"Ginny wanted me to give this to you for Gwen."
Bill reached out his left hand to take the small brown box with a sigh. "How was it after we had gone, Harry?"
Harry ran his heavily scarred hand shakily through his longish black hair. "Rotten, frankly."
Leaning back into his chair, Bill responded dully, "I'm sorry, Harry."
Harry shook his head. "Isn't your fault, Bill. I sided with you, which is why she was so furious. I told her that to continue this grudge is ridiculous when there is no mistake after the party how Gwen feels about you."
Bill reached across to set the box down on the desk to his right and said unhappily, "She is more furious with me than with Gwen, you know. I don't think that she ever was truly close to Gwen really. My wife isn't easy to understand, Harry, and with all of her eccentricities she can be incomprehensible. I wish it weren't making things difficult for you though, mate. The first months of marriage are hard enough."
Harry smiled crookedly as he looked beyond Bill with a strange gleam in his eyes. "Ginny and I have been…really, don't worry about us. She is wonderful, actually."
Bill nodded. "Yes, Ginny is something rare."
Harry turned an all too intelligent look on Bill and shook his head slightly. Harry watched sympathetically as Bill began searching through his pockets clumsily with his bandaged right hand. After a moment Harry held out a very battered silver case with the initials SB engraved on the lid and said, "Mongolian?"
Bill looked up and his body relaxed visibly with relief. "Thanks. Much better than the Turkish I've got hidden in this robe somewhere." Dropping two pinches of needle on the inside of the case lid, Bill commented, "Did you talk to Ron again?"
Harry grimaced. "Yes. He made an excellent point, too. We're hypocrites."
Bill agreed with a short laugh, "Dirty great hypocrites, yes, but I don't want Ron to start. It is a bad habit that becomes a dangerous crutch."
Harry shrugged, "Yes. I will not continue for much longer. But I need more time for now. When I start at Hogwarts I want to have given it up."
Bill nodded encouragingly. "It will be a new beginning for you, so perhaps you can make a clean break of several bad habits."
Harry looked up at Bill with surprise. Bill dryly answered Harry's unasked question. "I've known about it for almost a year, Harry. Ginny knows, too."
Harry scowled, but didn't comment. After several minutes of silence, Harry said, "It is still home, Bill, but it is like going home after your family has moved away. Everyone important is gone. Part of me doesn't want to return."
Bill considered Harry for a moment. "That was exactly how Remus saw it, Harry. Hogwarts was the first time he ever belonged, the first place he found friendship, but then he returned after losing everything. You'll have Ginny when she isn't off training and Ron is being posted to Hogsmeade. It won't be the same, but I think it will be good for you."
Harry repeated with surprise, "Ron will be in Hogsmeade? He thought he was being sent to Berkshire for his second year."
Bill smiled grimly, "No, Anders warned me that they've changed all that now that you've accepted the Defence position. They are posting two additional aurors to Hogsmeade each with a second year trainee and Ron will be one of them."
Harry opened his mouth for a moment and then closed it again. After a few seconds he said, "They are going to put Ron to defend me when he hasn't even finished his training? They can't do that to him, Bill."
Bill indicated with his hand that he was serious and then added, "I don't like it either. But they know that Ron would do anything to protect you and so many aurors were killed off or injured that they can't afford not to use trainees. You already know that the third years have been getting 'practical' experience in London this year."
Harry made a noise of disgust and slunk back into his chair. "Ginny is going to be furious when she hears that."
Bill sighed and commented sadly. "Mum will lose the plot entirely, I fear."
Both wizards were silent as they stared into the flames in the small fire grate for several minutes. Finally it was Harry who asked awkwardly, "How did things go for you after the party though, Bill?"
Bill looked at Harry with a mysterious smile, "Very, very well."
Harry turned back at the fire with a smirk. "Very unusual traditions, the Breton."
Bill laughed. "You are not joking. Do you know how many damping levels alone there were in that binding spell? In addition to the progressions and charismatic intervals."
Harry answered with a snort of laughter, "All I know is that Ron was completely asleep before it was done."
Bill grinned. "Not surprised. But it was worth it. Gwen wasn't expecting me to have prepared a binding spell for her and the look on her face when she realised what I was doing was more than worth the pain from performing it."
