I trusted him. I tried to help him. And he betrayed me.
Like so many pieces of a puzzle drifting down and interlocking to form a bigger picture, Charlie remembered random wisps of conversations he'd had with Ron. Now, in the stark aftermath of shock, they all made blinding sense and came together to weave a disturbing image.
"So," Ron had drawled one evening soon after he'd arrived to stay with Charlie, "how many dragons do you take care of?"
And I was only too happy to go on for ages about all my dragons and the workings of the reserve because Ron was taking an interest.
And a few days later: "Maybe you can get me a job at the reserve. You know, like cleaning out stalls or something." Perhaps it had been fortunate that the reserve had been fully staffed at the time and that you had to be a fully-hired apprentice to gain access to any work there.
And the following week: "All the dragons live in the reserve, then?" Ron had asked nonchalantly over a tea of fish and chips.
And then I told him about the sentinels and how they guarded the reserve boundaries. And a few days later the Father was dead…
Anger seethed through Charlie's blood like poison. Each step he took across the polished wood foyer of Cairo's Ministry of Magic was like a dynamo pressurising his rage until it pounded in his head and curled his fingers into fists. He was still too angry to feel the inevitable sense of betrayal that was hounding the edges of the black rage like a circling Dementor.
If the Dementors don't Kiss him first, I'll kill him with my bare hands. I felt sorry for him a few hours ago… I wanted to help him! And all along he's been a traitorous dragon killer!
He didn't notice the exquisite desert murals on the walls. He was blind to the large statue of Imhotep next to the Floo entrances and the beautiful pyramidal fountain, which dribbled a shimmering sheath of water down its glass sides.
He barely heard Tonk's voice above the roiling tempest in his mind. "—both Britain and Romania want to extradite him for the dragon killings, and they're having an argy-bargy about who gets him. In the meanwhile, Cairo is holding him on suspicion of illegal activity, but that's just a favour that the Head of the MLE here is doing for me… until I can get a story out of him. He's refusing to talk." Tonks stopped talking as they reached the bank of lifts, and she gave him a quizzical glance.
In the burnished brass lift doors, Charlie saw that his face was contorted into a fierce grimace. He grunted because Tonks seemed to be seeking some sort of reply from him, but he kept his jaw grimly clenched.
"Bill was off at work when the Aurors arrested Ron," Tonks continued, stress still tightening her voice. "I couldn't get hold of him via owl or Floo; he's down checking on some tomb, apparently. And Fleur was just about hysterical. I swear to Merlin I thought she was going to Morph when we told her she couldn't come with Ron. Or maybe it was because she was so pissed off with him."
Charlie made a low noise in the back of his throat again, to indicate that he was listening, sort of. The doors of the lift finally slid open, and Charlie took another step closer to murdering his brother. Just before the doors slid closed, a scarlet envelope darted into the enclosed space with them, smouldering at the edges already. Tonks sighed and pushed the button for the lowest bowels of the Egyptian Ministry, and then she opened the Howler.
Perhaps he'd been expecting a Slavic-tinged accent, or even one from London's Ministry of Magic, but the voice that screeched and swirled around them like a hurricane was his mother's. It was enough to distract him from his furious brooding for a moment.
"Nymphadora Tonks! You bring my son back to England this instant! Your intelligence—Ha! Intelligence!—is obviously wrong. Ronniekins would never, ever do anything illegal. He helped Harry Potter defeat You-Know-Who, for Merlin's sake! Don't you dare take another of my sons away from me! Don't you dare—" A ragged sob ended the message.
In the vacuum of silence that followed, both Charlie and Tonks stared at the floor of the lift. Flecks of ash from the Howler filtered through the uncomfortable atmosphere like the aftermath of a cataclysm. In all of his righteous anger, Charlie had forgotten about the effect this would have on his mother, how it might rip a tenuously mended family apart again, how their grief might spill scarlet into the air. The mist of black rage started to lift, and Charlie remembered that he was a Weasley, that he had to help sort this mess out because his family's sanity was at stake.
