I know no one pays attention to Charlie Weasley’s date of birth and this is an incredibly nitpicky timeline complaint, but according to the wiki, Charlie graduated Hogwarts in June of 1991. (Harry and Ron show up for their first year of Hogwarts in September of 1991.)
I thought it was implied (or perhaps outright stated) that the Gryffindor Quidditch team was dismal the year before Harry became Seeker? McGonagall says outright to Wood that they were flattened in their last match with Slytherin and that she couldn’t look Snape in the eye for weeks.
So… did Charlie not play Quidditch in his last year? Did he get injured in Care of Magical Creatures class or something? McGonagall and Wood are absolutely the sort to get overly dramatic about the state of the Gryffindor Quidditch team due to one match where Charlie Weasley couldn’t make it (maybe he had a job interview that weekend), but it really makes more sense to me if Charlie was just one year older and Gryffindor went through a “Great Year of Shame”.
I think for my upcoming fic, it’s either going to be “universe alteration: Charlie Weasley is one year older” or I’m going to have to make sure that Minerva McGonagall and Oliver Wood take every opportunity to passive-aggressively complain about Charlie Weasley’s “Betrayal” of the Gryffindor Team to Ron.
(Ron: “???He was in the hospital???”)
Oliver Wood, when Harry starts ending up in the Hospital Wing due to his adventures, wide-eyed with horror: “Oh, no. It’s happening again.”
I just assumed that Charlie pulled a F&G and left after getting his OWLs. Maybe he had a six year, maybe not, but that he didn’t do seventh or bother with NEWTs at all. It’s not like we know what the required qualifications are at the dragon reserve.
Oliver Wood and Professor McGonagall being Gryffindover Dramatic about missing one match is amazing and perfect, though.
Oh, I like that idea. I could totally see Charlie speedrunning his last couple years at Hogwarts, taking his NEWTs at the end of his sixth, then running away to Romania now that he’s seventeen and officially An Adult.
I figure Molly would be out for blood if Charlie just ditched his NEWTs altogether, but Charlie countered that by getting the absolute minimum number of NEWTs (he did well, though) needed for his job (or to later get promoted at the reserve into a job that did require qualifications) and to graduate Hogwarts. (I don’t know how wizards do post-secondary education and the field of magizoology is obvious a hot mess, but Charlie is the Weasley I can most see doing an apprenticeship or some magical university / college program.)
So, Molly is… proud… of him, but I imagine Charlie also countered that by just straight-up not telling anyone he was going to pull this. Like, he studied himself (using Bill’s books), he signed up for the exams himself (maybe Bill also took a NEWT early), and then he went out and got the job himself. (Initially failing to get his Apparition License was a bit of a setback, but it was a good diversion for his family while he was stressing out over his NEWTs.)
Like, no one really had time to be proud of Charlie? Because, like, he just dropped it all on them and then left for his New Adult Job a week later (max).
(Charlie, I imagine, is a very steady dude, which lulls people into a sense of complacency, but he’s interspersed with Big Exciting Moments. Like when he was eight, he went out and caught a toad, put the toad on a chicken’s egg, took careful notes, and almost succeeded in making a basilisk. Every once a while the older Weasleys are still overcome with the urge to “Check On What Charlie Is Doing Now”, but when they checked on him over the past year, they mistakenly passed it off as “oh, just school stress” and didn’t look closer.)
“I wanted it to be a surprise,” Charlie says, reassuring, in the same not-actually-reassuring way he talks about Quidditch accidents or COMC projects. “What if I’d failed? That would have been embarrassing. Don’t worry, Mum, I know this guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who works at the reserve, and he says he’s got a spare couch for me to live on. Everything’s taken care of.”
Fred and George were very impressed. Ron and Ginny were too young to really understand or care, save that they were losing their big brother. Percy was also vaguely impressed (Percy is the guy who would go on to take 12 OWLs, he thinks Charlie could have done better) but mostly distraught, because Charlie ditching 7th year leaves Percy alone with Fred and George at Hogwarts. (So, when it comes down to who feels more Betrayed by Charlie Weasley, between Percy and Oliver, it honestly just depends on what happened that day (what F&G did that day, actually, since Percy and Oliver both deal with them).)
