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The frost clung stubbornly to the grass that afternoon as Charlie Weasley finished up his lecture for the Dragonology elective at Hogwarts.
As soon as he finished his last word the seventh year students had stuffed their supplies into their schoolbags and rushed to gather at the edge of the enclosure. He let them observe for a few moments while he prepared lunch for the hatchlings.
He strode across the grounds with a crate of preserved meat slung over one shoulder and a hessian bag of hearth-warmed stones in his fist. The November air nipped at his ears but did little to cool the pulse of excitement running through him.
Ten hatchlings waited in the paddock.
Ten dragon hatchlings.
On Hogwarts soil.
Safely.
Legally.
Well, mostly legally.
As far as the Headmistress was concerned.
Students stood along the fence as he returned, murmuring with that mix of awe and nerves he lived for. The paddock shimmered faintly under dozens of layered wards; some for warming, a few for protection, and several for containment, each one humming its own tune.
Charlie flicked his wand, reinforcing the perimeter, and stepped through the gate.
The dragons greeted him in their usual fashion: a chorus of chirps, shrill screeches, and one ambitious attempt at a roar from the red hatchling that thought itself larger than it was.
Charlie moved among them with practised ease, distributing the warmed stones first. The babies clustered greedily around the heat, wings twitching.
He felt lighter here, steadier. The world narrowed to scale and breath and instinct. No politics. No war scars hiding beneath shirtsleeves.
Only creatures that wanted to grow.
His hand paused at the last pen.
The purple hatchling blinked up at him, enormous eyes glinting like polished obsidian. She had hatched from a standard Hebridean Black egg, but instead of an onyx body and amethyst eyes she’d come out…well. Not that.
Instead she was an extremely rare mutation for her breed, the colours reversed as if the egg had decided on a whim to reinvent itself.
She was the most haunting shade of dark violet.
She’d grown again overnight, though he doubted the other professors would believe him when he told them. She was sharper than the rest, quicker, too aware for a days-old dragon.
Her scales shimmered with a metallic lilac sheen that deepened along her spine.
“Morning, trouble,” Charlie murmured.
She trilled, a soft, musical sound none of the other hatchlings ever made for anyone. Not even him.
The students behind the fence whispered excitedly.
Charlie set down her warmed stones, then her portion of meat, and she nudged his palm as if claiming his attention. He laughed under his breath and scratched gently between the ridges of her crown.
“You’re going to be impossible when you’re older, you know that?”
A ripple ran along the fence, wool robes brushing and boots shifting over frost.
A Gryffindor boy on the other side of the fence raised his hand. “Professor Weasley, sir? Why is she the only purple one?”
Charlie straightened. “Because she’s rare. Incredibly rare. There are only a handful of purple dragons recorded in Britain in the last seven centuries.”
“Does she have a name?” a Ravenclaw girl asked.
The question stirred something in him he tried not to examine too closely. He’d let them name the other nine, of course. But this one he was especially fond of.
He cleared his throat. “Her name’s Pansy.”
A ripple of reactions followed. Surprised laughter. Head tilts. A few of the girls cooing through the posts before they all turned to head back to the castle for lunch.
Charlie ignored them all. He turned back to the hatchling as she blinked serenely at him, completely unaware that her name belonged to a ghost from his past.
Someone he hadn’t thought about in years.
Or rather, someone he’d pretended not to think about.
He set another stone near her tail. “Eat slowly,” he warned her, “or you’ll upset your stomach.”
She ignored him and tore straight into her lunch.
Footsteps crunched over frost behind him. Draco Malfoy appeared at his side, hands in his pockets, expression irritatingly knowing. Charlie braced himself for the inquisition he felt was coming.
“Did I hear one of my Slytherin students call that dragon my best friend’s name?” Draco asked, though it was certainly rhetorical if his smug look gave any indication.
“It suited her,” Charlie replied, a little too quickly.
Draco studied the hatchling, then him. “Interesting choice, don't you think?”
“Drop it, Malfoy.”
“Oh, I will.” Draco smiled like someone who absolutely would not drop it. “But she’s going to want to know.”
Charlie froze. “Who? The dragon?”
“Pansy, obviously.”
“You can’t be serious. She’ll hardly care.”
