Black Sheep
3rd April 2004 (Ron is 18, Hermione is 24)
HERMIONE: I was up to my elbows in the glowing purple gunk that had exploded all over one of my colleagues in the magical rehabilitation centre when the fireplace burned green and Percy's head stared out at me with a grimace and a funny sounding lisp for some reason.
"Hermione I need you to come over to my place as soon as you're cleaned up please, Ronald's here and...well he's young."
My hands were well and truly stuck in the rapidly solidifying purple goop while my colleague Paula screamed about her beautiful hair being ruined and three house elves ran about the lab frantically apologising for thinking it possible that they could ever become productive individuals within magical society. Tippy was so mortified that he was slamming his head in my locker door as I answered.
"Percy you can see how busy I am and you know the routine, if he shows up as a baby we take him to your mother's or drop him off at Bill and Fleur's to play with Cam," I huffed and tried to blow a loose strand of hair out of my face.
"No Hermione, I don't mean baby young I mean," Percy seemed to flinch and sigh about something he was listening to in the background, "I mean teenage young."
I could see it now, Ron the hot headed newly empowered time traveller showing up at his disowned brother's place and giving him what for. Except Percy wasn't disowned anymore, not in this time, and Ron never really managed to control his temper until he was about twenty.
"Look I'll clean up and be on my way over but can't you call Fred or George to help out in the meantime?"
Percy's head turned around to look behind him and he looked back at Hermione with a shake of the head.
"I really don't think that the twins are up to defusing this situation and before you say it I've already flooed Ron at his office and his secretary said he was out on a recruitment assignment."
I rolled my eyes up to the ceiling and heaved a worried sigh for my present day husband.
"I hate it when they call it that, he always comes back in a state when he's on recruitment assignments," I said sarcastically as I knew that somebody was out there right now attempting to evade capture by firing curses at my husband, "Right ok then Percy I'm coming now, get your head out of the fire and tell him to calm down."
Percy snorted.
"Of course why didn't I think of that?"
As his head disappeared from the green flames and the fire returned to normal I asked one of the distraught house elves to scourgify my arms and finish helping Paula with her hair.
"You can't leave me with them!" she had whimpered desperately, "They're the ones who did this in the first place, are you mad?"
"Listen I explained to you when you applied for this job that you will suffer the odd little catastrophe and I also warned you that in the event of a family emergency you are expected to hold the fort while I take care of it now pull yourself together Paula and remember that you are helping us build a better future for magical folk everywhere."
While Paula began to rant about the pointlessness of a rousing speech when her head was being encased inside a huge purple crystal I tossed a handful of floo powder into the fire and called out my destination.
"Flat three, Appleford court!"
I spun around and stumbled out from the fireplace and into Percy's flat before I was really ready to arrive there. As I staggered into Percy, who caught me and kept hold of me until I was steady, he began to apologise.
"...should have warned you, I have a faster connection on the floo network now, are you alright?" he was lisping again.
I looked up and noticed that his lip was bleeding heavily and one of his front teeth was missing.
"Oh Percy he didn't?" I gasped as I pulled a tissue out from my pocket and tried to clean up his battered face.
"Never mind that, I can't bump into a travelling version of him these days without getting punched in the face, just go and calm him down will you?" Percy shrugged off my fussing and nodded to his closed bedroom door where something was being smashed.
We both flinched at the sound of breaking glass and I bit my bottom lip.
"You didn't have anything valuable in there did you?" I asked him.
"Not anymore no."
I took a deep breath and marched over to the door, flinging it open and stepping into Percy's bedroom to find an eighteen year old Ron, wearing a pair of Percy's trousers and a black shirt with white pinstripes that wasn't buttoned up, hurling an ornate picture frame across the room and shattering it on the writing desk by the window.
"Ron stop it now!" I ordered.
He looked at me with an expression of outraged shock on his face and grabbed another picture frame from the shelf beside him and stomped over to me with wild and slightly unfocused eyes, shaking it beneath my nose as he yelled at me.
"Family photographs! Can you believe that hypocritical prick Hermione? He's got family photographs in his bedroom when he's treated us like scum for the last couple of years."
I tried to take the frame from him before he turned and roared out of the door at Percy who was sitting with his head in his hands in the living room.
"Fucking scum!"
He threw the frame over my head and towards Percy where it smashed into the lamp just beside his head, breaking both items with an explosion of glass, and I shoved him backwards and closed the door behind me.
"Listen to me Ron and I mean listen don't rant," I hated it when I had to talk to him like this but there was something very volatile about him right now and I was beginning to see what it was and I hated it, "You're drunk aren't you?"
Ron threw his hands up into the air and he stomped over to the bed, sitting down on it heavily, where he began to talk animatedly at me or to himself. I never could tell when he was like this.
