Chapter Text
It was only at night that she remembered she was lonely.
Once the blurry adrenaline rush of being jolted awake at the sound of crying had subsided and she was settled into the cushy chair in Elodie's nursery, Hermione would find herself staring into the dark, listening to the sounds of the cottage.
Charlie had left for the Burrow shortly after dropping off his suitcase and confirming details of his stay with Percy, asking if it was all right if he came in and out throughout the week.
“Of course. I’m quite busy, but if you need anything, Hermione's always here,” Percy had replied, and she'd turned it over in her mind for ages afterward to try and parse any judgment in his tone.
Charlie slipped back in sometime before midnight, tiptoeing past the nursery where she was finishing up one of Elodie's earlier nursing sessions. The unfamiliarity of his footsteps had initially sent her pulse skyrocketing, but then his presence was something of a relief. Though she hardly knew him, there was something steady about him, and it was unexpectedly reassuring. His entry was the only deviation from the usual routine, and the evening settled in around her like a boa constrictor.
She knew the night sounds of the cottage better than anyone now.
The creaky sighs of the overhead beams, the scrape of the cherry tree branch against the sitting room window, the breathy whistle of wind through the old front door that didn't latch well. At night they became magnified, eerie.
She listened and listened and the line between waking and dreaming always seemed very thin. Even with Elodie in her lap, the infant so small and almost alien-like still, she felt very alone.
Sometimes she considered telling Percy about the strange things that crossed her mind in the night.
I hear a sound like someone breaking in and I'm too scared to check so I sit in the nursery long after Elodie’s fallen asleep.
I hear a sound like hooves and I imagine a nightmarish goat-man in the hall or a vicious centaur in the woods or a monstrous creature on the roof.
I hear a sound like someone gasping and I think you’re awake with me, but then I realize it's just the house settling and I'm still alone.
But in the daylight everything sounded so absurd that she hardly recognized herself, so she stayed quiet, feeling achy and hollow, and waited for the next night to come.
Now, with the baby snuggled to her in the dark, she thought of the men down the hall. Percy had been asleep for hours. The sound of the baby fussing didn’t even wake him most of the time, and he knew it only took a moment of Elodie crying to bring Hermione to alertness so it seemed he’d never developed any instinct to listen for the sound. And Charlie…Well, she could only imagine how he felt about spending the week with such a demanding little creature on the other side of his wall.
And yet…Their earlier interaction had been so brief, but Charlie had come in with such confidence, like scooping up a fussy child was second nature to him.
A powerful sort of longing came over her, and she imagined, in some alternate universe, that instead of having gone straight to his room that night, Charlie might have peeked into the nursery to see that she and Elodie were settled. She imagined him placing a cup of water on the nightstand beside her, intuiting that she would have forgotten both her wand and her water glass by her own bed. She remembered the warmth in his face when he’d had the baby in his arms earlier in the evening, and imagined him stealing a glance down at Elodie, cuddled up against her breast.
He seemed like he might be the sort of man who would rock the baby to sleep after she fed so that his partner could go back to sleep.
She felt dreamy and delirious as she carefully transferred Elodie back to her crib. When she slipped back down the hall to bed, passing by the closed door of the guest room, she tried not to linger on the thoughts of her child tucked contentedly against Charlie's shoulder.
Her brain was never at its best at night.
***
In the morning, she immediately knew something was wrong.
She woke easily, gently, cracking open her eyelids to discover that sunlight was streaming through the curtains. It must have been nearly seven. She was in her own bed and it was quiet.
She couldn't remember the last time she'd woken without a burst of noise.
Where was Elodie?
She clambered up to a seated position. Had she brought the baby to bed with her sometime in the early morning? She couldn’t remember for sure. Was Elodie being smothered by the blankets? She started to yank the bedding off, tugging away the patchwork quilt that Mrs. Weasley had made them for Christmas, the roar of panic so loud in her ears that she almost missed another sound.
A murmur from down the hall.
She froze, looking around. Her bed was empty. She had assumed Percy had already gone to work, but no, he was apparently in the kitchen, perhaps lingering longer than normal since his brother was in the house. It was unusual for him to go so long without nudging her awake to feed Elodie, but perhaps that five a.m. feeding had held her over longer than usual.
Charlie's arrival had been such a chaotic event that she felt determined to appear more put together when she encountered him this time. She quickly tied her hair up into a bun and slipped into a pair of soft leggings and a jumper that hadn't yet been slept in. She felt marginally more human as a result, something she suspected Percy would appreciate as well.
But when she made her way into the kitchen, it wasn't Percy who was peering out of the window over the sink, the baby sprawled and airplaning along his forearm. It was Charlie.
