Chapter Text
Tony Stark looked down at his daughter as she somehow managed to break his worldview again.
It wasn’t like it was anything strange or mysterious to the magical world. It was supposedly right there in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. But the magical world was a big place, and it had been a busy summer, so Tony hadn’t given it much thought until now.
But then, Holly started digging in the dirt in the garden of her friend Ron Weasley’s house, and she pulled out a creature that was even more impossible than usual. It was about a foot high and looked like someone had taken Mr. Potato Head a bit too literally. And as she held it up, it kicked its feet and spoke in a squeaky voice, “Gerroff me! Gerroff me!”
“This is a gnome,” Holly told him.
“That’s impossible,” Tony said.
Holly shrugged. “It’s magic.”
“How can it talk?”
“No idea.”
“I think Fred and George might’ve taught them the swear words,” Ron Weasley cut in. “But they always say gerroff me!”
“Gerroff me arsehole!” the gnome squeaked.
“Hey!” Tony and Holly said at the same time.
“Sorry about that,” Ron said sheepishly. “What’s the big deal, anyway? All they do is tear up the garden.”
“Because it shouldn’t be able to speak English without being taught,” Tony insisted. “Humans can’t speak English without being taught. And how does it look so human? Is it some kind of monkey?”
“I don’t know,” Holly said. “I just wondered if it was weird that it could talk.”
“Extremely weird,” Tony confirmed. “I want one.”
“You do?” said Ron incredulously. “Why?”
Holly shook her head. “To study, of course,” she said. “I’d offer you this one, but we don’t have anywhere to—ouch!”
The gnome had twisted around in her grip and bitten her hand. Holly immediately tossed it in the air and caught it with her other hand by the ankle.
“Well, don’t hurt it!” That came from Emma Granger, the mother of Holly’s other best friend, who was watching from nearby.
Holly just shook her head: “Mrs. Granger, the Weasleys get rid of gnomes by spinning them around and throwing them. I think they must be magically tough.”
“Throwing them?” Mrs. Granger said, aghast.
“Holly, you should put that down,” Tony told his daughter. It was good that she wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, but… “You should be more careful handling wild animals…They don’t carry diseases, do they?”
“Nah, we’ve all been bitten by them, and we’re fine,” Ron insisted.
“Should probably check with Pomfrey, just in case. Anyway, I’ll call JARVIS and have him overnight a cage out here so we can grab one in the morning. What do they eat?”
“Oh, roots and bugs and stuff,” Ron said. “They’re always getting into the garden. But really, I don’t get why you’d want to study them.”
“I study everything. It’s how I got where I am today. So, are there any more weird animals around here I should know about?”
“Well, there’s a ghoul in the attic,” Holly suggested.
“What’s a ghoul?”
Tony stared at the creature that apparently lived in the Weasleys’ attic. It was hard to see all the details by the flickering candlelight, but it was very clearly ape-like. Human-sized and human-shaped, though obviously lacking in the brains department, it was pale, with hairless, oily-looking skin, buck teeth, and large eyes that suggested a nocturnal creature.
It also did not appear pleased to see them. It let out a call like a moan and banged on the pipes in an ape-like display.
“You keep that thing locked up in here?” he said.
“Oh, he can get out through the roof,” Mrs. Weasley said with unsettling calmness. “We just don’t want him coming into the rest of the house. And that’s enough out of you!” she snapped, wagging her finger at the ghoul. “Down. Now. We have guests.” To Tony’s surprise, this was so effective that he wondered if it was magic, as the ghoul backed away from the pipes and sat quietly.
“So…” Tony started, “is it a pet or an uninvited houseguest?”
“I’ve started wondering that too,” Holly agreed.
“Well, he’s a little of both, to be honest,” said Mrs. Weasley. “He’s really not as much trouble as he looks, and relocating a ghoul is such a hassle. He can take care of himself. Ghouls are solitary creatures. We just give him some table scraps and some fresh fruits and vegetables so he’s less tempted to go foraging in the village.”
Tony thought this was a thoroughly bizarre arrangement. Muggles wouldn’t tolerate squirrels in their attic, let alone something that looked like a hairless chimpanzee. And he wasn’t even sure a chimp was the correct comparison.
“It’s wearing a loincloth,” he pointed out.
“We had to teach him to do that,” Mrs. Weasley explained. “We didn’t want him running around in the nude with small children about, even if it was mostly at night.”
“Does he have a name?” Holly asked.
Mrs. Weasley stopped short. “A name?” she said, apparently thinking back. “We haven’t needed one for a long time…I think at one point we called him Pringle.”
