A/N: These spin offs are really quite therapeutic as far as my writer’s block is concerned. This little ditty is especially for Katie Louise, the newest addition to my next door neighbour’s family. She arrived at 7.03pm on Thursday the 28th of July, just as I was putting the finishing touches to this and so I thought it would be appropriate to honour her arrival. So three cheers for Katie! Hip-Hip Hooray! Hip-Hip Hooray! Hip-Hip Hooray!
As she followed Charlie from the kitchen, Ellie couldn’t help the deep concern that engulfed her. His behaviour over the last couple of days had been extremely strange at best and horribly worrying at worst. His kisses, that were so usually full of passion, were empty and less abundant that normal. In all the time she had known him he had never acted this way. He led her up the stairs and in to the drawing room.
“You might want to sit down,” he said hoarsely, and politely pulled out a chair for her to sit on. The second he had tucked her into the table he meandered over to the window. He raked a hand through his fairly long, red hair before shoving both of the rough skinned appendages in to the pockets of the navy robes he was wearing. Even after all these years she could still turn him in to a nervous wreck.
While he took his time at the window she thought back over everything that had passed between them in the fifteen years that they had been in love. Fifteen years, she smiled to herself, that was longer than some marriages lasted. Nobody had expected their love to stand the test of time; everybody thought that they just had a passing infatuation with each other. After all, the intervening years were the most important times of a person’s life. Those were the years in which Ellie and Charlie changed the most, not just physically but mentally and emotionally. They formed who they were going to be, their morals, principles, likes, dislikes and ideals. All their crucial personality traits had surfaced in that time. In Ellie’s case she had turned out to be loyal and caring, while Charlie was brave and hard-working. On top of these things they had decided where to take their lives; Ellie had taken hers to teaching in Britain while Charlie had taken his to training dragons in Romania.
They had written to each other constantly during their time apart, with no more than a few days between each letter. They hadn’t exactly been short on little declarations of love either. Their letters had often stretched to five or six feet of parchment with tightly packed prose jammed in to every square inch. Not even Snape requested essays that long. They had relayed the minute details of the writer’s life since the last communication, even- in the more boring weeks “ numbering how many rashers of bacon Charlie had had for breakfast the morning before. Ellie, on the other hand, had described the scenery of the country she was living in such a vivid manner that he had been able to picture the place long before he ever had the opportunity to visit. Their letters had only ceased during the summer holidays. Ellie was forced to stick close to her grandfather, which meant she spent most of her time flitting between Hogwarts, the Ministry and the Dumbledore family estate in Kent. They had enjoyed some of their best times running around the castle and exploring the grounds together. They didn’t quite know every nook and cranny of the castle but they had come closer to it than anybody before them.
She could remember every compliment that he had ever paid to her and that added up to an obscene number. Every thing from ‘You’ve got the prettiest hair I’ve ever seen,’ which he had admitted to her the night after he had first proposed, to ‘I really love the shape of your calf, it’s very round,’ which he had announced to her the other morning as she scrambled out of bed. She could remember the day of his proposal like it was yesterday.
After Charlie had punched Percy on the nose she had run after him and eventually found him taunting a gnome in The Burrow’s back garden. “Thank you, Charlie,” she blushed as she tugged on his elbow.
“It’s okay,” he replied grumpily.
“Are you my friend?” she asked with the stunning innocence of unabashed purity.
“‘Course I am, I’ve always been your friend,” he said much more kindly.
“Percy doesn’t like me,” she told him sadly.
“Percy doesn’t like anyone,” Charlie snorted.
“You’re my hero!” Ellie suddenly gushed.
“Thanks, you’re quite pretty you know,” he had said after a moment’s contemplation. The warm summer sun was shinning down on her hair and was making it gleam a beautiful golden shade of copper.
“I think you’re handsome, are you a prince?”
“No, why would I be a prince?”
“Because in the stories my daddy reads me all the handsome boys are princes.” She looked at him strangely; she clearly thought that he was being silly. He just chuckled at her. “Do you want to play a game?”
“What game?” he asked still smiling at her.
“We could get Ginny and play mummies and daddies?” she said excitedly as she bounced up and down on her hunkers.
“Okay, mummies and daddies it is,” he sighed. They walked back up to the house to find Ginny, who was sitting in her cot in the living room. Charlie lifted her from the confinement and the three started their game. He grabbed his father’s nearby briefcase and left the living room. He came marching back in again a few minutes later with a sigh; he was now pretending to have been at work.
“Hello, husband,” Ellie greeted him with a kiss on the cheek.
“Hello, wife,” Charlie replied. “And baby Ginny,” he said patting his sister on the head in a fatherly way. They went through the motions of daily life as they knew it until James happened upon them later on in the afternoon.
“What’s going on here then?” he asked suspiciously. Charlie was sitting on the floor cross-legged with Ellie sitting in his lap; the pair of them were fussing over Ginny in a very odd way.
“Charlie and I are married and Ginny is our baby,” Ellie answered giving him a scandalously funny ‘You’re so stupid’ look. James couldn’t believe it; he was being visually berated by a three year old.
