No Laughing Matter

That night, after closing, Fred was pleased to get a "Floo" from George. His twin didn't have long to talk, but he'd wanted his brother to know that he and Lee had arrived in America without incident. With his head sticking out of the fire, George filled Fred in on what they had done so far. It was very early in the morning there, and they were planning a trip to the village connected with the Salem Witches' Institute that day. They wanted to check out the local joke shop and hopefully talk to some of the students there. When asked how things at the shop were going, Fred bit his tongue as he was about to mention Carly, and simply replied,

"Fine, things have been pretty slow."

He had seldom deliberately lied to his brother, even by omission. Each of them seemed to know instinctively when the other was being untruthful or hiding something. When George had gone from the fire, Fred reflected on why he had done it. George might have teased him a little bit about having met a woman the moment he'd been left to his own devices, but it wouldn't have been that big a deal. Both he and George actually dated quite often, though not seriously, and Fred barely raised an eyebrow anymore when his twin announced he had a date. It was something else that had stopped him telling about Carly. Maybe it was because it was all so new, and he just didn't want to share it yet... He wanted to let things develop without outside influences. Besides, what was there to tell, really? He didn't want to acknowledge, even to himself, that he was already in love with her. It just didn't make sense for love to happen that fast or easily, and so he tried to dismiss it as impossible. What he was feeling was just infatuation.... Wasn't it?

He didn't see the significance of the gesture when he sent one of the store owls to deliver a red carnation he'd picked from the window box to her with a note that read, "Thanks for today." Carly didn't miss the hidden message in the gesture, though, as she was looking through one of her herbology books when it arrived. She flipped through its pages until she found the section that listed the names of flowers with their meanings. "Carnation, Red: My Heart Aches For You." With a smile, she held it to her cheek for a moment, then conjured a small vase and put the flower on the table next to her bed. Who would have thought she would find London so enchanting?

The next morning, Fred woke up and was whistling as he prepared to open the shop for the day. The prospect of seeing Carly again had him in a cheerful mood, and he wondered where they should go for their date. It took him a full hour to realize that one of the owls on the long perch by the window was his parents' new owl, Holle. Errol had finally been retired, and Fred and George had given their parents the new owl for their wedding anniversary. She had her head tucked under her wing, and was clearly asleep, though she hadn't delivered the letter tied to her leg yet. Typical. The Weasley family always tended to own quirky owls, each one with some sort of character flaw.

He untied the letter from her leg without disturbing her, and read it with growing alarm. His mother wanted him to come to dinner. Tonight, no excuses. Oh no! The letter said that Bill and Fleur were coming as well, so at least he wouldn't be totally alone with his mother and father, whom he was not sure had recovered from his last visit home. He knew that the family meal was partially because his mother would be worried about him being lonely with George gone, but what was he going to do about Carly? Should he send her a note, saying he had to postpone? He really didn't want to do that, but he knew he couldn't get out of dinner at the Burrow. Invite her to come? Would she think that he was odd, or rushing her into "meeting the parents" at this point? The last thing he wanted to do was scare her away before he had the chance to convince her that he was the man of her dreams.

After mulling it over, he decided that he would send word to his mother that he would be bringing a friend to dinner with him. If Carly decided not to go, he could at least spend an hour with her before going to the Burrow. He scribbled out his response, and then prodded the recalcitrant owl awake to deliver his answer back to its home. As she flew out of the window, Fred hoped he wasn't making a mistake. His family could be a handful, even in small doses, and might be overwhelming at first.

There was a steady business all day long, which was unusual for a Wednesday, but not unwelcome. Quite a few parents had come in to pick up small treats to send their kids at Hogwarts, and some older "kids" came in to look around. A couple were friends from Hogwarts who had left school the previous year and wanted to see the new shop firsthand. He added ingredients that were due to be added to two of his potions, and readied the ingredients for a large order of Canary Creams that they would be sending out at the end of the next week to a convention of wizards that would be gathering in London from all over Europe. As anxious as he was to see Carly again, the day went by surprisingly quickly; it was closing time before he knew it. He was just sealing the bag of the day's receipts to go to Gringotts when she arrived, wearing pretty lavender robes, with her hair swept up away from her face in a way that made his stomach tighten with want.

"Hello!" He called from the small office behind the counter.

"Hello yourself," she smiled, meeting him as he came out, and kissing him lightly on the mouth. "Thank you for the flower."

"Anytime," he said, resisting the urge to take her into his arms with great difficulty. He held up the deposit bag and asked, "Fancy a walk to the bank?"

Carly turned the sign in the window to closed and followed Fred out of the store. They walked hand in hand toward the snowy white building where Fred made the deposit, then turned back toward the Leaky Cauldron. After they were served their wine, Fred broached the subject of a visit to the Burrow. He was slightly surprised, but very pleased, when she readily accepted the invitation; she was curious to meet some of the people he had told her about at lunch the day before.

