No Means to Use the Stove

Seeking for Expert's Advice

Dean Thomas, startled, suddenly noticed someone stepping into his personal space. "Oh, Charlie," he managed to gasp almost coherently. He took a step backwards and studied his broad-shouldered co-worker cautiously, ready to bolt if the normally so calm man got crazy again.

"Dean."

"Yes?" The muscles in his legs were already tensing.

"Happen to know about Seamus? Finnigan?" That was a bit of a surprise. Charlie seemed really anxious about this. Dean didn't remember Seamus and Charlie ever being mates or anything like that. He calculated hurriedly in his head. He didn't believe Charlie Weasley was after Seamus for anything bad. He wouldn't hurt Seamus, even if he had behaved a bit out of control a moment ago. And - Dean decided looking at the readhead - Charlie might hurt him, if he didn't answer pretty soon.

"Works for the Ministry. Games and Sports." Dean had thought he had been ready to bolt, but Charlie's reflexes were obviously superior to his. He had hardly time to realize that Charlie had moved before he was gone. And Dean still really couldn't think of any reason for him to be needing Seamus.

* * *

To say he was nervous would have been a severe understatement. He massaged his neck with his right hand, watching the small house surrounded by hedges in front of him. Hermione had suggested that he should ask Dean. From Dean he had gotten the information on where Seamus Finnigan worked. In the Ministry they had told him Seamus had a day off and could be found in Ireland. So he had Apparated to Ireland, near the old town of Droghada. From Seamus himself he had, after some explanations, gotten this address and a promise to send an owl. Then he had Apparated in the nearby woods as Seamus had advised, and walked here.

It had all taken him only two hours. After that, he had walked round the nice-looking, suburban block seventeen and half times, first waiting for the owl to arrive and then for the appropriate time to pass from its arrival, before going to the door. The owl had arrived eight rounds ago and still he stood there, contemplating on how to approach the house.

The house itself didn't look particularly menacing or ominous. The Grimmauld Place Number 12, for example, had given a much more sinister first impression. But it wasn't the tidy little brickhouse that intimidated Charlie, only the people inside. Nevertheless, he wanted to understand, even if it was too late to change anything. Finally, he took a deep breath, stepped forward and opened the decorated wooden gate leading to the house's front yard.

"Beat it! Bloody buggers! Shouldn't be attacking me! If you'd ever heard of fair play, you'd wait for a wizard!"

At the same moment Charlie stepped inside the hedges, bellowing broke the silence. He had barely time to recognize that a silencing charm must have been placed around the house, before he saw the person responsible for the noise. In front of him stood a large man with sandy, slightly curly hair, big moustache, massive arms and wide chest. He chased after garden gnomes, an activity Charlie himself had often taken part in, but his tactics were quite peculiar. He lashed around with a shovel, but didn't seem to be aiming at anything, certainly not the gnomes.

Charlie was about to silently retreat from the danger's way when the man noticed him and yelled:

"Good! Just what I needed! Tell me, lad, where are the little buggers?"

He was blind? How come a blind person thrashed about with a shovel? That was damn dangerous. Charlie decided he should do something. He had faced dragons; a few garden gnomes weren't anything compared to a Norwegian Ridgeback.

"Put the shovel down, sir. I'll catch them for you."

"Be my guest, lad. It should be one of your kind to deal with them, anyway. Seamus was to visit this week, but that lass of his takes all his time, I suppose." The man sat heavily on a garden bench. "Use the sack! You can't just throw them over the hedge, the neighbours are Muggles."

It didn't take Charlie but a moment to catch the gnomes. They seemed to be used to an opponent that couldn't see them and didn't even try to hide themselves. He got a few bites, but all together, it was almost unfairly easy. He placed the wriggling sack by the bench and wiped the sweat off his neck and forehead.

"Fine job, there," the man stated. Even his normal voice came close to a bellow. "You must be Charlie. My son wrote I should be expecting a red-haired dragon tamer and you tamed the gnomes all right. Sean Finnigan." He shook Charlie's hand. His grip was strong and he looked straight at him. He seemed to be seeing him just fine. Wouldn't Seamus had mentioned it if his father was blind?