"I—" Charlie's voice was hoarse, and he cleared his throat. "What did you need me to help with, Tonks?" he asked.
Tonks reached out to press the 'stop' button. The lift shuddered to a halt. She turned to him, her lips drawn into a thin line. "He refused to answer any questions. Veritaserum was administered." She was speaking in a quick monotone, as if to make it hurt less that she was talking about his brother. "He still refused to answer any questions—"
"Imperio!" Charlie interrupted, feeling a knife-sharp stab of hope pierce the gloom. "That's the only thing that counteracts Veritaserum, isn't it?" Gods. If Ron was under the Imperius Curse… It was still horrible, but it meant that his brother wasn't a sadistic little fuck, that he was just a victim—
Tonks clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, and her lips twisted into a sour grimace. "That's the first thing we checked, Charlie," she said. "Finite Imperio didn't give any marked change in his demeanour; we tried it four times!"
Charlie deflated as the gloom pushed back to smother the nascent fluttering of hope. "Oh."
"We took a blood sample from him, and the forensics department matched it to the blood sample by traditional methods, too."
"Oh." The gloom began to spin around him, to gather momentum, to spark the anger again. "So what exactly do you want me to do, Tonks?" he snapped. "He's obviously guilty—send the little shit to Azkaban or Nuremgard or Anubis and get it over and done with!"
Tonk's hair was a vile mustard colour, the colour of frustration. "We need to know why they wanted that damn Dragon-thingy Stone! Even you said you thought it might be part of a wider conspiracy. What if he was part of a larger team? Veritaserum immunity is damn serious stuff, Chaz… I don't know if Ron could have achieved that by himself." She sighed heavily. "Look. It's not fair to bring you down here. It's not even standard procedure to let you talk to him—the Wizengamot is probably going freak out when they find out. But I need you to talk to him, to see if he'll talk to you. Otherwise he's going to jail, Chaz, and no matter how much I love you and your family, there's nothing I can do to stop it."
A muscle jumped in Charlie's jaw, and he crossed his arms over his chest as he thought it over. He didn't want to talk to Ron—Merlin, he was afraid he'd take one look at him and smash his fist into Ron's face. But his mother would expect him to try. Bill would do it; Bill had a patient way about him and enough patience to coax a tomb open for months and months. He nodded slightly. "OK," he said, reaching forward to start the lift going again. "Let's go."
Tonks and Charlie stood on the other side of the one-way observational shield, which bisected the interrogation room. The lower level of the Egyptian Ministry of Magic wasn't a dungeon, but it certainly held a stark, institutional feel. The bare, green-grey walls and the stainless steel table stripped the room of colour and life. The even, bright lighting charm washed out Ron's freckles and made him look pasty and wax-like. Ron stared at nothing in particular, glassy-eyed and unfocused. Charlie wanted to step through the shield, to take Ron by the shoulders, to shake all the answers from his unmoving lips, to flay the truth from his very skin.
He took a step forward, and Tonks put a hand on his arm. "Wait," she said, staring through the shield. An Egyptian Auror—he could be Kingsley's Arabic twin he was so large and muscled and bald—sat opposite Ron.
He spoke calmly, although Charlie sensed that he was keeping annoyance on a tight leash. "Have you taken any potion to give you immunity to Veritaserum?"
No answer. Ron didn't move a muscle. You'd think he was dead but for the slightest rise and fall of his chest.
"Where did you get the injury on your arm from?" the Auror asked. "Was that where you cut yourself on the Hebridean Black?"
That was the first time that Charlie noticed Ron's right arm was bandaged to the elbow. Where the evidence had been an intangible to him, it was now leaden and real. Charlie's saliva tasted metallic and bitter, and his stomach heaved.
"It was a nasty cut," Tonks murmured to him. "He tried to Heal it himself, but he made a mess of it. There was blood on a set of robes we found in the rubbish—his and the dragon's. And there was also dragon blood on the tail twigs of his Firebolt."
"Did you place the Imperius Curse upon the Scottish dragon keeper?" the Auror asked, cycling through a long list of questions that'd been asked before, many times.