“I see, well, I’ll be back in a minute.” James then disappeared and came back with Ellie and Charlie’s mums and dads. “I thought that you should know that during the time you left your children unattended they’ve been getting up to all sorts. Tell them, Ellie,” James chuckled.
“Charlie’s my husband and Ginny’s our baby!” Ellie answered irritably.
“They certainly do things fast these days!” Jane managed to say before she exploded with laughter.
“They certainly do!” Molly giggled. “One afternoon and they’ve started a family already!”
“I’m afraid Charlie can’t be your husband,” Arthur told Ellie gently. He immediately regretted it because the girl’s lip quivered dangerously.
“Why not?” she cried tearfully.
“Because he never asked your father for permission first,” he replied softly. Ellie instantly started looking from her father to Charlie. The young boy took the hint.
“Mr. Potter, can I marry Ellie?” he asked.
“I think you’re a bit young for that, you don’t love her…” Andrew chortled. He realised that as soon as his daughter got to school he was going to have to turn down a lot of offers for her.
“I do too!” Charlie protested. “I’m going to marry Ellie one day, whether you like it or not!” The two of them clambered to their feet and stormed from the room hand in hand, Ellie managed to stick her tongue out at her father on the way past. The adults collapsed in to hysterical laughter the second the kids were out of earshot.
“You do want to marry me, don’t you?” Charlie asked her when they were back out in the garden again. She thought about the question for a second and then answered.
“Yes,” she said firmly.
“So, when we’re old, like twenty or something, will you marry me?” he asked her with complete seriousness.
“I will,” she nodded fervently.
“I’m not really sure how to say this,” the now deep voice that the present-day Charlie had intruded on her daydream and she was snapped out of her reminiscence. He was much taller now than he had been all those years ago, his shoulders were broader and his frame more muscular. It wasn’t the tense look on his face that worried her; it was the rigidity of his muscles and the awkward way he was standing. He normally looked very relaxed with his shoulders falling back and his arms hanging loosely by his sides but now his shoulders were hunched and his arms folded across his expansive chest. A horrible thought occurred to her; he wants to break up with me!
“I lied to you about your grandfather’s letter,” he admitted guiltily. She couldn’t stop a gulp from escaping her throat.
“What was it about then?” she hoped that her voice sounded casual and not fraught with the panic that was now rising in her. Half of her didn’t want to know the answer.
“It was about you, and something I should have done a long time ago,” he looked up from the floor and in to her eyes. She was amazed by how much love lay in his sun-beaten features. The Romanian sun had blurred several of his freckles together; there was one particularly large grouping under his right eye that she liked to kiss for luck.
“Oh, right, are you going to tell me what or do I have to guess?”
“Honestly! You’re got no patience, Elizabeth Potter!” he scolded.
“And after all these years you should know that, Charles Weasley,” she answered back.
“True, anyway, getting back to the point.” He now came around to her and knelt down beside her chair. “I want you to know that I’ve loved you ever since the day I first saw you, I’ve never even so much as looked at another girl…well, not seriously anyway…”
“That’s nice to know,” Ellie chirped nervously.
“Don’t interrupt; otherwise I’ll never get finished. All I want is to spend the rest of my life with you; I want to wake up to your beautiful face every morning. I want you to be the mother of my children, let’s play mummies and daddies for real, forever. Elizabeth Alexandra Jane Potter, will you marry me?” he asked her. There was a knot the size of a dragon egg sitting in the bottom of his stomach.
“Charlie, I feel so sorry…” Tears were sliding down her cheeks and falling on to his hands, which were wrapped around hers and nestled in her lap. His heart plummeted.
“It’s okay, I understand, you’re not ready.” His insides were cringing, after all this time he couldn’t tell that she wasn’t ready for marriage? She’s only eighteen you stupid prat! He cursed himself and his stupid ideas.
“Charlie, let me finish…” she objected.
“No, its okay, you don’t have to explain.”
“Charlie, SHUT UP!” she begged. “What I was trying to say was that I feel so sorry for you being stuck with an moaner like me everyday for the rest of your life, that’s going to be hard on you,” she smiled.
“Is that a yes?” he asked dubiously.
“As if I could say no? I want to marry you, I love you, Charlie,” she beamed.
“Oh! Thank Merlin!” he exclaimed. “You’ll need this then.” Charlie reached into the pocket of his robes and pulled out a little black leather box. He opened the lid to reveal a glistening ring of tiny diamonds set in to a white gold ring.
“Oh Charlie!” she gasped loudly. He slid the ring on to her finger and kissed her passionately, finally she was going to be his wife.
“I love you, Ellie,” he said quietly. She kissed him back even more avidly than before. She rushed from the room clasping her newly engaged finger while Charlie looked at the picture on the wall behind where she had been sitting. “I promise I’ll take care of her, Mr. and Mrs. Potter,” he told the smiling faces of his fiancé’s family.
“Are you coming?” Ellie asked him as she happily popped her head back in to the room.
“A herd of rampaging Thestrals couldn’t keep me away.” Charlie planted another kiss on her lips as he pulled her towards the door that separated them from the family that were waiting on the other side with baited breath.
A/N2: The world's biggest hug goes to Magical Maeve who once again took the time to read over this in addition to the main fic, she is my saviour!