She gaped in the doorway.
Charlie’s hair was swept up in a knot in the back again, and he was wearing a blue flannel shirt that was unbuttoned over a white tee, along with a pair of brown boots that appeared to be held together by Spellotape and a prayer. The flannel was cuffed to the elbows, revealing muscular forearms.
The only reason she noticed his fitness, of course, was because she had attempted to soothe Elodie with this exact motion many times before and it was exhausting. One would have to have very strong arms in order to manage it for any extended period of time, and Charlie looked like he might chop wood recreationally.
He must have sensed her arrival, because he turned around, a relaxed smile on his face, his arm swinging gently side to side. There, Elodie was belly down in yellow footie pajamas, gumming his wrist with her wet mouth.
It was terribly sweet and Hermione suddenly felt a bit breathless.
“Good morning,” Charlie said, nodding to the table. “That’s yours. I didn’t know how you liked it so I left it plain.”
Rock, rock, rock. Elodie seemed perfectly content against his body, showing none of her normal morning belligerence. Was it possible Charlie reminded Elodie so much of her father that she’d gotten confused? But no, Charlie with his trim beard and kind eyes was so different from his brother, who would already have been clean-shaven and in formal robes and glasses by this time of day.
Charlie cleared his throat.
She blinked at him. “Sorry, what?”
It was becoming a bit embarrassing how her brain always seemed half asleep when she spoke to him, and yet she once again found herself trying to make sense of a scene that simply didn’t add up.
“Your tea,” he explained patiently, tilting his head toward the table again. There, her favorite olive green mug (the one with the big handle that just felt right when you picked it up) sat steaming under a stasis charm. She stared at it.
“Should still be hot,” Charlie added. “Percy was rushing out so I didn’t get a chance to ask him if you liked milk or sugar.”
He doesn’t know anyway, she thought, and was immediately relieved that she managed not to say it out loud. That was…well, it was just too much to explain.
“Thank you,” she said instead. She didn’t reach for the cup. She was used to having her hands full as soon as she woke up and felt unsure of what to do with the unusual freedom, as if she’d accidentally dropped something important. “Why do you…Sorry, I guess I slept in? Was Elodie fussing?”
Impossible, of course. She would have heard her. She was so sensitive to sounds now that even the smallest cries had her launching herself out of bed. As if she sensed the thought, Elodie started to grumble. Charlie changed the direction of his arm, shuffling her forward and back instead.
“Oh no, she’s been quite happy,” he said. “I saw Percy head in early and when Elodie started wiggling I just picked her up since he wasn’t here to do it. Figured he usually did the mornings so you could sleep a bit.”
Her face must have revealed something concerning, because his smile faltered slightly.
“Sorry, should I have woken you? I didn’t mean to overstep.”
She thought of her average mornings, with tea made one-handed and then quickly forgotten, found later cold on a side table.
“Oh,” she said, with false brightness. “No, that’s lovely, thank you. I hope she didn’t keep you up all night? She can be a bit noisy.”
Charlie leaned against the counter, smiling down at Elodie who had begun to make a little humming noise.
“Oh, I’m up and down all night anyway,” he replied. “Depends on what’s going on at the reserve. Dragons don’t keep to our preferred schedules necessarily.”
She felt nearly hypnotized by the motion of his arms, the smooth forward-back-forward-back, the skin marked by burn scars, the blank stare in Elodie’s eyes as she was lulled into submission.
“Of course,” Hermione said vaguely. She could only imagine that her own face mirrored the baby’s. The silence stretched, as clearly her efforts to be less of a muppet than the previous night were already failing spectacularly. She shook herself out of the stupor. “Will you be around today?”
“Mum’s asked me to come back over to the Burrow for a bit,” he began, and then Elodie apparently decided at that moment that she’d had enough. She let out an ear piercing wail, followed by a series of agitated snorts.
“Oh goodness, I suppose that’s my cue,” she said. “Time to eat, then.”
She stepped forward and Charlie tilted Elodie over to her, conveying her easily as if they’d done this exact hand-off dozens of times before. The little pajama-covered feet wiggled against her, and the baby immediately began snuffling against her shoulder. Hermione tucked her chin to press a kiss to the soft spot under her ear. There was an unfamiliar scent lingering on her, something fresh and woodsy. Charlie’s laundry detergent, transferred to the fabric of her jammies from being in his arms so long, she thought.
It smelled very nice.
“Where do you like to sit?” Charlie asked, and she glanced up from her investigation of this new scent experience in time to see him nodding toward the kitchen door. “I’ll follow with your tea.”
