Archive of Our Own

It starts out, as most revolutionary things do, in a bout of rage. 

Lavender Brown is cross-legged on the library floor, having only made it three steps before her self-control breaks and she simply must stop where she’s at to read the much-anticipated third book and finale to her favorite fantasy series. Feet shuffle into her periphery every so often, people having to walk around her, but Lavender keeps turning pages. Devouring. 

It’s chapter twenty-three that does it.

“What the fuck?” 

Lavender remembers she’s in a library when heads whip in her direction, each with disapproving frowns.

It’s not just the demise of her favorite character. It’s their ruined growth, their suddenly flimsy motives—which would be fine if it was a convincing villain arc, but it’s not; it’s lazy writing. As an added punch to the throat, the entire conflict that’s been brewing comes to an abrupt halt, solved with none of the satisfaction the previous two books provided.

A middle-aged white man gives her a leery look as he passes by and Lavender smiles sweetly.

“We’re both wearing blue!” she says, gesturing to her biker shorts that only come to mid-thigh. They’re covered in fat little cherubs with wings and have very little in common with the man’s jeans, but it catches him off-guard and he gives a reluctant smile anyway.

Lavender could make a career of pulling love out of reluctant places.

She hate reads the rest of the book, so angry there’s only one thing to do: she has to write her own version.

What starts as a single-minded mission to mend the broken bits of what she loved so dearly ends up as something completely different. 

She gets a part-time job at the library so she can write even when she’s behind the circulation desk. The book takes on a mind of its own as the months drag on, entirely new characters and conflicts coming up for air like they’d been submerged deep in her psyche. 

She loves to fix what’s broken, our Lavender. 

The Wyvern Solstice is the closest she’s ever come to fitting her heart in a jar. Clear as glass for all to see. She holds it up to the sun, her flesh turned translucent, veins mapping a path to everything that matters to her. 

She writes about children turned into werewolves without their consent. She delves into the tragedy of wielding claws before you’ve had a chance to learn how to be gentle with yourself. Her villains are polite heroes who don’t see violence unless it comes in crimson, who call for unity without acknowledging the quiet brutality of a clenching stomach. Her heroes are afraid of getting what they want.

There are dragons and fucking and fucking dragons. 

The gritty texture of her words comes as a surprise to literally everyone who knows her once the first book is published, including her fiancé. Ron’s fierce blush overwhelms his freckles when his little sister Ginny reads a particularly explicit scene over the dinner table. Percy nearly keels over. Molly’s spoon clatters noisily from her hand when penetration enters the chat.

Lavender’s not bothered, though. She endured elementary school as an unapologetic horse girl and she didn’t learn to turn off the ‘read’ receipts on her iPhone until she turned twenty-five. She bought the world’s most uncomfortable couch from an Instagram influencer who only dresses her toddler in shades of beige. The first time she met the Weasleys, she accidentally walked in on Arthur while he sat upon the porcelain throne. 

She’s not about to start acting like she’s ashamed that her fans call themselves dragonfuckers. 

She can understand the shock, though. For someone whose hair makes its way through the rainbow every year or two and whose banana-yellow Volkswagen Beetle is lined with a collection of Hello Kitty bobbleheads, the tortured characters in her books are from an entirely different planet.

Her readership is as delightfully weird as she is. They’re either there for the gore and politics, or it’s the dragon fucking. The best kinds delight in both. She goes on book tours and never tires of the shocked expressions when her readers realize she’s a living, breathing heart-eyes emoji. A 5’4” woman with light pink milkmaid sleeves and eyeliner shaped like puffy white clouds.

These contradictions are easy for her to hold in the palms of her hands because she keeps them soft. Keeps herself soft, really. Pours all her trembling anger into characters shaped like empty bottles, and when one overflows, she tips it all into another. 

Ron channels his anger through the blades of his skates and the hockey stick he uses on his professional team, but embarrassment isn’t an emotion he’s quite mastered. This disparity between them starts out small, then trickles into everything.

