Note: Hey all! This chapter was a tough one to write, and I'm not even sure why! Just having a bit of a block, I guess. Anyway, time's been racing along lately and I genuinely didn't realise so much of it had gone by since I last updated. Sorry! And, as always, feedback would be so much appreciated if you can spare a moment to leave it. :)
4. Happy Birthday, Weasley
Summer ended quickly. Charlie had only been at the sanctuary a few weeks before it burnt itself out. Autumn was an almost welcome relief. It was cool, but didn't feel harsh, particularly as Charlie and the other recruits had started proper, paid work at the sanctuary.
In Charlie's case this meant many glamorous days shovelling dragon dung. The dung was used for Herbology purposes worldwide and so, sadly, was in high demand. It wasn't Charlie's favourite experience – he was only shovelling it into sacks, so he didn't even get to go near a single dragon – but pockets full of Sickles and Knuts made up for the drudgery. As autumn became winter and the mountains grew icy, Charlie found that he had saved up enough gold to rent out a room at the local Inn for his parents to come and visit.
Unfortunately his money couldn't stretch to his brothers too. That was the problem with being one of seven children – there were always sacrifices.
As predicted, there was a growing pile of letters spilling out beneath his bunk. And with the exception of a cheerful note from ten year-old Ginny, they were all from his mother. Molly Weasley was a fiercely protective, maternal woman who wasn't about to let thousands of miles prevent her from mothering her second eldest son. Some of the letters made him laugh – "You haven't caught dragon pox, have you?" "You can't actually catch dragon pox from dragons, Mum... I know the name suggests otherwise." Others just made him hungry and made him lie, all in the same letter – "Have you been eating well, Charlie?" "Of course I have! The food's great!"
Anna hadn't been joking when she said that they always lost a few recruits early on. Soon, only Charlie, Sam and Keavy remained in their group. Sam remarked that he was only sticking around so as to avoid being dragged back to the drudgery of the Ministry by his mother. Some days, Charlie wondered whether he really was joking or not.
December arrived in a whirl of bitter hill snow, and Charlie found himself writing home to invite his parents to Romania for Christmas. First, though, there was the small matter of his nineteenth birthday.
Aside from dragons – and that wasn't so much a born skill as something she'd learned over the years – drawing was the only thing Anna had ever been any good at. Even at Hogwarts, she wasn't anything special. She could race down from Gryffindor Tower to the Great Hall for breakfast in record time; she could mess around in Care of Magical Creatures like nobody's business; and on a few Saturdays a year she got a moment's glory on the Quidditch pitch. Providing Gryffindor won, of course.
Although, as she remembered with a smile, they almost always did.
By the time she reached seventh year, it didn't matter that Anna was bottom of Transfiguration, or that she melted a cauldron a month. The only thing that mattered was a looming war that spread shadows over their youth. As long as she could hold her wand the right way around, she qualified. Anyone did.
Qualified for what? To fight. To defend. To die.
And die they did, before they'd had even a sniff of life. Kids who were barely in their twenties. Families destroyed in a heartbeat. The Prewetts... the Potters... the McKinnons...
For a moment, Anna sat frozen. When she jolted back to life, her quill was aimlessly suspended above her parchment, her mouth slightly open and eyes unfocused. Then she remembered that it was 1991, not the Dark Mark-ridden days of the late seventies and early eighties. She was sat in her office in Romania. It was long over.
She turned her attention to the half-finished sketch. It was of a baby Swedish Short-Snout trying to fly for the first time. She'd photographed him a few months ago; he was the size of a double-decker bus now. In real life his fledgling wings had looked spindly, but surprisingly strong. On parchment they looked wrong – as thin and frail as the paper itself. Anna tugged a hand through her messy hair and scratched out the unfinished wings. Outside, a long, low howl wavered; the fire in the hearth flickered and roared. It sounded like the cry of a wolf or a dragon, but it wasn't either of those. Having spent ten years in Romania, Anna knew the place almost as well as she knew her home town, the village of Upper Flagley in Yorkshire. She could still say only a few sentences of Romanian, but the landscape she knew intimately. All its tricks and its pitfalls were second nature to her now; as much a part of her as Hogwarts had been. And so she recognised the sound of the winter wind blowing down off the mountains for what it was.
Her old Gryffindor scarf was hooked over the back of her chair. Before putting quill to parchment again, she wrapped the scarf around her neck and imagined that she could still smell her childhood on it.
When Charlie walked into class, late, on the morning of his nineteenth birthday, he was certain he'd taken a wrong turn. He had surely wandered into a volcano or a furnace, if the ferocity of the wall of heat that assaulted him was anything to go by. "Merlin..." he muttered. He had spent the night wishing he was warmer and longing for the comparatively milder Devon winters or his four-poster bed in Gryffindor Tower. Now he felt like he was going to burn up on the spot.
Keavy, Sam and a number of the European students were gathered around the fireplace. The fire was blazing spectacularly. Before Charlie could join them, Anna addressed him unexpectedly:
"Weasley, take off your jumper."
"W-what?" he spluttered.
"You'll boil alive in that." She had dispensed with her usual jacket, he noticed, and was wearing a tank top. To Charlie's intense embarrassment, he remembered he had thrown a Weasley jumper over his t-shirt this morning. It was cobalt blue featuring a blobby, knitted Common Welsh Green – a leaving present from his mother. He wrenched it off. His faced burned, but not wholly as a result of the heat. Drawn by curiosity, Charlie walked up to the fire. "What are we looking at?"
