[summary] Charlie&Draco [The Princess and the Frog] "Look," the ferret grumbles, far more irritated than a ferret has any right to be, "I just need a place to stay for the night. I wouldn't ask, except I really wasn't expecting all the dragons."
A/N — This is very loosely based on the Princess and the Frog. Except there is no frog, and the princess has always been a cat.
And many thanks go to my lovely beta, Amber :)
Leaning on the balcony of his shared home on the manor house turned dragon sanctuary, Charlie stares up at the sky, watching the distant shape of a Hebridean Black in the distance.
He's been living here for quite some time, he realises, the thought coming unprovoked into his head. Sometimes, he misses the sanctuary in Romania, where there are far more dragons, far more keepers. But far more casualties, too. And he hadn't been able to do that to his mother. Not after Fred.
So, when the Sanctuary of the British Isles had been proposed, Charlie had jumped at the opportunity. He was more than qualified.
And it's nice being back in England. He gets to go home every Sunday for a roast dinner his mum has made for the entire family. A family that has grown a lot in recent years, expanding past the capacity of the Burrow's kitchen table, and spreading into the back garden.
He's still thinking about roast dinners — beef and pork and sometimes lamb — his mouth salivating a little at the imagined tastes, when a scrabbling at the balcony rail draws his attention.
This in itself is not unusual. They keep plenty of live animals on the reserve, not just dragons — the dragons have to eat, after all — and it's fairly common for them to explore farther than the keepers might like. And there's nothing particularly unusual about the ferret; it's fur a sleek white, beady eyes an intelligent grey, and whiskers twitching as it sniffs the air.
There's nothing unusual about it, that is, until it starts to talk.
.oOo.
"Oh, come on," the ferret huffs indignantly, "will you stop that?" it asks as Charlie continues to back away slowly. "You're a wizard, aren't you? You work with dragons. Surely a talking ferret isn't that unusual?"
Charlie is still stuck on the ferret's accent, English upper class, finding it easier to focus on this one aspect rather than the whole. Because, yes, people turning into animals is fairly normal, in his experience. But those animals don't talk.
"Look," the ferret grumbles, far more irritated than a ferret has any right to be, "I just need a place to stay for the night. I wouldn't ask, except I really wasn't expecting all the dragons."
Still trying to regain control of his mouth — it feels like it's hanging open, but Charlie couldn't possibly be that surprised, he thinks as the shaking in his hands finally begins to recede — Charlie nods dumbly. Not knowing what else to do, he scoops the ferret up into his cupped palms.
"You bastard," he hisses, finally regaining his voice as the ferret sinks sharp teeth into the flesh of his thumb. "What was that for?"
"I can walk, thank you very much," the ferret says, nose in the air in what Charlie can only describe as a look of extreme superiority. It hops gracefully over the wooden threshold and into the communal living room. Here, it pauses. "Well?" it asks. Charlie can only stare, his instincts so far in this case proving woefully lacking. "Aren't you going to tell me which way to go?"
"Oh!" Charlie hurries into the room after the ferret. "Right, of course." Charlie doesn't know if ferrets are supposed to be able to roll their eyes, but this one certainly can.
.oOo.
Charlie wakes to a cold nose prodding his eye, whiskers tickling his cheeks. He groans, swiping away his housemates boisterous cat with a muffled, "Princess Murder-Mittens, no."
"What did you just call me?"
Charlie sits bolt upright, staring at a very irate ferret on his bedroom floor. He'd thought he'd dreamt it all — hoped, more like — but the ferret glaring daggers at him would suggest otherwise. Or maybe he's hallucinating.
"I need to use the facilities," the ferret says stiffly.
Charlie hopes he's hallucinating.
.oOo.
With a cup of tea still too hot to drink cradled in his hands, Charlie finally feels prepared to face the ferret again after the incident in the early hours of the morning. Or maybe not so much prepared, as a little more caffeinated.
"So," he begins.
"So," the ferret repeats, and Charlie gets the distinct impression it's mocking him. Being patronised by a ferret does not improve his mood.