For instance, he never kisses her with his tongue. Like, never. She straddles his lap and cards her fingers through his ginger hair, showing a bit of Victorian ankle every time she risks slipping her tongue past her own lips. It’s like his are vacuum-sealed shut. Instead of French sophistication, she’s more like a gerbil suckling from the sippy bottle attached to the side of its cage.

She is abundant with nowhere to go.

In and of itself, not a dealbreaker. Nothing about their relationship is. Both are prone to jealousy, both have an unearned god complex. They attend a Nickelback concert unironically and swear to each other that they’ll take it to the grave. He wears her I’m Not Superwoman But I’m Surviving Lupus So Close Enough t-shirt that inches up his belly when he raises his arms because it’s too tight. It makes her laugh on days she can barely move. 

All of these things make her forget, briefly, that he’s happiest when they’re alone. Add another person into the mix, and suddenly he flinches when her laugh is too loud or her theatrical voices too juvenile.

They call off the wedding.

Two years of living together ends and she imagines the collective sighs of relief from both the Weasleys and her best friend, Parvati, echoing off the walls of her new studio. She writes shitty lowercase haikus to cope because they make her feel like rupi kaur.

he kissed like a man

more specifically, a man

who lost his dentures

She publishes a second book. Moves on, letting Parvati set her up on blind dates.

Cormac McLaggen is pleasant enough for exactly three weeks, but then he makes an offhand joke about her swollen ankles that’s really just a thinly-veiled insult. 

the dick inside him

was enormous enough to

tickle my g-spot

Dean Thomas flirts with her for an entire month before confessing he could never disrespect Ron like that. 

funny how an ex

can turn you into some grass

that’s been peed upon

Six months post-breakup, she finds Ron’s old Portland Rosebuds jersey in the back of her panty drawer. Normally this wouldn’t have disastrous consequences, but it’s the same day she spent three hours on the phone with the hospital trying to figure out why she was billed $3,000 for her last visit and her rent was upped by a hundred dollars. She’ll have to make the transition to working at the library full-time, losing precious writing hours. 

Seamus Finnegan invites her out for drinks and Ron is there. His day must have crushed him like a trash compactor too, because they fall back into bed together with a sigh.

But Lavender—she’d forgotten about the gerbil kissing.

More importantly, she’d forgotten the tripwire of his scrutiny that nearly convinced her that if only she could laugh a little quieter, he wouldn’t be embarrassed to take her out.

When he leaves, she tells him to take his jersey too.

If Charlie Weasley was a more observant person, he might rightfully conclude that he is cursed. 

But he’s not, so, you know, he doesn’t. Seems a bit self-important to make a statement like that.

Here’s the thing: Charlie’s nose only ever bleeds when his life is on the precipice of change.

His first kiss.

The night before he dropped out of college.

Minutes before he got the call about Fred’s death.

It has all the makings of a harbinger of doom but Charlie’s ham hands are too clumsy to string those events together, so he’s ended up with a cautiously optimistic nature anyway. 

Fred’s death was nonsensical. A silly infection after being bitten by a dog, a fucking border collie, a fate so ridiculous in this age of modern medicine that sometimes it seems more likely that Fred faked his death as an elaborate prank. It’s just the sort of thing he’d do.

While his family accepted casseroles and orbited each other in a daze of tears and begrudging laughter, the gears in Charlie’s brain whirred like an overheated laptop. He thought about that border collie, how it bit Fred for no reason. Aggressive just because it could be.

Or aggressive for reasons he couldn’t understand.

Charlie’s heard about dogs raised to fight, born and bred to shed blood. It becomes a sort of fixation, a distraction, something to keep him from falling into grief that waits for him like an open maw.

He googles the shit out of dogfighting. Learns terms like gameness, dogmen, and scratch lines. Moves to Romania six months after the funeral where his emotions can quietly spit-roast him without an audience. He does his best to rescue dogs from fighting rings. 

He misses Weasley family dinners and tries not to notice how quiet George, Fred’s twin, has gone in the family text. He follows the trail of illicit money all the way to Vilnius, where the dogfighting is vicious and the local way of saying thank you sounds like the sweetest sneeze. Ačiū.

