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Charlie had always been unreachable for Ron - for all of them, really. He had always been different from the others, and when he had finished at Hogwarts, he had gone the farthest, away to the dragons. Ron knew that their mother couldn’t quite understand why her son had done that, why he had left them all to collect dragons’ eggs and shiny burn scars. Arthur understood his son a little better, and Charlie and Ginny had always been unusually close, but really, Charlie had been unreachable even before he’d gone away. To most people, anyways.
The second son is a myth. The second son is the usurper. The second son is the favored. The second son is the deceiver. The second son is best, and all praise him. The second son is always playing catch-up.
The second son in a family of seven is a first in his own right: the first to follow, the first to necessitate the plural. The second son is the first other son. The second son is the first to come after, and appended to the the name of the second son is the prefix and. The second son is the first to be born incomplete; the second son is a twin born alone. The second son is the first brother.
The myth of the second son is a story of power and birthright, of light and shadow. It is an epic. As far as second sons go, Charlie does not make for a likely epic.
As far as other things go, as far as life goes: well, that’s an entirely different sort of story.
For those of us who know what is to come, for those of us who know how this story will unfurl and become a myth of its own, it is improbable to imagine a time when the Burrow was not teeming. It is improbable to imagine the moment captured by this faded photograph, this one right here, taken when the roof was newly thatched, when the halls did not echo with the sounds of seven lives beginning, when the story was just a story of a man and a woman and their two sons and an already-overgrown vegetable patch yet-undisturbed by garden gnomes. The photograph is proof of something that shouldn’t even exist: a time before.
This is the photograph: a husband and a wife with their two sons, in front of a cottage which already sprawls skyward. The man is tall and thin and he’s got one arm around the woman. She is tired and smiling; she has just given birth to the tiny bundled thing resting in her arms. At their knees, a grinning boy jumps between the steps, back and forth, caught in a flash of joy. The baby sleeps; you can just barely make out the wrinkle of his closed eyes beneath a curl of ripe strawberry red hair.
This is the Weasleys on December 12, 1972.
As the decade passes, there will be more photographs, marking the family’s exponential expansion. After Bill and Charlie, there is Percy, and Fred and George, and Ron, and then there is little Ginevra, although if you called her that she’d hex you nine ways to Sunday, and this is the full picture: the seven Weasley children.
Eventually, time will take its toll on the Weasleys, as it does to all families. Photographs will begin to mark the advent of absences, and there will come a time when they are only all-together on holidays. Bill will go off to school, and seven will become six, and then Charlie, and then Percy, and then Fred and George, and Ron, and lastly, Ginny. And eventually, inevitably, the gaps between photographs will grow, and taking a new picture of the seven children, all at once, all-together, will become something that happens on Special Occasions, and these photographs will have a peculiar quality to them, a sense of pretense, of smiles frozen in place, of arms carved around waists, of permanence, of stagedness. The photographs are precious all the same, but time, time takes its toll.
There will be photographs that are like a near-finished puzzle missing just one piece; you can make out the picture all the same but something feels off. Bill is in Egypt, and he can’t make it back for Christmas for the first time; Charlie’s gone to Romania and he says he’ll come home for a few weeks in the summer but there’s a breach birth and it’s all hands on deck, so to speak. And with the older brothers off on their adventures, the integrity of the whole splinters just a little bit, and the younger Weasleys beg off coming home at the holidays, and they don’t mean anything by it, it’s entirely innocent, but there isn’t much point in standing on ceremony, anymore. As the years pass, life becomes too dark to be illuminated by the camera flash, too dangerous to chance the light, too rushed to spare the time.
Distance is not the only absence. Eventually, there will be betrayal, and that is a wound that is slow to heal. And one day, on a Saturday in May, there will be an ultimate kind of absence, the wound that never heals. No photograph will ever be complete after that day, and photographs of the seven Weasley children all-together will become precious and punishing to behold, all at once.
Charlie left as soon as he could, but he didn’t mean anything by it.
“You’re running away from them, and it isn’t right,” Bill said, his feet dangling off the edge of Charlie’s bed, into his nearly-full trunk. Just two years older than Charlie, just two years out of school, and already so sure of himself and of the world, so certain of what’s <i>right</i>. Charlie shook his head slightly, and tucked his potions kit into an empty corner of the trunk.
Bill was confident, in a way that made people say, “He’s a natural-born leader.” His sentences carried the weight of certainty, honey-coated in charm, and his sincerity sold it. Percy, who envied and admired Bill all at once, would often attempt to imitate his confident assurance; he never could manage it. Whenever Bill tried to play the part of wise older brother with Charlie, he was usually met with an eyebrow twitched in placid amusement.
Today, on the day that Charlie was leaving the Burrow, he didn’t find Bill quite so amusing.