Draco tapped his pale fingers to his chin, “I wouldn’t be so sure…”
Charlie groaned. “Don’t you dare tell her.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Weasley.”
Charlie squared his shoulders, “I mean it, Draco. Don’t.”
Draco only patted his shoulder and walked off, humming.
Charlie watched him go, ready to chase after him and revoke any and all visiting privileges to he dragons, but Pansy the hatchling trilled again, demanding his immediate attention. He crouched beside her instead, rubbing her warm scales.
“You,” he muttered, “are going to cause me so much trouble, same as your namesake.”
Frost cracked under his boots as Pansy nudged his hand again, more insistent this time. He ran his gloved hand down the scales of her back and she gave a triumphant chirrup, puffing out a curl of warm smoke.
Something she shouldn’t be able to do at only six days old.
Charlie couldn’t help laughing.
Trouble indeed.
______________
The music had been too loud, the lights too bright, the air too warm.
The Emerald Cauldron pulsed with bodies and colour, the kind of place where no one cared about the war or who you’d lost to it. Charlie had pushed through the door that night and felt something in him loosen, just a little, like the world finally stopped pressing on his ribs.
He’d barely made it three steps in when he saw her.
Raven hair lit violet under the shifting lamps. Sharp mouth painted a wicked plum. A dress the exact shade of a bruise you didn’t mind earning. She leaned against the bar like she owned it, like she owned the whole damned Alley. Her long legs crossed, fingers wrapped lazily around a glass of something she didn’t even seem interested in drinking.
She looked at him once, slow and assessing, and then her lips curled into a wicked smirk.
“Well,” she’d said, her husky voice sending heat skittering down his spine. “Someone’s let a Weasley loose unsupervised.”
He stopped dead. She smirked harder.
“And those boots,” she continued, flicking her gaze down and back up with surgical precision, “are a cry for help.”
A laugh punched out of him before he could stop it. “You always open conversations with insults?”
“Only with men whose outfits offend me.” She lifted her glass in a mock salute, holding her other hand out to him. “I’m Pansy Parkinson, and… which Weasley are you? I didn’t know there was a hot one.”
He should have walked away. He knew that even then.
But then she tipped her chin in challenge, and he was a dragon tamer. He couldn’t have resisted if he tried. He slipped his hand into hers and she tugged him closer, leaning her hip against the bar.
He ordered her a fresh drink before she could mock his taste.
They traded barbs like they were duelling to the death.
She rolled her eyes, laughed at him, shoved his shoulder when he said something cheeky. And then, Merlin help him, she smiled at him. Properly. Genuinely. Like she was surprised to find herself doing it.
“Come on,” she said, grabbing his wrist with fingers cool from her glass, “If you’re going to keep wearing that hideous shirt, the least you can do is prove you can move in it.”
She pulled him into the crush of bodies, and the music swallowed them whole.
He remembered her scent—something dark and expensive. He remembered the way she looped her arms around his neck like she’d decided she belonged there. He remembered the scrape of her nails when he teased her back.
She kissed like she fought: decisive, unapologetic, hungry.
Then she whispered against his mouth, “Don’t think. Just feel.”
He hadn’t realised how long it had been since he felt anything properly.
Later, in his rented room above the Apothecary, her fingers in his hair, her laugh warm against his throat, the way she pushed him back onto the bed like she’d been waiting her whole life to ruin him.
She’d traced a scar on his ribs.
“Dragon?”
He’d nodded, breathless. She kissed it approvingly.
Her lips against his skin were the closest he’d ever been to nirvana.
He remembered thinking, in a moment of absolute idiocy, I could fall for her.
And then—
Morning light. A cold pillow. Empty sheets rumpled and cold beside him.
No note.
No trace except the ghost of her clove and cinnamon perfume on his shirt.
He sent one owl.
Then another.
Then one more, written and rewritten three times before he sent it.
No answer.
Not even a returned envelope so he knew she’d read them.
He told himself it didn’t matter.
He told himself he was an idiot.
He told himself to forget her.
He never quite managed.
A rustle of straw, a flash of lilac scale, a sharp, slightly annoyed trill—
Charlie inhaled and blinked hard, the memory snapping like a rogue Bludger.
Cold air in his lungs. Frost at his boots.