Ron lifted his thumb to his mouth, chewed on his thumbnail and spat a little wedge of fingernail and saliva onto the table. He didn't show any sign that he was listening to the Auror, let alone aware of his presence.
"He's been like this all morning." Tonks put her hand against the shield, and the Auror pushed his chair back with a nerve-grating scrape. He stepped through the shield. He didn't seem surprised to see Charlie and gave him a curt nod.
"Chaz, this is Auror Ali El-Sayed Al-Moselhi. Al, this is Charlie Weasley," Tonks said.
Al nodded again. "You were never here, Charlie," he said evenly, and then he walked out of the room. The door swung closed behind him, and Charlie heard the lock engage loudly in the silence.
Tonks gave him a weak smile and gestured to the shield. "He's all yours."
What Charlie wanted to do was to rage at his brother.
You killed a dragon! How could you do this to Mum? How could you do this to me? Why? Why? Why?
But the moment he'd stepped through the shield, he'd felt a sense of preternatural calm settle over him. Raging at Ron had never worked. In fact, all the Weasley children were immune to raging, inoculated against it through years of grimly ignoring their mother's temper. Charlie loved his mother, but she was prone to panicking, and she had never seemed to handle having so many children to wrangle. They'd all overwhelmed her, and the wars had drawn her thin.
What he did do was pull the spare chair closer, so that he sat with his knees and legs perpendicular to Ron's. Ron didn't glance in his direction. Charlie rested his chin on interlinked fingers—a parody of a prayer that this would all resolve itself. "I feel kind of… Bilius," he said quietly.
Ron didn't move a muscle. There wasn't even a twitch of a smile for the years-old joke about Ron's unfortunate second name. A slick sheen of sweat covered Ron's face, and perspiration beaded on his upper lip. Although he looked at ease and unperturbed, there was something different about his eyes, like they'd iced over and all the colour had been leached out of them. Had they been like that when he'd stayed with Charlie in Bucharest?
"Look," Charlie said, "Mum is frantic… I'm—" There were no words to explain the sense of betrayal Charlie felt. Ron knew how he felt about dragons, that he'd devoted his entire life to their study and care, that he'd missed countless family functions watching over hatchlings, that he was heartbroken to be faced with the evidence that his brother, his own flesh and blood, had killed a dragon.
"Why?" he asked, leaning closer to Ron. "What is going on? What did you get yourself into?" Charlie felt his throat closing in, so that it became harder to breathe without his eyes tearing up. "You know better. Dad and Percy and Harry… they'd all be ashamed of you." Charlie swallowed hard. "I'm ashamed of you."
And what Charlie really meant to say was that he was ashamed of himself for not noticing that something had been seriously wrong with his younger brother.
Ron kept staring ahead blankly like the world held no interest for him. Charlie reached out to shake his shoulder. "Snap out of it, Ron." A drop of sweat fell off the end of Ron's long, narrow nose, leaving a teardrop stain of stubbornness on his grimy t-shirt, but otherwise he didn't react to Charlie's touch.
Charlie leaned closer still, so that he was almost nose-to-nose with his brother. He stared into the unseeing eyes. Ron still didn't focus on him. Charlie brought his hand up to grab the back of Ron's neck, to force him to look up. As his fingertips brushed the damp skin beneath Ron's heavy ginger hair, a jolt of white-hot pain burned him, and he jerked his hand away, staring at his fingers wide-eyed.
"What the fuck?" Little blisters had already started to form on the pads of his fingers. "Tonks!" he called, but she was already stepping through the shield.
She put a hand on Ron's head, to tilt it forward, and then she gingerly parted his long, thick hair to bare the nape of his neck. "Oh, my God," she murmured softly.
Charlie peered over her shoulder, his heart racing with alarm, and he gasped. "Bloody hell," he said incredulously.
There, tattooed on the back of Ron's neck, was an intricate, strange hieroglyphic-like script. In the interrogation room light, the dully-glowing charm etched into Ron's skin looked like hellfire itself.
Author's Note: Thank you to Gelsey for proof-reading.