Where You Stand (Part 5) Neville/Charlie
Written for 7spells
Disclaimer: None of these characters are mine.
Title: Where You Stand
Characters: Neville/Charlie
Part 5 Prompt: “sleepwalk”
Rating: R just because it’s slash, but I don’t plan on anything more explicit than kissing and implications
Word Count: 4,800
Summary: Neville discovers that Charlie’s lost his confidence with dragons.
A/N: This will be all one story in chronological order. Part 5 is long, so please just pretend it’s chaptered. :)
Prompt table lives here: Prompt Table
Warnings: slash
~(~ 5 Sleepwalk**********************************************
Charlie woke up with one thing on his mind - how to get Neville safely back downstairs. He still couldn’t believe he’d made somebody with a cane climb a flight of stairs to rescue him from a case of the night terrors, but he was going to have to set that mortification aside for the moment and focus on the practical. He was just going to have to talk Neville into trusting to his levitation skills.
But Neville was not in the little yellow guest room, or any of the other rooms on the upper floor. He finally located him downstairs in the kitchen.
“How did you get down here?”
“Apparated,” Neville said around a mouthful of toast.
“But I thought you couldn’t.”
“So did I. Guess I’ve healed a bit since the last time I tried it. It hardly hurt at all.”
“Well, that’s wonderful! You won’t have to rely on the Floo at the Leaky so much.”
Neville responded to this observation with a pleased smile. The expression briefly lit up his face, and Charlie found himself wanting to see that transformation again, and a bit more often. But Neville had seemed to remember himself abruptly, and gone back to his newspaper.
Charlie picked up the second mug of tea waiting on the table. “I’m going to Hogwarts today to see the Headmaster, and pick up a few things at the library. Do you want to come along? Stop by Pomphrey’s office maybe? It’s summer, she won’t be busy.”
“I’m fine, Charlie. You don’t have to worry about me.”
“Well, what about the Quidditch match tonight? My whole family’s going, do you want to come with us?”
“Absolutely not, but thanks for asking.”
Charlie set down his cup and regarded him with concern. “You haven’t gone out since I’ve been here except work and the market. What are you going to do here all day?”
“Exactly the same things I did all day before you came along, Charlie,” Neville said calmly. He glanced up and favored Charlie with a slight smile. “Have a good day and I’ll see you at breakfast tomorrow if you get in late. All right?”
“All right,” Charlie began reluctantly. “If you’re sure. Don’t overdo it.”
Neville arched an eyebrow at him. “You, either,” he said pointedly.
~(~
Neville was surprised to find night had fallen by the time he finally emerged from the outbuilding where he’d been doing laundry. With a basket of bed linens and towels levitating ahead of him, Neville made his way through the house, lighting lamps as he went and dropping off dish-towels in the kitchen, his work robes on the sofa, and some of the clean sheets on the bed. The rest he’d leave at the foot of the stairs for Charlie to take up when he got home.
Although, he considered, the stair-climbing hadn’t really gone all that badly. Poppy had told him so many times to be patient, to keep trying, she’d sworn he would get better eventually. Maybe he’d been wrong to stop believing her. He kept the basket in the air, and sent it on ahead, and tackled the stairs with careful deliberation.
Several minutes later, he was at the top of the flight, savoring a moment of quiet victory. He’d just started down the hall when he came to a startled stop. The bathroom door was open, he saw Charlie standing shirtless in the bright light in front of the mirror, struggling to wrap a fresh bandage over his shoulder. It was the first time Neville had seen the wounds, a row of puncture marks still ringed with angry dark bruises.
There was also a mark on the other shoulder, but it was not an injury, just a small tattoo of a winged, green dragon.
Charlie’s eyes met his in the mirror before he turned around and revealed a matching set of punctures on the front of his shoulder. “Neville. I wasn’t expecting to see you up here. I didn’t hear you Apparate.”
Neville shook his head. “I took the stairs. It’s getting easier. Can I give you a hand with that?”
“It’s not very pretty.”
Neville shrugged. “I saw worse come through Grimmauld.”
Neville joined Charlie in the small bathroom and washed his hands, then set about applying the herbal salves that Charlie had been attempting to skip. He tackled the next job with quiet efficiency as well, unrolling and wrapping bandages around Charlie’s shoulder and torso.
His eyes kept wandering to the tattoo, for some reason the ordered lines of the green dragon juxtaposed on Charlie’s randomly freckled skin fascinated him. The small orange spatters on the cream-colored background were eye-catching on their own merit, freckles were one of the physical features he’d always found most intriguing about Ginny and Ron. Not that Neville had taken a survey or anything, but Charlie seemed the most heavily dappled of the bunch.
“You must be good at hiding your pain,” Neville remarked simply, fastening the end of the gauze in place.
“You can’t show weakness on the preserve, you’ll come off as prey,” Charlie said, almost cheerfully, though Neville had to suppress a shudder. “So hiding it’s a habit.” After a moment he confided, “Of course, the potions help, too.”
Since he'd already gone this far, Neville went ahead and picked up Charlie’s pajama shirt and helped him into that as well, though he left him to get his own buttons.
“Thanks. We seem to spend a deal of time dressing and undressing each other, don’t we?” Charlie gave him a slight smile, green eyes crinkling in the corners.
Neville froze, wondering if that sort of remark was supposed to mean anything and how he ought to respond, if at all. He’d never been very good at picking up on people’s intentions. He’d never been very good at thinking up humorous comebacks, either. 'Blush and retreat' was his standard strategy for dealing with anything ambiguous, and he used it now, after bidding Charlie a hasty good-night.
Too rattled to Apparate, Neville had no choice but to take the stairs again, discovering in the process that coming down was an entirely different proposition from going up. Finally he reached the living room, dropped onto the sofa amid stacks of folded laundry, and tried to collect his thoughts.
Neville didn’t know if Charlie was just one of those people who flirted with everybody they came across but meant nothing by it, or if he was trying to be friendly. Or worse...funny. Neville was not very amused by the prospect of living with someone who was going to make unsettling remarks just to watch him get flustered. He’d come to like Charlie, rather a lot in fact, and had hoped that he was going to prove different from the rest of his brothers. But if not… then Neville was going to have to ask him to find another place to live.
