Chapter Text
When did it start? Several possibilities come to Charlie’s mind.
Usually, he’s pretty good at keeping his memories tidy—placed high and safe on the shelves of psyche.
Charlie learned Occlumency first from the dragons whose minds were so bright and strong that you could get swept away by their barest thoughts. He’d learned it again with Moody over the summer, after Voldemort rose from a cauldron in a graveyard. So Charlie knows how to keep a grip on himself, even under Mad-Eye levels of duress. He knows to hide his precious things in plain sight, so no one would ever suspect that they were precious to begin with.
So yes, Charlie is good at Occlumency, but evidently not as good as Bill, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise since he’s never been as good as Bill at anything. And certainly not at whatever this is—whatever it is to sit across from your brother’s new and serious girlfriend at Christmas dinner, two to three sheets to the wind, remembering to smile and laugh and joke and play along like you’re happy for him—like you’re the happiest because you’re the closest, because you love him best and everyone knows it. So it’s only natural that you’re happy! Your brilliant, responsible, noble brother has finally gone and let someone take care of him. And what a someone at that.
Holding court across the table, Bill’s hair glows red as a cardinal’s wing in the firelight, his skin bronzed and brassy like coins. His eyes turn downward and adoring and bright for each family member as they jockey for his attention, receiving it one by one.
Yeah, Bill’s fucking fantastic at whatever this is—or maybe he’s just in love.
Charlie licks his lips, lowering his eyes to the fork and knife clasped loosely in his hands, resting on either side of his full plate of Christmas dinner.
So, when did it start?
The memories are not where he expects them. Instead of those familiar shapes, he finds a sticky swirl with the viscosity of mixed paint dripping down the shelves in his mind. Ignoring the jolt in his stomach, Charlie forces himself to follow the swirl’s colors, starting with the brightest. The reds.
Red ink, cardinal red. Charlie would scrape sickles and knuts from in between the floorboards, braving the ghoul in the attic, because red was expensive and their father’s heart was too big for money so his sons wrote letters in runny black—all but for Charlie, such a proud Gryffindor, such a good boy, sending his threadbare owls creaking off into the sky with words as red as his brother’s hair. Maybe it started then, back when Charlie first dipped his thumb into an inkwell and pulled it back out slick and cardinal red.
Or did it begin in Charlie’s second year (Bill’s fourth) at the third quidditch match Charlie flew seeker? Charlie was a good flyer and always had been, but the brooms at home were old. Charlie had never seriously flown on something that would listen to him—he didn’t even know the word for it was, though Bill taught him later: responsive, Charlie, responsive.
The Gryffindor’s cleansweep was mediocre at best, but Charlie loved it. His fingers shook and cheeks stung with how easy it was to turn and dip and dive. He loved that shitty cleansweep so much he got drunk off it, forgetting about the jealous Slytherin seeker Johannes Carrow right up until the moment he baited a bludger straight toward Charlie’s elated heart. Charlie was so high up when the black ball slammed him clean off the broom that he didn’t hear the screams of the crowd until he’d been falling for a good few seconds. With an adult stab of insight, Charlie felt sure that no one was going to catch him, and he was going to hit the ground so hard that they wouldn’t be able to scrape him from the roots of the yellowing grass. But someone hit the ground a second before Charlie, cushioning his fall in a fury of unintentional magic.
Bill caught Charlie with his whole body. His mouth and nose were slippery with blood as he rolled them over, sinking his knees into the muddy pitch on either side of his brother’s hips. Bill’s hands hovered beside Charlie’s cheeks, too scared to touch. His blood dripped down onto Charlie’s face.
“Fine,” Charlie gasped, the wind knocked out of him. “Bill, I’m fine.”
Bill’s eyes skipped back and forth between Charlie’s face and body until he accepted that Charlie was safe. Immediately, Bill buried his face in his trembling hands and let a single, broken sound escape him; it was the closest Charlie had ever seen his brother come to tears.
Johannes, it was obvious, hadn’t meant things to get so serious, hadn’t actually wanted to kill Charlie, or even injure him, but this did nothing to absolve him—the other seeker watched with wide, horrified eyes as Bill approached. Carrow spun on his dragonhide-heel for shelter, but the Slytherin team could see the expression on Bill’s face and unanimously took a cool step backward, deeming what was to follow as a losing proposition.
Red sprayed from Johannes’ dumbfounded mouth as kind, perfect, honorable Bill Weasley broke his nose and cracked his jaw with a closed fist, screaming in a voice deranged by fear: “He’s my brother! He’s my fucking brother! My brother! MINE!”
It’d taken both teams and Professor McGonagall to pull him away.