They apparated directly into the front garden of the Burrow, and walked to the front door from there. The house looked the same as ever; built up over time as extra room had been needed, and held together, for the most part, by magic. The front door opened before Fred could reach for the knob, and Mrs. Weasley stood in the doorway, wiping her hands on her apron.

"Welcome to the Burrow!" she smiled at Carly. "Fred said he was bringing a friend with him. I'm Molly."

"Mum, this is Carly Winters. She's here from America and getting ready to start work at St. Mungo's," Fred introduced. "Carly, my mother, obviously."

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Weasley." Carly offered her hand, and instead of shaking it, Molly took it and led her into the house.

"Please, call me Molly. You just come tight in here and make yourself comfortable."

Fred followed behind, slightly worried. It was clear that his mother had taken one look at Carly and made up her mind automatically that she was important to him. He could practically see the wheels turning in her head as she wondered how long "this" had been going on. With and inward groan, he hoped she didn't embarrass him too much with stories of his formative years. Knowing his mum, she would do everything in her maternal power to ferret out any details by lulling him into complacency, then springing her attack. He'd seen the normally easy-going Bill blush furiously on several occasions as Fleur had been treated to several stories of her fiancée's childhood, and Bill had been the "good" child. He would just have to stay close and try to nip openings to any potentially damaging stories in the bud.

No sooner had this thought crossed his mind, than his mother, who was steering Carly toward the living room, called over her shoulder to him, "Fred dear, go on out to the shed, will you dear, and tell your father that dinner will be ready in a few minuts? He out there tinkering with some strange muggle device he found."

Fred wasn't at all sure he wanted to let his mother alone with Carly; he knew this was a ploy to get him out of the way for a few minutes. He nodded warily and went back outside. By the time he'd listened to his father tell him about his newest muggle acquisition, the 'eclectric razor,' a bizarre device that muggle men supposedly used to remove unwanted facial hair, and returned to the house with his dad. Carly was sitting on the sofa with Bill and Fleur, laughing merrily at something Molly had just said. With not a little trepidation, he sat beside her and prepared for a long, and probably mortifying, evening. It turned out that she had been introduced to his brother and soon-to-be sister in law while he'd been out at the shed, and so he introduced his father.

"Fred's never brought a girl home with him before." Bill winked at Carly in a friendly teasing way.

"And he hasn't brought one home this time," Arthur Weasley countered smoothly before Fred could even draw breath to make a rude comment or gesture to his brother. "He's brought a very lovely young woman. How are you finding London, Carly?"

"I can see where Fred gets his charm, Mr. Weasley," Carly grinned. "I haven't had a dull moment from the minute I met him."

"If Fred is being charming," Mrs. Weasley chimed in, placing dishes of roast potatoes and vegetables on the table, "he's either up to something or he must really like you."

"Or both," Arthur agreed sagely.

The family ignored the fact that Fred's ears were turning red, and continued having fun teasing him and getting to know Carly. Fred had almost no chance of getting a word in edgewise; he simply held the chair for her when dinner was announced, and sat next to her, letting the others ask the questions. He could learn a lot more about her that way, without seeming to be too eager for the information.

With Molly's gentle prodding, they all learned about Carly's closeness with her family, her desire to become a fully qualified Healer, and her impressions of London. She listened intently to the discussions of the others as they talked about suspected Dementor attacks and Dark activity all over Britain. She was pleased that the Weasley family was so adamantly against the Dark Arts, and voiced her opinion about it when asked for it. She told them that two of her brothers, Kyle and Patrick, were members of the Magical Law Enforcement Squad in America, and her sister, Rowan, was a crime/dark arts reporter and columnist for the North American Interpreter; a popular daily newspaper in the States.

At one point during the meal, Bill made a comment about international wizarding law that Fleur apparently disagreed with, and she made a short, pithy comment in French that had Carly chuckling into her goblet. Carly then made a comment incomprehensible to Fred, and apparently to everyone else but Fleur who simply answered, "Oui!" and the two young women laughed again.

"You can speak French?" Bill and Fred asked at the same time.

"Yes," Carly nodded. "My Aunt Suzette is French. She taught me years ago, and I visited her and Uncle Nigel in France often as a child before they moved to England."

"Then you can help to interpret for me from time to time," Bill said with satisfaction.

"Trust me," she answered back with a teasing smirk. "You don't want to know."

Everyone was already so comfortable with Carly's presence that it did not seem odd to assume she would be around in the future. The meal was punctuated with laughter and a strange familiarity; it was as if she had been to dinner at the Burrow a hundred times before. After the meal was finished, they all retired to the living room and Fred decided now was the time the family would band together to try to embarrass him with stories. He thought about spiriting her away for a walk or moonlight broom ride, but she seemed to be having such a good time, he discarded the idea. He didn't miss the significant look that passed between his parents when Carly took his hand in hers, and didn't release it once he was seated next to her. With an inward shrug he settled in, and almost immediately regretted his decision when the topic turned to the incident he had mentioned to her the day before. As fate would have it, it was her own question that sparked it and started the story that was sure to become one of those stories of family legend.

