what was happening. He'd be making a damn fine case for himself in the custody battle if the judge got wind that he wasn't good enough a father to protect his little girl from as much of the backlash as was possible. Knowing Hermione, he would. When Hermione decided she wanted to cut her losses, her losses were cut indeed.

" Listen, Helena Jane," he said, putting his hands on her shoulders. " You don't worry about a thing, darling. Daddy's going to take care of it all. You don't worry your pretty little head about it, all right?"

" All right," Helena said trustingly. " I'll go tell the others you're home. I've still got a few books Mum gave me on my birthday I haven't read yet, so I'll be up in my room until dinner, Dad."

" That's all right. I'll attempt to cook."

Helena pretended to gag. " Ugh. Food poisoning? That's a bit of a low way to try to kill someone, Dad."

" Hey! I am a very good cook, thank you very much."

" Yeah, sure," Helena said skeptically, then darted off giggling before Ron could reply. It was for Helena and her siblings that he had fought in the War, though none of them had been born in the earliest years and Helena only two when it ended, so that they could be so trusting and so they could giggle and just be kids the way he hadn't been able to. He could still recall that first year of the War, directly after Voldemort's resurrection, when the Ministry had gone berserk and Harry, with no more aid than Ron and Hermione, had single-handedly turned a group of terrified school kids into an organized fighting unit bent on the destruction of the Dark Forces. That tiny ring of students had been the foremost generals in the later years of the War, when most of the old timers were either dead or incapacitated. Harry had resurrected the program in a slightly varied form when he became a teacher, the first successful Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher in decades. It had been unexpected but not that surprising to Ron that Harry retired from active duty as an Auror after the War and started teaching the one subject he could even beat Hermione in.

He started to think about the past. It hadn't been that long ago that he, Harry, and Hermione were inseparable. He could still remember sitting in the Common Room with Harry directly after their N.E.W.T.'s, bemoaning the mistakes they had made, mistakes that Hermione would never hear of when she returned from her exams. He could see himself and Harry dashing into a girl's bathroom to save Hermione from a troll in their first year as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. How had they been driven apart? Hermione was filing for divorce and he couldn't remember the last time him and Harry just had a beer and listened to a Quidditch game on the WWN. Looking up, he caught a glimse of himself in the talking mirror over the mantle. He couldn't find a trace of the ambitious and optimistic boy who had left Hogwarts with the girl he considered the prettiest girl in the place as his fiancee, a best friend who would stick by him though anything, and a little light at the end of the tunnel. The worst part of it was that he knew he had unconsiously ruined that himself.

"If you're expecting me to tell you you're pretty you're wasting your time," the mirror said. Ron would always believe that Fred and George had enchanted the mirror themselves, because Ron had never heard it make a comment that wasn't an insult. Thinking about Fred and George was even more painful than thinking of his own diminshment, so he cut that line of thought off quickly. Fred and George were the family secrets, not to be thought of or mentioned.

Sitting there at his kitchen table with the ghost of his own past tormenting him and his adult life in ruins around him, Ron Weasley resolved to turn things around. He wouldn't challenge the divorce, but he was going to regain his two best friends and his own self-respect if it was the last thing he did.