Chapter Text
Charlie Weasley always defied expectations.
He wasn’t the daughter his mother expected; he wasn’t the son who would follow his father to the Ministry. His parents were never disappointed in him, but they were a little bit confused by his decisions. That was especially true when he was at Hogwarts and doing so well at Quidditch some professional scouts came to see him play. “You could play for England, Charlie,” they said. “You could name your price.”
But Charlie had a different path in mind. He didn’t want to work in England, in Quidditch or anything else. He didn’t want to marry Nymphadora Tonks (to her great relief), even though they did really well together and got into scrapes and promised to take care of each other’s children. No, he wanted to get far away from a world where he didn’t understand himself.
He’d spent every moment he wasn’t in class or at the Quidditch Pitch with Hagrid, running after the groundskeeper and hearing about everything to do with animals. The best day of his life was his sixteenth birthday, when Hagrid, beaming with delight and awe, invited him to his hut, because Newt Scamander had come to visit the Forbidden Forest’s unicorn population. Charlie hung on the naturalist’s every word, and walked away late at night with a signed copy of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and an invitation to Romania the next summer to see a dragon preserve.
The first time Charlie stepped through the gates and saw a Chinese Fireball playfully wrestling a Welsh Green, he knew he’d come home at last.
Here nobody cared that he was a Weasley, only that he loved his family. Nobody cared that he was choosing a faraway home, they just helped him through the homesickness. Nobody cared that he was running to find himself, only gave him support as he worked it out.
The first time Charlie heard the word asexual, he understood everything.
He wrote long, cheerful letters home, one for every sibling. Sometimes Fred and George would try to trick him, responding to each other’s letters, but Charlie always knew.
After he met Harry Potter, Harry Potter who didn’t attack the mother dragon, just tricked her (which kept her pretty calm), Charlie wondered if he should write to him too. Ron’s letters were full of him, and all his other siblings talked about him too. Fred was particularly proud of the ‘specky scrawny git’, and encouraged Charlie to write.
But Voldemort returned, and Charlie got his first letter from Albus Dumbledore, suggesting that Harry needed to stay focused on survival. Charlie didn’t agree, but when his mother wrote in code to promise that Harry was being looked after, he swallowed his concerns.
Then the war came, and Charlie wasn’t eight this time, and he knew everything that was going on. He wanted to come home now, wanted to protect his family, but there was no way to protect them all. The Weasleys were scattered to the winds, fighting battles on their own, and it would be a miracle if the home fire would keep burning. All he could do was work internationally, try to make sure people who escaped found safe places, and pray.
Dora Tonks-Lupin was the only one he knew was safe. They couldn’t send owls, but the Romanian wizards had given Charlie a tablet he could write on and the person who had the other tablet could see it years ago as a gift, and Dora still had it. (Years later, his niece Roxanne would explain that this was largely how email worked).
Dora was pregnant—imagine it, pregnant. Charlie worried for her, his Hufflepuff friend who loved so strongly. She wrote daily, talking about all the bits and pieces of pregnancy and news. And when Charlie found out that the baby was due in April, he started making plans to return.
He got back in May, bringing with him as many witches and wizards as he could find to fight Voldemort. Charlie wanted to rush to Dora’s side, to see her little son, but there was no time. The moment they landed, they got word that a battle was starting at Hogwarts.
When Charlie and his forces landed at the edge of the castle grounds, Slughorn was there to meet them. He couldn’t tell them much; they had to focus on getting through the wards. But his eyes were heavy with grief.
Then they got in, and it was a blur of movement and fighting, and Charlie tried to count red heads—he saw his mother kill Bellatrix Lestrange—and then Harry was there, and Voldemort was gone.
And for one moment, Charlie was swept up in the joy of that moment, of seeing Voldemort dead and gone, and his parents were there, and his brothers and his baby sister, all grown up now, and Harry and Hermione…
And then Charlie counted heads. He took one look at George, and he knew.
He didn’t cry when he saw Fred, not at first. His little brother smiled in death, just like he used to smile in his sleep. But Fred’s hand was cold, and he didn’t speak when George fell silent.
Charlie turned to look around, wanting to get all the heartache over at once, to see them all. And his tear-blurred eyes fell on Tonks and Lupin, lying hand in hand not far away.
Charlie was the one who found out how they were killed, who had done it. He kept asking until he found out that Dolohov took Remus Lupin out at last. And Dora had found him, had crouched over him to protect his body from Fenrir Greyback, and she hadn’t seen Bellatrix Lestrange.
Charlie didn’t stay with his family that night. He sat in the Great Hall until sunset, holding George tight, watching Fred be still, so still, for the first time. But after sunset, he stood.
“I’ll be back,” he promised. And he left.
He found his way to Andromeda Tonks’ house, and heard the wailing of a baby. Teddy cried when Charlie held him, but Charlie didn’t mind; he was crying too. He sat with Andromeda Tonks in a house gone quiet without Ted and Dora, rocking an infant orphan.
Charlie found out that Harry was Teddy’s other godfather, and accepted that. His path was still dragons, and he couldn’t take the child so far away from Andromeda; it would kill her. But Teddy became another correspondent, even when the child was far too little to read. It didn’t matter—Charlie loved writing letters, and he’d lost a few of his addressees.
There were soon more, little babies Charlie saw four or five times a year at first, but he wrote to them all, once a week. It soon took up two nights a week, writing these letters, but it was how he stayed connected to his family.
Not all of his nieces and nephews wrote back as regularly, and some rarely wrote at all. But Charlie did have his constants—James, Molly, Rose, Teddy, and Lou. And he got one letter from each of his niblings about some secret, something they were confused about that they didn’t—or couldn’t—tell their family in Britain. Charlie soothed James and Rose about asexuality, guarded Molly’s girlfriend’s prophecy, promised that Lou could be perfectly happy without romantic love, wrote to Teddy or Maia, depending on how the letter was signed. For the others he encouraged schemes, supported dreams, offered advice and comfort, and promised each and every one of them that no matter what, Uncle Charlie was only a Portkey away.
And the day that Hermione wrote to ask if Hugo and his friend could come and see the dragons, even if his friend Ricky was a Muggle, Charlie took a Portkey immediately.
All his life he’d wanted to share dragons with his family, to find someone else whose heart beat for them the way his did. And he had a feeling from the way Hermione wrote that this kid was going to be family sooner or later.