Maybe it was the cherry-red of a cigarette, flaring hot like a firefly in the blue night air after fifth-year’s Yule Ball. Bill was already set on becoming a curse breaker then, making money and righting the whole leaking Weasley ship because their parents had love to spare, but nothing else, and Bill had already learned that love doesn’t put food on the table, or buy little brothers the things they deserve. He didn’t share any this with Charlie, but Charlie saw it flare on his face each time he sucked in smoke. Bill had let Charlie have a cigarette too, and laughed when Charlie started coughing.
Was it the first shiny burn that Charlie ever came home with? Bill refused to talk to him for three of the seven days of Charlie’s Christmas leave over that burn, but it hadn’t been red so much as primrose—terribly bright, nonetheless.
How about the red of the Chinese Fireball scale earrings? Charlie caught him alone in the Burrow’s third floor stairway, as if it was an afterthought: “Oh. Bill. Well, now that I have you I got you something. Oh, it’s nothing, look—I forgot—“
Charlie wonders about the ruby guts of the Death Eater they’d tracked to Hungary two months ago. He went for Bill with a Crucio and Charlie sunk a cutting curse into the man’s belly so fast that none of the three of them knew what had happened until they heard the loud, slopping thwack of intestines hitting the floor.
Alright, it definitely started before that, but Charlie thinks of it anyway, because Bill’s met a girl—a beautiful fucking girl—who looks at him like he hung the moon and who is brave and clever and probably deep-down a little mean, born with that vicious streak that gets his brother’s blood up—the one Charlie could never even pretend at.
“You’re staring, Cal.” Fred bumps his shoulder, too gentle by half.
Charlie shakes himself out of the daze, giving his brother a weak grin. “Ah, yeah, sorry, just—“
“Veela,” George supplies, leaning across his twin to pour Charlie more wine. “Just like Bill, frankly. Fucking monk all his life and then shows up with a minor deity on his arm.”
Charlie forces a laugh, looking down again at the candlelight shining in the dull silver of his cutlery which he still hasn’t put down.
“Didn’t even think he liked girls, if I’m honest,” George continues. “What with how many have thrown themselves at him over the years. He couldn’t even be fucked to let them down easy. Every Valentine’s was a bloodbath. Christ, do you remember Spinnet…“
Fred chuckles along. George launches into the torrid odyssey of Bill’s nonadventures, waving his hands and making Harry smile shyly from across the table. Fred’s gaze lingers on Charlie, but eventually moves away, though a little line remains pressed into the center of his freckled brow.
The lights seem brighter. The scraping of knives and forks too loud. It’s a weird, bad Christmas by any measure. Dad is still in the hospital, Percy’s fucked off with Scrimgeour, and they’re in Grimmauld’s gloomy kitchen instead of the Burrow’s warm one. The House of Black clearly detests their presence: somehow the air is both terribly cold and cloyingly damp. Charlie spent his afternoon wrestling fires into all the hearths just to make it feel like snow wasn’t melting over your shoulders the moment you stepped into a room.
Given the circumstances, Fleur and Bill prove a welcome distraction for the dinner table, and make no bones over the attention. Bill’s arm rests easy over the back of Fleur’s chair while he cups his other hand around his mouth to shout across the table at Remus and Hermione.
“It’s the thirteenth spell thread that you need to take your time with!” Bill tells them, smiling broadly. “Trust me, saw a Patagonian Lock just last week!” His fingers brush the sleek curtain of Fleur’s hair. “Didn’t we, love?”
Fleur rolls her heron-blue eyes.
“I saw eet last week, and I was ze one to untie ze thirteenth strand, no?”
Bill’s eyes shine as he looks sideways at her.
“It’s the ninth!” Granger insists, particularly bossy. “The ninth has fourth-order harmonic implications—“
“Oh one must simply sing to ze ninth,” Fleur interrupts sweetly. “Sing eet a lullaby and eet unwraps pretty as a ribbon.”
Ron puts his elbow into his soup and takes several dreamy moments to notice he’s done it. Granger’s fist tightens pointedly around her fork as she forges onward, ignoring Fleur’s statement altogether.
Charlie catches a brief flash of satisfaction in Fleur’s clear eyes, lined with lashes so dark and shiny they could’ve been feathers.
His cheeks burn at this morning’s memory of his own reflection shivering in a cracked mirror as he spelled his eyelashes just this side of burgundy and a fraction longer. His hut had smelled of mud and scales and, though it’d been barely dawn, he’d already had soot on his mouth.
“Excuse me,” Charlie says, loud and too fast. He stands, scraping his chair over Grimmauld’s rich, walnut floor.
The bubbly late-night din dies down. Bill, still facing Remus, catches Charlie’s eye out of the corner of his own.
“Just needs some air.” Charlie smiles. He throws back the rest of his wine, thunking the tumbler back on the table demonstratively. The room finds this acceptable, returning to their conversations and food and drink. Fred frowns again, but lets it go.
Bill’s eyes glitter, dense as stone as they slide away from Charlie before he’s even left the room.