According to his family, this all-consuming hobby is not only an unhealthy coping mechanism for Fred’s death, but it’s downright repulsive. He’s always been the most emotional Weasley child and he knows they didn’t expect him to find salvation in scratched-up arms, bitten calves, bloodied fingernails. Molly’s wondered aloud if he finds catharsis in the bruises, but her second-eldest is much softer than she gives him credit for. He finds it in teaching crotchety old dogs how to love and be loved. It’s the perfect kind of work for someone like Charlie: someone who feels a lot. Arguably too much.

Listening to spoken word poetry activates a cringe response in his body powerful enough to register on the Richter scale, but it also makes his pulse flutter with a delicacy he’s only seen on butterfly wings. He likes the audacity of it, the emotions playing on their faces like shutters flung wide open. Tears. Hands clenching at their chests. Whatever it takes to make you feel something.

He’s doing pull-ups at his cement-clad gym and listening to spoken word poet Andrea Gibson’s ODE TO THE PUBLIC PANIC ATTACK through his headphones when that five-year-old gaping wound in his chest finally begins to knit itself back together. It’s time to go home. It’s time to face his family.

He goes for Christmas, when the grey sky above Vilnius is an iron pressing down on the cobblestone streets. Charlie scurries out from under it to find his way back to the rain-slick pavement of The Burrow. The sticks of Oregon, with its clouds that actually know how to cry so they don’t feel quite so oppressive.

It’s an eighteen-hour flight, but it only occurs to him to prepare five minutes before he leaves his apartment. Right. He’ll need entertainment. He scrolls through Audible’s picks of the week and selects a series at random, figuring that if it’s good enough for The New York Times, it’s good enough for him.

But holy shit, he didn’t expect the dragon fucking. Didn’t expect to like it, either. Because, yeah, the sex parts are compelling, but he’s moved to tears against his will more than once. The depth of suffering and nuance have his throat clenched tight like a fist.

When he finishes the first book, he moves right on to the next.

He googles the author Lavender Brown as soon as the plane’s wheels hit the tarmac with a jolt. 

Sweats too much to be wearing a goddamn winter coat as he waits for his luggage by the carousel.

Lavender Brown looks like she smells good. Her dark brown skin seems to glow from within, and those hooded eyes are bright, sparkling with intelligence. Knowing she’s written every word that he’s hung onto like a newly rehabilitated dog hangs onto affection does something to him. It’s a terrifying glimpse of seeing himself in somebody else’s reflection.

Ron picks him up from the airport.

Charlie cries when he sees how grown-up his little brother is: a more filled-out version of the beanpole he’d left behind. Ron pats him on the back and asks him about Lithuania.

“They know their way around a potato,” is all Charlie says, shifting in his seat because if he talks about the horrifying shit in his day-to-day life, he won’t have the strength to return. And then he offers his new favorite topic. “Have you heard of The Wyvern Solstice series?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

This is how Charlie learns of his little brother’s ex-fiance. 

That should be the end of it. 

It isn’t.

“She’s a lovely girl, really,” Molly Weasley says, straining to fit the last corner of the bedsheet on Charlie’s bed before he wordlessly takes her place. “Just a bit much, you know?”

Charlie grunts. A bit too smart? A bit too attractive?

“The kind of girl who doesn’t realize how much attention she attracts,” Molly adds, wiping the sweat from her forehead. 

His childhood room is stifling hot and the full bed looks more like a twin than he remembers. It’s only for two weeks, he thinks, and he’ll miss the warmth when he goes back to his freezing studio apartment in Vilnius.

“She’s pretty,” he says. Charlie could say the rest, that his little brother has always cared a bit too much about what other people think. He doesn’t, but Molly hears the unspoken criticism anyway.

Molly’s hands clench around a lumpy pillow and she pauses in her endeavor to flatten it. 

“You know Ron. He cares about appearances. He sunk thousands of dollars into that old truck and he's too prideful to admit it wasn't worth it.” She tosses the pillow, hitting him square in the chest. “You’d best leave it be, Charlie.”

