The Gift of the Mages

THE GIFT OF THE MAGES

by Mary Ellis-with apologies to J.K.Rowling and American writer O. Henry whose short story Gift of the Magi inspired this piece.


1. POVERTY SUCKS

His pocket watch chimed a quarter to five as the lanky young man broke the seal on the last remaining scroll in the in-tray. It was in his nature to save the least-worst for last, and he already had the bills opened, flattened and sorted into neat little piles the way his wife had shown him.

"Remember, Ron, we only need to pay the ones marked FINAL NOTICE, because if we don't they'll send Howlers. The others will wait until work picks up again." Then she'd gathered her own paperwork, stuffed it into her backpack, grabbed a cracker from the breadbox, and trotted breezily out the door as if nothing could be surer than work picking up.

He wished he shared Hermione's viewpoint, but as the next-to-youngest child in a family full of optimists he felt the Potion of Hopefulness had run dry long before it reached him--his father and brothers having downed double doses before passing it on. What native optimism he did have was not stirred by the letterhead on the scroll in his hand:

Kickham, Waltherdown, and deWitt-Neatley, Solicitors
13 Sowerby Street

London, U.K.

Lawyers. Well, that could be good news or bad. Maybe this was the final payment for his enquiry into the Hopkirk matter. A small fee but welcome, though the case had cost him dearly in other ways. He ripped it open, and scanned the first lines.

Dear Master Weasley:
In re your letter the 5th of October 2000, concerning compensatory recognition from our client, Robert Raglan,...

He clasped the parchment to his chest. Merlin's Monkey! The Robert Raglan was finally writing back to him--well, sort of. His eyes misted with happiness.

As a kid, he'd bought, borrowed, or traded for every issue of Raglan's Mad Muggle comic books he could get his hands on. He had so wanted to be like Raglan back then--writer, artist, humorist or--why not?--all three. But George--and Fred, rest him--had already cornered the market on funny, and Ron's drawing skills had never progressed much beyond stick-figures. So, he decided to be a writer. But first he read and re-read the comics, scribbling editorial comments and new plot threads in the margins as they came to him.

From there it was a short leap to actual composition. He made up all kinds of stories, with Martin Miggs as the bumbling Muggle hero, accidentally running up against the magical world everywhere he went. Ron's first efforts came out of personal experiences with spiders (The Acromantula Invasion), hang-gliders (The Mysterious Collision over Surrey), gardening (The Gnomes of Otterbottom Hill), and the twins (The Two Wicked Step-Brothers). Other ideas he got listening to his father's stories from work: The Enchanted Tea Set, The Car from Outer Space, and The Wacky Toilets of Bethnal Green, to name but a few. Most recently, he'd started writing stories tied to his years at Hogwarts. It wasn't easy Figure out ways to get a Muggle onto the school grounds, but he'd managed it three times in The Floo Powder Accident, The Reluctant Prefect, and Caught in the Quidditch Crossfire with, he thought, rather hilarious results.

Thinking back, he was amazed at how many he had written, but no more amazed than his teachers would have been to learn of his prodigious output. They had long since despaired of ever getting him to do his homework essays completely and on time, Hermione's help notwithstanding. They'd have been even more amazed--nay, flabbergasted--to hear that he had mustered the courage to send some of his better efforts to a published writer. In return, Robert Raglan sent him signed glossies and an occasional cheery note. Ron even thought he saw glimpses of his own plotlines in the series, but the famous cartoonist never flagrantly exploited his material--until this year.

Ron might never have discovered this sorry fact. After he took on the responsibilities of husband and breadwinner, he had gradually let go of his childhood, even going so far as to put his beloved comics collection in George's hands to sell at the shop, although he continued to write for a while. Then Fred and George gave him and Hermione a set of self-sharpening knives for their first anniversary--and a copy of Robert Raglan's first novel: Martin Miggs the Mad Muggle and the Quidditch-Playing Prefect of Pigpimple Academy. To his surprise, the book featured no less than three of his plot-arcs; in fact, the last three he had written. (He thought a good bit of the dialog looked familiar too.)

