A/N: Welcome to Love is a Battlefield! If you've not checked out my last collaboration piece, Maybe I Know, you should head on over to xyellowconverse's page and read it. We had so much fun writing it that we started another project, this one! This time, we've included the other lovely writers, Freakin-Little and Missing Triforce. This story will be told in multiple viewpoints, Val, Emma, Joss, and Jo. The first four chapters will be told in that order, and you'll get to know each of the Wilde sisters as they travel through the war and fall in love. This story is going to go all the way through the end of the Harry Potter series, starting at the beginning of book four. I hope you stick along for the ride and enjoy! We've been planning since February and we're so excited to display our work for you all!
-J
The tavern was packed with people. I wasn't meeting a source that day; thank Merlin, because I wouldn't have been able to hear a word over the din in the seating area. Even the bar was far from quiet.
"Butterbeer, please," I said clearly to the barman. "And a chicken sandwich. Wheat, not rye."
The barman frowned. He didn't like that I was so picky with my orders, but he put up with me because I brought him quite a lot of regular business, holding all of my interviews for work there, when I didn't have to interview them in their natural environments, so to speak.
"Hey, I know that voice…"
I stiffened, following the sound of the voice of the speaker with my eyes and sure enough, finding none other than the freckle faced redhead Charlie Weasley, with one of his fellow dragon-tamers.
Charlie and I had gone to Hogwarts together. He had been in Gryffindor, and I in Hufflepuff. I had fallen in love with him, and he had hardly known I existed.
He knew my best friend, though. Everybody knew Tonks.
She had been the "fun one", and I had been the Prefect. Even in the bad we'd had together (The Primordial Soup), she had been the star, despite the fact that she'd been the drummer and I had been the front man.
People just loved Tonks.
Still, Charlie Weasley had been the star Quidditch player in our time at Hogwarts, so I became the commentator. He had taken Care of Magical Creatures, so I took it too. And when he got a job in a dragon colony in Romania, I packed my bags first and filled out applications for journalistic work after.
And he'd never noticed me.
But there we were, in a Romanian tavern, and he'd recognized my voice.
"Are you…" he said nervously, noticing that I was looking at him. "Sorry, did you go to Hogwarts?"
And he still didn't know my face.
"Yeah," I said, trying to ignore the fluttering in my stomach. "You're Charlie Weasley, right?"
Of course he was, but it wouldn't do for him to know that I'd followed him to Romania.
"Yeah," he said with a grin. "Sorry, your voice just sounded so familiar, and I was hoping I wasn't just imagining things."
"Um, yeah," I said. "I commentated for a few years–"
"Oh, yeah, you were Tonks's friend!" Charlie said brightly.
And there it was.
Three years gone by and the other end of the continent, and I'm still 'Tonks's friend'.
"Yep, that's me!" I said in the cheeriest voice I could muster.
"What's she been up to?"
"Oh, Auror training. Mad-Eye Moody's pulled her under his wing. Apparently she's topping her year in disguise."
He grinned.
"Well, that's not too surprising, but it's hard picturing Tonks in a regular job. I mean, didn't you guys have that band? I loved The Primordial Soup, you were really good."
"Yeah, Tonks was great," I said, trying to keep my straining smile.
"No," he said, his ears tinging pink. "I mean, she was, but I was talking about you. You… you had a beautiful voice, even speaking. I loved listening to game commentary as I looked for the Snitch because you had such a beautiful voice." He shook his head a little and said, "I went to all your performances."
I probably looked like a fish, gaping at him that way, but there you go. We sat there looking at each other for a moment, him growing ever pinker and me with my mouth slightly agape.
His friend cleared his throat and raised an eyebrow.
"Are you going to introduce me, Charlie, or what?"
My mouth snapped shut and Charlie seemed to become aware of himself as well, shaking his head a little.
"Right, sorry. This is Felix Thomas. He works with me at the local dragon colony."
"Of course," I said genially, shaking Felix's hand. He was blond, sturdy, and maybe ten years older than us, which would certainly account for my having never met him before, but there was something familiar about the way he looked at me that I couldn't quite place. I brushed the thought aside as paranoia, despite the crawling in my skin, and brought myself back down to earth. "Pleasure to meet you, Felix. I'm Valerie Wilde."
"Pleasure's all mine," Felix said with a grin. "You two went to school together, then?"
"Yeah," I said, shrugging. "Charlie was a Quidditch star and I was the best friend of a girl who constantly outshined me."
That sounded a lot bitterer out loud than it had in my head. Felix just laughed.
"I can't fathom anyone outshining you," he said with a wink.
The wink didn't faze me. I wasn't the type to turn into putty over just any pretty boy, pretty though Felix was.
"You clearly haven't met Tonks," I said with a wry smile. "She outshines the sun."
"Wait," Charlie said, a look on his face like he was working out something complicated. "Wilde? Are you related to Emma Wilde? She would have been about Bill's age…"
"Yeah, she's my older sister," I said, nearly internally groaning. If people didn't know me as 'Tonks's friend', they knew me as 'Emma's sister' and I hadn't even chosen that one. I loved my sister, but she was so perfect that it was sometimes difficult to live up to.