"An Antipodean Opaleye egg," Anna said, grinning. Her tone bordered on smug. "First of its kind at the reserve in – ooh, thirty years?"
Something was glinting pearly grey amongst the flames. Charlie leaned closer... he knew about these, they were famed for their rarity.
"This is an orphan egg. It was confiscated from the black market by the Romanian Ministry. There's been a bit of a crackdown lately. About time, really." Anna pointed into the leaping flames. "See that? Look closely and you'll notice a faint outline of the baby dragon." Something tiny and pink was just visible through the opal shell. "These eggs have a translucent shell and when the mother heats them you can see the baby, if you know what you're looking for – "
While she was talking, Sam sidled up to Charlie and continued his relentless, self-appointed mission to force Charlie into celebrating his birthday. "I'm nineteen," he retorted. "It's not even a special birthday."
"First birthday away from home?" Sam muttered. "How is that not special?"
Charlie grunted and folded his arms. He could have pointed out that he'd had birthdays away from home many times at Hogwarts. Somehow he didn't think that was Sam's point. Anna was explaining how you could make out a very faint heartbeat if you looked intently enough. "Come on..." Sam persisted.
"Eddowes! Weasley!" she snapped. The rest of the class swung around to stare. "For the love of Merlin, shut up! I doubt that anything you two have to say to each other is more interesting than this egg."
A strange, uneasy warmth squirmed in Charlie's stomach. Again, it was nothing to do with the heat of the fire. It was the simple fact that he agreed with her. As a kid, he would have given his right arm to be in the same room as something so awe-inspiring.
He opened his mouth, but Sam beat him to it. "It's Charlie's nineteenth," he explained.
Anna raised one eyebrow. "Does he want a medal?" she said. She was not looking at Charlie – instead, she glared past him, at Sam. But when she turned back to the fire, her eyes rolling at their nonsense, he caught a brisk, "Happy Birthday, Weasley."
Sam won. Of course.
Later that evening, they followed the rocky path away from base and into the local village. Keavy Connelly followed them at some distance. She had spent the day – like Charlie – insisting there was no way she was coming. The night was cloudless, peppered with stars and a fat half-moon that illuminated their way.
According to Sam, there was an amazing tavern in town. "Similar to The Three Broomsticks!" he promised. He was particularly derisive when Charlie admitted that he had only been into the village once or twice. "You're missing out, mate."
"He's hardworking," Keavy put in, drawing level with them.
Charlie wasn't sure. Perhaps he had spent too long with his nose in textbooks or out on his broom. He'd learned hardly anything of the culture. All he knew was that the village was almost entirely magical. The few Muggles nearby were very much of the easygoing, turn-a-blind-eye variety. Sam, on the other, seemed to know everything – from reams of gossip to the best drinking spots.
The tavern was just as Sam had promised – a Romanian replica of The Three Broomsticks. In place of Madam Rosmerta was a pretty, black haired witch called Ramona. "Not bad," Charlie admitted. They took a seat in the corner and, as he nursed his Firewhisky, Charlie sat and let the mix of the languages wash over him.
"Hey, take a look at that!" Sam jolted him out of his reverie with a sharp jab in the ribs.
"What?"
"Over at the bar."
Charlie looked up. Leaning on the bar with her elbows, was Anna. She was accompanied by the two male tutors from the reserve. The older of the two wandered off into the gloom of pub, but the other stayed with her. "So what?" he asked Sam.
But when Charlie looked at Sam he noticed he was smirking. Even Keavy's smile was a little off.
"Know who he is?" Sam nodded at the man by Anna's side. He was dark haired and his tanned skin was like a jigsaw of dragon burns.
"Yeah. He's Dragos something. He tutors the Romanian students."
"But do you know?"
"Know what?" Charlie sighed.
"Those two – " Sam jerked his head towards the bar again; Anna was now laughing at something Dragos was saying – "they're, you know..."
"Together," Keavy finished for him. "And I bet that's not even true, Sam."
Sam snorted and downed the rest of his drink. "OK, sure. Everyone knows she sneaks in and out of his room like, every other night." Suddenly, to their mortification, Anna was walking over to them, holding a glass of Firewhisky. Sam cut off his rant abruptly and forced a sickly smile onto his face. "Evening, Miss Wilson!"
"Sam, Keavy." She smiled and nodded at them, then placed the Firewhisky on the table. "That's for you, Charlie. Happy nineteenth."
"Oh, thanks, I wasn't expecting anything." Charlie felt the sudden urge to apologise for the incident in class earlier, but she was already turning away.
"Oh, and Sam?" she said, glancing back at him. "Please never call me Miss Wilson again. It makes me feel like an old spinster." She rejoined Dragos and together they too disappeared into the gloom at the back of the pub.
Everyone knows, Sam had said. Charlie slumped back in his chair. Not him – he was Oblivious with a capital O.
He knew he would later look back on this birthday as a mixed one.
There were plenty of upsides: he was finally in Romania, at the reserve he had been dreaming about since he was five. He had seen a real Antipodean Opaleye egg, up close.
And yet, as the day ended, he felt vaguely unsettled. He couldn't shake it.
Whatever it was.