He loves Ron. Loves the kid’s loyalty and sense of humor. And he needs to remember that he doesn’t know Lavender. He’s just read her books. 

But he knows what it’s like to be too much in the worst kind of way. He’s not entertaining like George or charmingly blunt like Gin. He’s walked through life with emotions sensitive as sunburned skin, every hurt registering magnified like the scrape of a nail against already tender flesh. 

Maybe it’s stupid or he’s projecting, but Charlie’s got a hunch. Lavender can’t write the kind of humanity that she carves into the pages of her books without being a person who experiences life in excruciating detail. She’s a feeler, he’s sure. Like him.

Accompanying Ginny to feed the chickens is a strategic move. He knows his little sister, and though he hasn’t been able to hug her tall, wiry frame over the past five years, they FaceTime every week. They don’t talk about anything that matters, but it’s something. On the cusp of graduating high school, she’s got the hard-earned toughness of being the only girl in a family of boys. He loves her. Loves her too-wide mouth and the honesty that’s guaranteed to spill from it.

“You left me,” she says, scattering lazy handfuls of corn on the straw. “And George. All of us, actually.”

Charlie doesn’t have a compelling defense. He lets in the pain that’s always there, waiting to bleed through at the slightest opening. Lets his eyes sting with the duplicitous relief of crying.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” he says. The flapping of wings and the cluck of hens reminds him he’s ridiculous for letting his emotions get the best of him in a chicken coop but it’s not enough of a bother to make him stop.

“Could’ve stayed,” Ginny says. She sees the tear tracks on his cheeks and rolls her eyes. “Or not. I don’t think I could have handled your crying on top of everything else.”

It’s forgiveness, delivered the only way she knows how.

Charlie grins. His lips taste like salt.

“Come here,” he says, taking a menacing step in her direction. “I wanna use your shirt as a tissue.”

When he and Ron are tasked with picking up dinner at the local pizzeria, he can’t help but dig.

“What happened?” he asks, filling a styrofoam cup with water and glancing around at the interior. It’s gone through minor renovations since he left: instead of the nonsensical ski lodge theme, they’ve turned it more western. A lasso hangs on a wall of pictures that famous people have signed when passing through.

Ron doesn’t look at any of that, his focus divided between the hockey game on the tv and texting his teammates about it. 

“With Lavender?” Ron asks.

“Yeah.”
His younger brother, taller than him by an inch and too observant by half, pockets his phone.

“Mom says you’ve asked about her,” he says, folding his arms. They’re not close to being as thick as Charlie’s but the height gives him the gravitas that his bulk doesn’t. “You liked her books that much, huh?”

Charlie grunts. He stares unseeingly at the portrait in front of him. It takes an entire ten seconds to recognize that it’s Guy Fieri, which surprises him. 

“You didn’t?” he asks.

It’s Ron’s turn to grunt. The mouthwatering smell of garlic bread and tomato sauce makes Charlie’s stomach rumble.

“We dated for a few years. Lived together for most of that, and it was good. I don’t know,” Ron says, sinking onto the red leather benches in the waiting area. “She’s funny.”

Charlie’s eyes land on a portrait of warm dark brown eyes, her brow quirked like she thinks it’s ridiculous they want a picture of her. Lavender’s signature is surprisingly blocky and even, like it’s the only thing about her she intends to be easy to digest.

“Seems really smart, too,” Charlie says.

When Ron doesn’t answer, Charlie looks over to see the confusion in his brother’s face the split second before it turns to knowing.

“For fuck’s sake,” Ron says for the second time in as many days. “You’re into her.”

He won’t deny it. He doesn’t even know why this woman has burrowed so deep under his skin without ever having met her, but he’s intrigued. Painfully so.

“Sorry,” he says.

Ron chuckles ruefully, drumming his fingers on the surface of the stool beside him before he hunches closer, reading the writing above the small collection box that’s perched on it. His smile spreads wider but he doesn’t look any happier.

“You want to meet her?” he says, taking one of the tiny scraps of paper and scribbling down Charlie’s name in his messy handwriting. “Why don’t we enter you for a chance to win a coffee date with her? Don’t know if you knew or not, but she’s a beloved local author.”