“Pringle?!” Tony and Holly said at once, and the ghoul immediately perked up and came toward them. Tony added, “You named him after a snack food?”
“A snack food?” Mrs. Weasley said in confusion. “No, we named him after the old caretaker at Hogwarts, Apollyon Pringle.” She looked at Holly. “I know the boys complain about Argus Filch, but Pringle was much worse. Dumbledore sacked him as soon as he became headmaster for caning students. Arthur’s still got the marks—No! Pringle, down!” she said when the ghoul tried to rush at them.
Tony watched the scene warily as Holly flinched back while Mrs. Weasley drew her wand to corral the ghoul back into its lair. Then, he pulled out his phone (a matching build to Holly’s with a titanium-gold case so that it could hopefully handle high concentrations of magic) and snapped a photo before asking the real question on his mind.
“Can you make him hold still long enough to get a DNA sample?”
Impossible creatures aside, Tony was fascinated to get to see a magical house. He’d had a good look at the outside of the Burrow a week ago when he’d dropped Holly off. She and Hermione had been invited to stay with the Weasleys for the last week of summer. It was a strange place at first glance. It was so haphazardly built that it had to be held up by magic. And it equally had to be intentional, he thought. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to come up with the concept of stacking rooms evenly on top of each other.
Or of laying them out side by side. He wasn’t entirely sure why they’d built vertically at all.
The inside of the house was rustic. No electricity, obviously. Fireplaces, gas lamps, and magic wands provided light at night. The magic wasn’t in your face here, he noted. It was more the little things, like the knitting that did itself, or the mirror that offered fashion tips. A large wall clock had nine hands on it for each member of the family, and instead of numbers, they pointed to places like “Work,” “School,” and “Hospital.” Most of that would be trivially easy to recreate with technology, at least if people kept their phones with them, but how on Earth did it judge “Mortal Peril” and “Lost”?
Tony asked Mrs. Weasley that, but she didn’t know. “It was a wedding present from my uncle, but he’s gone now, and I don’t know anyone else who has one.”
However, they didn’t spend a lot of time in the house. With Tony and Holly and the Grangers visiting, Mr. and Mrs. Weasley set up tables on the lawn for dinner. The children were tasked with setting the table by hand. (Mrs. Weasley was evidently strict about the rule against children using magic outside of school.) Regardless, when they sat down to eat, Tony was impressed.
“Well, whoever said British food was bad obviously never tried your cooking, Molly,” he told her. “You interested in a job?”
Mrs. Weasley blinked. “A…job?” she asked.
“Sure. I’ve always got a place for a good chef.”
“Oh! You flatter me, Mr. Stark,” she said, turning pink.
“Oh, no, he’s serious, Mrs. Weasley,” Holly jumped in. “If my dad offers you a job, he means it.”
The table fell silent. The Weasleys evidently hadn’t quite been prepared by whatever Holly had told them. Molly turned even pinker and looked back and forth between Tony and her husband. “That’s very generous of you, Mr. Stark,” she finally said, “but I couldn’t possibly. Not in America, with Arthur’s job here and the children still in school.”
“Well, something to keep in mind,” Tony said.
They mostly made small talk through dinner, with the children discussing what they were excited for at Hogwarts this year. Hermione seemed especially taken with the new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, Gilderoy Lockhart (as was Mrs. Weasley, in fact). Holly diplomatically agreed that Lockhart was both talented and good-looking, but after meeting the Avengers, she was a good deal less starstruck, which Tony was thankful for.
Dinner finished with something called “treacle pudding” (which was decidedly not pudding in the American sense), which Holly loved, but Tony privately found a bit too sickly-sweet for his taste. After that, the Grangers gave their apologies and left immediately, saying they wanted to get back to London tonight rather than try to rush it in the morning.
Tony was going to go back to the hotel for the night and see Holly off in the morning, but Mrs. Weasley stopped him.
“Are you sure you don’t want to stay, Mr. Stark?” she asked. “You haven’t had a chance to see Holly for the past week. We can put you up in Charlie’s room for the night. In fact…” She looked him up and down. “…I think his old clothes might fit you.”
Tony considered his options and just how much a force of nature Mrs. Weasley was reported to be. “Well, I guess I can stick around,” he said and sat back down. “So, what do you do for fun after dark around here?”