"Why can you talk?" he asks. "How can you talk?"
"How can you talk?" the ferret snaps. Charlie's torn between worrying he's offended it and thinking it's a ferret.
"I'm not a rodent," Charlie says. He wonders why he's defending himself to a ferret, but he pushes the thought aside.
"I think you'll find ferrets are more closely related to weasels, actually." And then the ferret refuses to speak again for the rest of the day.
It's just Charlie's luck to get himself landed with such a temperamental rodent — sorry, mammal.
.oOo.
The next time Charlie sees the ferret, it has somehow managed to open a book of children's fairytales to the story of Babbity Rabbity. The bottom right corner of the book looks slightly chewed, and there's the slight impression of a damp nose on the page.
"Could you turn the page?" the ferret asks, not bothering to look up.
"A please makes it happen," is Charlie's only response. He flops down onto his bed, exhausted from a hard day of doing almost nothing but lounging around the house. It's a Thursday, but it's also his only full day off and he hadn't wanted to ruin it with productivity.
He can feel the ferrets eyes boring into the side of his head, but eventually the creature relents. "Could you please turn the page?" it asks, somehow still managing to sound far superior to Charlie. "I am really rather bored."
Charlie sighs, but turns the page. The teeth marks continue onto the next page, and he imagines the next as well, and he wants to ask how long the ferret had been attempting to turn the page, but instead he asks, "Where did you find this?"
"Your mother sent it to you."
"My …" Charlie flounders for a moment, eyes casting about the room in an attempt to find some meaning to the ferrets words. He understands what the words themselves mean, of course, but —
And then his eyes land on the torn brown paper of a package, the address written in his mum's familiar looping handwriting.
"You went through my post?" he asks, indignation lacing his voice.
"I told you," the ferret replies, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, "I was bored."
He's far too angry at the gross invasion of privacy to bother with a retort, but he leaves the ferret with the book, and picks up the note his mother had left him — I hope you might find need of this someday, love Mum xxx — and finds his irritation waning.
It doesn't occur to Charlie until much later to wonder how it is that a ferret could learn to read.
.oOo.
"Do you know what this place used to be?" the ferret asks quietly. Charlie frowns, but he's grown more used to the ferret's random mood swings in the last few days, the creature somehow inserting itself into his life as if it belonged there.
"It was donated, I think," Charlie says, though he isn't entirely sure. He's never really thought about it before, but he supposes that a sprawling manor house isn't something usually donated as an animal sanctuary.
"When?" the ferret asks.
Charlie thinks for a moment, trying to recall. "Ninety-nine, I think," he says. "Maybe two-thousand." Not long after the war, really, but he doesn't think that information would be particularly useful to a ferret. "Why?"
The ferret makes a gesture that could have been an attempt at a shrug, a sort of shimmy of its body that Charlie doesn't know how else to interpret, and slinks over to the pillow it's claimed as its own.
Charlie's favourite pillow, but somehow he doesn't think now is the time to point that out. It's not made any difference before, after all.
.oOo.
"Are you a person?" Charlie asks, exactly a week after first meeting the ferret.
The ferret scoffs. "Don't be ridiculous."
.oOo.
A loud hissing jolts Charlie awake, and he looks around his dark room with sleep addled confusion, his eyes finally settling on the narrow beam of light from the slightly ajar door.
There's another hiss, even louder, followed by a pain-filled shriek, and Charlie bolts out of bed, legs tangling in his duvet and nearly tripping in his haste to reach the door.
He doesn't have time to prepare himself for the horror he is sure to see, he can only fling the door open and hope for the best. Because he'd forgotten about —
"Princess Murder-Mittens!" he scoops the cat up, cradling her to his chest. She's shaking, cowering in his arms, and there's a scratch across her pink nose. Charlie glares down at the ferret, his fear for its life evaporating as quickly as if arrived. "Why are you terrorising the cat!?" he snaps, his words punctuated by a soft mewl from Princess Murder-Mittens, less defensive now that she is safe in Charlie's arms.