Charlie watches Ron slip it into the collection slot and rubs his palm along the rough hair lining his jaw.

“You’re okay with that?” he asks.

Ron shrugs and their name is called, the food ready.

“Why the fuck not?” he laughs. 

Charlie’s brushing his teeth the next morning when blood drips from his nose.

There’s a reason Lavender’s never done pageants.

Or—well, there’s a multitude of them, but high on the list comes this: Lavender Brown doesn’t wait to be picked. Pageant girls technically don’t either. They learn their angles and how to present themselves to entice, but Lav doesn’t. Hasn’t. She’s too busy, too chaotic for that.

The raffle feels like a pageant.

Every time she visits the library, the ice-cream peddler’s, the pizzeria, it mocks her. Those tiny opaque boxes with probably zero scraps of paper in them, making her feel like she nominated herself for homecoming queen and didn’t rake in any votes.

But it’s not a self-esteem thing, this suspicion that her mom will be the only one to enter. It’s simply too high a probability to ignore. This is a small town in Oregon, after all, and even though she’s a best-selling author, she has a hard time picturing anybody around these parts identifying as a dragonfucker. 

Especially not a Weasley.

When her agent sends over a picture of the raffle winner’s name, she recognizes the chicken-scratch handwriting.

It doesn’t belong to the name he’d written, nor does the phone number scrawled beneath it.

Lavender sighs. Is this meant to be some kind of mind game? Her relationship with Ron has been fraught, yes, but neither of them has ever done anything so odd as this. 

She’s never even met Charlie. He hadn’t been back to the States in all the time she lived with Ron. 

“That’s an aggressive pout,” Parvati says, cracking an egg over their skillet of shakshuka. 

Lavender hands over her phone and watches as her best friend’s smile fades into confusion.

“Ron wrote that,” Lavender says. She grabs a knife and cuts an avocado in half.

They’re cooking together and sipping mimosas for their monthly brunch date. They’d go out if any local lunch spots knew how to properly season their food, but alas.

“Is he trying to set you up with Charlie?” Parvati asks, wrinkling her nose. “Or trying to make sure you don’t have an actual coffee date with anybody else?”

It’s a mystery.

“Why do I feel like I’m walking into a trap?” Lavender says, adding champagne to her flute when it’s almost empty.

Parvati walks the shakshuka to the table and sets it on a trivet, careful to move the leafy monstrosity at the center of Lav’s table out of the way. 

“You don’t have to go.” Parvati returns to the kitchen for the plates and Lavender brings over their drinks and silverware. 

“Have you met Pansy?” she asks. “She’s not going to let me out of this one. Always complaining I don’t take advantage of my home base enough.”

They sit with their legs crossed on the cushioned bench in Lav’s alcove, tucked away behind the table and enjoying the sun that streams through the window. 

“Well,” Parvati says, smart and wicked, “why not use your home base to your advantage?”

Charlie’s never been to a poetry slam.

Didn’t even know they could be found in this tiny town.

He’s watched poet after poet on YouTube, reminding himself to breathe because it’s hard to witness the kind of vulnerability that sucks the air right out of your lungs. He’s written his own poetry, everything too literal and clunky to ever be read aloud, but here, tonight, his heart jackhammers against his chest and his hands are sweaty.

He’s going to meet Lavender Brown.

Her agent, Ms. Parkinson, contacted him with the news that he’d won the coffee date but there’d been a change of plans. Lavender wanted to meet him here, at a bar, where a stage was set up with a mic and the lights were low.

Anxiety builds a bonfire in his chest. Should he order them beers? Find them a table? He wipes his palms on his jeans.

“The elusive Charlie.” 

And there she is, more stunning in the hazy glow of blue and red lights than she has any right to be. Her outfit is ridiculous in all the best ways, with light blue eyeliner zig-zagging like lightning across the bridge of her nose and a sweater hanging with strawberry pom-poms. One shoulder peeks out from beneath the sweater and Charlie traces the soft line of it with enough hunger that he’s grateful for the dim lighting. 