That was how Tony was introduced to the game of Exploding Snap, which Holly insisted was based on a muggle card game. Mr. and Mrs. Weasley watched with amusement at how much Tony got into it with the kids. He brought to the game enthusiasm, a better than average ability to count cards, and a complete lack of experience. He’d barely even heard of Snap before, and that was without the “exploding” part. He knew Slapjack and Egyptian Ratscrew from his own time in boarding school, but he hadn’t played those in about twenty years. Besides which, there was no slapping involved in Snap. You just had to call the snaps.
The cards didn’t really explode hard enough to hurt, thankfully, but it definitely livened up the game. If you called a snap wrongly or were too slow, the cards exploded, after which you had to put them in the pot. A card could also explode in your hand if you flipped it too slowly or in the wrong direction, which would have saved him a few arguments in school. The time limit also got faster and faster the longer the game went on. It was unlikely, but theoretically possible for the pot to win the game if no one was fast enough to claim it at a crucial moment, although it was unlikely for any of this bunch to be too slow. Holly had the fastest reaction time, but the other Quidditch players were no slouches, and the longer the game went, the more easily Tony could anticipate the next card in the sequence.
Tony obviously wondered how the cards worked. Where did the explosions come from? Why didn’t they damage them? How did they respond to the complexities of timing in the game? By the time they were done, he had added Exploding Snap cards to his shopping list.
He tried to show the kids Slapjack, but that lasted about two minutes before they figured out that the cards were still following the Exploding Snap rules.
Eventually, the evening wound down, and Mrs. Weasley sent the children off to bed. Tony took a few minutes to browse the large piles of books on the mantelpiece. He was particularly interested in one titled One Minute Feasts—It’s Magic.
Mrs. Weasley noticed and clucked her tongue. “Honestly, that book is overrated,” she said.
“Really? How so?” Tony asked.
“Oh, you can make a meal in one minute with those spells, but it’s never going to be as good as doing it properly.”
“Ah…Yeah, we have something like that,” Tony said. “It’s called a microwave…But if Pepper asks, I insist it’s just as good. But I’m more interested in the spells. The way heat and temperature work would normally make it impossible to actually cook something that fast.”
“Hm…” she said thoughtfully. “Well, magical theory isn’t my strong suit. Percy might know, but there’s not time to ask him just now.”
“Its too bad he didn’t stick around after dinner,” Mr. Weasley said. Percy, the oldest Weasley boy still living at home, had excused himself to his room early. “He’d normally love to talk theory with a scholar with a different perspective, but he’s been keeping himself very busy this summer.” He leaned closer and added conspiratorially, “Molly thinks there’s a girl.”
Tony smirked. “Yeah, sounds about right.”
Finally, before they retired for the night, they went over the plan for the next morning, which was mainly that Holly would ride to King’s Cross with the Weasleys. Tony would grab a gnome from the garden for study (something that still baffled Mrs. Weasley), properly hidden in the trunk, and then ride back to London separately with Happy, just in case there was trouble.
“You’re sure you don’t want to come and see Holly off tomorrow, Mr. Stark?” Mr. Weasley asked.
Tony shook his head: “I’d like to, but it would be a bad idea. Holly’s famous in your world, but I’m just as famous in mine, and frankly, my world’s a lot bigger. If she goes with you and keeps her head down, people will overlook her. But if she goes with me, and she walks past Platform 9 without continuing to Platform 10? They’re going to ask questions even I’d have a hard time answering.”
Mr. Weasley frowned. “I’ll mention that at the Ministry,” he said. “That problem isn’t going to go away, and we may be able to do something better for future holidays.”
“Thanks, Arthur. Appreciate it. Also, do you have a car that’ll fit everyone. I only saw that old Anglia in the driveway.”
Mr. Weasley responded to this question in a peculiar way. He froze, just for a moment, and then made a show of crossing the room to grab a cloth to wipe down his glasses. “Oh, yes,” he said. “It’s amazing what you can fit in those muggle cars.” And then he winked at Tony at an angle where his wife couldn’t see it.
“Ah…right,” Tony said, catching on at once. “Well, I leave you to it then. Molly, great dinner,” he told Mrs. Weasley. “And thanks again for letting Holly stay here for the week. Even with as busy a summer as we’ve had, she really wanted to come back here.”
“It was really no trouble, Mr. Stark—” she started.
“Call me Tony.”
“…Tony. We love having the boys’ friends around to visit. And I hope Ginny will have a couple of friends going off to school, too.”
Ginny, the only girl in the Weasley family, had absolutely appeared starstruck by Holly at her birthday party a month ago, but after sharing a room with her and Hermione for the week, she seemed to have warmed up to her a fair bit. Tony agreed it would be good for Holly to make some more friends her own age. But mostly, he was just hoping she would have a less eventful school year than last year.