The prospect of doing that was strangely painful, though.
Neville leaned his head on the back of the sofa and wondered if he was ever going to figure out how he was supposed to feel about anything ever again.
He remembered breaking one of his grandmother’s dishes in the sink, cleanly down the middle, right after she had died, and how he’d stood there with a half a plate in each hand for five minutes, wondering if he should be upset about it because they were her favorite dishes, or not care because it was such a trivial thing considering what he had really lost.
He’d decided it was trivial. He’d decided everything was trivial. It had just seemed wrong since then to feel anything to too great an excess. He could still experience small satisfactions - when a package of seeds germinated past their expiration date - or minor disappointments - when the handle of his best shovel broke off - but there were no great joys or sorrows anymore and frankly, he was content to leave it that way.
Neville fell asleep where he was sitting. The fact that he woke up in the morning with a blanket draped over him did not escape his notice. He supposed having a housemate was not without advantages, even one with a quirky sense of humor.
~(~
Charlie had to admit there was something soothing about transferring a flat of seedlings into their first terra cotta pots. Something hopeful about the whole process. He was quite absorbed with getting the young shoots nestled into the proper level of soil when a hand came to rest on his shoulder. Charlie almost dropped the container, black earth spilling out onto the counter.
“Sorry,” Neville said quickly, voice laden with genuine, abashed apology. The hand was gone from his shoulder as quickly and unexpectedly as it had arrived, and Charlie felt a surge of anger at himself for reacting like a jumpy trainee, spooking not only himself but the person he’d been trying to set at ease for weeks.
Though his heartbeat was still thudding in his ears, he forced his voice to be calm and light as he turned around. “Don’t apologize, Neville, you just…”
“Startled you, I know. Gran was always scolding me for skulking into a room without announcing myself.”
Before Charlie could reply, Neville thrust a plate at him. “I brought you lunch.”
Charlie accepted the roast beef sandwich and crisps in a bit of a daze. “Thanks, but aren’t you eating?”
“Already had something. I’m going into town to pick up a few things at the pet shop. Just wanted to let you know I’m leaving.”
The words sent an unpleasant jab of memory through him.
~Amissia…. standing in the doorway, lips red with the imported crystalline paint she favored, even at five Galleons a tin, eyes regretful but determined.
“It’s just not working out, Charlie, you know it’s not. I’m leaving.” ~
And left she had, following in the footsteps of Janna five months before, and Erikk two months before that, and Lanne…
Don’t be so pathetic, he reminded himself severely, you aren’t the first person in the world to be jilted... four times in two years…
He shook himself out of his fog, looked up to find that Neville was already walking out of the greenhouse door.
Charlie sank down onto the potting bench and let out a slow breath. He should be focusing on the here and now, not letting his mind wander to the past. It was that kind of inattention that had landed him in such trouble to start with.
He picked up the sandwich, cheered a little by the smell of spicy dark mustard. He was rapidly getting very used to Neville’s taste in expensive condiments, particularly when teamed up with black bread and homegrown tomatoes.
Once he’d eaten enough of the crisps to uncover most of the plate’s flowery surface, he noticed a fine grey line running through the center where someone had done a less-than-perfect Reparo.
Charlie, like most of his siblings, was a pretty fair hand at that particular charm, having grown up in the Burrow, where things got knocked over on a regular basis and concealing the evidence from a wrathful mother had been of paramount importance.
He rinsed the plate clean in the utility sink by the door, dried it on the hem of his shirt, then settled back on the bench and drew his wand.
He re-cracked it neatly along the seam with one spell, then fused it back together with another. He tipped the plate in the sunlight with a feeling of great satisfaction, inspecting the smooth surface. It would pass even Mother-Level scrutiny, he decided.
Charlie turned the plate over in his hands. He’d been meaning to bring the subject up with Neville one of these days about buying some new dishes … ones that weren’t covered in yellow chrysanthemums. Everything in the house seemed to carry the indelible mark of Augusta Longbottom, and Neville acted as if he were just visiting there on holiday and would step back out as soon as the rightful owner returned.
He decided to catch up with Neville in Diagon Alley and broach the subject, after a quick stop to visit the twins and deliver a dinner invitation from their mother.
As it turned out, there was only one twin in the shop this afternoon. Fred laughed when Charlie asked if Neville had been by. “I don’t think we carry much he’s interested in. How are you two getting on, anyway?” Fred inquired, with what would have passed for innocence to someone who knew him a little less well.
Charlie considered. “Well, so far I’ve broken his lamp, made him climb a flight of stairs, and required all sorts of help with bandages. He’s been very polite about it all, but I’m sure he thinks I’m crazy.”
Fred smiled. “Well, let us know if you do manage to ruffle his feathers, we’ve got a little bet going.”
Charlie stared at him in disbelief. “Are you mental? You want us to get in an argument?”
“No, no, we’re just wondering how far the Longbottom reserve will hold up against the Weasley exuberance.”
“We’re getting along fine! And why wouldn’t we?” Charlie demanded hotly. “Are you trying to say I’m difficult to live with?”
Fred leaned back and put up his hands. “Slow down there, brother, I didn’t say anything of the kind.”
“You must be thinking it. Everyone in the family must have thought it when Amissia left ~ oh, that Charlie, he’s run off another one!” Charlie made a wide gesture through the air, nearly tipping over a jar of soap bubble gumballs. “Well, maybe I am difficult to live with.” He narrowed his eyes at Fred. “You’d tell me, wouldn’t you? Nobody in our family suffers from over-subtlety.” Charlie raked his fingers through his hair. “Merlin, Fred, what’s wrong with me?”
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you, your screening process just needs a little fine-tuning. You need to find someone who’s got a more loyal and giving nature. Someone… not so flashy, maybe, but steady.”
Charlie gave him a suspicious look.
Fred smiled again, less innocently. “You know, someone with a kind heart. Here, have a toffee, you look like you could use a laugh.” Fred tossed him a piece of candy wrapped in foil.
Charlie threw the sweet back across the counter.