He’s not thinking in words so much as he’s thinking in actions—not all of it sexual, necessarily, but stupidly whimsical, like sitting on a porch swing with her legs over his, or holding her hand in the car. And well, yeah, there’s the sexual stuff, too. He’d like to kiss the juncture between her shoulder and her neck. He’d like to see his hand dwarfed by the pleasant thickness of her thigh, to feel how soft she is.

“I see why all your photos on the mantel are outdated,” she says, gesturing to his bare arms. They’re covered in tattoos, a riot of dragons and greenery that disappears beneath his shirt and twists all the way up to his neck. “Molly doesn’t approve?”

“I’m very good at making my mother sad,” he says.

Lavender gives him a leisurely perusal that tosses gasoline on the already raging fire in his chest. Anxiety mixes with a heady shot of pleasure. 

He flexes his hands.

“She doesn’t like your hair either, does she?” Lavender asks.

God, she’s beautiful. White teeth. Broad nose. And he’s supposed to be able to make casual conversation?

“No,” he says, aware of the weight of the bun on top of his head, “she doesn’t.”

Lavender tilts her chin back and takes a deep breath.

“Why are you here, Charlie Weasley?”

Somehow he knows that this question is an important one. It’ll split the night into two neat sections: before and after. He can only be honest.

“I read your books,” he says. “Listened to them. And I think you’re incredible.”

Her surprise is sweet before her eyes narrow.

“Did Ron put you up to this?”

No sense in lying now. Charlie’s entire face goes hot.

“Sort of,” he says. “I annoyed him with all my questions about you, so he entered my name. Don’t think he counted on me winning.”

“And he knows you’re here?”

He nods, shoving his hands in his pockets. On the cusp of apologizing and heading for the door.

But Lavender relaxes, her shoulders dropping.

“Well then,” she says, eyes sparkling with something he should probably be afraid of, “let’s find a table near the front.”

His reply is lost in feedback from the speakers as a man built like a brick wall takes center stage. 

“Welcome, everyone,” he says, lips too close to the mic, “to the Third Annual Southeast Oregon Poetry Slam. I’m Greg Goyle, and I’ll be starting us off tonight. But first, a few orders of business.”

Attendance is sparse and none of the tables next to the stage are taken. In fact, there are only two tables in the back that look like they’re paying attention to Greg, with the majority of people laughing loudly at the bar.

Lavender chooses front and center, right below the mic, and Charlie is helpless to follow. Does she know this Greg? If he were the one performing, he’s not sure he’d want such close proximity, but it doesn’t matter. He gets the sense that she’s testing him. 

Pulling out a chair for her, he leans in close.

“Can I get you a drink?”

His premonition was right. She does smell good.

“A Dirty Shirley,” she says, dark eyes scrutinizing. He can’t imagine how else he’s supposed to react to her telling him exactly what she wants, so he nods.

“I’ll be right back.”

She’s thrown down the gauntlet. If this were Ron, he wouldn’t have followed her to this table. He’d tell her he’s getting a drink and then post up at the back of the bar, watching from a healthy distance. They’d fight when they got home.

But this isn’t Ron. This is Charlie, and he’s back five minutes later with two Dirty Shirleys.

Lavender does her best not to be impressed by the bare minimum.

Greg finishes the last announcement—another event he’ll be holding in Portland—and, after looking at his feet for a moment, he takes a deep breath and begins. 

It never gets old. Lavender is not a poet unless you count truly awful haikus, but she thinks she might be witnessing actual magic when Gregory Goyle, the closest thing she’s ever seen to a giant, opens up with all the delicacy of a desert flower. He blooms in metaphors and his throat works around concepts that usually seem too nebulous to be captured by words, but capture them he does. He cuts the quickest path to bone-deep loneliness and if nothing else, Lavender has always appreciated efficiency.

Charlie’s eyes are riveted on the stage. A single line exists between his brows, the emotions playing across his face like one of those cut-out lamps that spins and tells a story on the walls.

The story here is this: Charlie Weasley knows what it means to be lonely. 

