Deck the Halls
Charlie Weasley was a solitary man. He knew it worried his parents, who assumed that being alone meant you were perpetually lonely, but they'd come to accept it. He always showed up on Christmas morning, presents in tow, but Christmas Eve was his. Tomorrow, he'd Floo back to England to be with his family. Tonight, he was enjoying a good book, a steaming mug of chocolate, and complete, lovely, solitude.
Which was why he jumped a little in shock when there was a knock at his door that year. He put down his book and stepped carefully over his dog, Wheezy. He opened the door to see a boy with a leather jacket, bright pink hair, and an even brighter smile standing on the stoop.
"Happy Christmas, Uncle Chuck!" Teddy said. "Passed my Apparition test."
Uncle Chuck - Teddy had taken to calling him that ever since he found out that it had been Tonks's nickname for him. Charlie loved it. He laughed and stood aside so the young man could step into the entryway. "So I see. Scotland to the Netherlands isn't an unreasonably long trip, but I don't think you could've managed it by broom in the… thirty minutes you've been free from school." He led the way into the small living room, and poured Teddy a mug of chocolate while the boy curled up on the couch.
Wheezy jumped into Teddy's lap and resumed his nap.
"To what do I owe this pleasant surprise?" Charlie asked, passing Teddy the mug.
"I'm seventeen now," Teddy said, and grinned as though that explained anything.
"Erm...yes. You are - that's why I don't feel bad about the shot of firewhiskey I added to your drink."
"Cheers. But you promised you'd tell me the Christmas lights fiasco story after I turned seventeen," the boy continued. "You know - about you and my mum getting on McGonagall's bad side."
Charlie flushed bright red, and just barely resisted smacking himself in the face. "I… listen, I…." He broke off, huffing. He'd completely forgotten. And, knowing Teddy, there was no way out of this conversation. The boy looked like he was already enjoying this…. "Fine," Charlie groaned. "But not a word to your grandmother or Nana Weasley, understood?"
"Loud and clear," Teddy said. He lost his grin for a moment, then, and narrowed his eyes in suspicion. "Wait… I'm not about to learn anything… unseemly, about you and my mother, am I?"
Charlie snorted. "Unseemly? You been babysitting Scorpius again?" he asked. "And no. Are you going to laugh until you're nearly sick? Yes. Am I going to have to put you in therapy after this? Possibly. But I swear on my Merlin Scouts badge collection that your mum and I were only ever friends. Despite what some people in our year might say to the contrary."
Teddy quirked an eyebrow at him at this statement.
"Moving right along," Charlie said, sipping his chocolate. "It was our sixth year, and your mum came round before a Hogsmeade visit, looking a bit...er...flustered."
"Tonksy!"
"Chuck."
"Uh-oh," Charlie said, grinning. "What's happened? You've got the Look."
"What look?" Tonks asked, hair changing from green to blue.
"The Look. It's the one you get when you're trying to scheme your way out of something."
Tonks huffed and sat down next to where Charlie was weeding Hagrid's pumpkin patch. "Why do you do this anyway?" she asked. "Nice of you, and all, but usually this is what they make first years do for detention."
"If I lurk long enough, he lets me play with the animals."
Tonks nodded. "Sprout caught me out after hours again."
"Bloody hell, mate! Your whole midnight snack thing has got to stop."
"Yeah, well…. Anyway, now I have to decorate the Charms courtyard for the first years' Winter Social."
"That doesn't sound too ba -"
"Without magic."
Charlie flinched. "Oh...sorry. What's the plan, then?"
"Does that mean you're on board for whatever I propose?"
"No, I just want to be able to say I told you so when your plan goes up in flames. Like that greenhouse second year when you -"
"We said we were never going to speak of that again!" Tonks said. "Anyway, I don't have a plan. Just have to go with it, I suppose."
Charlie stood and tossed his gloves into the pail next to him. "Is it time to go down to Hogsmeade yet?"
"People have already started leaving, I think."
"Not to worry, then, Tonksy-Wonksy! Let's walk. We'll think of something cool."
"Now...I want to get one thing perfectly clear here," Charlie said, taking a sip of his drink. "We really didn't know."
"Know what?" Teddy asked.
Charlie sighed. "You'll understand when I tell you. To this day, McGonagall thinks it was all planned from the start. So back in those days sixth and seventh years could go to the neighboring Muggle village if we dressed in Muggle clothes. So we made our way down to Hogsmeade first, trying to get a plan together. Popped into the old joke shop - Zonko's, it was, before your uncles bought them out - and got a few things of novelty fairy lights. Your mum didn't want to use the boring ones McGonagall had given her. That's when she had the bright idea…."