"Uh...Fred?" Carly had asked him quietly while Molly was passing around coffee, "Where are all of the pictures? There are nails up in the plaster, but the pictures are all missing."

"Oh, well," Fred began, his ears beginning to turn red.

"Yes, Fred," Bill chimed in loudly, overhearing her question. "Where are all of the pictures? Now that you mention it, didn't that wall used to be covered with family photos?"

"And didn't there used to be a painting over the fireplace?" Fleur added, getting into the discussion with an impish grin. "And a mantle?"

"I told you it was an accident," Fred said somewhat desperately to his mother, who was handing Carly a cup of coffee.

"I'll have to take your word for it, as I couldn't hear anything for two days after the initial explosion," Molly said sternly.

Carly was looking at Fred with a raised eyebrow and expectant expression that was a bit too much like his mother's and made him squirm slightly. He looked around appealingly at everyone else, but found only similar expressions staring back at him.

"Okay, the first thing I want to say is that it was entirely George's fault," Fred began, and was answered with a chorus of laughter. "We had just opened the shop a couple of months before, and had come home to pick up a few of our things. We had had a couple of cauldrons full of experimental potions brewing, and moving them was proving to be a little trickier than we'd planned on. I came down the steps first, holding one of them, and George was holding the other. He missed a step, and dropped his cauldron, and when he fell, he hit me, and my cauldron spilled over. When the two potions combined, they had a bad reaction to each other, and boom!"

"Boom, Indeed!" Molly sniffed, "Every last picture was blown from the walls, frames and all, and the mantle fell into the fire and melted instantly. I don't know how the two of them survived, but none of us could hear a thing for two days. I don't even know if I've found all of the pictures; I haven't had time to repair all of the frames and re-hang them, what with being on duty for the Order and...."

Molly's hand flew to her mouth and everyone else looked surprised at the slip. The Order of the Phoenix was still a secretive organization, even with Voldemort's return being common knowledge, and Molly was usually its most guarded member (aside from Mad-Eye Moody). Carly looked at Fred first, then at the others, then took a sip of coffee and spoke into the uncomfortable silence.

"And you didn't skin them alive? My mother would have stunned me where I stood and then screamed at me for an hour, whether I could hear her or not!"

Fred was the first to recover and said, "We're too fast for Mum to catch us with a stunner, but I don't doubt she was screaming. George and I cleared away what we could of the potion and broken glass from the frames, then stacked all of the pictures we could find into crates and high-tailed it out of here."

"Yes, well," Arthur said, grateful that Carly was pretending she hadn't noticed anything amiss. "Don't think you're off the hook yet, Fred. As soon as George gets back from America, the two of you are going to have some work to do around here."

"So Fred and George are the family trouble makers?" Carly smiled. This was the sort of story she had been hoping to hear from the moment she arrived. There was nothing like family to give a girl an idea of the type of man she was dating.

"Well the two biggest ones. We've just gotten a letter from Hogwarts about our youngest son, Ron, and his best friend Harry. Seems the two of them have been given detention for fighting. Honestly, if Ron doesn't watch his step, he'll lose his prefect badge!" Molly confided to everyone in general. "Though apparently the fight was with Draco Malfoy, so there's no surprise there."

While everyone else in the room nodded in understanding, Fred told Carly, "The Malfoy family and the Weasley family have been on the opposite sides of everything as far back as anyone can remember. Add Harry Potter to the mix, and things tend to get ugly pretty fast."

"Harry Potter?" Carly asked with some interest. "I know who he is, of course, but I didn't connect him with your brother. My uncle Nigel thinks the sun rises and sets on that boy, and likes to tell the story about how he met him in Diagon Alley once in a shop. He's sent us all newspaper clippings about him at home. My parents were reluctant to let me come to London, in fact, in light of Voldemort being back.... Sorry!" She added when everyone cringed at the sound of the name.

"Well, I daresay that it won't be the last letter we get from Hogwarts." Molly sighed, frustrated with herself for the slip in secrecy; she would have to tell Dumbledore, of course.

Talk began to turn to Bill and Fleur's wedding plans, and so Fred took the opportunity to excuse himself and Carly. They said their good-byes to the family, with an invitation for Carly to visit again very soon. They left by the front door, and out into the garden, where they planned to say their own good-byes and apparate to their separate homes. Their 'good-byes' didn't end until the front door opened again some time later, and Mrs. Weasley called,

"Goodness! Are you two still out here?"

"Just leaving now, Mum!" Fred called back somewhat breathlessly, while Carly stifled a laugh.

"I guess moms are the same all over the world." Then she added, "I like yours. It's easy to see that your family really loves each other. I'll Floo you sometime tomorrow when I get back from my meeting at St. Mungo's."

He nodded, and watched her disappear with a loud 'pop' of air, then apparated to his own doorstep, and home.