"You did look ill there at the end."
Bill's face twitched. "That was probably the Sanglante charm."
Harry blanched and changed the topic quickly, "She looked very happy, Bill. Ginny said to me that she didn't remember Gwen ever looking truly happy before."
Bill smiled softly, "She was. It wasn't her traditional wedding, but she got to wear those robes from her family and get fed the traditional sweet cake."
Harry began to speak, but stopped as he heard the door open behind him. Both Harry and Bill turned round as another wizard entered the small parlour. Harry immediately stood up and said, "Hello Master Drumbrogian."
Not rising from his seat, Bill nodded, "Drumbrogian."
The dark haired wizard with a very long black beard ignored Harry, but responded with a nod to Bill. "Weasley. Have you finished with the Rote Coverte?"
Bill looked over to the desk that he had been using, which was covered with a stack of books. "Not really. I will probably finish today though."
The wizard looked annoyed, but merely bowed and said, "Kindly leave it in my box, Weasley. I don't want Gurley to find it or I won't see it for weeks."
Bill's face showed a look of sudden interest. "Is Esmond Gurley actually here?"
Drumbrogian waved his hand dismissively, "Yes. The first time he has darkened the doors of Andromeda's new building and nothing but criticisms. Quite a clash of wands it was, he and Kent."
Bill stood up hastily, knocking his chair back into the desk causing Harry to stand up again in surprise. "Kent! That rubbishing little sod."
Drumbrogian peered with intense curiosity at Bill, who rushed past him and out of the room.
Looking along the dark, bare black walls of the long corridor, Bill lunged forward and made for a narrow green door at the far end. As soon as he reached it he yanked it open without knocking and saw Luther Kent lounging on a chair with a very large book in his lap. "What were you thinking? Is he still here?"
Luther Kent raised his eyebrows and stood up slowly from his chair. "Of course he's still here. He's got an escape for a few hours from that bitch you call a mother-in-law, hasn't he?"
Bill almost snarled, "Were you considering telling me he'd arrived?"
Luther's face lost some of its cool composure as he began to look genuinely surprised. "Calm down, Weasley. I sent an Aviatrice. You didn't get it?"
Bill stepped back somewhat and said simply, "No."
"You aren't untraceable at the moment by any chance?"
Bill muttered, "Bugger." Raising his wand to his neck and speaking under his breath, Bill then looked at Luther and apologised solemnly, "Sorry, Kent. I think I'm beginning to lose the plot myself. Where is Gurley?"
At that moment a small red object that looked somewhat like a paper hat with wings appeared floating in front of Bill. Bill reached out and unfolded it quickly. Immediately after Bill had read it, the crimson Aviatrice burst into flames and Bill said, "Right then. Is he in the senior common or in a private parlour?"
Luther said softly with a gesture, "Things must have got very bad, Weasley."
Bill did not reply, but asked more quietly, "Which room, Kent?"
"The red room. You will remember not to use permanent spells at least, Weasley?"
Bill turned on his heel and walked to the door saying sarcastically, "I haven't forgotten the society rules. More than one maimed body a week is frowned upon."
Luther Kent stared at Bill's retreating back and then, quite uncharacteristically, laughed loudly.
"Just look at that, Arthur."
Arthur Weasley dutifully lifted his head from the small circuit board that he had been happily poking with the tip of his wand and followed the direction of his wife's excited gaze across the garden. Seeing both his eldest son laughing so hard that he was lying back on the grass as he held his stomach and his son's tiny, dark haired wife, whowas seated next to Bill waving her arms manically as she talked, Arthur smiled broadly and replied, "Yes. For a while I didn't think we'd ever see him like that again."
Her pleasure diminishing somewhat as she heard her husband's response, Molly anxiously asked, "Do you think she is going to be able to make him happy, Arthur?"
Arthur was still watching his son, who had just reached up a hand and forcibly pulled his wife onto the grass with him, and did not respond for a moment as he considered his daughter-in-law's obviously contented reaction. "I don't know, Molly. Bill has done everything in his power to please her and I think that he has succeeded for now. Yet I don't really understand her myself, dear."
Molly waved her wand at the long wooden table that she had been arranging for dinner and said, "We didn't understand Fleur either, but he was terribly happy with her, wasn't he?"
