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Charlie Weasley wakes up both too late and too early—five o'clock on New Year's Day morning—and doesn't bother trying to fall back asleep. The Burrow is quiet for once. There is no running, no shouting, no Celestia Warbeck's greatest hits playing on a magically amplified gramophone. George sleeps beside him, and his soft snores don't bother Charlie at all. They only magnify the quiet shroud around the rest of the house. For a while, he lays in his bed and soaks in the quiet. It's beautiful and unnatural and reminds him of home. At twenty seven years old, he's far outgrown the Burrow. He likes it there well enough, but his home, his true and chosen home, is a small little house in Romania. In the back of his mind, he calls it the Lair.
Eventually he gets up, throws on some casual clothes—reminds himself not to scoff at the lack of protection charms and the thin fabric,—and walks downstairs. Charlie silently thanks luck and magic for his absent mother.
"Who's taken my shoes?" runs through his head when he checks the shoe cabinet, so he takes his father's shoes instead. Arthur's shoes are wet from last night's rain, but they're soft and worn and Charlie glibly considers not returning them. He knows he will, but the thoughts ride him outside and onto the little dirt road that connects the houses in Ottery St. Catchpole.
Maybe if he steals his father's shoes, his mother won't expect him to return home. Maybe she won't ask him to move back to Britain, won't introduce him to this or that nice girl George went to school with, won't ask him for wives and children and a house with white picket fences far away from huge fire-breathing beasts. Or maybe he's still drunk off the beer Bill brought last night—or had that been this morning?
Eventually he gets closer and closer to the only other person on the road, a young woman in a pale yellow robe carrying a bucket of fireworks. He opens his mouth to say good morning, but she doesn't wait for his greeting.
"Chocolate heals nargle bites," she says and hands him a chocolate square from her pocket.
Charlie takes it. Their hands brush. Hers are so warm against his cold ones, and he thinks she must have just left her house. He wants to hold her hand, but thinks it wouldn't be wise to ask.
If she wants to speak in non sequitor, he might as well join in. "Your robes match your hair," he says and she blinks at him. Her eyes are too wide, too blue. He thinks of fresh deep forest air and the scales of a baby Hebridean Black. She stares at him for a while, until he thinks that perhaps he took her comment the wrong way, and he feels uncomfortable enough to eat a stranger's chocolate. And his mother had spent so long teaching him not to accept candy from strangers.
"You still have nargles in your hair," she says.
"Okay," he says. He's not sure what to say to her, really, and perhaps his mother is right: he gets too little normal human contact on the reserve. He hasn't met someone new in ages, but he feels like this is an odd beginning of an acquaintanceship. He looks away from her eyes and down at his hands. (Looked at in the right way, under the right light, the three deep horizontal wrinkles in Charlie's thumb resemble the skin on a dragon's neck. The hand's been burned and healed so many times, by sunburn and dragonburn, that his skin is just a little too red to be normal.) There are worse things than being obsessed with dragon, he decides.
Charlie starts walking back to the Burrow and can't say he's pleased when the woman follows him back. "You have a burn on your arm," she says, calm and airy and as though that was perfectly natural, don't you think?
"Got caught by a dragon," Charlie says.
"Tell me about it."
And so he does. He tells her the story with a with a happy smile. It should have been terrible—dragon burns don't heal easily, even with magic—but it was his favorite dragon that got him, and she apologized afterwards in her own dragon way. Charlie had photos of his flight on dragonback. Then the woman wants to hear more, and he obliges, and something tells him this is the beginning of a beautiful freindship. Maybe one day, he'll even find out what nargles are and how he should protect his hair from them.