"Bill told me about her," Charlie said slowly, "but I guess he probably wouldn't want me sharing that. Anyway, didn't we know each other as… as…" A strange look came over his face. "… Valley?"
My eyes widened.
Charlie's father, Arthur, had been very close to my father before my father's death, and I had seen him a bit as a child. Apparently, 'Valerie' is a difficult thing for a small child to say, so Charlie had called me 'Valley' instead. The last time anyone had called me that was at my father's funeral, when Charlie had said goodbye. But that had been years before Hogwarts, and I was so sure he wouldn't ever put two and two together, realize I was the little girl he'd chased around the pews of the Muggle church my mother selected for the funeral.
"Wow," I said softly, sure I'd colored bright pink. "I never thought I'd hear somebody call me that again."
"It's really you?" he whispered, looking at me closely. "Wow, it is." His eyes were taking in my basic looks, the mousy-brown hair, the hazel eyes, the completely nondescript face… It was no wonder nobody ever remembered me. "You look just the same; I can't believe I could have forgotten."
That was a bald-faced lie. As a child, I had been energetic and full of life, and that always makes a person more attractive. I had become increasingly worn down with responsibility and regret throughout life, and it seemed like the only times I was acting like that child anymore were when I was behaving completely crazy because of Charlie, like following him to another country. How could he possibly look at me and say I looked like the same person? When I looked in the mirror I cringed at my plainness.
"I guess," I said with a shrug. "You look different. Older, obviously, but…"
I cut off, aware I was blushing. How did you tell someone they were absolutely gorgeous and the thing of your dreams? Perhaps it was one of those things that ought not to be said out loud.
"I can't believe it's you," he said, shaking his head. "I can't believe I didn't realize it in school."
"I'm not surprised," I said with a shrug. "You didn't have any cause to notice me."
That, of course, was false. I went out of my way every day doing everything I could think of to get him to notice me, for all the good it did me. He had hundreds of causes to notice me, but never did. There was always someone prettier, something more interesting. He knew my voice, yes, but big deal. I wasn't my voice.
But then, maybe I was. People remembered the words I had sung in The Primordial Soup. People remembered my broadcasts. When they didn't recall my face or my name, they remembered the words I said and the voice that said them. Maybe I was my voice.
"So what do you do?" Felix asked, picking up the conversation ball Charlie and I had clearly dropped and trying to get it rolling again. "I mean, what's your job? Charlie and I clearly work with dragons…"
"I'm a journalistic correspondent to the Daily Prophet," I said, hoping I sounded far more important than I actually was. "I cover any story in the area, although as there's not a lot of stuff going on in Eastern Europe of interest to the Prophet, I tend to just get called for everything from Greece to Lithuania, even though I live in Romania."
"Oh, really?" Felix said, grinning. "Far from here?"
"No, not far at all," I said casually, not wanting Charlie to realize that I'd gotten a flat as close to the dragon colony as possible. Not that I like dragons. They're terrifying and I lived in fear that one would break out every day, but I also lived in the hope that I would run into Charlie at some point.
And thankfully, that happened before a dragon could break out, so apparently I had some measure of good luck.
I explained to Felix where my flat was and his eyes lit up.
"Wow, you should visit the colony sometime!" he said eagerly. "Maybe do a feature on the amazingly attractive men working there, hmm?" he prodded, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively.
I thought Charlie might be scowling, but I wasn't entirely sure what at, so I just laughed and said, "I'd love to do a piece on the dragons. They're a bit terrifying, but maybe I'd make a decent page for once. My work always gets shifted to some unimportant corner of the paper where nobody will ever see it because they'll have fallen asleep by the time they get there. Dragons are interesting, though. I might have a shot of getting read with that."
"And a nice big picture of me will get you the front page, sweetheart," Felix said with a wink, and there was no doubt about it: Charlie was scowling at Felix and his flirtatious behavior. Perhaps Felix did this a lot and Charlie found it annoying.
"You should visit sometime, he's right," Charlie said, rearranging his features quickly into a friendly smile as he turned back to me. "I'll be sure to keep Felix's ego in one of the dragon containment zones if you do."
I assured them that I would, and Felix scribbled down the information for the colony on a napkin, but he didn't have to. What he didn't know was that I walked past the colony about twice a week in hopes of catching a glimpse of Charlie at work through the fence.
"C'mon, mate, we've got to be getting back to work," Charlie said. "Nice seeing you, Valerie."
"Absolutely," Felix said, still grinning. "Hope to see you again soon, sweetheart."
I just rolled my eyes and said goodbye, assuring them that I would be dropping by while mentally calculating how soon I could drop in on the colony without making it look like I was desperate to see either one of them (because Felix and his giant ego might misinterpret my presence as for his benefit).
Then I made my way back to my flat to finish the letters I was writing to my sisters, Jo, Joss, and Emma. I had to let them know when I would be going back to England for the Quidditch World Cup, and that things were going well. I also decided to put in Joss's about running into Charlie at the tavern, knowing she would tell the other two, getting the discussion all ready for me when I got back to England so that I would have time to decide how I felt about it and what it meant for my life in the long term, if anything.