"What if we decorated with Muggle Christmas things?" Tonks asked as they strolled through the village. "You know how the professors are always on about appreciating Muggle culture and the like. You think she'd like it? I really want to get back in her good graces before term grades are due…."
"Worth a shot," Charlie said, nodding. "We'll have to get going though - it's a twenty minute walk, and I haven't been down there yet."
"Nor have I. Onward, Chuck! We've got shopping to do!"
They walked down the winding path toward the Muggle village, joking about what the next year would bring, and coming up with mock N.E.W.T. questions for each other.
"If faced with a house elf rebellion, what do you do?" Tonks asked.
"Cry?" Charlie responded. "They outnumber us. We're here though," he said, nodding to the village sign they were passing. "Where do you think they keep the Christmas things?"
It took a while, but they found a small grocery store after another few minutes of walking. The Christmas things had been picked over, but they found one neglected box of crackers shoved under a bottom shelf.
"Oi, we can't do anything with just this lot," Tonks said.
"Maybe there's another store we can go to," Charlie suggested.
"Right. We'll get these and go look."
"I'm not hearing anything terribly traumatic at the moment," Teddy commented.
Charlie offered him the biscuit tin. "Oh, you're about to. We got lost. Not terribly lost, mind you, but we hadn't been paying attention when we found the grocer. We needed to find the High Street, but that required us to go down some back streets. And...well…"
"If we find another place with some Muggle Christmas stuff, then we can go back and get some proper crackers," Charlie said.
"Good thinking. It'll be a mostly Muggle Christmas. What's that?"
"The Treasure Chest?" Charlie read. "I don't know. Look - there's a Christmas display. What is this stuff?"
"Let's go in."
The seedy salesman at the front pretended not to see them as they walked over to the Christmas display. The plastic...things there were all very Christmasy, but Tonks and Charlie had no idea what they were playing with. They grabbed two that looked like Christmas trees and a few things that looked a bit like glittery ornaments, and took them up to pay, before heading back to the castle.
"Why are you blushing already?" Charlie asked, grinning.
"A place called the Treasure Chest? Muggle stuff that you don't know what it is? Let me guess - did it vibrate?"
"Not that we knew of at that point," Charlie said. "So we got back to the castle, and had to decorate right away. The firsties were going to get there just after dinner, but we wanted to have time to eat dinner ourselves. We set up the...er...things, around the courtyard and turned them on because they flashed colored lights."
Teddy had both hands covering his face and was leaned all the way back, causing Wheezy to look up in concern. With one hand still over his eyes, he scratched the dog behind the ears and asked, "Uncle Chuck, had you really never seen… you know?"
"No! And how, may I ask, have you?"
"...this isn't about me. What happened next?"
"It was the covered courtyard, so we decided to hang some of lights around the ceiling and from the chandelier. That's...that's where we ran into trouble."
"Chuck!"
"What are you doing?"
"I can only get these round half of the chandelier. Climb up the other side and I'll toss them to you."
Charlie scurried up the other side of the ladder, and caught the ball of fairy lights. "Hold on, you've got it all tangled."
"Just use your wand!"
"You said no magic."
"I said I couldn't use magic, just - bollocks!"
Between the two of them moving, the ladder had fallen away, leaving them hanging from the chandelier. The lights were draped off of them, falling into a pile on the ground.
"Just drop," Charlie said.
"You drop first and catch me."
"What? No!"
"Where's your chivalry, Charles?"
"Where's your bravery, Nymphy?"
"Don't know, but when I find it, I'm going to shove it up your aaaARGH!" Tonks yelled as the chandelier dropped a bit. It tilted, and Charlie slid around next to her.
"What in Merlin's name?" came a voice from the entryway.
Sex toys buzzed. Fairy lights twinkled. Charlie and Tonks tried to look anywhere but at Professor McGonagall.
Teddy's hair was going through every color in the book as he laughed. "Did...did the first years see it?"
"No," Charlie said. "McGonagall cleared everything up before they got there. But she didn't believe us when we said we didn't know they were sex toys. We were in detention for about a month."
"Is that why McGonagall went into retirement halfway through my time at Hogwarts. Was she afraid of a reemergence."
"Probably not of that. Probably more that she didn't want to be the school counselor again if you turned out to be the same brand of womanizer -"
"Wait, what?"
"Oh Merlin…."
"I'm hungry," Teddy said, standing up and stretching. "I'll go get take-away, and when I get back, you're telling me another story."
With a pop, he vanished.
Charlie shook his head, and took their mugs to the kitchen. He normally loved his solitary Christmas Eves, but just this once, he was okay with some company. He grabbed the pan of gingerbread and took it back to the living room to wait for the young metamorphmagus to return.