Greg finishes and she and Charlie clap. When she hoots and hollers he doesn’t immediately look around to see if other people might be annoyed by her enthusiasm. Instead, he turns the widest grin on her and shakes his head in disbelief.

“Goddamn,” he says.

They sit through five poets before it’s over. At one point they were both discreetly wiping tears from their cheeks, laughing when their eyes met.

“It makes a difference,” Charlie says as they make their way to the bar for more drinks, “being in person.”

She hasn’t had enough to drink to be anything more than tipsy, but Charlie is the opposite of what she expected and it’s making her footing too wobbly for comfort. 

“You’ve seen spoken-word poetry before?”

He nods, boyish dimples proclaiming what she’s been doing her best to ignore: Charlie is beautiful. He doesn’t have perfectly symmetrical features or even a straight nose, but there’s no facade. Nothing to parse through but the honest truth that he is good and strong and kind.

“On YouTube,” he says, hand hovering behind her lower back as they find vacated stools to sit on. She wishes she could press into the warmth of his palm. Wishes, abruptly, that they were alone.

“You’re Ron’s brother,” she blurts. Maybe she should have eaten something before coming here, but she was nervous. 

He nods again, those dark blue eyes giving the impression that her ex is the last thing on his mind.

“I’m Ron’s brother,” he says. “Have you spent a lot of time thinking about that?”

“You’re different. It’s hard not to notice.”

The heat of Charlie’s palm incites a very different kind of heat below her belly when he presses it to her back.

“We are,” he admits.

“You live in Eastern Europe and spend your time in dogfighting rings,” she says. “He worried about you. Didn’t think you were happy.”

Charlie blows out a breath, the sweet scent of cherries wafting over her. 

“I wasn’t,” he says, hand flexing on the bar as he turns to face her more directly. “Didn’t think I could be after Fred.”

She watches the sadness spell itself out in the downward tug of his lips.

“I took him on a camping trip the week after he was bitten,” he says, holding her eyes with the air of a confession. “We were gone for eight days and I didn’t notice how bad it had gotten. He didn’t tell me he’d lost his antibiotics.”

Another deep breath and he pulls himself out of what Lavender knows must be a dark place.

“Sometimes it’s not any one person’s fault. Just shitty luck.” He says it quickly, like he wants to beat her to the punch of absolving him of guilt. 

“Enormously shitty,” she agrees.

“But lately,” he says, dragging his eyes away to draw a finger around the rim of his glass, “I’ve been remembering what an idiot Fred could be.”

Lavender almost spits out her drink. He rewards her with a reluctant grin.

“I’m serious,” he says. “He used to hang Ginny up on the back of her door by the overalls and switch out my conditioner for mayonnaise at least once a year.”

She listens, her chest aching at the tenderness in Charlie’s eyes.

“And now that I’m remembering, it helps. Gives me hope I can find life outside of, or, you know, alongside the grief.”

She cannot read his mind. She doesn’t know him well enough, but Lavender can treat him the way she’d want to be treated if she were in his shoes.

“Tell me the dumbest story,” she says. “Shock me with his idiocy.”

This time, Charlie’s smile isn’t reluctant.

“One time we were waiting to be seated at one of those fancy steakhouses because, you know, our family alone basically requires three tables,” he says, running the back of his knuckles along his short beard. “We’d only been there for five minutes when Fred and George disappeared. By the time we were seated, it was an hour later and my dad gets a call from a furniture store two and a half miles down the road, saying somebody needed to come pick up these two scrawny redheads.” 

Her laugh is loud and rambunctious as she throws her head back. Charlie moves closer like he can’t help it, watching her with obvious enjoyment.

When she asks for more, he obliges. They talk until her throat has gone raspy like it always does after a really good catch-up with Parvati. They talk until the sides of their hips are pressed together, until she moves to put her legs between his, until his gaze on her lips is too heavy to be ignored. 

She’s not wearing a bra, as she’s a believer in freeing the titties, even if (especially if) they’re full and lush and droopy. She watches Charlie valiantly fail at not staring at her nipple piercings, made all the more visible by how hard they’ve been for the past thirty minutes.