"It's always that isn't it?" he practically spat the words, "It's never anybody else's fault, nobody's ever in the wrong, it's never Percy's fault it's always Ron's fault! Ron's taking his clothes off in public and he doesn't remember why, Ron's blacking out left right and centre. Percy's shitting on the family name from a great height while kissing the minister of magic's arse and Ron's the bloody arsehole!"
I swallowed, Ron didn't know what was happening to him, this must have been where he travelled to when he took one of his very first trips and didn't remember afterwards. This must be the night he went out drinking with Charlie.
"Listen Ron," I began as I moved over to the bed to try and reassure him but he jumped back up to his feet with so much momentum that he almost fell over and I hopped backwards out of his way.
"No! I will not listen I..." he wobbled a little before falling to his knees, "...feel sick."
He was about to disappear again, turning up back home to blunder into the flat completely naked and with no memory of this night except for the dreadful hangover he suffered the following day, and I crouched down and lifted his chin with my hand and looked into his bloodshot eyes.
"You live at flat number fourMornington CresentRon, go straight home ok, it's cold out and you're going to be naked again."
As he blinked back at me without comprehension I felt his soft youthful skin dissolving away under my touch and within a second all that remained of his visit, apart from Percy's broken possessions and missing tooth, was the pile of warm clothing nestling crumpled before me. I picked up the shirt and brought it up to my face, inhaling his smell deeply, and wondered if my own Ron was doing ok wherever or whenever he was.
"Is he gone?" Percy's lisping voice asked as his head peered around the door, I nodded, "Well do you think maybe you could fix my mouth before you go back to work, I'd do it myself except I'm not sure I can pronounce the incantation properly like this."
I got to my feet and smiled at my, so often, bloodied brother-in-law.
"It must hurt," I said as I put the clothes Ron had been wearing on Percy's bed and followed him out to the kitchen where the light was better for me to see the damage properly.
"Just a bit," Percy snorted as he sat down and wiped his still bleeding lip.
"Not that," I sighed, "I mean Ron, when he comes here and still hates you, it must hurt."
Percy looks down at his lap and whispers, so softly that I can barely hear him.
"I deserve it."
I rub his arm and try to give him a reassuring smile.
"Nonsense, you were young and you had misguided loyalties, you were the same age as the Ron that just left and look at the kind of irrational prat he was!"
Percy laughed at this; it had been pointed out to me a lot more often ever since we were married but now I could hear it in myself as I spoke, I sounded just like Ron. I even swore more than I used to despite all my best efforts, he found that so amusing.
"I wasn't talking about my youthful naivety Hermione, I was talking about how I reacted the first time he ever came to me. I deserve it for that. I was old enough to know better by then wasn't I?"
I gave Percy a hug, not really bothered about getting his blood on my clothing seeing as I had to throw away my entire outfit now that the solid purple crystal that was splashed all over it was starting to eat through the fabric.
Oh Merlin I hope they've got it all off poor Paula's hair!
"Seriously Percy, what were you supposed to think when he turned up like that, and after all the times he had beaten you up and hurled abuse at you before, of course you would think it was a prank Fred and George were playing on you. I always tried to convince him to send you an owl and let you know about his condition but he was so stubborn back then."
"Back then?" Percy scoffed with his eyebrows raised above the rims of his glasses.
"Good point," I shrugged as I flicked my wand at Percy's lip and healed it non-verbally before sighing, "recruitment assignment, that's what they said when you asked for him wasn't it?"
Percy took my hand and nodded.
"He'll be fine."
I swallowed before looking him in the eye.
"What, like last time?"
8th January 2023 and 11th February 2000 (Ron is 42)
RON: I am running my third lap around the park when I see him. I catch my breath and pull my wand out from my pocket and aim it at his back.
"Obtineo!"
The spell holds him and I run to the spot he had been failing to conceal himself in the bushes, keeping my wand on him the whole time.
"You're getting very careless in your old age mate," I say as he stares at me with narrowed eyes.
"I'm not your mate Weasley," he snarled.
"No," I nod as I take in his slender frame and the scars and wrinkles that ravage his once familiar face, "not for a long time now."
"Have you see her yet?" he asks me, for a moment he almost seems human.
I shake my head and adjust the spell just enough to let him stand up and face me.
"It still hasn't happened, I'm beginning to think that maybe you're full of shit."
He smiles at me bitterly and looks back up at my flat, the place he had been watching not so stealthily, with an arrogance that I know so well now but never would have recognised back when we shared a dormitory at school.
"You'll be there don't you worry about that. I just thought I'd come and see if you could give me any answers or excuses or, I don't know, maybe a reason for it all. We both know it's got to happen soon don't we? How old are you now?"
I know exactly what he's getting at.