"That cat," the ferret spits the word like it's the most heinous of insults, "meant to do me great harm."
Princess Murder-Mittens starts to purr.
.oOo.
Several hours later, Princess Murder-Mittens is still curled up on Charlie's favourite pillow, purring softly, while the ferret glares from his perch on top of the wardrobe. Charlie isn't sure how it got up there, and he's never seen it there before, but the creature appears to be sulking still and Charlie doesn't want to bother it.
Princess Murder-Mittens stretches and contracts her paws, digging her claws softly into the pillow in her contentment. The ferret huffs and turns to face the wall.
.oOo.
"Lord Sulkington?" Charlie muses, lying with his head at the foot of his bed and staring up at the ceiling. When he was a kid, his dad had given him little dragon stickers to stick to his ceiling that flitted about the room and produced little sticker flames whenever they accidentally bumped into each other. He finds himself wishing he had them now. "General Glares-A-Lot?" Charlie scratches the bridge of his nose. "Sir Hissy-Pants?"
"What are you going on about now?" the ferret asks, somehow managing to sound both bored and irritated at the same time. It's a tone the ferret is particularly good at.
"You need a name," Charlie says, still staring at the ceiling and imagining his little sticker dragon army. He wonders if they're still on the ceiling of his old room. He can't actually remember; the Burrow both stuck in time and ever changing in his memory.
He is brought crashing back to reality by the sting of sharp claws across his cheek. The ferret stands above him, panting angrily, practically vibrating with its fury.
"Mister Scratch-and-Sniff?"
Charlie is honestly surprised he doesn't lose an eye.
.oOo.
Eventually, they decide on a name for the ferret.
Well, 'they' is a bit of a loose term, as the ferret simply says, "You can call me Mal," a few days after the original naming incident, and then retreats back to the top of the wardrobe. A place Charlie secretly terms its Sulking Corner. But his cheek is still smarting from before, and it splits open every so often — whenever he laughs or smiles or chews — so he doesn't want to risk angering the creature further.
But he likes Mal. It's a good name. He's unsure where the ferret plucked the name from, but maybe it had had an owner before Charlie. Though he isn't quite sure he owns the ferret, per-se. It's such a temperamental creature, and no one can deny that it has a mind of its own.
He finds he likes having it around, though.
.oOo.
"Did you know this house used to belong to a Death Eater?" Mal asks one afternoon. Rain is pouring heavily outside, and days like this seem to negatively impact the creature's already sour disposition, but today it seems more melancholy than anything.
"I think 'house' might be stretching it a bit," Charlie says, because, no, he hadn't known that, but he supposes it makes sense. "Does it matter?"
This gives Mal pause, and it seems to think for a moment before answering, "I suppose not."
"It doesn't really matter what it used to be," Charlie adds on, his idea gaining traction and growing as he gives voice to it. "It just matters what it is now. What it's become."
"I suppose so," Mal murmurs, and doesn't really say much else for the rest of the day. His silence lasting the duration of the storm.
.oOo.
"Do you think people can change, too?" Mal asks, sitting on the windowsill and bathing in the bright sunlight filtering into the room. "Like this building?"
Charlie feels like this might be a serious question, something that's genuinely bothering the ferret, because he doesn't usually keep conversations like this one going, preferring to avoid heavier topics. So, Charlie gives the question some thought, and tries to answer as honestly as he can. "I do think people can change," he says slowly.
"But?" Mal asks, his tail twitching in agitation though he keeps his eyes trained firmly on the window.
"But," Charlie continues, "people aren't buildings." Mal makes a noise that Charlie can only describe as the verbal equivalent of an eyeroll. "No, I mean of course they're not," he hurries to add, "but they change in different ways." Here, he pauses, trying to gather his thoughts.
It's difficult, he realises, having this type of conversation with anyone but particularly a ferret. He doesn't know the right words to use, the right way to phrase them, and he doesn't want to cause upset.
