Firewhiskey and Dragon Scars

Firewhiskey and Dragon Scars

The day will come when the scorches and claw marks left by the dragons will fail to mollify the emotional scars left inside your broken heart. Only then will you decide to go home to England.

But not yet. Not today.

You still need to stay away from the family who loves you, who claims to understand your pain. They forgive you, as your father has told you over and over for years, though you can't yet forgive yourself. Your mother is pleading in her letters to you. "Come home," she writes. "Come home for keeps."

You burn the letters, one by one; you read them and then burn them, soon after they arrive. The parchment fuels the fire before the owl that delivers them has a chance peck at your blistered fingers, requesting a reply. No. No more replies. You replied just once and that was when your father bribed you with World Cup tickets. You wanted to decline, to tell your father to ask one of the twins' friends to come along, or a girl for Bill. Your friends at the Dragon Colony, however, wouldn't have understood why you would have wanted to stay when tickets for the event were so hard to come by.

And your mother wouldn't have understood if you'd sent one of your friends.

So you went home.

And left soon after with the memories cutting into your heart.

But your mother, bless her ignorance or optimism or whatever it's called, saw that the door had been opened and her owls continue to come.

"Come home," she writes. "Come home to England. Come home to us."

Her pleas are stronger now that another brother has left the fold, but he didn't do the thing you did. He didn't...

He didn't...

You did.

You were the one they left in charge when your mother went to have another baby. You were the one who let them in. You opened the door when your parents told you not to open the door to anyone.

"No one at all," mummy said as she wheezed through the contractions that would produce Ron. Strange that after all these years, the identity of the woman who raised you still remains "mummy" in your memory of that day, though you call her "mum" at all other times.

You nodded then as she leaned down to kiss your cheek. "I'll watch them," you promised with as much mock-solemnity as your nearly eleven-year-old self could muster. Smiling at your mother as your father led her out to the car. "I'll guard them with my life."

How prescient those words turned out to be. They trusted you and you betrayed them. You brought the death into your house. You allowed them to take away your closest brother. You were the one who broke your parents' hearts when they should have been at their happiest.

You killed him just as much as if you had been the one who held the wand.

You made the choice. "The best choice you could," your father told you over and over as you cried through the night. "Charlie, you couldn't do anything more. What were you going to do? Fight?"

Bill would have fought them. But then, Bill was much older.

Bill was at Hogwarts and you were home. You were the one they left, just as you were the one who left him. There were too many of them and not enough of you. Thank Merlin Percy hadn't been home that day. You would have left him as well. You only had two arms and they were filled with screaming three-year-old twins as you told...

You begged...

You ordered him to run.

But you didn't look back to see if he had followed you.

It didn't take long. You hoped that it didn't. They searched your house, you know this now, as you knew then that he never made it out. You hid in the woods behind the house, silencing the twins with your hands since you knew no magic, murmuring frantic pleas for him to come out to you. To come out alive. You prayed, desperately, that he was smart enough to hide as long as he could, though his nine-year-old legs were already too long to fit under the beds.

The room you shared was ransacked, the Quidditch posters torn to shreds and left on the floor, his toy broomstick broken at his feet. His lifeless body lay amongst a heap of clothes, all hand me downs from Bill since he was already too tall for your clothes.

Percy found him when he came back from playing with Cedric Diggory.

Daddy found them both.

Daddy found the Dark Mark that had risen above your house. He saw it as he was coming home to tell you all about Ron. He could see it from the road, you supposed, from the way the car kicked into high gear, crashing unmercifully into the fence in his terror. From your hiding place you could hear him calling for each of you by name, his voice trembling and breaking.

"George... Charlie... Percy... Fre-OH MERLIN!!"

And then you heard the cries of a young brother and a broken father.

The Dark Mark was your father's memory of that day, the one last reminder of his beloved third son. Mercifully, though you knew it had risen, you never saw it yourself as you lay clutching George on your left and Fred on your right, waiting for your father to come and seek you out. The Dark Mark was his and his alone, until he shared it, you supposed, with your mother as she sat in Saint Mungo's cooing over her seventh son. You, however, would not hear him speak of it for more than ten years. His silence was kept until IT rose again over a place where you were sleeping. When it rose into the air over the campground, heralding the return of a panicked time. Harry Potter asked the question. He didn't understand. He didn't remember the Mark when it had risen above him once before. But you did. You had memories of the Mark, though you had never seen it. You and your father, who could never deny the truth from any of you, were doomed to remember that terrible day again.

"The terror it inspired," your father told Harry Potter and your brother and the others, his voice again trembling. "You have no idea, you're too young. Just picture coming home and finding the Dark Mark hovering over your house, and knowing what you're about to find inside..."

You left them to the silence that followed his explanation and drowned yourself in Firewhiskey, sitting outside the tent while watching the embers of a lingering campfire burn, feeding the fire that burned in your heart.

You drown yourself this way each night, listening in the Romanian darkness as the dragons scream their greetings. They sound so much like the screams of your childhood. Screams of life and life taken. Screams, you only imagined then as you remember in your imagination now. Unable to remember any real sounds from the time you left your brother to be slaughtered until the time you heard your father cry out for you, your imagination fills the void. You see in your mind's eye that as your youngest brother was screaming his first breaths of life, another child, another brother, was screaming in agony as the blinding green light filled your windows, leaving no mark except the wounds on your heart and the hearts of the parents and the brothers old enough to comprehend.

Fred learned not to ask questions. George thought he was an imaginary friend. Ron never knew him. Percy...

Percy never looked at you the same way again.

Percy never looked at you at all.

You escaped at your first opportunity, going to Hogwarts later that year with the brother who hadn't been home that day. You escaped with the one who would have fought. You excelled in school and on the Quidditch pitch. You were popular and trusted by your friends and teachers. You helped Hagrid care for the creatures he kept in his hut, knowing that you would never again trust yourself to care for a human being. Bill taught you things that your classmates would learn much later, when it became clear to you both that you were talented and smart and had a hunger to learn to protect yourself and your family from any more harm.

You hid your tears the next year when another Weasley wasn't sorted into Gryffindor, no, when another Weasley wasn't sorted at all. Bill left you soon enough and you tried to be strong and brave. You hid the tears when you realized you would be the only Weasley where there should have been two. You learned enough for both of you. But you couldn't hide the tears when Percy came and was sorted into your house. Six years wasn't enough, hadn't been enough, to mend the rift of betrayal in a brother's heart. He was a stranger, though you shared a name.

"Now there are two Weasleys at Hogwarts," your housemates cheered as they swooped down upon the younger that shared your name. "Two Weasleys in Gryffindor!"

Two, where there should have been three.

In the darkness, you see an owl aiming for you, carrying another letter from your mother. She's learned not to send Howlers anymore. You won't answer them anyway, so she sends her pleas wrapped in woolen jumpers and cookies baked with love. "Come home," she writes. "Come home for keeps."

But you can't go home now.

Not yet.

Perhaps not ever.