“I know that it seems like you’ve got to go, like they wouldn’t understand, like they’re just going to start pressuring you to settle down and you’re never going to be able to explain it, but you know, when I talked to them about my situation, they were really cool about everything, and they just want - “
Charlie, who was crouched on his toes, gathering up errant socks and a tattered red-and-gold scarf, looked up to catch Bill’s eye.
Once Bill really got going, he was near unstoppable, and he had a tendency to jump from the abstract to the personal with surprising agility. One moment, you’d find yourself engaged in a conversation about goblin politics or how to make the perfect soufflé, and suddenly, you were disclosing your deepest anxieties and Bill was offering up sage, insightful advice on how to best tackle the problem at hand. By his seventh year, the professors treated Bill like an equal. He seemed to magnetically attract distinction and commendation without ever growing arrogant, and he was an especially big hit with the mothers of whoever he was dating at the moment.
Very few people could throw Bill off, but Charlie had always had a unique talent for stopping him in his tracks.
“Can you get your feet out of my trunk, Bill?” Charlie asked in slow, patient tones. Bill sighed, but he pulled his long legs onto the bedspread without complaint. Socks unceremoniously sprinkled over the rest of his possessions, Charlie closed the lid with a soft click.
“Look, I just don’t get it,” Bill said, by way of a summary.
“There’s nothing to get. It’s a job. Working with dragons, which is exactly what I wanted to do, and so I’m doing it. That’s it.”
“Mum’s in pieces, you know.”
“She gets worked up when one of us goes away for the weekend, and Merlin’s beard, you’ve seen her at the start of term. She’ll be fine.”
“It’s different. It’s Romania.
“Yeah, well - you went off to Egypt, so go on and tell me how it’s so different.
It wasn’t a question, and Bill didn’t have an answer.
It wasn’t a secret, but it wasn’t often discussed. Their family hadn’t been upset when Bill had come out as bisexual, but it simply wasn’t something anyone knew how to talk about, and Bill had been so very Bill about it. He hadn’t needed to talk about it. He hadn’t been unsure. He had just come home one summer, and when Molly asked him about that nice Ravenclaw girl he had been seeing in the fall, Bill had smiled easily and said that they weren’t going out anymore, but they were still friends. When Fred had nosily prodded Bill - bright, brilliant Bill, so handsome and so perfect, the apple of their mother’s eye, always taking pretty girls out to Hogsmeade - and asked, “So who’s on deck now, then?”, Bill had just laughed.
"His name’s Richard, he’s my year, in Hufflepuff.”
Molly had looked up quickly, carefully. “Oh, he is? Well, Bill, that’s wonderful, that’s lovely.”
And really, that had been about it. Because everything that Bill did was wonderful, just lovely, because he did it all calmly and confidently. A couple conversations with their parents to explain the finer points (“No, mum, not gay, I’m bisexual, so yes, I fancy just about everyone. Well, not everyone, but you know what I mean.”), and one brotherly but firm dismissal of a rather rude comment of Fred’s, and that was really that. Percy had gone a little tense at the news, but then, that was Percy - always twitching at any sign of difference. Arthur instantly warmed to the idea, especially when he learned that Richard’s father was a Muggle who owned an auto garage. Charlie had just shot Bill a wink over the dinner table, and while no one ever asked, everyone was pretty sure that Charlie had known for a while. And that was that.
Charlie had known for a while.
Bill is fourteen years old when he identifies that strange ballooning in his chest as the thing that older students called a crush. He has a crush on a Gryffindor girl with eyes the color of parchment, burnt at the edges, framed by full lashes that curled into commas, sweeping across rosewood cheeks. Her name is Salma, and she is two years older than Bill is, and she knows charms in three different languages, and he is entirely taken by the way her head tilts when she laughs. Salma is a prefect and she’s perfectly lovely to Bill, but he’s fourteen and she is sixteen-going-on-seventeen, and in another world, and so this is the one crush that Bill never acts upon.
He talks about it though, about the crush, with a boy in his dorm. Aeron, who curses in Welsh when he can’t get a potion just right, and flushes sunrise golden during Quidditch practices, whose peat green eyes roll dramatically whenever Bill sighs wistfully about the way Salma’s laugh peals over the table at breakfast.
Bill is still fourteen years old when he realizes that his ribs swell strangely whenever Aeron drives a bludger down the pitch with a resounding thwack, when he realizes that breath catches on the rapidly broadening ridges of Aeron’s shoulders. And one night, when the boys are stretched out by a dying fire in the common room, dragging a Transfiguration essay out of their quills, this is the first crush that Bill acts upon.
He’s seen something flicker in Aeron’s eyes, a soft shiver of sweet-grass in the marsh, a hidden depth revealed, and Bill acts without thinking, and leans forward. Their lips tangle and a pot of ink spills over their battered copies of Intermediate Transfiguration.
