The Curse of the Seventh Weasley
8th August 2014 (Ron is 34 and 29, Hermione is 34)
HERMIONE: I had been walking around the maternity section of Madame Malkin's shop with Ginny when we heard the bell ringing as a customer burst into the shop and stumbled over to a shocked Madame Malkin in a breathless panic.
"Do you have a fireplace I can use? There's been some kind of accident outside."
Ginny and I glanced at each other with a frown and leaned to peer out of the window. A large crowd had gathered and all we could see were people's backs.
"Come on Ginny, let's not rubber-neck, I hate it when people do that, it's so thoughtless," I said as I rubbed the slight bump that was now forming in my belly.
"Yeah you're right," Ginny nodded as she scrunched up her nose with distaste toward all the nosy vultures who wanted to gawp at the misfortune of another, "so do we go for a larger size so you and junior can grow into it then?"
I was about to give Ginny a playful shove when the bell above the door rang again and somebody else ran inside in a state of panic. I resolutely refused to turn my head and be nosey.
"I need to..." the panic-stricken voice began.
"This gentleman is about to floo St Mungo's for a medi wizard right now sir, don't worry," Madame Malkin said.
"Healer Wanless!" the voice yelled across the shop, striking me with an icy chill that almost froze the life out of me.
As I spun around I saw Ginny's terrified expression as she looked across the shop to call out to her frantic brother.
"Fred?"
I was already throwing the armful of fabric I had to the floor and rushing for the door when Fred met my eyes and grabbed me about the arms.
"Ask for Healer Wanless!" he shouted over my shoulder before looking me in the eyes and speaking with a shaky but low tone, "Hermione it's our Ron, he just came back to me and George in the street and he's not..."
I could feel Fred shaking as he gripped me.
"...He's not breathing or moving or nothing."
Ginny ran for the door and flung it open, screeching at the crowd to get out of her way. I tried to follow but Fred was still holding on to me and shaking his head, his eyes wide and his voice sounding so unlike his usual cocky self that it was almost as unsettling as what he was saying to her.
"We're trying everything and it's not working," Fred's voice suddenly went high, he seemed to be descending into a panic attack, "C.P.R.'s not working, nothing's working!"
I shook him off just as the fireplace erupted into green flames and Fred followed me out the door and through the crowd where I saw George on his knees flicking charm after charm at Ron's chest, tears rolling down his face as he did. Ginny was rummaging through a medicinal bag that Verity had brought from the twin's shop and started pouring different potions and remedies down Ron's throat. I sank down to my knees and held my small rounded stomach as I watched them both trying and failing at everything.
"Out of my way, let me through," A familiar voice was bellowing at the crowd, "I'm his healer now move!"
Ben burst through the spectators and almost fell over me where I was crouched at Ron's bare feet.
"Sorry Mrs Weasley, what's happened? Do we have any idea?" he asked as Ginny moved aside to let Ron's healer listen to his chest while a hand that must have been Fred's gripped my shoulder tightly.
"We were talking to him outside the shop," George said shakily, "and he had a seizure and as soon as we picked up his stuff he was back like this. He...he wasn't breathing and he didn't have a pulse and-"
"What?" I gasped as I looked up at Ben just as he lifted his head from Ron's chest and shook his head.
"Spiritus-" Ginny said as she swished her wand down at Ron before George grabbed her arm and pointed the wand to the ground.
"We've tried that, we've tried everything Ginny."
I've seen him older. He can't be dead I've seen him older. Ben will fix him. Ben fixes him.
"Fix him!" I snapped at Ron's healer as he quickly scanned Ron's entire body for some sign of what could have caused this full body shutdown.
"I don't know what's wrong with him," Ben mumbled before pulling out his wand and swirling it around in tight circles in front of Ron's still pale face, "Invenio sano! Invenio sano! Invenio sano! Come on find it and heal it for me, he mumbled to himself as the spell flowed into Ron's body and something glowed beneath his skin before fading into nothing.
George grabbed Ron's wrist and checked his pulse again before looking up at the bemused healer and shaking his head.
"What the hell happened to you?" Ben growled down at Ron before throwing more healing spells at him, "Corrigo! Permeo pulpa corroboro! Spiritus indentiem! Vivificus! Shit!
