Time Will Tell

Dedicated to JDPhoenix. Merry Christmas, JD!

To make the long story short: he died before she did. It wasn't according to their plan, but ever since his spat with Godric—yes, it was a spat, and a silly one to boot—nothing seemed to go her way.

By the time she got to the Great Ether—where he was supposed to be waiting for her, as per their agreement—he had already moved on to the next life. According to Helga and Godric, he was looking for her. According to the God of the Ether (who was the only God, really, but somehow time had mixed up that fact), he had mucked up his attempt to return to her approximate time and ended up several centuries in the future.

She sighed in exasperation (he was always so impatient; she really should have expected this) and turned to beg poor Godric and Helga to return with her. It would be easier to recognize the signs, if they were all there. Before she could ask, they had each taken one of her hands and together they reentered the mortal plane.

Her last thought before thought was lost was that Salazar had better beg for her forgiveness.

What Salazar failed to realize in his impatience was this: reentering life after death tended to strip one of their memories. It was the reason most decided to stay in the Great Ether, no matter how bored they were. Why muck about on Earth, one's past forgotten in favor of a new lifetime's worth of memories, when they could stay with the ones they loved and be happy?

That was the philosophy of most, anyway. And Salazar had never been like most.

It took her around thirty years to figure it out, a fact that she was thoroughly ashamed of later. She blamed a score of things, not the first of which being that damned Sorting Hat—of course the foul thing would want to place her in Gryffindor. It knew her, knew who she was, and it had hated her from the moment it had been created. Everyone else ended up where they were supposed to be, so she knew it was a personal vendetta.

Of course, she didn't have time to waste on petty rivalries, especially those with hats. Helga was late and she was quite sure that Godric would never fully understand who he was, at least not this time around. Salazar… well, he was making a beast of himself, as usual. It pained her poor heart to even think of what had happened, what had caused such a turnaround in his character, but she knew somehow that it was her fault. If only she had put the pieces together sooner, maybe something could have been done. There had been that pull, irresistible, toward him. She should have realized what her heart was telling her.

But she hadn't. And now he was gone.

So all she could do was wait. She took up a position at Hogwarts. It was the only place for her in the end and she knew that he wouldn't be able to stay away for long. He would be back. And then they could finally be together.

And, if she had a bit of fun torturing the Hat when she was put in charge of it… well, that was fine, too.

Of course, neither realized just how badly an unprotected, barely authorized crossing between planes could affect a person's mind.

The power of such a mishap had practically scrambled his poor brains into a paste. Oh, he was still clever. Of course he had cunning. But something vital, something he had known that she had taught him and that should have stayed with him had been lost. So it has hardly surprising that the moment he realized what it all meant (who he was and who she was and why they were there at all) was also the moment he died.

And that was even more shaming than her thirty years.

Something new that had come to her in this lifetime was stubbornness. A true Ravenclaw, after all, knows when one must give up her flawed hypothesis for one better. And while no one had offered her a better option—indeed, no one knew that she had need of a better option at all—she had made a decision and she would stick to it.

If he thought that she would come running to him the moment he fell off the mortal plane, he had another thing coming. She would be damned if she was going to waste the rest of this life because he had made a stupid mistake—and she had a good one this time around. No children of her own, maybe, but she had students she thought of as sons and daughters. Though she still condemned Godric and the Hat alike, she was fond of her new house and the people in it.

She would find him again when she was good and ready. And he would just have to wait.

The problem was, Salazar really was horrible at waiting. Just purely awful at it. It wasn't a trait he was particularly proud of and he didn't like to advertise it, but he could not escape the fact that he was an abominably impatient man. And in a land where time was virtually irrelevant and people could go in and out whenever they jolly well pleased, he was at the end of his rope. It was truly lucky that Godric had come back when he had. He shuddered to think what sort of person he'd turn out to be on a second unprotected excursion.

Godric managed to convince him to stay back at least until one of the women arrived. If it was Rowena, their problems were solved. And if it was Helga… well, they'd go in together, protected by one another's magic, and try to find her.

Helga refused to come back with her.

There were several reasons for it, or so she claimed, but the most predominant was thus: she'd simply had enough of their wild goose chase. She would wait right here for the two of them to settle down and stop wasting all of their time. The Great Ether, she said, was a place to relax and forget about the woes one had experienced in life. And that was something Rowena and Salazar both needed to learn.

A loyal friend indeed, Rowena had thought. But she'd swallowed her resentment and bid her friend farewell.

That was when everything changed.

Fate, it seemed, was on their side for once—though it certainly didn't look it at the time. There had been the war and the blood feuds and the fact that she was a damn Gryffindor twice in a row. (If he didn't know better, he'd say the Hat was almost gleeful about its little prank.) But, in the grand scheme of things, it was a highly simple solution to a centuries-long problem.

Of course, not even divine intervention could have made iteasy. The war had shaken them both, changed them; in some ways for the better and in some ways not. He was more patient now, but she was more skittish. His family's reputation was tarnished, possibly forever. She could go nowhere in peace. The years of fearing for their lives had worn on them, turned them into old souls (as if they weren't already), but they had also driven them together.

Still, it took ten years for them to even admit to one another that there was something there—something that had been there for a while, almost as long as they could remember. It took them five years after that to get married, and another three to have children. Once they got over the shock, it amused their friends to no end that it had taken them so long.

No one ever really understood why they were the ones who laughed hardest at the joke.

end

a/n: I'd like to apologize for the shittiness of this story. It just kind of got away from me. I meant to do so many things with it and it just fought me at every turn. I think I got it right in the end, but it was still a struggle. I hope you like it anyway.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Edit 11/2/15: Upon looking at this story again I realized that there are a few things that were left unexplained and for anyone who happens upon this story in the future, I wanted to clear them up. Rowena is reincarnated as Minerva McGonagall, and then Hermione Granger. The fluidity of time outside life allows these reincarnations to exist at once. Salazar is reincarnated as Tom Riddle and then Draco Malfoy. He went back to the mortal plane unprotected and combined with that and his new mortal life, his brains were more than a little scrambled as Tom. Shortly before I wrote this story JD had pointed out to me that Minerva and Tom would have been in school together, so that was part of my inspiration. Godric is reincarnated as Rubeus Hagrid and then Neville Longbottom, and Helga is reincarnated as Pomona Sprout and then refuses to return for a third time. I hope that clears everything up!