Bill dives into the fen of Aeron’s eyes again, and again, during the spring of their fourth year. It’s experimental, exploratory, hesitant: a kind of finding-out, rather than a falling-in. They spend occasional nights together, late nights by the fire, more as an afterthought than an intention. Bill continues to sigh wistfully at Salma’s laugh, and Aeron keeps rolling his eyes; they are still friends, they are just finding something out. And then, on the day before the final Hogsmeade trip of the year, Aeron tells Bill that he’s asked a girl to the tea shop in town, and while neither of them says it, they both know that they won’t be kissing by the fire anymore. This is the first time that Bill realizes you can want someone without wanting to keep them all to yourself. Five years later, Aeron marries that girl, a sweet-tempered Hufflepuff girl from Manchester who’s a wicked hand at Potions. Bill attends the wedding, grinning from ear-to-ear.
After a lazy summer afternoon of tossing a weathered old Quaffle back and forth, and flying through the trees beyond the Burrow, Bill tells Charlie about Salma, and about Aeron. The brothers are laying on the sun-stained ryegrass, watching flies flit idly by.
When Bill tells his family about Richard, over the dinner table, he is unconcerned, confident, calm. When Bill tells Charlie about his late-night fumblings with Aeron, and about the unrequited crush on Salma, his voice is thinner, slower. He knows that there is something secret in the telling of this story, something perhaps better left hidden in the fen.
Propped up on his elbows, eyes squinting against the sun’s last rays, Charlie’s eyebrows curve upward. His mouth curls into appraising consideration, as he interjects, “Aeron? You mean Maddox, the Beater?” But when Bill finishes his story, Charlie just drops down onto his back, and turns to grin at his older brother. “Cool. He’s got a swing like a dragon’s tail.
Bill can’t help but laugh. Because of course, his brother would make a comment about Aeron’s prowess on the pitch, without even raising any of the questions that Bill wasn’t quite ready to answer. That was just quintessentially Charlie.
Over the years, Bill was the object of many crushes, from boys and girls alike. Charlie remained his confidante, and when Amina - that nice Ravenclaw girl - broke up with Bill, he turned to his brother to commiserate.
They sat by the edge of the lake, watching the Giant Squid lash out against the water, and Bill sighed. “I just really liked her, you know? I think I might’ve even loved her, and it wasn’t just about the, you know, the physical stuff - you know, when it feels like something, I don’t know…more?”
This was a question, and Bill was looking for an answer, an affirmation, but Charlie just shrugged. Because that’s an answer he doesn’t really have, an answer he isn’t even really concerned with, and it’s hard to put that into words. But Bill kept waiting for a response, and he jabbed Charlie in the ribs when it didn’t seem forthcoming.
“No, to be honest, I don’t,” Charlie said, without a trace of confusion or puzzlement or concern.
That very trio of emotions cracked into Bill’s face. “What d’you mean, you ‘don’t’?”
Charlie shrugged again, his signature gesture of explanation when confronted with one of the many things that Bill cares about that just seem irrelevant: getting good grades in Arithmancy, being everyone’s favorite, kissing.
“I just don’t really think about that stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“You know,” Charlie sighed, exasperation coating his throat. “Dating, or whatever. Girls, boys, all of that. It’s just not that important to me.”
“But you’ve had crushes before, haven’t you?”
Charlie shrugged, again, much to Bill’s consternation. “Don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so? C’mon, you’d know!”
“Well, then I guess I haven’t.”
Bill snapped into mentor mode, into the measured tones of a future Head Boy. “Well, that’s perfectly normal. Loads of people don’t, when they’re your age. Maybe you’re just a late bloomer, or something.”
Charlie snorted. “A late bloomer? Merlin, you sound like Mum, have you been stealing The Witch’s Guide to Motherhood off her?”
“No, ‘course not,” Bill retorted in a rush, which just made Charlie snigger even more. “No! I’m just saying, it’s totally fine, you’ll find someone, when you’re ready…Stop laughing at me, you tosser, I’m trying to make you feel better!”
“I don’t feel bad, I’m just not interested in liking people, or whatever you call it - “
“Exactly!” Bill interrupted. “And I’m saying, that’s normal, it’ll happen eventually - "
Charlie cut in, and when he spoke, his voice was steady and slow, the kind you use with a child who can’t quite grasp some basic phenomenon. “You aren’t listening, I’m saying that I’m not interested. Like, I’m not interested at all, and I don’t really think I’m going to be. Ever.”
Worry sunk into the lines of Bill’s forehead. “You’re probably just too young, or something, to really get it.”