“Charlie,” she says, transfixed by the dramatic pout of his lower lip. “This should have been an awful date.”

He shifts against her and it’s subtle, but he’s showing her the length of him, the want of him.

“I know.” He swallows.

And then he kisses her.

They crash into the bathroom with very little subtlety and Charlie does his best to lock the door quickly so his hands can resume their exploration of her body. He finds her ass and then he’s lifting her, taking her by surprise if her squeak is any indication. 

“Of course,” she says, letting her head fall back and hit the door as he kisses up the column of her throat. “Of course you’re strong enough to lift me.”

He grunts, too distracted to understand her point. “How are you so soft?” he growls into her pulse. When he licks the fluttering vein there, her legs wrap around him.

“Shit, Charlie,” she moans as he ruts against her center. His body is tightened with desire and every inhale against her neck has him seriously worried about coming in his pants.

“Mm,” he rumbles, finding the smooth skin below her jaw. He nips and soothes, using his tongue and teeth to map the spots that have her desperately grinding against him. “This is happening. Reminds me of that sex scene you wrote between Evandrin and Lucia—”

Lavender laughs, resting her forehead on his.

“Oh my god,” she says. “Literally any other time, Weasley.”

The burst of affection swelling inside him is near-lethal. She scrapes her long nails against his scalp, sending goosebumps along his forearms. He tightens his grip around her, reveling in the way she fits against him. Seconds later, his hair is tumbling from its restraints and Lavender leans back to appraise the mess she’s made. 

“Ugh,” she says, adorable nose scrunching as she runs her fingers through his admittedly lush tresses, “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Hold on,” he says, centering her balance on his leg. She’s warm against his thigh as he hikes up her skirt, mourning the loss against his cock. But if there’s anything he wants more than he wants to thrust inside her, it’s to watch her fall apart by his hand. 

His fingers stroke the silky material of her panties, and a groan rumbles through his chest when he realizes they’re wet. She tugs at his hair.

“Fuck, Lavender,” he says. Her breath starts coming faster when he lazily strokes her. “Deep breaths.”

They both make a conscious effort to slow this down, to savor it. 

He keeps stroking over her panties and focuses on torturing her with another deep kiss, playing out the full seduction they probably don’t have time for in a bar bathroom. She melts against him, her pink braids tickling the bottom of his forearm as he works circles around her clit. 

“You want my fingers?” he asks gruffly.

Her eyes squeeze shut and she shakes her head. 

“Doesn’t do anything for me, but a little to the right?” 

He obliges, a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. He loves that she’s honest. He loves that she asks for what she wants. 

“Yes,” she gasps. “Fuck, yes, yes, yes.”

Through the fog of desire, he registers that the door handle is rattling. Lavender whimpers. 

“Be greedy,” he whispers, increasing the pressure just barely but keeping his pace. “Take it.”

Her hips stutter but he rocks his hand and thigh against her, eyes riveted to the bliss that spills across her expression. He forgets they’re in a bathroom, forgets about the years of dirt lined in the grout of the tiled floor. It’s all swallowed up, completely consumed by how beautiful Lavender Brown looks when she takes what she needs.

“Holy shit,” she says, resting her head on his sternum. Charlie’s achingly hard and desperate to get her in his bed, but it’s more than that. He’s already weaving an entire lifetime of delusionally optimistic fantasies. Holding her daily, being the person who encourages her writing. He wants to worry over whether she’s pressing too hard when she brushes her teeth and he wants to gross her out by eating kiwis without removing the skin. He wants to introduce her to his family.

That thought bitch slaps him back to the present, reminds him not to get too ahead of himself. There will be time—he will make the time—for all that.

“Have dinner with me tomorrow at the Burrow, Lav.”

Her unfettered laughter echoes against the tiny walls. Both of them smile.

“What, you think I’m interested in collecting Weasleys?” she says.

Charlie’s thumb brushes against the curve of her grin. 

“Wouldn’t be mad about it.”

“Good,” Lavender whispers, standing on her tiptoes to reach his mouth. “Because I’m coming for your dad next.”