“You two must think Neville and I are the stupidest people on earth,” Charlie snapped, and stormed out of the store, nearly breaking the cuckoo over the door. The mechanical bird's mocking laughter was still ringing in his ears a block later.
~(~
“So,” George bestowed one of his sunnier smiles on Neville just outside of Magical Menageries. “You’re looking well these days.”
Neville felt himself turning faintly scarlet. He mumbled something about cooking more at home, which for some reason made George’s eyes sparkle with amusement and won him an even wider smile.
At that moment, Neville saw Charlie striding towards them up the crowded street with fire in his eyes.
“Oi, Charlie,” George began cheerfully, “ I was just talking to…”
“So I see,” Charlie snapped. He turned to Neville. “Are you done shopping?”
“Yes, I just bought the…”
Charlie took him by the arm and before Neville even realized what was happening he found himself Apparated into his own kitchen.
“…toad treats.” Neville finished, looking around the room.
“Everything’s just fun and games with those two!” Charlie shouted. “Manipulative gits!”
“What are you so angry with them for?” Neville asked curiously, setting his packages on the table and easing himself into a chair.
“Alphabetically or in order of degree?” Charlie demanded.
“Um, order of degree, I suppose.”
Charlie gripped the edge of the table and seemed to brace himself. “They were playing matchmaker,” he announced in a rush. “This whole arrangement was a set up to… to…to set us up!”
“Oh.” Neville felt himself go rather white, struggling not to become personally offended… or hurt… by Charlie’s reaction. “And you’re… upset about that, are you?”
Charlie seemed to realize he was in serious danger of being misconstrued. He dropped into a chair and laid his hand over Neville’s wrist. “Merlin, Neville, not because it’s you!” he said urgently. “I just don’t like people trying to maneuver me… especially my family! Aren’t you angry that they played on your sympathies like that?”
“Well, I figured something was up, I mean, it usually is where the twins are concerned."
"And you still let me move in?"
"Well, I didn’t think you were in on anything, and you did need a place to stay and I did have an extra room and a Floo and even if your brothers had an ulterior motive I think their intentions were still good and I might have been the tiniest bit drunk that night and George is very persuasive and…”
“Neville.” Charlie tightened his grip on Neville’s arm a bit and Neville managed to stop the nervous babbling. “It’s all right. It was good of them, and it was certainly good of you. I guess I wouldn’t have gotten so angry if it weren’t for the fact that …well, I have come to care about you a great deal and I do find you very ...” Charlie broke off suddenly as if catching himself and looked suddenly anxious. “What I mean is…”
“I know what you mean,” Neville said, with a soft hint of exasperation. “I do have some worldly experience, you know.”
“You do? I mean… of course you do.” Charlie stared at him, green eyes searching. “Are you telling me that you might actually want...?”
Neville pulled his arm gently out from under Charlie’s hand.
“Don’t get me wrong, Charlie. Anybody’d be lucky to have you, including me, but I’m the last person anybody needs to get involved with. I’m perfectly resigned to the life of eccentric bachelor; in fact, I’ve planned for it. It’s all I want, and, honestly, it’s about all I can handle.”
He hoped that wasn’t going to hurt Charlie’s feelings too much, but Charlie looked more concerned for him than worried about himself.
“But if someone really wanted to be involved with you, you wouldn’t be angry if they gave it a try?” he ventured.
“No, I wouldn’t be angry. But they’d be wasting their time.”
~(~
Later that evening, as they shared takeaway on the back steps of the house in the summer twilight, a thought occurred to Charlie.
“So when you say experience…” he asked suddenly. “One of these experiences wasn’t Ginny, was it?”
Neville handed Charlie a bottle of butterbeer. “I don’t kiss and tell,” he said, then added, “I especially don’t kiss and tell their dragonkeeper brothers.”
Charlie thought about that a moment, then burst out laughing.
~(~
Charlie tossed the last corrected paper into the apple crate on his desk with a deep sigh. He hadn’t realized the amount of parchment he’d have to wade through on this job would be quite so astronomical. Night was draped deeply over the castle as he sought out the staff Floo, intent only on getting home.
Charlie was tired, and it was not the most graceful trip he’d ever made through the Network. He tripped over a brick on his way out and came blundering out of the Floo like a drunken rhino, bumping his shin hard into the corner of Neville’s bed and covering the pristine sheets with a coating of grey speckles. Worse, he realized Neville was actually in the bed, and had evidently just been woken up none too pleasantly.
“Sorry… I didn’t realize it was getting so late!” Charlie fumbled for his wand to clean up the soot. “I forgot you’d be sleeping in here. Although, grant me that most people don’t go to bed as early as you do.”
“Granted. I thought you were upstairs,” Neville said blearily, blinking as the cleaning charm swept over him and around the room.
“Nope. Got caught up grading essays on the proper care of the pygmy puffskein and all I can say is heaven help the poor creatures. I’ll have to talk to the twins about educating their customers better before letting people walk out the door with the things. Merlin.”
Charlie sat down on the end of the bed, rubbing his bruised shin. “Isn’t it about time you got this thing out of the living room? Now that you can manage the stairs?”
“I’m not sure I want to manage them multiple times a day,” Neville said, sounding slightly defensive.
“Well, you can Apparate, then. Wouldn’t you like to have the space down here? We could set up a table in the evenings and play cards, or, I don’t know, do one of those eleven thousand piece jigsaw puzzles that has a picture on each side.”
Neville dropped his head back to his pillow and closed his eyes. “I hate those things,” he muttered. “Fred and George gave me one for my twelfth birthday that not only had a picture on each side, but the picture changed every ten minutes. I threw it out the window. I still find pieces in the mulch from time to time when I weed the border.”
“No puzzles, then. The point is…. you’re not an invalid anymore.”
“Never claimed to be,” Neville snapped, eyes opening again to glare at him. “I have been going to work every day in case anybody's failed to notice. Speaking of which, I need some sleep….?”
Charlie stood up.
He took a step or two toward the kitchen, then stopped, then sat back down, this time on the side of the bed, right next to Neville, who sat up in confusion and ended up almost nose-to-nose with him. Neville looked rumpled and annoyed and thoroughly beautiful.
“I don’t think you do,” Charlie said.