Emma was the oldest, and she was always driven by her work and need to help people. As a Healer, she'd work extra hours often, especially when some particularly gruesome case was brought to her attention. She couldn't help her need to help people, and that was admirable, if not incredibly difficult to live up to.
Joss was a firecracker. She was still in school, in her seventh year. My parents had told me for years that I wasn't supposed to have a favorite sibling, but Joss had long been my secret favorite sister. Her full name was Jocelyn, but our mother's taste for stuck-up, classical Muggle names didn't keep us restrained by them. She went by Joss, I went by Val, and Josephine (less than a year younger than Joss) went by Jo. Only Emma managed to come out with a decent name, although nearly everybody but my sisters and Tonks called me Valerie, and I'd come to think it wasn't so bad.
Everybody addressed Joss as Joss. They might have suffered loss of limb if they hadn't, except for Professor McGonagall. To her, all four of us were "Miss Wilde", but what could you do about that? Occasionally, when Joss and Jo were getting into trouble together (which happened alarmingly often), they had the pleasure of being called, "Miss Jocelyn Wilde and Miss Josephine Wilde," usually all in one breath.
I think Joss spent more time in detention than out of it. She liked pulling pranks, and although she had gotten much better about not getting caught, the same couldn't necessarily be said for Jo, whom she often dragged along for the ride.
One thing I had done growing up that I regretted more as I got older was not paying enough attention to Jo. Granted, half my attention was always being sucked up by my obsession with Charlie Weasley, but I always preferred to play with Joss, or study, or hang out with Tonks (which I probably did just to drive my mother insane and it worked and I gained a wonderful friend besides), or play adults with Emma while our mother slowly went more and more insane (you should see some of the boyfriends she tried to bring around – she's finally settled for a horrible man named Archibald) and I just sort of let Jo slip through the cracks.
That's not to say she was completely ignored and neglected growing up. Emma was the maternal one, filling in where our crazy mother was lacking, which was nearly everywhere. Everything from womanly issues to homework to getting their ears pierced, Emma was there for the girls. But I found myself the one they talked to, particularly Joss. But Jo, who was constantly attempting to prove herself, would coming to me gushing about the Falmouth Falcons (favorite Quidditch team of all of us… except Emma) or asking me what I thought of a band she'd started listening to.
No, I hadn't completely abandoned Jo, but I hadn't made an effort, and that was almost as bad. My father had told Emma and me, before he was killed in the war against Voldemort, that family wouldn't just be there. You had to make an effort while you were young, or you wouldn't have each other when you got older, and family was important. I promised myself that I would do a better job of making an effort with Jo, starting with the World Cup.
I sent off the letters, made myself a cup of tea, and settled in with my notes on an article I was working on. There was nothing tying it all together, and it was completely unimportant and I could just picture the obscure little section they would find to tuck it away in once I finally had it finished and the thought made me want to scream with frustration. I was a good writer, a far better writer than Rita Skeeter. I was top of my class in half the subjects Hogwarts offered, a prefect, a model student. I had so much promise, as everyone, including my mother, had been so keen to point out. Perhaps I really had thrown it all away to go chasing Charlie Weasley, but isn't that what they'd said about him? Throwing away a promising career in Quidditch to go chasing after dragons? Were we so different, really?
Of course we were. Charlie Weasley was wonderful, brilliant, interesting, exotic. I was a boring little former prefect with boring looks, a boring job, and the privilege of being the boring half of every pair I was a part of. The most exciting thing in my life was following Charlie Weasley around. I sighed, setting aside the notes of the sure-to-be-failure article and pulling Tonks's latest letter towards me, scanning it for anything unusual before settling down and reading it in earnest. She liked to tease me about being in Romania, my obsession with Charlie, even my job, but I knew she did it with the best of intentions. She was asking me if I would be coming to the World Cup, or if I would be too busy stalking a certain redhead. She said her mother missed her favorite not-daughter and wanted me to visit if I was going to be in the country, if I wasn't too busy tracking down the home of a certain redhead and stalking him in his natural habitat. I rolled my eyes, ready to write the most sarcastic, annoyed, loving response I could muster to my best friend when an unfamiliar owl swooped in through the window and dropped a little note in front of me and flying right back out of the window.
I frowned, opening the note.
Valley,
It was good to see you today. Sorry about Felix, he's a twit. I really hope you visit the colony. It'd be great to catch up with someone from home. And if you're going back to England for the World Cup, maybe I'll see you there. My dad's managed to get tickets.
-Charlie
My hands shook so violently that I nearly ripped the letter in half, but instead, when the words sunk in, I dropped the parchment onto the table, leapt to my feet, and screamed excitedly at the top of my lungs, hopping up and down through my flat hugging everything I could get my hands on, Tonks's letter and the reply I had been formulating lying forgotten beneath that little scrap of parchment that had made my whole miserable existence brighter than I could have ever possibly dreamed.
It was a good day.
