Four Weddings and a Dragon - Charlie Weasley

Chapter 5

Hermione awoke in her new husband's, Charlie Weasley's, bed to the sound of the shower running in the bathroom. His mattress on the floor next to her was empty, the blankets tangled in a knot like a statue he'd hurriedly sculpted in commemoration of last night's restless sleep.

As for herself, Hermione had slept rather well. Frustrated or not, she had traveled from London to Bucharest to the Carpathians, helped administer a gravidity detection potion to a dragon, accidentally been married in a ceremony that was more like a brawl, unsuccessfully fought to escape a lock-up, mourned her a ex a little more, been on both sides of failed seductions, and done all of it in one day. She couldn't help but be quite worn out.

It was still early enough in the spring for there to be frost in mountains in the morning, and the grills on the window next to the bed twinkled in the early sunlight, the only diamonds she'd ever seen as the newest Mrs. Weasley. She raised her arms above her head and stretched between Charlie's sheets with a muffled squeal. The moment her spine curved with her stretch, it was back. Last night's feelings -- the butterflies in her stomach were moving again.

Through the closed bathroom door and the sound of streaming water, she heard Charlie clear his throat. Any moment now the water might shut off, and Charlie could appear, dewy in his dressing gown, just like yesterday, before dinner, when...

She sat up. It was best if she left. All her things were still in the deserted witches' bunkhouse anyway. It was plenty of excuse to cross the courtyard and get ready for the day over there. She rose and tried the front door of Charlie's place, the one that had been charmed shut all night, and it swung open as freely as it ever had on its heavy iron hinges. She jotted a note explaining where she'd gone and telling him she'd see him at breakfast in the mess hall. Without taking the time to cloak herself in a Disillusionment spell, she gathered yesterday's clothes and crept away still wearing Charlie's quidditch t-shirt.

Whatever happened, she was keeping that.

The witches' bunkhouse was cold, as if there hadn't been a fire in it for years. Frankly, cold, empty space was exactly what she needed. Hermione stood in the stream of the shower, wishing the water could be just a little warmer, trying to do what had been so difficult to do while lying under Charlie last night: think.

Thinking, as she well knew, was best begun by assembling what she already knew, and looking for gaps, finding the vacant spaces where what she needed to know ought to be. She'd been married to Charlie by an old Carpathian witch who, thanks to a language barrier that had done enough damage already, she could not question directly, without an interpreter. And with all the possible interpreters acting like they were scared of Doamna Marius, that route to finding anything out was closed -- for now.

The wedding had every indication of being a bizarre but not altogether implausible misunderstanding. But Hermione had seen enough conniving and machinations in her day to look at every misunderstanding with an eye for subterfuge. Had Doamna Marius truly misunderstood, or was there something about getting them married and locking them away together that served some other purpose? And what would it be? Charlie hadn't been at the meeting about Ela's egg last night. From the sounds of the crowd, it might not have happened yet. As far as they knew, no one had yet decided how best to care for the relatively little dragon carrying an enormous egg.

Charlie had said something the night before connecting their wedding to the breach in the wards that allowed the skittish opal-eye and the bully of an iron-belly to mate. He thought Doamna Marius had something to do with it, but how could she? Someone who'd lived at this settlement for a hundred years would understand better than anyone what a wildly dangerous risk it was to breed that particular pair of dragons.