“What?”
“Need any more sleep.”
It had been awhile since Charlie had trusted his instincts, but he yielded to them now ~ leaning in and pressing a kiss to Neville’s lips, his hands slipping beneath the sleep-tousled hair.
~(~
It took Neville three and a half very sweet seconds to come to his senses. When he finally did, however, he laid a hand on his friend’s chest and pushed himself back for breathing space and a chance to pull himself together. His heart was thudding from the unexpected kiss, from the spark of surprise, the delight, the guilt, the shock of feeling anything like this after so long.
“Charlie, stop. I told you that I didn’t want this sort of thing. That part of me is dormant now, and I need it to stay that way.”
“Why? Do you think sleepwalking through life is going to make it hurt less? You can't just hibernate through the winter like one of your toads, Neville. It’s time to wake up and start living again.”
“I am living!”
“You’re surviving. I mean, look at this house, there are whole rooms upstairs that you can’t use, full of the belongings of the dead.”
“Don’t!” Neville began fiercely. “Don’t call them that!”
“The point is ~ they would want you to go forward. And there are a lot of good things to go forward to, Neville. I mean, for one thing, you’ve got a career you enjoy, you can have the pleasure of spending your days working with plants.”
“You have no idea how I spend my days! I’m a clerk, Charlie! I sit in an office pushing a quill in a ledger and watching other people work with plants.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“When I started that job I couldn’t even stand up for longer than fifteen minutes. I certainly couldn’t do the physical kind of work Herbology calls for. I’ve been doing paperwork - filling orders, keeping books, tracking the inventory...”
“But you’re better now….you’re not even using the cane anymore.”
“Well, Krabbetree likes the current arrangement. Apparently I’m ‘trustworthy with the finances’.”
“That is not what you were trained for.”
“You’re one to talk about that! You think I haven’t noticed that you’re not exactly brimming with enthusiasm about your job? You’re a dragonkeeper and you’re playing around with pygmy puffs!”
Neville regretted the words the moment they were out of his mouth. “I’m so sorry, that was completely out of line.”
“No. No, you’re absolutely right.” Charlie was quiet a moment, and then said resolutely, “I have a confession to make.”
“That sounds ominous,” Neville ventured. “What is it?”
“I wasn’t exactly fired.”
Neville studied Charlie’s face as he processed this new information. “What exactly were you?”
“Scared,” Charlie said flatly. “The director and I talked it over and we both decided that because of my state of mind it would just be best and safest for everybody if I took a leave for a while. But I wasn’t sacked … or forced to leave.”
“I see.”
“I feel terrible that I lied to everybody,” Charlie admitted, his voice so thick that it hardly sounded like his own.
Neville reached out, not sure exactly where to touch, but wanting to offer some kind of comfort. His hand eventually landed on Charlie’s forearm. “Well, you might not have told the whole truth, Charlie, but you didn’t exactly lie. You were injured very badly and you did need some time away. It’s all right.”
“I hope my family’s going to be as forgiving.”
“I’m sure they will.” A thought occured to Neville, then. “Does this mean…. you could go back if you wanted to?”
Charlie nodded.
“Do you want to?”
“I don’t know. Not… not right now.”
“You’re welcome to stay here as long as you want,” Neville said quietly. “You’re also free to leave whenever you want. I like having you here, and you’ve… you’ve been a lot of help to me, but … I would be OK.”
He looked up to meet Charlie’s eyes, and found entirely too much understanding there for comfort.
“Neville…. you’re my friend. Even if I did ever go back to dragonkeeping, I’m never going to just walk out of your life. You know that, right?”
Neville nodded, but his gaze dropped away.
“I know you’re thinking about your other friends… you think they abandoned you, but I’ll bet they didn’t. I think you probably shut the door in everybody’s face, and they didn’t know what else to do. But see now, I have keys to the place, and I won’t let you get away with that again.” Charlie stood up, resting his hand briefly on Neville’s shoulder. And then he left.
Neville fell back into the pillow, staring at the ceiling as if he might find something helpful written there.
~(~
The next evening, Charlie walked out of the Floo to find that the living room actually looked like a living room. He found Neville upstairs putting the sailing ship in a box.
“Looks good down there,” he offered from the doorway. “ I hope I didn’t push you into a decision you weren’t ready for.”
“No, you were right, it’s time to put the house in order. Life goes on. Gran would’ve been the first person to tell me that.”
Charlie regarded him with a blend of compassion and pride. “How can I help?” he asked.
Neville tossed him a roll of Spellotape.
~(~
The weeks of autumn passed by, while Charlie divided his time between three projects ~ trying to adjust to his job, trying to restore the house, and trying to repair Neville.
The first of these projects he’d pretty much given up on, but the second was coming along nicely. The floral china was replaced with plain white crockery; and they painted over the lacey wallpaper. The paisley parlor sofa was hauled out, a blue one with simple lines was brought in, and flanked with a stately pair of potted palms. And Neville’s bedroom was converted from a museum of childhood to a place far more suitable to the master of the house.
So while his first project was proving impossible, and the second was promising to be attainable, the third was drifting back and forth between the two.
Neville seemed to be floating in and out of Charlie’s general orbit. He kept coming back, like a wild animal approaching for food, but only able to snatch a crumb at a time before pulling away with a start. Neville was not a wild animal though, Charlie corrected himself, more like a cat left outside too long. Not used to being touched or petted anymore, but still carrying the potential for domestication.
Charlie had once made a career of taming the feral. And the first step of the process was always simple observation.
His most important observation is that while Neville might still be acclimating to the house, there is one place he seems entirely at ease, one place that he truly feels to be his territory.
The greenhouse is full of more than vegetables and salad herbs these days. Neville’s gone back to his first love ~ the exotics ~ and the humid air is filled now with the heavy fragrance of orchids and flybrights and tentaculas.
Charlie is patient. And then one soft day he presses Neville against a brick wall thickly cushioned with ivy. Neville’s eyes, which are already so dark, go darker still and into soft focus. Neville turns his head to the side, into the mat of green leaves, not to evade him but to offer the place he most wants to be kissed, and Charlie brings his lips to the pale curve where throat meets shoulder.