"A building is a building," he settles on. "It changes based on what it's used for. But a person … is a person." He frowns; that wasn't what he'd meant to say, but he doesn't know how else to put it. "A person needs to work on changing?" he finishes the sentence as a question, having lost track of where he was going with this.
But when he looks over at the ferret, he is nodding thoughtfully. "I think I understand what you mean," he says. And finally, Mal looks over from the window, his eyes crinkling in what Charlie thinks might be an attempt at a smile.
.oOo.
"Do you think I could be a good person?" Mal asks. Charlie would say the question was out of the blue — he's sitting in his bed in his pyjamas, the radio turned down low to create some background noise, and heavily buttered toast leaving crumbs in his lap — but it feels like this is where they've been heading all along.
"I think you would be very irritating," Charlie says through a mouthful of buttery toast. "But no more than you are now." He swallows, and takes a deliberately slow sip of his tea. "But I think I would like you, as a person."
Mal seems pleased for a moment, then suddenly indignant. "Do you not like me now?" he snaps, his fur standing on end and his lips pulling back as if he's about to growl or hiss.
Charlie rolls his eyes, nudging Mal off the bed with his foot, and says, "You're alright," as Mal hits the floor with a dull thud, landing in an indignant tangle of limbs.
Mal bites Charlie's foot in retaliation, which Charlie supposes he can't fault him for.
Despite himself, he really does like Mal. And he can't help but wonder, no matter how illogical it might be, whether or not the ferret likes him.
.oOo.
Charlie awakes not to the press of fur or whiskers or a wet nose to his face, but the stickiness of sleep-soaked skin pressing against sleep-soaked skin.
It takes him a moment to realise that's not right.
And when he does, when he finally registers the naked man curled up beside him, Charlie practically throws himself across the room with an embarrassingly high-pitched shriek.
.oOo.
Strangely, it doesn't take long for Charlie to become accustomed to Mal in human form. Learning that his name used to be Draco rings a slight bell somewhere in the recesses of Charlie's memory, but learning that Mal is short for Malfoy doesn't bring the alarm he thought it would. That he feels it should.
Mal, on the other hand, seems to struggle to adjust, and Charlie is left wondering how long he was trapped as a ferret. How he was trapped as a ferret. But he doesn't want to pry.
It somehow feels too personal, now that Mal is human, to ask such a seemingly forward question, despite Charlie knowing full well that Mal has seen him in various states of undress during the time they've been at the sanctuary together. His cheeks warm at the thought, and he tries to busy himself with preparing their meal, but Charlie rarely cooks for more than just himself, so the measurements are a little tricky and he's pretty sure something is already burning.
He gives dinner a few more minutes to magically fix itself under his inexpert hands, but eventually he gives it up for a lost cause. "Take-out?" he asks, glancing over his shoulder at Mal.
The look of disgust on Mal's face — a look so reminiscent of his expressions as a ferret that Charlie struggles not to laugh — is all the agreement he needs to search for a menu. He'll have to head out himself to pick up the food as no unauthorised personnel are allowed on the reserve, and somehow Charlie doesn't think emergency take-out will qualify, but even he doesn't want to try eating his disastrous attempt at dinner, so needs must.
.oOo.
When he returns, Mal is back in Charlie's room, sitting on the bed in borrowed clothing that's too short for him but also far too baggy, looking incredibly lost.
Charlie sets the takeout containers on the bed, not caring if they get grease or sauce on the sheets, and sits down next to Mal. Mal accepts the offered cutlery, but simply stares at the food, so Charlie dishes out two servings onto two paper plates.
Mal begins to eat, slowly at first, but then he starts to wolf down his food. Charlie wonders if giving him so much was a mistake — he looks painfully thin, and Charlie had heard somewhere that you weren't supposed to feed starving people a lot of food straight away, that you were supposed to ease them into it, but he isn't sure how that applies to someone who was up until recently a ferret.
"We'll figure it out," Charlie says the thought aloud, not quite meaning to but glad that he did. Mal looks up, his mouth crammed full of meat and rice, and gives a somewhat hesitant curry filled smile.
And somehow, Charlie is sure they'll be alright.