This was both the best and the worst present he'd ever gotten from the twins. Granted, it was the only one they ever gave him that didn't end up inflicting pain and/or humiliation. Also, he was proud to know his stories were good enough to print. However, it showed Raglan up as a thief, a plagiarist, and a scoundrel. Ron couldn't believe that of his hero. There was probably some mistake, some reason why no one had asked his permission to use his stories. His address had been mislaid, or the owl that delivered the letter had collapsed and died. Or some evil wizard had taken over Raglan's mind and was forcing him to steal other people's ideas. The Imperius curse had explained far worse crimes than this.

So, wanting to believe only the best, he wrote Raglan a request for recognition and waited patiently and naively for a cheque, however small, which would acknowledge his part in what had turned into a best-seller. Now finally, here in his hand was a reply. He took a breath and read further:

...we hereby inform you that Mr. Raglan has no recollection of any contribution you may have made to his novel. Unless you have some witnessed or dated evidence to the contrary, we advise you not to speak of this matter to anyone else as it would constitute slander and be, thereby, actionable.

It was not signed by Raglan, but by one of the deWitt-Neatleys, Junior. Ron was impressed by the lawyerly language--for about two seconds. Then he began taking the apartment apart looking for any scrap of proof that he had written those stories. He thought he'd made a copy of at least one of them before sending in the original--Hermione was always after him to do things like that-- but if he had, he could find it precisely nowhere.

Now he slumped over the paper-laden desk and pushed at his unruly mop of red hair. Hermione'll be home soon, he thought. Best have tea ready. Also, best get away from that depressing pile of bills--and his forever-lost opportunity. Oh well, at least they'd got the last of the wedding debts settled.

Now here it was, two weeks before Christmas, and not a Knut in the till for gifts. Ron sighed, remembering Christmases past--especially at Hogwarts. What a little prat he'd been back then. There was his sweetie, carefully choosing gifts for him and Harry every year, and neither of them with so much as a chocolate frog for her. It had taken him years to learn to reciprocate--he just hadn't liked her that much back then. No, that wasn't the whole reason. A gift from a boy to a girl meant something quite different than the reverse. Girls could give guys all the presents they wanted and it could be explained away as part of their motherly instinct. But if a boy gave a girl a gift, it meant he was serious about her, and that always started the old school gossip mills turning. With brothers like his leading the taunts, life would have become unbearable.

None of that mattered now. Hermione was his--all his--and he didn't care who knew it. He felt a sudden ache in his chest, which rose slowly in the direction of his Adam's-apple. He always got this way when he thought of his responsibilities as a husband. Here they were, a year married and poor as Muggle church-mice in their tiny bed-sit flat. True, his private agency, Aurors 'R' Us, had worked out well for a while. With his friend Harry as partner, newly triumphant from their defeat of a certain major evildoer, they were able to entice lots of business to their little office in the East End. Then Harry and Ginny got married and took a well-deserved, year-long honeymoon--a trip around the world, donated by a grateful public. Ron's had been the most generous contribution: most of their funds from the agency, though he didn't tell Harry that. He'd managed for once to quell his natural aversion to poverty, and reminded himself daily that it had been worth it to see their happy faces--Ginny's especially. He'd never realized how much his little sister had suffered during the Voldemort years until then.

It was probably because of Harry's absence that Ron had made a botch of his most recent case. Tailing the philandering husband of Ministry official Mafalda Hopkirk late one night, he was able to take an incriminating picture of Magus Hopkirk at a wild party, while balancing on his broomstick outside a third-storey window. He presented it triumphantly to Mafalda, and she, equally triumphantly--and boasting of a very lucrative divorce settlement--showed it to her friends while they were all having their nails done. As the lurid magical photo made the rounds in the beauty shop, several people in it moved aside to reveal Ludo Bagman, cured of his gambling addiction and relegated to an assistant's post in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, whooping it up in a hot tub with a witch who was emphatically not Madam Bagman. If Harry had been involved, the picture would surely have revealed all its contents to him immediately, not taken its good old time--Harry was clever, or lucky, that way. Needless to say, Madam Bagman heard about it, her husband took up residence in the family doghouse, and Ron abruptly stopped getting work from Ministry personnel, who made up the bulk of his clientele.