Continue…
Disclaimer: None of these characters are mine.
Title: Where You Stand
Characters: Neville/Charlie
Part 5 Prompt: “sleepwalk”
Rating: R just because it’s slash, but I don’t plan on anything more explicit than kissing and implications
Word Count: 4,800
Summary: Neville discovers that Charlie’s lost his confidence with dragons.
A/N: This will be all one story in chronological order. Part 5 is long, so please just pretend it’s chaptered. :)
Prompt table lives here: Prompt Table
Warnings: slash
~(~ 5 Sleepwalk**********************************************
Charlie woke up with one thing on his mind - how to get Neville safely back downstairs. He still couldn’t believe he’d made somebody with a cane climb a flight of stairs to rescue him from a case of the night terrors, but he was going to have to set that mortification aside for the moment and focus on the practical. He was just going to have to talk Neville into trusting to his levitation skills.
But Neville was not in the little yellow guest room, or any of the other rooms on the upper floor. He finally located him downstairs in the kitchen.
“How did you get down here?”
“Apparated,” Neville said around a mouthful of toast.
“But I thought you couldn’t.”
“So did I. Guess I’ve healed a bit since the last time I tried it. It hardly hurt at all.”
“Well, that’s wonderful! You won’t have to rely on the Floo at the Leaky so much.”
Neville responded to this observation with a pleased smile. The expression briefly lit up his face, and Charlie found himself wanting to see that transformation again, and a bit more often. But Neville had seemed to remember himself abruptly, and gone back to his newspaper.
Charlie picked up the second mug of tea waiting on the table. “I’m going to Hogwarts today to see the Headmaster, and pick up a few things at the library. Do you want to come along? Stop by Pomphrey’s office maybe? It’s summer, she won’t be busy.”
“I’m fine, Charlie. You don’t have to worry about me.”
“Well, what about the Quidditch match tonight? My whole family’s going, do you want to come with us?”
“Absolutely not, but thanks for asking.”
Charlie set down his cup and regarded him with concern. “You haven’t gone out since I’ve been here except work and the market. What are you going to do here all day?”
“Exactly the same things I did all day before you came along, Charlie,” Neville said calmly. He glanced up and favored Charlie with a slight smile. “Have a good day and I’ll see you at breakfast tomorrow if you get in late. All right?”
“All right,” Charlie began reluctantly. “If you’re sure. Don’t overdo it.”
Neville arched an eyebrow at him. “You, either,” he said pointedly.
~(~
Neville was surprised to find night had fallen by the time he finally emerged from the outbuilding where he’d been doing laundry. With a basket of bed linens and towels levitating ahead of him, Neville made his way through the house, lighting lamps as he went and dropping off dish-towels in the kitchen, his work robes on the sofa, and some of the clean sheets on the bed. The rest he’d leave at the foot of the stairs for Charlie to take up when he got home.
Although, he considered, the stair-climbing hadn’t really gone all that badly. Poppy had told him so many times to be patient, to keep trying, she’d sworn he would get better eventually. Maybe he’d been wrong to stop believing her. He kept the basket in the air, and sent it on ahead, and tackled the stairs with careful deliberation.
Several minutes later, he was at the top of the flight, savoring a moment of quiet victory. He’d just started down the hall when he came to a startled stop. The bathroom door was open, he saw Charlie standing shirtless in the bright light in front of the mirror, struggling to wrap a fresh bandage over his shoulder. It was the first time Neville had seen the wounds, a row of puncture marks still ringed with angry dark bruises.
There was also a mark on the other shoulder, but it was not an injury, just a small tattoo of a winged, green dragon.
Charlie’s eyes met his in the mirror before he turned around and revealed a matching set of punctures on the front of his shoulder. “Neville. I wasn’t expecting to see you up here. I didn’t hear you Apparate.”
Neville shook his head. “I took the stairs. It’s getting easier. Can I give you a hand with that?”
“It’s not very pretty.”
Neville shrugged. “I saw worse come through Grimmauld.”
Neville joined Charlie in the small bathroom and washed his hands, then set about applying the herbal salves that Charlie had been attempting to skip. He tackled the next job with quiet efficiency as well, unrolling and wrapping bandages around Charlie’s shoulder and torso.
His eyes kept wandering to the tattoo, for some reason the ordered lines of the green dragon juxtaposed on Charlie’s randomly freckled skin fascinated him. The small orange spatters on the cream-colored background were eye-catching on their own merit, freckles were one of the physical features he’d always found most intriguing about Ginny and Ron. Not that Neville had taken a survey or anything, but Charlie seemed the most heavily dappled of the bunch.
“You must be good at hiding your pain,” Neville remarked simply, fastening the end of the gauze in place.
“You can’t show weakness on the preserve, you’ll come off as prey,” Charlie said, almost cheerfully, though Neville had to suppress a shudder. “So hiding it’s a habit.” After a moment he confided, “Of course, the potions help, too.”
Since he'd already gone this far, Neville went ahead and picked up Charlie’s pajama shirt and helped him into that as well, though he left him to get his own buttons.
“Thanks. We seem to spend a deal of time dressing and undressing each other, don’t we?” Charlie gave him a slight smile, green eyes crinkling in the corners.
Neville froze, wondering if that sort of remark was supposed to mean anything and how he ought to respond, if at all. He’d never been very good at picking up on people’s intentions. He’d never been very good at thinking up humorous comebacks, either. 'Blush and retreat' was his standard strategy for dealing with anything ambiguous, and he used it now, after bidding Charlie a hasty good-night.
Too rattled to Apparate, Neville had no choice but to take the stairs again, discovering in the process that coming down was an entirely different proposition from going up. Finally he reached the living room, dropped onto the sofa amid stacks of folded laundry, and tried to collect his thoughts.
Neville didn’t know if Charlie was just one of those people who flirted with everybody they came across but meant nothing by it, or if he was trying to be friendly. Or worse...funny. Neville was not very amused by the prospect of living with someone who was going to make unsettling remarks just to watch him get flustered. He’d come to like Charlie, rather a lot in fact, and had hoped that he was going to prove different from the rest of his brothers. But if not… then Neville was going to have to ask him to find another place to live.