Ginny had started to cry. I heard shouts from behind me somewhere. Somebody else was trying to get through.
"Move your fat arse out of my way old man!"
I felt my whole body shudder and I didn't dare turn my head to see. I didn't dare hope. Not until I saw the expression on George's face change from one of desperate fear to a look of relieved hope. Ginny gagged on her own sob that had stopped so abruptly that it had jarred in her windpipe and Healer Wanless shuffled to one side to let the new arrival drop beside him by the cold pale body on the ground.
"Get out the way Ben," the new Ron said as he balled his hand into a fist and positioned it over his other self's still chest.
Ben blinked and tried to ask what was going on when the new Ron lost patience and shoved him backwards onto his backside and drew a sharp deep breath and raised his arm. Gritting his teeth he swung his fist back towards the spot on the breathless Ron's chest and slammed it down with so much force that there was a hollow boom along with the sound of cracking bones as the punch landed.
All of us flinched at the force of the blow and then fell back in shock as the dying Ron sat bolt upright and gasped for air while choking and wheezing at the same time.
"Right," the new Ron said as he pulled Ben back forward and pointed at the injured Ron as he slammed back down onto the floor and continued gasping, his eyes wide to the point of bursting out of his skull altogether, "now you can fix him with wands. Do his ribs first, I've busted a couple."
Ben didn't say a word; he just set about flicking his wand down at the recovering Ron on the ground. Fred was laughing now and George hugged Ginny but the healthy Ron crawled along the ground to me and threaded his arms underneath me before lifting me up and smiling at me sadly.
"Cover your ears babe," I frowned but did as I was told, Ron looked back out at the crowd and hollered at the top of his lungs, "Get out of my fucking way!"
In a dumfounded silence the crowd parted like curtains being drawn apart to let the daylight into a darkened room and Ron carried me through them and back into the shop.
"Ron what's going on?" I said, glancing over my shoulder to try and see how the treatment of my present-day husband was going, "I don't want to leave you."
"I have to get you to St Mungo's Hermione," he said with a tremor in his voice as he nodded to Madame Malkin to throw some floo powder into the fireplace for him, "you're bleeding."
"No I'm not," I began as I looked at him as if he was crazy.
"Check," he said just before calling out the name of our destination.
When he staggered out of the fireplace at St Mungo's with me still firmly in his arms I ran my hand over my body and wondered why he was so convinced that I was hurt. I hadn't been anywhere; it was my Ron lying naked in Diagon Alley who had been almost fatally injured.
"Sir what is it?" a medi witch said as she rushed up to the pair of us.
"It's my wife," Ron said as he ran with me over to a side room for treatment, the medi witch summoning assistance from a passing healer as we went, "she's losing her baby."
As he had spoken those last four words his voice had broken into a throaty choke and I lowered my hand and felt between my thighs. There was something warm and sticky and I felt my eyes burning with the fearful tears that were springing forth from them.
"Set her down on the bed for me dear, don't worry we'll help her and the baby."
I stared at Ron as he lowered me down onto a bed and slid his arms out from under me. Wiping his own, now tearful, face with the back of his hand.
"I'm sorry Hermione," he whimpered as he stumbled backwards into the wall.
"Ron?" I cried out as the healer blocked him from my view, "Ron!"
The healer moved aside and I saw that he was sliding down the wall and his head was dropping into his hands.
"Do they save it?" I called across to him.
"I'm only twenty nine Hermione, this isn't me yet. This isn't my life yet," he said, unable to look at me.
"But you know!" I screamed at him, my voice raw, "You knew to go and save yourself and you knew I was bleeding before I had started to. You know Ron, tell me."
He still had his head in his hands.
"I told myself to get to Diagon Alley and re-start my heart before getting you straight here before it kills you."
"What kills me?" I called across at him from the bed.
The medi witch and the healer were trying desperately to soothe me and block the visibly devastated Ron from my sight but I shoved them apart with my bloodied hand and yelled at him again.
"Before what kills me Ron?"
He looked up, his face red and his eyes redder.
"The miscarriage," I felt myself hollow out both emotionally and physically as Ron swallowed and shook his head in apology, "we don't get a baby this year Hermione. We don't get to have this baby."