The purple hatchling blinked at him, head cocked, utterly innocent.
Charlie scrubbed a hand over his face.
“Bloody hell,” he muttered to no one at all.
___________
The lesson should have been simple.
Final class of the term. A brisk review of hatchling behaviour, a reminder not to feed the dragons mince pies over the holidays, and a demonstration of ward maintenance for the students staying behind over the holiday. Charlie had his elective gathered in a semi-circle, all of them stamping their feet against the frost while ten dragons chirped and shuffled behind him.
“—and that,” Charlie was saying, “is why you never, under any circumstances, stick your arm through the wards unless you want to spend your Christmas explaining to Madam Pomfrey how you lost a hand—”
The wards chimed.
Not the soft hum of containment being tested by eager students.
No — this was sharper, intentional.
Charlie frowned.
And then, before he could lift his wand—
The wards unravelled themselves just enough to let someone through.
Someone in fur-lined boots, a fitted winter cloak the colour of pomegranate wine, and an expression that suggested she had never once asked permission for anything in her life.
Pansy Parkinson strode through the shimmering barrier as if it hadn’t been tailored by two-thirds of the Golden Trio, Professor Malfoy, and an ex-Dragon Keeper.
The students went silent.
Charlie forgot the rest of his sentence.
Pansy pushed back her hood and shook out hair that looked longer than he remembered. Her eyes swept the enclosure, took in ten baby dragons, fifteen students, and finally settled on him.
A slow, devastating smirk.
“Oh,” she drawled, voice carrying effortlessly across the paddock, “Would you look at that? A Weasley loose and unsupervised. Again.”
Charlie’s mouth went dry.
Three years.
And she still hit him like a punch to the gut.
“Hello, Trouble,” he managed.
“Professor,” murmured a Ravenclaw girl near the edge of the paddock, “do you… know her?”
Pansy arched one perfect brow. “Intimately.”
Charlie choked on absolutely nothing.
A ripple of scandalised delight ran through the students.
“Miss Parkinson,” he managed, “you can’t simply—this is a restricted area—how did you even—”
She ignored every word, breezing past him toward the pens. The purple hatchling squealed the moment she appeared, scrambling over her siblings in a flurry of wings and claws to reach the front of the enclosure.
Pansy, the witch, lit up.
“Oh, hello darling,” she cooed, kneeling gracefully—uncharacteristically unbothered by the mud, the frost, the very concept of boundaries. “Aren’t you just the most beautiful creature to ever hatch.”
“Get away from there,” Charlie snapped, only serving to stir up more whispers from the gathered students who’d never heard him raise his voice.
The purple hatchling pressed her snout to the wards, trilling adoringly.
“She likes you,” one girl whispered.
Pansy flashed a look over her shoulder. “Of course she does. She has taste.”
Charlie scrubbed a hand over his stubbled jaw. His heart was trying to gallop out of his chest. His students were eating this up like holiday biscuits.
He cleared his throat. “Pansy. Why are you here?”
She stood, brushed some straw and frost off her gloves, and sauntered back toward him with an ease that made his stomach twist. When she stopped, she was close enough that he could smell winter air tangled with clove and cinnamon.
He hated that he remembered it.
He hated that it made his knees almost weak.
“I’m moving back to Britain,” she said. “Permanently. Thought I’d say hello before the holiday rush.”
Her gaze dropped to the dragons.
“And to meet the little minx that’s stolen my name and your heart.”
Several students stared at Charlie like he had three heads.
“She’s a dragon,” Charlie said, trying to sound steady but landing somewhere in the vicinity of strangled. “It wasn’t—I didn’t—it doesn’t mean anything.”
Pansy smiled like she knew precisely what kind of liar he was.
“Well,” she murmured, stepping close enough that her cloak brushed his arm, “we’ll talk about that later.”
Charlie’s heart did something deeply inconvenient.
Pansy turned to the class, offering them all a bright, razor-edged smile.
“Don’t mind me. Pretend I’m not even here.”
Absolutely impossible.
Pansy the hatchling trilled again, frost bit at his cheeks, and Charlie tried to convince himself he could breathe.
Fuck.
This was going to be a nightmare.
And he already knew he wasn’t going to walk away from it.
“Class dismissed!”