The prospect of doing that was strangely painful, though.
Neville leaned his head on the back of the sofa and wondered if he was ever going to figure out how he was supposed to feel about anything ever again.
He remembered breaking one of his grandmother’s dishes in the sink, cleanly down the middle, right after she had died, and how he’d stood there with a half a plate in each hand for five minutes, wondering if he should be upset about it because they were her favorite dishes, or not care because it was such a trivial thing considering what he had really lost.
He’d decided it was trivial. He’d decided everything was trivial. It had just seemed wrong since then to feel anything to too great an excess. He could still experience small satisfactions - when a package of seeds germinated past their expiration date - or minor disappointments - when the handle of his best shovel broke off - but there were no great joys or sorrows anymore and frankly, he was content to leave it that way.
Neville fell asleep where he was sitting. The fact that he woke up in the morning with a blanket draped over him did not escape his notice. He supposed having a housemate was not without advantages, even one with a quirky sense of humor.
~(~
Charlie had to admit there was something soothing about transferring a flat of seedlings into their first terra cotta pots. Something hopeful about the whole process. He was quite absorbed with getting the young shoots nestled into the proper level of soil when a hand came to rest on his shoulder. Charlie almost dropped the container, black earth spilling out onto the counter.
“Sorry,” Neville said quickly, voice laden with genuine, abashed apology. The hand was gone from his shoulder as quickly and unexpectedly as it had arrived, and Charlie felt a surge of anger at himself for reacting like a jumpy trainee, spooking not only himself but the person he’d been trying to set at ease for weeks.
Though his heartbeat was still thudding in his ears, he forced his voice to be calm and light as he turned around. “Don’t apologize, Neville, you just…”
“Startled you, I know. Gran was always scolding me for skulking into a room without announcing myself.”
Before Charlie could reply, Neville thrust a plate at him. “I brought you lunch.”
Charlie accepted the roast beef sandwich and crisps in a bit of a daze. “Thanks, but aren’t you eating?”
“Already had something. I’m going into town to pick up a few things at the pet shop. Just wanted to let you know I’m leaving.”
The words sent an unpleasant jab of memory through him.
~Amissia…. standing in the doorway, lips red with the imported crystalline paint she favored, even at five Galleons a tin, eyes regretful but determined.
“It’s just not working out, Charlie, you know it’s not. I’m leaving.” ~
And left she had, following in the footsteps of Janna five months before, and Erikk two months before that, and Lanne…
Don’t be so pathetic, he reminded himself severely, you aren’t the first person in the world to be jilted... four times in two years…
He shook himself out of his fog, looked up to find that Neville was already walking out of the greenhouse door.
Charlie sank down onto the potting bench and let out a slow breath. He should be focusing on the here and now, not letting his mind wander to the past. It was that kind of inattention that had landed him in such trouble to start with.
He picked up the sandwich, cheered a little by the smell of spicy dark mustard. He was rapidly getting very used to Neville’s taste in expensive condiments, particularly when teamed up with black bread and homegrown tomatoes.
Once he’d eaten enough of the crisps to uncover most of the plate’s flowery surface, he noticed a fine grey line running through the center where someone had done a less-than-perfect Reparo.
Charlie, like most of his siblings, was a pretty fair hand at that particular charm, having grown up in the Burrow, where things got knocked over on a regular basis and concealing the evidence from a wrathful mother had been of paramount importance.
He rinsed the plate clean in the utility sink by the door, dried it on the hem of his shirt, then settled back on the bench and drew his wand.
He re-cracked it neatly along the seam with one spell, then fused it back together with another. He tipped the plate in the sunlight with a feeling of great satisfaction, inspecting the smooth surface. It would pass even Mother-Level scrutiny, he decided.
Charlie turned the plate over in his hands. He’d been meaning to bring the subject up with Neville one of these days about buying some new dishes … ones that weren’t covered in yellow chrysanthemums. Everything in the house seemed to carry the indelible mark of Augusta Longbottom, and Neville acted as if he were just visiting there on holiday and would step back out as soon as the rightful owner returned.
He decided to catch up with Neville in Diagon Alley and broach the subject, after a quick stop to visit the twins and deliver a dinner invitation from their mother.
As it turned out, there was only one twin in the shop this afternoon. Fred laughed when Charlie asked if Neville had been by. “I don’t think we carry much he’s interested in. How are you two getting on, anyway?” Fred inquired, with what would have passed for innocence to someone who knew him a little less well.
Charlie considered. “Well, so far I’ve broken his lamp, made him climb a flight of stairs, and required all sorts of help with bandages. He’s been very polite about it all, but I’m sure he thinks I’m crazy.”
Fred smiled. “Well, let us know if you do manage to ruffle his feathers, we’ve got a little bet going.”
Charlie stared at him in disbelief. “Are you mental? You want us to get in an argument?”
“No, no, we’re just wondering how far the Longbottom reserve will hold up against the Weasley exuberance.”
“We’re getting along fine! And why wouldn’t we?” Charlie demanded hotly. “Are you trying to say I’m difficult to live with?”
Fred leaned back and put up his hands. “Slow down there, brother, I didn’t say anything of the kind.”
“You must be thinking it. Everyone in the family must have thought it when Amissia left ~ oh, that Charlie, he’s run off another one!” Charlie made a wide gesture through the air, nearly tipping over a jar of soap bubble gumballs. “Well, maybe I am difficult to live with.” He narrowed his eyes at Fred. “You’d tell me, wouldn’t you? Nobody in our family suffers from over-subtlety.” Charlie raked his fingers through his hair. “Merlin, Fred, what’s wrong with me?”
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you, your screening process just needs a little fine-tuning. You need to find someone who’s got a more loyal and giving nature. Someone… not so flashy, maybe, but steady.”
Charlie gave him a suspicious look.
Fred smiled again, less innocently. “You know, someone with a kind heart. Here, have a toffee, you look like you could use a laugh.” Fred tossed him a piece of candy wrapped in foil.
Charlie threw the sweet back across the counter.