As he faded into a heap on clothing pilled messily against the wall I wailed and screamed and cursed until there was no more sound left in me. There was nothing else left in me at all, nothing but myself.
RON: Charlie's been with me for three hours now. I told him I didn't want to see anybody but Hermione and she's told the mediwitch that she doesn't want to see anybody including me.
Charlie's been keeping people out of my room and not saying a single word to me. I think he's fast becoming my favourite brother for this act alone.
"Ron it's Ben let me in please," my healer's voice sounded through the closed door. I nodded to Charlie to let him come inside.
As the door opened I turned away from the half-dozen anxious faces I knew were peering in after him for a glimpse of the dead man who came back to life and the guy who knew that the baby his wife had been carrying so blissfully these past few months was destined never to be.
"Ron I need to know what happened to you to have sent you back to your brothers in that state."
I heard the door click shut and turned to face him.
"My usual," I said with a voice that sounded so far from my own I wondered if it was really me speaking at all, "I was trying to blindside the mole. I turned up on a day when I knew he'd just eluded me and tried to catch him while he left another me for dead."
Ben nodded and Charlie visibly shuddered.
"So what did he hit you with?"
"A non-verbal curse that stops the heart, that's all I know. Being non-verbal I wouldn't know a counter-curse and it's pretty resilient to magical remedies anyway so the only way I could have fixed it was to do it the old fashioned muggle way."
"And you knew all this at twenty nine because...?"
I took a deep breath in and let it out before answering.
"An older version of me told me when I was twenty eight. I've known since I was twenty eight that Hermione was going to lose six babies before we eventually get lucky."
Charlie looked devastated for me but Ben's eyes flew open wide as if a troublesome problem had finally been solved for him.
"Now she knows and she won't see me," I said as I drew my knees up to my sore chest and hugged them to myself, "She knows that I let her look forward to having a baby I always knew would never...be."
"You couldn't have told her Ron," Charlie said as he dragged a chair to my bedside and tried his best to make me feel better, "She'll understand that when the pain goes away a little more, she'll see that you couldn't have told her the day she found out she was pregnant that it...You couldn't have let her know and then expected her to carry the baby and just wait for this day to come."
"Your brother's right Ron, you did the right thing," Ben nodded as he patted me gently on the back.
"Then why do I feel like such a shit?" I scowled at the self-pitying sound of my own voice and buried my face into my knees to avoid looking at either of them.
"Because you do that Ron," Charlie said as the leather of the chair squeaked where he sat forward to try and find a way to make me meet his eyes, "you always find a way to hold yourself accountable for everything you can't do anything about. Just because you see something doesn't mean you can change it, isn't that what you always say?"
I look up but not at either of them. Instead I cast my gaze out through the darkened window.
"Maybe if I'd have let myself die today then history would've changed."
I felt Charlie struggling not to punch me in the arm for being such a prat.
"And how will that seventh baby ever come to be then you idiot?"
"Yes the seventh," Ben sighed, causing Charlie and myself to turn and stare at him.
"What?"
Ben cast a nervous glance Charlie's way before leaning in to talk to me in a conspiratorial manner.
"That little puzzle we're always trying to work out between the both of us," he began and I nodded, I knew exactly what he was getting at, "well it's been known for a time epileptic to be able to travel outside their own lifetime and into the lifetime of a parent or a child of theirs if they too suffer from the condition and the two conditions overlap."
I shook my head and tried to process this.
"So what are you saying?"
Ben tried to shut Charlie out of this conversation a little more by edging around to stand between us with his back to Charlie and his face a mere inch away from mine.
"I'm saying that it only effects the seventh child and you and your wife will conceive and go full term with your seventh baby," Ben almost looked afraid of the conclusion he was coming to, "your child will be a time epileptic who can travel back before their birth into your lifetime and you..."
"I can travel past my own death and into their lifetime," I completed the sentence that he wouldn't, "Which would explain why I can see Hermione as an old woman but I never see myself as an old man. I really do die don't I?"
Ben pointed his finger into my face and set his own into a determined expression of denial.
"We don't know that."
The two of us stared into each other for an uncomfortably long time before the low clear rumble of Charlie's voice caused us both to lower our heads and sigh.
"You two do know I can hear everything you're saying don't you?"