She hesitated, but he was watching her with open curiosity. He raised his eyebrows, awaiting her response.
“I like to sit on the sofa in the morning,” she admitted. “It’s nice to see out into the garden. As long as it won’t bother you if I’m in there? Percy prefers I feed her in the nursery but after I’ve been in there all night, the chair starts to bother my back…”
She could have almost missed the odd look that passed over his face, as it lasted only a second and then the comfortable smile returned. She wondered if he was truly uneasy with the idea of her nursing the baby in one of the central spaces of the home. There was a throw blanket that she would be sure to toss over Elodie’s head if he walked by. Elodie would almost certainly screech in opposition, but it would only be a moment and she certainly didn’t want to make a guest uncomfortable in her home.
“I’ll bring the tea,” he said, and she wondered if she’d invented the strange moment entirely. “Milk or sugar?”
“A splash of milk,” she said apologetically. “Sorry, I hate to put you out when you’ve already let me have a lie-in.”
He looked amused. “It’s really not a big deal. I’ll be right behind you.”
Within minutes, she was settled on the sofa, the cushions arranged so she could prop her arm up the way she liked, the hot tea on the nearby coffee table.
“If you don’t have plans for dinner,” she said, watching Charlie turn the mug handle so it was angled toward her, “you could join us. On Tuesdays Percy picks up Thai from a place in the village that’s quite good.”
“Alright, yeah,” he said, reaching over to tickle Elodie’s curls once more before stepping away. “If you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.”
“Great. I’m just going to take a quick shower and then I’ll be out of your way for the day.”
She felt a pang of disappointment but offered a smile and nod in response. When she heard the shower running, she absolutely did not think about what he looked like in there for even a moment.
***
If she’d believed that that evening would be the time she finally brought her best self to any interaction with her brother-in-law, Hermione was mistaken. Instead, when the floo lit up and Charlie stepped through, she and Elodie were in the sitting room again, and now they were both crying. It was not exactly the impression she’d hoped to make.
Charlie looked alarmed, ducking his head as he lurched out of the fireplace. Within a moment he was right beside her, his gaze scanning over them, one hand sliding over the top of Elodie’s head as if ensuring she was all in one piece.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, and already the rumble of his voice made Hermione feel like she could take a proper breath again. It came out as a choked sound that was almost a laugh.
“Nothing, nothing,” she said, adjusting the screaming baby over to her hip. “Sorry, I thought you were Percy. Well, I didn’t exactly, because he doesn’t usually come in through the floo, but I thought maybe today…”
He raised an eyebrow and something inside her crumbled.
“It’s just that she’s been fussing all day and then she skipped her afternoon nap and she won’t let me put her down and I’ve had to pee for two hours but I thought if I walked her around a bit she’d fall asleep but every time she starts to doze within thirty seconds she’s up again and people keep telling me she isn’t old enough to keep teething but I wonder if she might be anyway?”
The tears were welling up again and they felt stupider now that she’d unloaded her feelings upon a man she barely knew, but her arms were half-numb and Elodie’s wailing in her ear was making her brain feel like it was vibrating.
“I’m sorry,” she said wetly. “I know this must be terrible to come home to. You were probably hoping for a quiet place to stay.”
Charlie didn’t reply. Instead, he reached in and eased Elodie out of her grasp. The infant’s wailing increased and it made a little surge of panic rise in Hermione’s chest. She reached out as if to take her back, but Charlie shook his head firmly.
“It’s all right,” he said, looking her directly in the eye as he arranged Elodie higher against his chest so she could better scream into his ear. “She’s all right.”
“You don’t have to take her,” Hermione said thickly, then used her jumper sleeve to wipe her eyes. “Percy should be home soon, I think.” She actually had no idea. Percy’s schedule was unpredictable and he often forgot to communicate the details when things changed because he was so absorbed in his work. “And really, I’m okay. I think I just didn’t sleep well so I’m a bit—”
“It sounds like it was a long day,” Charlie said, “and there’s something I wanted to show Elodie in the garden anyway. Maybe you’ll join us in a few minutes, if you’d like.”
He was managing her. She wanted to push back, to be annoyed about how presumptuous he was, to remind him that he couldn’t just take her baby as if he knew what to do better than she did. Instead, something inside her seemed to go soft at the careful way he took charge.
She tried to imagine her husband stepping in and pulling the baby out of her hands like this and she simply couldn’t envision Percy doing anything of the sort.
“I’m fine, really.” If she said it aloud enough times, surely it would become believable. She was already doing a miserable job hosting him as a guest, but at this rate he was going to think something was wrong with her.