“You two must think Neville and I are the stupidest people on earth,” Charlie snapped, and stormed out of the store, nearly breaking the cuckoo over the door. The mechanical bird's mocking laughter was still ringing in his ears a block later.
~(~
“So,” George bestowed one of his sunnier smiles on Neville just outside of Magical Menageries. “You’re looking well these days.”
Neville felt himself turning faintly scarlet. He mumbled something about cooking more at home, which for some reason made George’s eyes sparkle with amusement and won him an even wider smile.
At that moment, Neville saw Charlie striding towards them up the crowded street with fire in his eyes.
“Oi, Charlie,” George began cheerfully, “ I was just talking to…”
“So I see,” Charlie snapped. He turned to Neville. “Are you done shopping?”
“Yes, I just bought the…”
Charlie took him by the arm and before Neville even realized what was happening he found himself Apparated into his own kitchen.
“…toad treats.” Neville finished, looking around the room.
“Everything’s just fun and games with those two!” Charlie shouted. “Manipulative gits!”
“What are you so angry with them for?” Neville asked curiously, setting his packages on the table and easing himself into a chair.
“Alphabetically or in order of degree?” Charlie demanded.
“Um, order of degree, I suppose.”
Charlie gripped the edge of the table and seemed to brace himself. “They were playing matchmaker,” he announced in a rush. “This whole arrangement was a set up to… to…to set us up!”
“Oh.” Neville felt himself go rather white, struggling not to become personally offended… or hurt… by Charlie’s reaction. “And you’re… upset about that, are you?”
Charlie seemed to realize he was in serious danger of being misconstrued. He dropped into a chair and laid his hand over Neville’s wrist. “Merlin, Neville, not because it’s you!” he said urgently. “I just don’t like people trying to maneuver me… especially my family! Aren’t you angry that they played on your sympathies like that?”
“Well, I figured something was up, I mean, it usually is where the twins are concerned."
"And you still let me move in?"
"Well, I didn’t think you were in on anything, and you did need a place to stay and I did have an extra room and a Floo and even if your brothers had an ulterior motive I think their intentions were still good and I might have been the tiniest bit drunk that night and George is very persuasive and…”
“Neville.” Charlie tightened his grip on Neville’s arm a bit and Neville managed to stop the nervous babbling. “It’s all right. It was good of them, and it was certainly good of you. I guess I wouldn’t have gotten so angry if it weren’t for the fact that …well, I have come to care about you a great deal and I do find you very ...” Charlie broke off suddenly as if catching himself and looked suddenly anxious. “What I mean is…”
“I know what you mean,” Neville said, with a soft hint of exasperation. “I do have some worldly experience, you know.”
“You do? I mean… of course you do.” Charlie stared at him, green eyes searching. “Are you telling me that you might actually want...?”
Neville pulled his arm gently out from under Charlie’s hand.
“Don’t get me wrong, Charlie. Anybody’d be lucky to have you, including me, but I’m the last person anybody needs to get involved with. I’m perfectly resigned to the life of eccentric bachelor; in fact, I’ve planned for it. It’s all I want, and, honestly, it’s about all I can handle.”
He hoped that wasn’t going to hurt Charlie’s feelings too much, but Charlie looked more concerned for him than worried about himself.
“But if someone really wanted to be involved with you, you wouldn’t be angry if they gave it a try?” he ventured.
“No, I wouldn’t be angry. But they’d be wasting their time.”
~(~
Later that evening, as they shared takeaway on the back steps of the house in the summer twilight, a thought occurred to Charlie.
“So when you say experience…” he asked suddenly. “One of these experiences wasn’t Ginny, was it?”
Neville handed Charlie a bottle of butterbeer. “I don’t kiss and tell,” he said, then added, “I especially don’t kiss and tell their dragonkeeper brothers.”
Charlie thought about that a moment, then burst out laughing.
~(~
Charlie tossed the last corrected paper into the apple crate on his desk with a deep sigh. He hadn’t realized the amount of parchment he’d have to wade through on this job would be quite so astronomical. Night was draped deeply over the castle as he sought out the staff Floo, intent only on getting home.
Charlie was tired, and it was not the most graceful trip he’d ever made through the Network. He tripped over a brick on his way out and came blundering out of the Floo like a drunken rhino, bumping his shin hard into the corner of Neville’s bed and covering the pristine sheets with a coating of grey speckles. Worse, he realized Neville was actually in the bed, and had evidently just been woken up none too pleasantly.
“Sorry… I didn’t realize it was getting so late!” Charlie fumbled for his wand to clean up the soot. “I forgot you’d be sleeping in here. Although, grant me that most people don’t go to bed as early as you do.”
“Granted. I thought you were upstairs,” Neville said blearily, blinking as the cleaning charm swept over him and around the room.
“Nope. Got caught up grading essays on the proper care of the pygmy puffskein and all I can say is heaven help the poor creatures. I’ll have to talk to the twins about educating their customers better before letting people walk out the door with the things. Merlin.”
Charlie sat down on the end of the bed, rubbing his bruised shin. “Isn’t it about time you got this thing out of the living room? Now that you can manage the stairs?”
“I’m not sure I want to manage them multiple times a day,” Neville said, sounding slightly defensive.
“Well, you can Apparate, then. Wouldn’t you like to have the space down here? We could set up a table in the evenings and play cards, or, I don’t know, do one of those eleven thousand piece jigsaw puzzles that has a picture on each side.”
Neville dropped his head back to his pillow and closed his eyes. “I hate those things,” he muttered. “Fred and George gave me one for my twelfth birthday that not only had a picture on each side, but the picture changed every ten minutes. I threw it out the window. I still find pieces in the mulch from time to time when I weed the border.”
“No puzzles, then. The point is…. you’re not an invalid anymore.”
“Never claimed to be,” Neville snapped, eyes opening again to glare at him. “I have been going to work every day in case anybody's failed to notice. Speaking of which, I need some sleep….?”
Charlie stood up.
He took a step or two toward the kitchen, then stopped, then sat back down, this time on the side of the bed, right next to Neville, who sat up in confusion and ended up almost nose-to-nose with him. Neville looked rumpled and annoyed and thoroughly beautiful.
“I don’t think you do,” Charlie said.
“What?”