"They shouldn't even be here. This is a Muggle house and a Muggle garden. They smell wizards, I tell you! They smell wizards and think they have the right to come here and ruin my garden and have me for lunch. Bloody nuisance, those gnomes."

"Well, they aren't that bad..."

"Nooo, but you can see them! I only notice them when they sink their little razor-sharp teeth in my shins! That's no party, Charlie, no party at all."

"You mean...?"

"I mean that Muggles can't see them! Didn't you know? Why do you think we believe dragons and gnomes and unicorns and bloody griffins to be imaginary beasts? I've been told that one can learn to see them, if they know of their existence and have the necessary amount of sensitivity or what ever, but I have dealt with these buggers for twenty-six years and they're still invisible to me. Thank Heavens, owls are real birds or I wouldn't get any post." He sighed and stretched his neck. "So you wanted to ask me something, Charlie?"

"Well, you see, sir..."

"Sean. I don't care for any titles."

"Sean. It's...I have a Muggle fiancée and I wanted to ask you some advice on...how to make it work. How it is for a Muggle to live with a wizard...or a witch, in your case." Charlie thought that if he wanted to get any information, it was probably better not to mention breaking up with Anna and Obliviating her. The large man sitting in front of him didn't look like one you should deliberately anger.

"Charlie, Charlie," he shook his head grinning benevolently, "that wasn't any simple question you asked. Let's go inside. And I could use a beer."

Charlie followed Seamus Finnigan's father inside the house. He looked around, curious about how the Finnigans lived with both a wizard and a Muggle in the family. There was an open fireplace, a cage for an owl and if you looked for it, you could see that the house was somewhat bigger in the inside than it's exterior had indicated. There were typical Muggle items as well: a television-set, a computer and muggle stereos were the first ones to meet the eye. Charlie took notice of the electronic light switches also, and when they walked into the kitchen, Sean opened an icebox to grab a couple of beers. On the shelf above the stove there were, side by side, an old cauldron and a...how was it called...a micro-wee-oven?

It wasn't very different from a normal Muggle home, like the one Anna had. It wasn't a Muggle house, though. Charlie could see where charms had been used to make the stairs fit into a corner way too small for them, and he guessed the Muggle lock on the door wasn't the only safety measure placed on it. He wondered if it took a wizard to notice the subtle differences or whether the Muggle neighbours could see them as well. Probably they couldn't, or were at least unable to understand what they saw.

Anna had once said that it took pretty much a lot for something to be viewed as magical or impossible in the Muggle world. Apparently they had a tendency to explain everything according to the reality as they knew it. Not that wizards didn't. They just knew a different kind of reality.

"Well, Charlie," Sean sat down at the heavy, round kitchen table, opened his can of beer and offered the other to Charlie, "you've come to seek for the expert's advice, eh?"

His question seemed rhetorical so Charlie just nodded and sipped his beer. He had actually begun to like the Muggle drink. After the war it had been necessary to mingle with the Muggle world in order to rebuild the magical administration situatuted partly inside of it. He had probably learnt more about Muggles in a few short months than his father had during all his time working for the Muggle Relations.

Or at least he had learnt the basics about the quotidian life of Muggles: he knew how to order in a restaurant without embarrassing himself or how to make a phone call or how to get a beer. Not for the first time after the previous morning, he thought that he in all likelihood had been a lot better prepared to manage in the Muggle world than Anna had been to fit in the wizarding one. Sean Finnigan's voice startled him awake from his thoughts:

"Well, the most important thing is to remember to..." he looked Charlie straight into eyes as if preparing to tell him a great secret, and formed his next words very carefully, "...tell her before the wedding, for Heaven's sake."

"What?" He hadn't expected that.

"Yes. That's not what happened to me," he stated gravely.

"She told you after you were married?" Charlie knew it wasn't funny from Sean's point of view, but it was very hard not to chuckle. Soon he realized that he shouldn't have bothered to hide his amusement, though, as Sean himself burst out laughing. His laughter was as loud as his bellow in the yard had been and more contagious. Charlie found himself guffawing along. It loosened up some tension and when the laughter finally ceased and Sean wiped his eyes and took a long drink of his beer it felt like they had known each other for a long time.