“I know,” he replied, turning towards the door, and speaking to her over his shoulder. “Sometimes a mum just needs a minute.”
He tilted his head toward Elodie to stage whisper conspiratorally, “That’s how we keep dragons from eating their young, too.”
Hermione’s lips twitched with the beginning of a smile. She watched him step out the door, bouncing the little red-faced infant as he went, and for one moment her busy brain went still.
He was barely out of the room when Percy’s patronus, a fluffy-tailed skunk that somehow always managed to look long-suffering when it arrived, slipped in.
“I’ll be late,” it said in Percy’s distracted tone. “Don’t wait for me for dinner.”
“But you were bringing dinner,” she snapped in response as it faded into the void. She took a deep breath and decided to find the loo before she solved this next problem.
Percy’s ambition, and his related commitment to his work, was one of the things that first drew Hermione to him. She had spent years being the one who was late to every Weasley gathering, squeezing in at the table long after the meal was underway, spilling apologies and paperwork from her overfull work satchel. She absorbed the weight of Molly Weasley’s disapproval, bracing herself for it each time she arrived at the Burrow. As much as she was grateful that the family encouraged her to join every event—a gift, considering her own parents now continued their lives without her in Australia—it was exhausting to manage the criticism of her lifestyle. Her career was important to her, a foundational part of who she was as a human.
But then at one celebratory supper (a Christmas Eve, no less), Hermione and Percy had both arrived late.
Hermione thought she could probably count on one hand the number of times they’d previously overlapped at family events prior to this, as Percy hardly ever showed up. They’d both exchanged vaguely panicked looks as they scrambled through the door at the same time, wincing in doomed anticipation as they made their way to the dining table with their coats still on. She remembered admiring the way his smart charcoal cloak fell over his lean body, a plaid scarf neatly tied around his neck, the way his glasses made him look distinguished.
“Well,” Mrs. Weasley had huffed, “I suppose I should just be happy the two of you bothered to show up at all.”
“Mother, you know how the department gets on a holiday,” Percy said, slipping his heavy cloak off. Hermione nodded eagerly in agreement, relieved that someone here understood..
“Mine as well!” she’d chimed in. “You wouldn’t believe the number of people who are trafficking Ministry classified XXX or higher dangerous creatures with the intent of gifting them for Christmas.”
Percy snorted. “Incredible. All these years in public service and I remain shocked by some of the things people try to get away with.”
“Extraordinary, really,” she’d agreed.
And suddenly, they were a united front.
***
In the end, it was Charlie who solved the dinner problem.
“I’ll just go pick up the food,” he said reasonably, once she’d reunited with the pair of them in the garden. The thing he apparently wanted to show Elodie, who seemed to have cried herself to exhaustion and was now blinking dazedly on his shoulder, was a bird’s nest in the cherry tree, though the child appeared completely unaware of any nature activity in the area. “Or, if you’d like to get out of the house, you can go pick it up and I’ll stay here with Elodie. Or we can all go.”
There was something about the idea of all three of them strolling down to the village together that made her insides twist confusingly, so after only a moment’s hesitation, she asked him to go. When he returned twenty minutes later with a large brown paper bag, Hermione had finally managed to get Elodie to sleep in her lap on the sofa.
“That smells wonderful,” she whispered, as he passed her a white take-away carton, easing each item out of the bag to avoid crinkling it around the baby. “Thank you for going out.”
“Not a bother at all,” he said, choosing a seat on the other end of the sofa and opening his own carton. He was a respectable distance from her, his tall body sprawled across the far cushion, knees spread, and yet he took up a lot of space. Perhaps she was just so used to eating in the designated spaces at the kitchen table that she’d forgotten what it was like to lounge so casually with another adult. Her skin prickled at the proximity. Was it strange that he hadn’t chosen the little armchair by the window?
She looked down to Elodie in her lap, her dark eyelashes spilling over soft creamy cheeks, her brow furrowed in slumbering concentration, and decided not to overthink it. This quiet moment felt like a small victory in an otherwise trying day.
They fell into silence as they ate, and the longer it stretched the more that Hermione realized she had spent so little time around Charlie that she hardly knew how to speak to him when she wasn’t sobbing or half-delirious from exhaustion. She tried to think of something to say, something to indicate she was still a normal human who could carry on a proper conversation. He was Elodie’s uncle, after all. She should be able to chat with him just like she did the other Weasleys.
Charlie carefully twirled noodles around his fork, and her focus on possible conversational topics waned. He had strong, dexterous hands. Long fingers and skin that bore the scars of a challenging work life. Functional hands, certainly. It was easy to visualize them doing all sorts of things. Scaling dangerous terrain or tying a complicated knot or sliding into a pair of worn dragon handling gloves.