"Forty three in March isn't it?" he says smugly, "Found anybody who's seen you at forty four yet?"
I say nothing, just concentrate on holding my wand on him.
"Forty five, fifty, sixty? Still not found anybody who's seen you as an old man? Speaks volumes doesn't it?"
I know I've got him. He's desperate to get just one thing over on me and I decide to let him have it. I let him think he's won in the long run. After all this time and all this pain and especially after all the pointless blame I just can't be bothered to fight for the last word.
"Ron!" I hear Hermione screaming down at me from our living room window, she's obviously just looked out to see if I was on my way back yet and spotted the two of us, "Don't let him escape again, I'll call Eldridge and the Aurors, hold on!"
I never looked away from his face, or he from mine, and we smile at each other.
"It's over then," he says with a halfhearted shrug.
"Yeah," I nod.
"I gave you the run-around didn't I?" he smirked.
"Yes you were very impressive," I say honestly, I really never would have thought he had it in him to elude capture for twenty two years, "it's just a shame you put all that talent to waste trying to kill me for something I still haven't done."
He looked away from me and ran his hand, roughened by the years of hard living and rough fighting, through his short dark hair. It was peppered with more grey than mine, maybe you can't tell grey against red as much, and he'd obviously taken the years harder than I had.
"The clock is always ticking though isn't it Weasley? Time's almost up and it's only a matter of time before you go to her, watch her die, and do absolutely nothing to stop it when you know you can. I don't care what you say, I know you can stop it if you really tried."
I heave a deep sigh and try to resist getting into this same old argument again. It gets neither of us anywhere and it just makes him hate me more for making excuses.
"What if it worked?" I ventured after a moment of tense silence, "What if I could stop it and she didn't die that day. Who's to say she wouldn't have died the day after instead?"
"Anything to wriggle out of your part in it eh Weasley?" he scowled while I heard the cracks of apparition sounding across the road, just outside my flat, followed by the sound of Hermione's voice directing the Aurors to where we stood behind the bushes.
"I have a family y'know?" I say quietly to him as the footsteps approach.
"What's that got to do with anything?" he snaps with genuine malice at the thought of me rubbing in the fact that I have the kind of life he never could let himself live.
"You're so sure I'll be dead before forty four, don't you think if I could do anything to stop that and stay with them I would?"
He blinked at me, his eyes briefly darting over my shoulder to see the team coming to arrest him, and folded his arms across his narrow chest.
"Maybe you just haven't had the opportunity to do it yet, just like you haven't had the opportunity to save her yet either."
Cavendish hit him with a powerful restraining hex and Davis gave me a pat on the shoulder to let me know I could lower my own wand now.
"Nice one Agent Weasley, it took ya long enough!"
"Give the guy a break and read this backstabbing shit his rights Bev," I put my wand away and took a step back while the two Aurors tried not to enjoy being rough with him during their formal arrest procedure.
"Do you remember I told you that as soon as I saw something in the future there was nothing I could do to stop it or change it because it had already happened and become my past?" I said to him as Davis stopped in the middle of her celebratory banter with Cavendish and stared at me in confusion.
He nodded at me.
"But you haven't seen her yet so it hasn't happened for you has it? Not like it's happened for me."
"I'm not talking about her, I'm talking about that other life you reckon I should be able to save," both Aurors were deathly silent now as they listened as intently as their prisoner was doing, "I've already seen that, there's no changing it, I've tried everything."
Cavendish shook himself out of his state of distraction and hauled the bane of my career and the greatest pain of my life away to be tried and sent to Azkaban while he stared back at me with the hate finally leaving his face for the first time in decades.
"Your poor girls Weasley."
He stared at me as he was dragged across to the prisoner transportation portkey, never breaking his gaze or saying another word, and I watched the three of them go. The remaining Auror squad were doing clean up, modifying some muggle memories and Eldridge was reassuring a fretful Hermione as she stood at our front door step and struggled to shake him off and run to check that I was alright. I saw my old friend in the distance going about his duties on the perimeter, Eldridge had obviously ordered him to keep his distance from the arrest as he was too close to the whole thing, and he nodded and smiled at me. We'd finally done it, we'd got him, it was all over.
I put my wand away and heaved a sigh as I walked around the hedge and tried to beam Hermione a reassuring smile as I waved to her from across the street and quickly looked both ways for oncoming cars before crossing to report to Eldridge. I think it was the sudden turn of the head that did it, the blur of the neon shop front that caught my eye or the sun reflecting off of the multiple windows of a passing bus, anyway something bright flickered rapidly and I felt it hitting me. Even though I'd just been running, which usually helps hold off the episodes, I hadn't warmed down and then I'd gone directly into a stressful situation before the flashing lights tipped me over the edge.