"I can laugh at it now, but hell, what a shock it was at the time. Bloody hell." Sean hesitated for a moment, watching his large hands gripping the beer can. "I don't know if it was the witch-thing itself. I mean, my family are Catholics and my Granny would probably have freaked out had she known and whatsoever, but what really hurt was the fact that she didn't believe I'd have stayed by her side on my own, without the Church's and my family's pressure. That bloody hurt."

Sean stopped abruptly and his last words were left floating in the air. They sat in the silence together, Sean examining his beer can and Charlie, absentmindedly, massaging his swollen knuckles. He hadn't had time to get them healed after their unfortunate encounter with the mantlepiece in Hermione's office. Then Sean broke the silence and his voice was surprisingly low for such a loud man.

"And when she did tell...I had always imagined myself as this big and strong man, you know. One who takes care of the little woman. I'm... hell, I'm ashamed to admit that one of the reasons I fell for Una was probably the very thing that she was so darn fragile and I could show her everything and help her around. I liked to be the competent one, the one in charge. Well, in your world I bloody wasn't. And she was."

Sean swallowed and looked at Charlie again. He had admitted his guilt and now Charlie felt guilty under the older man's scrutiny, though he didn't really know what for. Sean took a deep breath and continued, his voice rising:

"One thing that really got to me, and still does, is how you people make hard work so damn easy. I'm a carpenter. Guess how it felt to see Una's brothers conjuring a bed? Just like that! Ten bloody minutes and there it is, a nice piece of furniture, red oak, all the fine carvings in their place. Would have taken me three weeks, at least. And I'm a bloody brilliant carpenter!"

"Conjured things aren't that great, and they aren't real," Charlie said trying to offer some consolation.

"Yes. I know. And it takes a hell of an amount of magic to hold them together. I know. She wanted to build this house with magic, you know," he shook his head, reminiscing. "I didn't take it, no sir, I wanted to make everything myself, for real. In the end, we did it together. It has a solid foundation and strong walls, this house, but there's a bit of magic here and there. Making the closets bigger, the ceiling higher...that sort of thing. Hasn't collapsed yet."

"I did tell her before the wedding." All of a sudden Charlie wanted Sean to know that.

"Good for you. But she didn't take it well, eh?"

"She took it all right, I guess. It was afterwards that we had problems. When I took her home, my parent's house, that is. Or not even then, not right away, it was later. I really didn't see it before she left." He felt awfully stupid confessing his own blindness.

"Did she tell you any reason?" That was only a question, with no accusation or blame in it.

"No. Not really. That's why I wanted to talk to you. Everything was fine for over seven months and then I told her I was a wizard and took her home, and it was three weeks before she left."

Sean straightened up in his chair and suddenly, the atmosphere in the kitchen changed. "You told her and then, right away, whisked her off to the wizarding world for three weeks?"

"Well...yeah," he felt a need to explain further: "We were engaged and she hadn't met my family yet."

"So... you took her away to spend three weeks with a bunch of strange redhead wizards?"

"Well...yeah."

"With no other Muggles, with no telephone, with no means to contact her friends at all?"

"She could have written a letter."

"And sent it by owl?"

"Well...I was there to help her!" It had seemed natural at the time, but when Sean shot his questions like that, Charlie felt like he maybe had done a tiny little mistake somewhere. Sean looked at him, took a deep breath and asked his next question in a misleadingly calm manner:

"Let me guess: you come from a long line of pureblood wizards and she was the first Muggle they ever got to know properly?"

"No," Charlie offered quickly. "Hermione, my brother's wife, is a Muggleborn." Contented, he dared to breath again and silently thanked Ron. At least he had been able to answer one question correctly.

"Oh, one Muggleborn. Bloody great." Sean didn't seem appropriately pleased about his answer, though. Then he leaned back in his chair, sighed and massaged his forehead with his thick thumbs."I guess we need more beer, then."

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