Arthur grabbed his wife's hand as she fitfully straightened some cutlery and responded gently, "Yes, he was, Molly. But if he and Gwenaëlle can be happy together it will be very different from his marriage to Fleur. Bill isn't the same person that he was before."
Molly sniffed. "I know. My happy boy is gone, isn't he?"
"You cannot look at them out there right now and say that he isn't deeply happy with her, dear. But the feelings between Bill and Gwenaëlle are much deeper and more complicated than with Fleur. He's been through far too much to be capable of such a simple love any longer, Molly."
Molly sat down next to Arthur, who put his arm round his wife. "I don't know if I can bear to watch him continue to suffer, Arthur, and he will. Every time that they row over something he'll be in agony until she forgives him. I am afraid that she will continue to drive him on to become what she thinks he should be and Bill will lose himself for good."
Arthur looked down at Molly and smiled sadly, "Yes, their relationship will never be an easy one, my dear. But I don't think that we have to be afraid of Bill losing himself again. It did seem like that for those horrible first five months of the marriage. But if you watch her with him, Molly, you can tell how she feels about him."
Molly shook her head. "She doesn't talk about him with me. She doesn't seem to feel comfortable talking to me about almost anything, actually."
Arthur gently reminded her, "Unless you say something she thinks is somehow critical of Bill, dear."
Molly huffed, "All I said was that he ought to be more careful about how those nasty goblins perceive him at the bank and I thought she was going to hex my eyes out. You wouldn't think she would disagree, since she won't allow him to wear anything but formal robes to work."
Arthur laughed lightly, "My dear, she might agree with you completely, but just imagine what you would have done if my mother had said something critical of me."
Molly looked coyly at her husband. "I don't have to imagine, Arthur."
Arthur looked somewhat shocked. "I thought you and my mother got on well."
Molly smiled, "Very well, except when she said that you ought to have taken a more important position in the ministry. I don't think that she ever got that cooker to heat properly after that."
Blinking with surprise at his wife, Arthur said carefully, "No, my brothers and I had to buy her a new one. I wonder why Mother never mentioned to us why?"
Molly snorted. "She was not a stupid woman, Arthur."
"Who wasn't stupid, Mum?"
Molly turned round and saw her son George standing next to a tall, blond witch who was holding a large green pot. "George! And Patricia! You're early."
"I caught George sneaking into the roast twice, so I thought we'd better bring it by now else there wouldn't be any left."
Molly hurried forward to take the pot from her daughter-in-law and kissed her son on the cheek. "Remind me to show you the Hot Fingers charm. It is the only way that my food ever made it to the table without being half finished before dinner with six sons, dear."
Patricia Stimpson-Weasley laughed and looked at George, who appeared somewhat surprised. "You will definitely have to tell me about that one, especially if the newest Weasley is going to be anything like his father."
Molly shook her head as she plopped the pot down on her cooker and lifted the lid. "They all are. Arthur and his brothers were equally bad. But you might be lucky, Patricia. Your family has plenty of daughters."
Patricia returned her mother-in-law's smile and looked at George. "That would be a blessing, wouldn't it?"
George shrugged, "Well we'll find out in four months. Who else is coming? Is Angie here yet?"
Molly looked towards the door to the garden. "No, I don't think that Angie is going to be coming much more, George. She has been seeing Roger Davies for a few months now, hasn't she? We can't expect her to stay a Weasley forever."
George seemed about to say something, which promised to be somewhat ugly, but Patricia interceded. "I think that Bill and his wife are here though, George."
George looked at Patricia, who fixed a very powerful look on her husband, and then he said only, "Davies. Fred would have…I'm going to go find Bill, Patty, are you coming?"
Patricia nodded and looked quickly at Molly before she let George wrap an arm round her to lead her outside.
As the door to the garden slammed shut behind George and his wife, the distinct sound of a floo arrival could be heard in the kitchen grate. Arthur turned away from looking with concern at his wife, and smiled as he saw that the three remaining members of his family had arrived.
Harry Potter, who had Ginny's hand held tightly in his own, said cheerfully, "Hello, Mr Weasley. Hi Mrs Weasley. We've collected Ron for you."
Ron mumbled under his breath, "I'm not a parcel, you thickhead," before submitting to his mother's hug.
