Chapter 5: Hogsmeade

Tonks and Remus live in a cozy, though shabby, bungalow in the village of Hogsmeade. Three days after Neville and Susan's wedding, the moon is full and Remus is gone. Charlie goes to Hogsmeade for tea with Tonks and Stella. He is curious to see how she's managing. Tonks is as individual and independent as she always was, with curious oceans of reserve underlying her carefree manner. She is not the sort to mind a little time each month alone. But the strain, he can see, is very great. She is always on tenterhooks at the full moon.

Most of the time, Tonks is an Auror, even if she gets stuck with deskwork more than suits her taste. Remus, most of the time, is a stay-at-home father. The Werewolf Regulatory Act is still in effect, and there isn't much else he can do. He is writing a book about dark creatures. He is romping happily amid scrolls of parchment on redcaps and hinkypunks. He has so far avoided writing a line about werewolves.

In the bungalow's cramped kitchen, Tonks prepares tea with her usual lack of finesse. Motherhood has not made her domestic. After the kitchen floor floods twice, Tonks and Stella retreat to the living room while Charlie boils the kettle and steeps the leaves. He carries the tea tray into the front room and sets it on the coffee table. Tonks grins wickedly and says, "Those Romanian witches don't know what they're missing."

Bemused, Charlie shakes his head. He pours out as Stella snatches the tube of digestive biscuits and starts rolling it around on the floor.

"I thought you were getting along with Katie well, at the wedding," says Tonks, plonking herself down on the carpet.

Charlie thinks for a minute. He says, "She—she's nice."

"Just nice?"

"I didn't recognize her. She knew who I was, right enough."

"That doesn't sound like an irreparable mistake."

"I probably met her at some point, when we were kids," says Charlie regretfully. "And I did remember the name. Eventually. After I thought about it. There were three girls on the Gryffindor team with Fred and George. They all played Chaser. The name that stuck in my mind was Angelina—she's the one Fred used to talk about. But he did mention Katie, once or twice."

"I don't think Katie ever made quite as much of an impression on Fred as she seems to have made on you."

"I made a jolly bad impression on her."

"How do you know that?"

He shrugs. Tonks feeds half a chocolate digestive biscuit to Stella. Charlie looks at the pair of them, momentarily green with envy, and looks away.

"Her parents live in the south of England," says Tonks, practically. "Not far from the Burrow. You could Floo her."

To Tonks this seems simple. Not to Charlie. To Charlie, flooing Katie Bell seems far more complex and problematic than asking for a date with a Croatian witch who doesn't know English or German or Romanian or any of the other tongues that Charlie has more or less learned to speak, haltingly and ungrammatically, on the dragon reservation. Katie Bell is English, and she knows most of his family. She's known them for years. Katie Bell plays Quidditch, and Quidditch circles are small. Katie Bell works in hippogriffs, for heaven's sake, and he'll probably end up teamed with her next time he gets stuck hosting a petting zoo.

This would have been so much easier if he had met her years ago. If he'd been in England, hanging around Hogwarts, talking to his siblings, watching Quidditch. If he hadn't been off in Romania, chasing dragons.

He stutters out a question. "Do you—well—don't you think I'm—er—maybe a bit old for her?"

Tonks laughs. "Yeah," she says, "I've heard that one before. Correct me if I'm wrong, Charlie, but you're still a couple years shy of thirty. You're not too old for anyone who's grown-up." She half-heartedly wipes Stella's face, which is artistically smeared with chocolate. Like father, like daughter. "Charlie, why don't you tell me what you're really thinking?"

He looks perplexed.

"Well," says Tonks, "it would save time." Still he doesn't answer. She hands him Stella and carries the teacups to the kitchen. Charlie watches her, dandling Stella on his lap. She is walking oddly, her weight thrown backwards. She is already pregnant again. He didn't see it at the wedding, but now, watching her from behind, he can see it. There will be another child by Christmas.

He had a crush on her once, the year he was fourteen. She used to morph herself for Quidditch matches: red hair, whiskers, and tufted cat's ears when she was cheering Gryffindor; blue hair, beak, and talons when she was cheering Ravenclaw; canary blonde and a badger's snout when she was cheering Hufflepuff. Most of the kids thought she was nuts, but Charlie thought she was funny, and he had a tongue-tied crush on her for six months or so. Later, when they were almost grown-up, they got to be friends.

Now she is married. Now she has a child a year old, and another on the way. Now she's an Auror. Now she's a veteran of a dazzlingly grim war that will go down in the history books to be memorized and dissected and agonized over by generations of future students of Professor Binns, while Charlie, who is three months her senior, is still chasing dragons in Romania. And wondering what happened to the last nine years.

"She was in the war, wasn't she?" says Charlie when Tonks comes back.

Tonks looks startled. For her, this is a non sequitur. Tonks didn't realize they were still having a conversation about Katie. But she says, "Yes, since you ask, yes, I think she was. I don't know much about it, but she was around Hogwarts sometimes, doing errands for Minerva McGonagall. She was still in school when the war started, of course. I'm talking mainly about the last year."

Charlie is silent. Stella, sensing the tension, crumbles a digestive biscuit into his lap.

Tonks says quietly, "I don't know what she was doing, exactly. Something with hippogriffs, but it may have been something more. She was in St. Mungo's for weeks, just before the war ended. I don't know why."

They are silent for a few moments. Tonks says softly, apologetically, "I don't know how she got the scar."

"She fell on the blade of a sword," says Charlie.

Tonks looks at him. Stella fusses. Tonks picks her up and arranges her on her lap and looks at him. She says softly, almost inaudibly, "You got a long way, didn't you, in one afternoon."