Molly wrote Bill like, “DID YOU KNOW?!” To which Bill was like, “No??? But good for him. It sounds like he’s got everything taken care of.” (Bill doesn’t touch on how that Charlie doesn’t speak Romanian or is moving out to live on some random person’s couch, because he’s not going to bat that hard for his little brother.) “Honestly, Mum, it could have been way worse.”
and it’s… fine. The prince is great! They’re in love, he’s very sweet and passionate, writing her poems and songs, giving her anything she wants. The time she spends with her husband is great.
but cinderella is not royalty, her family was noble but she never spent time in those circles. She’s used to being busy, she’s used to cooking and cleaning and mending. There are hours, days, where she has nothing to do.
time passes. cinderella learns the fancy lady type of needlework. Learns to ride horses. Reads a lot.
as is normal for royalty at the time, they travel and are hosted by nobles or stay at castles owned by the king. But even that variety begins to become routine. The prince is distracted, there’s a lot of young women living and working on their route. Daughters of nobles. Younger and prettier with soft hands that have never done a day’s work.
cinderella needs something to spend her time on, and there’s a part of her thinking a couple-only trip might get her husband’s attention again, so she suggests making an old castle that’s fallen into disrepair their “project.” It was built in the time when castles were made to be defensible, so it’s quite sturdy, but it’s overgrown and secluded. The prince doesn’t know why his family stopped living there either. A hundred years ago it was their summer home.
so they go. And they work. And for a while it’s great! But when they leave for winter cinderella’s husband forgets her once again. cinderella resolves to make the best of her life and stop worrying about a man who has gotten what he wanted from her.
summer comes again and this time cinderella goes alone to the old castle (minus staff, of course, but cinderella manages to narrow it down to only repair workers and one maid). She can cook and clean and mend again, but this time it’s her own choice. She is happy.
this summer they make more progress on repairs. The workers say that most of it can be salvaged, except one tower that’s been completely overgrown with vines and briars. It will have to come down, eventually, but for now it can be safely ignored.
cinderella has more free time now. The old castle has a surprisingly untouched library, though time and moisture have damaged many of the books. Behind a collection of greek poetry cinderella finds an old diary. Very old, in fact, at least a hundred years. It’s rude to read a diary, of course, but whoever wrote this is long dead, and cinderella is bored, so…
from the description of activities the author looks to have been nobility. Maybe even a princess. She’s sensitive and sweet and smarter than she seems to realize. If circumstances had been different cinderella wishes they could have been friends…
after the summer ends cinderella returns to her husband. He’s spending a lot of time with a young musician and cinderella can’t even work up the energy to care. She does some research about the castle and the family she’s married into, finds out the name of the princess who wrote the diary.
aurora. Cursed and forgotten. She died young, they say, in a plague that also took out the castle staff and her own parents. Luckily they avoided a succession crisis, but not so lucky for the dead.
time passes. cinderella goes to the old castle again and again, even out of season. Soon enough all that remains to be done is the old tower, and the builders say they should tear it down and fill the gaps before it gets cold.
one night cinderella is restless. The princess from the diary had been fond of that tower, and cinderella is far more attached to a dead woman than she ought to be. She gets out of bed, reads by candlelight, and finally goes to walk the empty halls.
she finds herself going to the tower. Pushing past the vines that don’t seem so troublesome really. They almost part before her. The stairs are perfectly intact, the door at the top is already cracked open. As if she should have done this years ago, cinderella steps into aurora’s bedroom.
she’s as beautiful as the stories say. And sitting under her hands, crossed across her stomach as it rises and falls, is a book of greek poetry.
years later, people will tell the story of cinderella as a cautionary one. Don’t seek above your station. Don’t marry for prestige. After all, a girl who grew up as a servant once married the crown prince, and disappeared after only three years. She ran away, they say, she couldn’t handle the lifestyle.
two old women who run a bookshop together agree with the lesson. Marrying for the wrong reasons never ends well. It’s best to wait for someone you have things in common with, shared interests.
or, failing that, the more linguistic of the two says, wait a decade or ten for someone to fall in love with you from your diary.
her partner laughs and hits her with the socks she is mending.
Slightly belated now, but I decided to draw a little something for September first, as once again the Hogwarts Express is leaving to take Students home to school.
I’m turning the clock back a little on dogfather with this one. This is set about three years before Padfoot follows Harry home, and is meant to be more traditionally story-shaped. It’s provisionally titled “the black dog.”
I’m not sure if I’m going to post any more of it before it’s done, but I have the beginning and I also have no chill so here it is so far:
Warnings: Dudes. Do not read this if you love Jedi Apprentice Qui-Gon. It’s not explicitly mean, not like Catch the Lightening, but it’s not nice.
– – – – – – – – – – – –
The Force is subtle. The Force is calm. The Force is the quiet background hum of a Jedi’s life.
So when the Force practically screams LEFT at a young knight who’s never had a particularly strong connection to premonition before, he listens, turning left instead of right.
That’s the long way around, looping around the harbor district, and he almost second guesses himself and turns around – time is of the essence, dripping through his fingers like water as he races to stop the attack on the Prime Minister. But he is a Jedi. The Force is his life, and he can’t ignore that shout, grating against his senses, demanding to be heard.
blackash26 