They were running to get to me from all sides, I could hear them but I couldn't see them anymore, my vision had become hazy and I was on my knees before I knew it. I closed my eyes to try and stop the head rush and something spun me around because the next thing I knew I was shivering on a frozen street in the dark with not a stitch on me.
I tried to get to my feet but the ice was slick and I slipped and cracked my head on something metal. That was when everything went black.
A chill rippled along my back and I felt the first of a thousand fat flakes of snow stroking their icy caress upon my pale, goose pimpled skin. I was numb and cold and couldn't feel my feet anymore. I tried to sit up but my head pounded and I lifted my unnaturally white hands up to my face and felt something warm and sticky oozing out of a deep gash on my forehead.
"Where the hell am I?" I shuddered, a cloud of steam shooting from my chapped lips.
I reached up above me and got as good a grip on a windowsill as I could manage before pulling myself up and struggling to manoeuvre my feet beneath me so I could stand. I looked down at my feet, I couldn't feel them at all, they were still there though, very pale and very heavy but there all the same. I tried to walk but I found it almost impossible to lift them, they were like solid blocks of stone hanging beneath my ankles, and moved along the street by half dragging and half sliding them along the icy road surface beneath them.
I was heading for a lamppost so I could get some light and try to see when I had ended up. I could only go to places I had already been in my life at some point so there had to be something I recognised here, there had to be.
The snow kept falling and I gradually dragged my feet to the junction and saw the little square outside Percy's place, I had travelled to Appleford village. I wondered what year it was and hoped that one of my younger versions hadn't just beaten the crap out of my brother, rendering him physically unable to help me.
I reached the door to his block of flats and pressed the buzzer for flat number three.
Please be home, please be home, please be home...
"'Ershy Weesey, what time d'you call this?" Percy's sleepy voice mumbled from the speaker beside my head.
"Percy help me," was all I could get out before shivering violently as another gust of cutting wind seemed to slice right through me.
I heard my brother clearing his throat in order to wake himself up a little more.
"What? Who is this?"
"R-Ron, Percy you've got to let me in."
"Ron? Are you drunk again? On your way home from the pub and looking for somebody to punch is that it?" his clipped tones told me everything I needed to know.
I was in the late nineties and Percy didn't know about the travelling.
"P-Perce, you've got to floo Hermione for me please," I stammered before losing my footing and sliding with a thump down onto his doorstep.
"I will not waste good floo powder asking your girlfriend to come and pick up my intoxicated brother thank you very much. You managed to apparate here, why don't you try Fred and George's place?"
I banged my numb fist against the locked front door and tried to shout up to the speaker from my spot on the ground.
"I need to get to St Mungo's! Please Percy help me."
"St Mungo's is it? Another one of yours and the twins' oh-so-funny pranks at my expense? Why don't the three of you grow up and leave me alone?"
I couldn't speak anymore, I was too cold and too tired, and I just willed myself to travel back home to my wife and my friends. Willed myself to go home again. Willed myself off of this frozen doorstep. I felt myself drifting away into sleep and curled up as best I could for warmth.
"Oh Godric," somebody shouted as I was kicked awake by somebody falling over me as they tried to leave the fats in the morning light, "Mr Richardson quickly floo St Mungo's and get somebody here now!"
It was Percy's voice, he sounded scared.
"Mr Weasley?" said a befuddled sounding old man from somewhere in the distance.
"It's my brother, get on the floo network and bring me a medi wizard please!"
I felt a warm cloak being draped over my naked body and hands rubbing up and down my arms roughly.
"I'm sorry Ron, I'm so sorry I thought you were messing around again, please say something to me...please."
I could do nothing else but shiver and my eyes felt as if they were frozen shut.
Percy sounded as if he was crying now.
"Floo my mother! The Burrow, you've got to get my mum here."
There were footsteps running towards him now and Percy was trying to compose himself and explain all that he knew while I felt myself sinking away from it all. I melted away from the cloak, the ice, the doorway: everything. Then I heard screaming.
"He's here, get the medi wizards, and get me a blanket he's freezing! Oh Ron please don't leave me, you promised me you would never leave me, come on sweetheart say something to me."
I used everything I had to force my eyes open and look at her, my panic-stricken wife, and tell her what she needed to know before passing out again.
"Not g-going anywhere just y-yet...not time y-yet."
A/N Thanking you all for the positive reviews and hoping to give you a little pattern to follow to help you kee track of all these time jumps in the narrative.
I will be telling the main part of the story during 1998 and 1999, these years will be covered over the next ten chapters of so consecutively so you get some kind of traditional narrative to follow. Every other chapter will be one set in the future of way back in the past.
This is a future jump so the next chapter will be set in the present where Ron and Hermione are still getting used to Ron's condition. I hope that makes it a little easier to keep track of the dates for you.
Shari