Hermione imagined those hands feeding her dinner, bite by bite.
Or, she amended quickly, other hands could be feeding her while she held the baby. Her husband's, specifically. Those would be the ideal hands for the job. Not that Percy would want to eat on the sofa, but aside from that, it was a nice thought, wasn’t it, to have someone take care of your basic needs that way?
“You’re very good with all this,” Hermione blurted out, because suddenly it seemed safer to start talking instead of letting her thoughts wander further.
Charlie glanced over, his lips pulled in a half smile. “What’s that?”
She flushed. “With Elodie, I mean. You just…” She made a vague, hand wavy gesture. “You don’t seem to get overwhelmed by her. By the noise and the neediness and the unpredictability.”
“Well,” he began, leaning forward to set his food container on the coffee table, “I was hauling around babies from a very young age.”
“But so was Percy,” she pointed out, before she could stop herself. “Or, at least, I assume he would have been? With so many younger siblings? It seems like he would have had a lot of experience? I guess I thought it would be familiar territory for him.”
Charlie tilted his head, watching her, and she would have squirmed in her seat if she wasn’t afraid of disrupting the infant sleeping there. His gaze told her that question had revealed too much, that he’d unearthed some kind of insecurity. He leaned back, looking up at the ceiling as if finding his words there, and she wondered if it might be better if she poked Elodie awake to force a distraction so as not to have to delve into the fragile corners of her marriage.
“Percy is very good at directing things,” he said finally, turning his gaze on her. “He was a responsible kid and he ensured the younger ones followed rules, that they were safe. He was…I think he’s good at managing people, but taking care of them doesn’t come quite as easily to him.”
She looked away. But you’re very good at it, her brain supplied.
“I think if you need more,” he continued, “it’s always okay to ask for more.”
Her eyes shot back to him.
“What do you—” she began, but then there was a pop from the entryway and the clatter of a briefcase being dropped to the floor. Elodie startled awake with a wail and Hermione cursed under her breath.
“What a day,” Percy said, striding into the living room where Hermione was now trying to juggle the food container in one hand and the baby in the other. “I got an urgent owl from the Minister this afternoon—”
He dropped off, scanning the room.
“Why are you eating here?” he asked, raising his voice to be heard over Elodie’s crying. “You’re going to get crumbs everywhere.”
“Because this is where Elodie fell asleep,” Hermione said in exasperation. “Honestly, coming in here and making so much noise—”
The baby flailed in agitation, swatting the container in her hand. She fumbled it briefly, nearly dumping an avalanche of rice right onto Elodie’s face. In a moment, Charlie was reaching over and taking the carton away so that her hands were free.
If you need more, it’s always okay to ask for more.
***
That night, Hermione fell asleep hard, only to be woken up barely an hour later by Elodie whining. The noise was carried to her bedside through a variation of the Extendable Ears that George Weasley offered in the shop, which allowed her to catch the earliest disturbances before the full-on screaming began. She wobbled out of bed with the dizzy disorientation of having been thrust out of a dream. Groggily, she made her way down the dark hall.
She was nearly to the nursery door when she heard an unusual sound coming from the room beside it.
A low groan, universally familiar in a way that made her cheeks flush.
She went still.
The tone of the sound brought to mind a slick palm, a methodical tug over velvet soft skin, a hot urgency.
Even in the unlit hall, she could now tell that the guest room door was cracked open. She was certain that when she’d gone to bed it had been closed with Charlie behind it, but the cottage was old and the doors would shrink and swell as the temperatures shifted outside, the latches becoming fickle.
She felt frozen in the hall, holding her breath to avoid making any noise, leaning toward the gap in the door as if she might hear something that revealed what was happening inside. Surely he wasn't…? But perhaps he had been, as he was assuming that he'd secured his privacy. An image of Charlie filled her mind: the curve of his bicep, the confident tug of his hand, a desperation that must be fulfilled.
Suddenly Elodie screeched, startling Hermione so that she stumbled back across the creaky floorboards. She zoomed into the nursery, tripping over her own feet in her hurry, and closed the door behind her as quietly as possible. Her pulse banged against her chest and her cheeks were hot.
“Shh, shh, shh,” she murmured to Elodie, pulling her up from the crib and settling her into her lap in the chair.
Anything could have been happening in that room. He might have just been talking in his sleep or adjusting his blankets or maybe it was a yawn and her dazed brain had jumped to conclusions.
When she came back out twenty minutes later, the guest room door was closed tightly and Hermione couldn’t be certain she'd really heard anything at all.