“Need any more sleep.”
It had been awhile since Charlie had trusted his instincts, but he yielded to them now ~ leaning in and pressing a kiss to Neville’s lips, his hands slipping beneath the sleep-tousled hair.
~(~
It took Neville three and a half very sweet seconds to come to his senses. When he finally did, however, he laid a hand on his friend’s chest and pushed himself back for breathing space and a chance to pull himself together. His heart was thudding from the unexpected kiss, from the spark of surprise, the delight, the guilt, the shock of feeling anything like this after so long.
“Charlie, stop. I told you that I didn’t want this sort of thing. That part of me is dormant now, and I need it to stay that way.”
“Why? Do you think sleepwalking through life is going to make it hurt less? You can't just hibernate through the winter like one of your toads, Neville. It’s time to wake up and start living again.”
“I am living!”
“You’re surviving. I mean, look at this house, there are whole rooms upstairs that you can’t use, full of the belongings of the dead.”
“Don’t!” Neville began fiercely. “Don’t call them that!”
“The point is ~ they would want you to go forward. And there are a lot of good things to go forward to, Neville. I mean, for one thing, you’ve got a career you enjoy, you can have the pleasure of spending your days working with plants.”
“You have no idea how I spend my days! I’m a clerk, Charlie! I sit in an office pushing a quill in a ledger and watching other people work with plants.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“When I started that job I couldn’t even stand up for longer than fifteen minutes. I certainly couldn’t do the physical kind of work Herbology calls for. I’ve been doing paperwork - filling orders, keeping books, tracking the inventory...”
“But you’re better now….you’re not even using the cane anymore.”
“Well, Krabbetree likes the current arrangement. Apparently I’m ‘trustworthy with the finances’.”
“That is not what you were trained for.”
“You’re one to talk about that! You think I haven’t noticed that you’re not exactly brimming with enthusiasm about your job? You’re a dragonkeeper and you’re playing around with pygmy puffs!”
Neville regretted the words the moment they were out of his mouth. “I’m so sorry, that was completely out of line.”
“No. No, you’re absolutely right.” Charlie was quiet a moment, and then said resolutely, “I have a confession to make.”
“That sounds ominous,” Neville ventured. “What is it?”
“I wasn’t exactly fired.”
Neville studied Charlie’s face as he processed this new information. “What exactly were you?”
“Scared,” Charlie said flatly. “The director and I talked it over and we both decided that because of my state of mind it would just be best and safest for everybody if I took a leave for a while. But I wasn’t sacked … or forced to leave.”
“I see.”
“I feel terrible that I lied to everybody,” Charlie admitted, his voice so thick that it hardly sounded like his own.
Neville reached out, not sure exactly where to touch, but wanting to offer some kind of comfort. His hand eventually landed on Charlie’s forearm. “Well, you might not have told the whole truth, Charlie, but you didn’t exactly lie. You were injured very badly and you did need some time away. It’s all right.”
“I hope my family’s going to be as forgiving.”
“I’m sure they will.” A thought occured to Neville, then. “Does this mean…. you could go back if you wanted to?”
Charlie nodded.
“Do you want to?”
“I don’t know. Not… not right now.”
“You’re welcome to stay here as long as you want,” Neville said quietly. “You’re also free to leave whenever you want. I like having you here, and you’ve… you’ve been a lot of help to me, but … I would be OK.”
He looked up to meet Charlie’s eyes, and found entirely too much understanding there for comfort.
“Neville…. you’re my friend. Even if I did ever go back to dragonkeeping, I’m never going to just walk out of your life. You know that, right?”
Neville nodded, but his gaze dropped away.
“I know you’re thinking about your other friends… you think they abandoned you, but I’ll bet they didn’t. I think you probably shut the door in everybody’s face, and they didn’t know what else to do. But see now, I have keys to the place, and I won’t let you get away with that again.” Charlie stood up, resting his hand briefly on Neville’s shoulder. And then he left.
Neville fell back into the pillow, staring at the ceiling as if he might find something helpful written there.
~(~
The next evening, Charlie walked out of the Floo to find that the living room actually looked like a living room. He found Neville upstairs putting the sailing ship in a box.
“Looks good down there,” he offered from the doorway. “ I hope I didn’t push you into a decision you weren’t ready for.”
“No, you were right, it’s time to put the house in order. Life goes on. Gran would’ve been the first person to tell me that.”
Charlie regarded him with a blend of compassion and pride. “How can I help?” he asked.
Neville tossed him a roll of Spellotape.
~(~
The weeks of autumn passed by, while Charlie divided his time between three projects ~ trying to adjust to his job, trying to restore the house, and trying to repair Neville.
The first of these projects he’d pretty much given up on, but the second was coming along nicely. The floral china was replaced with plain white crockery; and they painted over the lacey wallpaper. The paisley parlor sofa was hauled out, a blue one with simple lines was brought in, and flanked with a stately pair of potted palms. And Neville’s bedroom was converted from a museum of childhood to a place far more suitable to the master of the house.
So while his first project was proving impossible, and the second was promising to be attainable, the third was drifting back and forth between the two.
Neville seemed to be floating in and out of Charlie’s general orbit. He kept coming back, like a wild animal approaching for food, but only able to snatch a crumb at a time before pulling away with a start. Neville was not a wild animal though, Charlie corrected himself, more like a cat left outside too long. Not used to being touched or petted anymore, but still carrying the potential for domestication.
Charlie had once made a career of taming the feral. And the first step of the process was always simple observation.
His most important observation is that while Neville might still be acclimating to the house, there is one place he seems entirely at ease, one place that he truly feels to be his territory.
The greenhouse is full of more than vegetables and salad herbs these days. Neville’s gone back to his first love ~ the exotics ~ and the humid air is filled now with the heavy fragrance of orchids and flybrights and tentaculas.
Charlie is patient. And then one soft day he presses Neville against a brick wall thickly cushioned with ivy. Neville’s eyes, which are already so dark, go darker still and into soft focus. Neville turns his head to the side, into the mat of green leaves, not to evade him but to offer the place he most wants to be kissed, and Charlie brings his lips to the pale curve where throat meets shoulder.
Continue…