Just about that same time, Hermione's private agency, dedicated to negotiating jobs and basic rights for disenfranchised beasts and beings, lost its government funding. A spokeswitch from DRACOMC insisted that cutbacks were being made all over. Still, thought Ron, it was a bit of a coincidence that the department's economies started right after he'd made an enemy of the Bagmans.

Ron sighed. Hermione had to put up with a lot in this marriage. He wondered at times like these what she saw in him. She was smart, witty, compassionate--and yes, bossy--but so beautiful. He remembered just when it was that the beauty had neutralized the bossiness in his mind. It was at that Yule Ball in fourth year when she went as the date of Quidditch-star Viktor Krum. Ron hadn't even recognised her at first, her white neck rising like a Sugar Quill, delicately curving, out of the collar of that filmy blue robe, the smooth mass of her dark toffee-colored hair piled up on her head and held in place as if charmed.

This effect he found out later, had come courtesy of fellow Gryffindor, Angelina Johnson, but was in fact only partly due to sorcery. The hair itself, normally frizzy and a bit unkempt, had been straightened and styled by Angelina, aided by slathers of an expensive magical pomade. A set of ornate Spanish combs, a Johnson family heirloom, had been stuck strategically in Hermione's hair, sculpting it into glistening waves and tendrils. They sparkled as she moved about, walking with Krum, dancing with Krum, sipping pumpkin punch with Krum, holding hands with--but he wouldn't think about that.

That wasn't when he had fallen for his sweetie, though. It was later that night in the Gryffindor common room. He'd made a tactless comment about her hair coming down in the back, and made a motion to show her where. She had whirled around to face him, just as his hand got tangled in the unruly strand and pulled it out completely. Just for an instant he felt the hair run, satiny smooth, through his fingers, and he suddenly felt the urge to pull it all down, until it covered her shoulders like a great shiny cascade of caramel and milk chocolate.

As it was, he never got within ten feet of her after that. She had pulled roughly away from him and started one of her endless tirades, attacking his appearance, his intelligence, his social skills, his magical skills, his motor skills, and by association, his budding manhood. This of course triggered all his defensive mechanisms, and they were going at it hammer and wands when Harry walked in and broke it up.

He never thought of her after that without being intensely conscious of her hair. He dreamed of it, slithering under his chin, tangling around his ears, tickling his nose. Now he had a sudden powerful urge to revive that perfect beauty which she hid from the world, as she hunched over massive legal tomes, squinting at tiny print in her efforts to better the lives of ungrateful house-elves and leprechauns. And he knew how to do it--how to reveal her beauty, affirm his love, and arouse her bit of feminine vanity all at the same time.

In a little shop in the Muggle village of Ottery St. Catchpole, he'd seen them: a set of hair combs, even prettier than Angelina's-- filigreed silver inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Ron wasn't much on style, but he knew instinctively, just looking at them, that they would look wonderful, nestled in his sweetie's rich dark hair--especially if he could afford some of that pomade too. Sadly, the price--he'd got his father to help him work out the exchange rate--was insurmountable, and his own pride wouldn't allow him to ask his parents for a loan.

The watch chimed again. Five o'clock. He took it out of his vest pocket. It was a wedding gift from his father: an early twentieth century platinum timepiece--Muggle-made, of course-- that Mr. Weasley had tricked out with all kinds of awesome spells. It could not only tell the time, the day of the week and date, and the phase of the moon, but also the next-nearest holiday and how many days until it came round. It could locate your nearest and dearest for you, just like the big grandfather clock in his parents' house, and--this was the biggie--it made a little tinkling sound whenever it passed a sweet shop. It was his father's pride and joy and undoubtedly valuable. He'd presented it to Ron with swimming eyes just before the ceremony. The bezel was engraved:

To Ron, on the happiest day of your life, from the second-happiest man in the world. Love, Dad.

Ron glanced at the watch. That knot started forming in his chest again. The locator showed Hermione "at home". He walked to the kitchen alcove to brew the tea. He'd failed her in so many ways. He'd lost all chance of getting some money out of Robert Raglan, screwed up his job, and had almost certainly lost Hermione hers. He heard her step, her hand on the latch, saw that face with its adorable moue of concentration framed in the doorway. Yes, he'd get the money--in the only way left to him.