Charlie looked at his brother, one of those looks that leaves Bill uncharacteristically uncertain of what to say. “You were my age when you knew that you liked that prefect, what’s-her-name, and that bloke Maddox. How would you’ve felt if I’d said you were too young to really ‘get it,’ when you told me about them?”
Bill went quiet, tugging at his lower lip with his teeth.
“Bloody terrible,” he said, after a moment.
“It’s the same for me, then,” Charlie said. “Now, c’mon. I’ve got to get to practice, let’s head back, yeah?
Bill nodded, and they walked towards the castle, and talked about other things. Later that evening, Bill went to his trunk and pulled out a book he’d gotten at a rainbow-festooned Muggle shop in London, a sort of primer on sexuality; he’d learned the word bisexual from its pages, and he wondered if maybe, if maybe there was a word for Charlie between its covers. Bill needed there to be a word, because while Charlie seemed entirely nonplussed about this whole business, Bill couldn’t fathom what it meant to simply not be interested.
They are still in Charlie’s little room at the Burrow, on the night before Charlie left for Romania.
“Fine,” Bill said quietly, after a while. “I just…I feel like you’re leaving so you don’t have to explain who you are to them. So you don’t have to explain the kind of life you want. And I think they’d understand, and that you…you should. Explain it to them. Come out to them, whatever you want to call it."
“I’m not running away,” Charlie said in a perfectly still voice, and Bill is reminded that his brother has more in common with the dragons than you’d think.
See, at first glance, there’s nothing really remarkable about Charlie. He doesn’t blend into the crowd, but he doesn’t stand out, either. Bill has always struggled to describe his brother, never really found a one-word moniker to attribute to Charlie or a quick illustrative anecdote to offer.
He doesn’t have Ron’s aching, fearful thirst for approval; he doesn’t ignite into bright flashes of manic energy, like the twins. He never shared Percy’s faith in titles or authority, or his passion for distinction.
And Bill knows, perhaps better than anyone else, that he and Charlie aren’t very alike, either.
But it’s in these moments, when Charlie just looks at him, when he speaks in that steady voice, that Bill sees it. Unlike the rest of his brothers, Charlie is perfectly, completely, entirely self-contained. Ginny’s got that strength, too, but in her, it sparks like fire. Charlie is all burnished metal: forged in flame, but cool to the touch.
“I know you’re not.”
At Hogwarts, Charlie had been a good student, but selectively so. He hadn’t really cared much for the more impractical subjects, and he never saw the point in pursuing top marks just to say you’d gotten them. He worked diligently and steadily at the subjects he needed, acquiring skills and storing away knowledge for the future, for the day he left to work with the dragons. Ever since his third year at Hogwarts, since he’d begun talking to Hagrid about dragon eggs and hatchlings and the far-flung preserves where they roamed freely, Charlie had known what he wanted.
Charlie knew that the future he imagined for himself was very different from the lives his friends dreamt of. And he’d known that he was different, ever since that sun-soaked afternoon in the field, when Bill had talked about Aeron, and something about Bill’s story seemed entirely untranslatable.
There were times when it nagged at him: when the difference felt like a defect, when it felt like he was missing something important. The feeling always passed, but sometimes, it left the dull ghost of an ache behind.
Eventually, Charlie found the words for what he’d always known, and learned that there were others with stories like his. It was easier, in a sense, once he had a word to explain something that seemed inexplicable to so many: oh, yeah, I’m actually asexual. But he’d never really gone searching for language, or for community, and he always just thought of himself as simply not interested. Not interested in relationships, or sex, or the kind of love that people fall into.
That just wasn’t his story.
Bill understood it, to a point. But he always wanted Charlie to follow in his footsteps, and he never understood why Charlie wouldn’t. He never understood that, for Charlie, there was no secret. No unspoken truth, no conversation to be had. He never understood that, for Charlie, there was no reason to sit down at the dinner table and explain to their parents that he didn’t want the kind of life they had, the kind of life Bill wanted.
After all, Arthur and Molly seemed to understand their second-born son, in their own way. They never asked about relationships, about family, about settling down. Molly was forever after Charlie to visit more often, to move closer to home, to respond to letters before weeks passed. They seemed to understand that he was happy, and that was all that mattered.
He never planned to stay in Romania for so long. The years kept passing, and there was always something on the horizon, and he would think: I’ll stay until the next hatch, until we nurse this dragon back to health, until the spring, just for another year, or maybe two.
But one day, he realized that his life was here, and it was a good one. It was a full and rich life, in a tiny wizarding town in the wilds of Romania, where almost everyone worked at the preserve or in one of the little shops that dotted the main street, where he knew everyone and where he was known everywhere he went. And Charlie realized that he had fallen in love, in his kind of love, with this place, with the work, with the life he had built for himself, and he realized that while he would probably never go back, he hadn’t run away. And he didn’t have anything to explain.