Title: Before Your Eyes
Author: Amalin
Notes: For Niche. Warning for incest. PG-13.




When he is sixteen years old, Charlie learns how to kiss in the rusted backseat of his dad's Ford Angelia that won't be rediscovered until almost a decade later. The taste of Bill is intermingled with the heady smell of grass stains and cherries, and he forgets how to breathe under the sunset and Bill's hands and the freckles on his shoulders that remind Charlie of the stars. Summer creeps around them like a guilty landlady and pulls evening in like a curtain.

The next day Bill gets a job at Gringotts, and he disappears in London smog. When summer swings back around, hot-breathed and full of undiscovered dusk, Charlie is a swaggering seventeen year old who has a dragon tattoo unfurling on the inner curve of his left shoulder blade (come on, Bill, you won't tell Mum, will you?) and a blistering smile that has kissed more than one boy in the interim.

Bill wears leather pants and licks over the flame on Charlie's shoulder and makes him arch up against him like he's never been touched before. They're in Charlie's room now, crowded with the furniture Mum can't bear to throw away, closing their ears to the din of seven other Weasleys in the same house.

"I waited all year for you," says Charlie.

"I'm going to Egypt next week," says Bill.

They make plans under the sagging ceiling like they're drawing a map through the desert, plans about Charlie's Apparation license and Christmas holidays and the burning sting of Egypt like the itch behind Charlie's eyes, and in the end Bill leaves Charlie still aching and tasting like cherries and Charlie goes back to Hogwarts one more time.

The summer after he leaves Hogwarts, Charlie visits Bill under a peeling sky and he freckles so badly that he can't tell what is tan and what is freckles. Bill kisses every one of them and says afterwards that his hair is growing too long. Charlie cuts it for him, one baking day as their shadows dance on the inside of a white tent, and after that Bill never touches it and just lets it grow.

In August, Charlie goes to London and pretends he's living with Bill three years ago, both of them threading through dull-eyed people and tourists with their flashbulbs and their hands in their pockets unconsciously rubbing the same coins so that when they glance at each other, it's almost like they're touching, really.

London is lonely, and Charlie learns from all the cobblestones that he should stop searching for a road to happily ever after.






"Are you going to forgive me any time in the next two centuries?"

They're back at the Burrow for Ginny's birthday party (what is she, Bill, eight? Nine? I can't keep track anymore) and sharing a room in the stifling feel of too many Weasleys with too little space, and Bill is too tall for his bed. Charlie's a dragon-tamer now, which Bill thinks is awfully cool. A four-year old Charlie would be impressed at this compliment from his older brother, but now Charlie just tosses a book at Bill and says, "You want to get out of here, then?"

They go to Paris because Egypt is too hot and Romania too far and everywhere else too foreign. They check into a hotel--a frivolity they crave, because neither has been brought up on hand-me-downs from five brothers before them--and pretend not to see their reflections in the mirrored elevators on their way to the seventh floor.

"I don't feel like I should be grown up," says Charlie.

"There's still a lot more to life," Bill advises. "You'll see."

Bill shares a cigarette with Charlie as they watch Paris go by seven stories down, but the twilight laughs when Charlie coughs and down the street taxis are jamming on their brakes, jazz is floating from a corner café. "Romania's nice," Charlie mentions offhand. "The dragons are great."

Bill thinks of Charlie's tattoo and absentmindedly feels his ponytail. "Sometimes I wish--" he says, and stops, which makes Charlie ask what he was going to say, and then it's never mind and I forgot and eventually he has to kiss Charlie to distract him.

It's wrong when Bill slips his arm around him under the crisp whiteness of hotel sheets. It's wrong when they're a tangle of breathing and hands and arms and lips and it's wrong, really, because it feels like they're bringing it into the world where it shouldn't be.

"We shouldn't--"

"--I know," agrees Charlie. He anticipates Bill's words, the way he anticipated the unspoken wish to be different people, and they leave by Apparating out of the Muggle room. They end up sharing a near-empty London pub with the faceless, nameless regulars, and Charlie tosses back Firewhiskey while Bill turns his glass and never sips. When they do stagger home, Bill has to sneak Charlie in the back door; even though they've been gone for years, Mum will still have a fit if she finds they've been out all night.

Charlie is too busy trying to kiss Bill to untie his own shoes, and they end up curled halfway under the same worn down sheets they've slept in summer after summer, Bill with his arm slung around Charlie and Charlie with his lips against Bill's forearm. They sleep until noon the next day, when Fred and George charm Bludgers into rubber and bounce them off Percy's window, when the sun breaks open the sky and Bill thinks, quietly, into Charlie's shoulder, "There's no place like home, yeah?"

Somehow, they never end up there at the same time again.






Bill sends Charlie an owl months later, written on a scrap of yellowing paper that gives off a faint scent of Egypt. Burned my arm rather badly from an unexpected curse, he writes. Got a month off, heard the best burn specialist in the world happens to be a colleague of yours, am coming to visit. OK?

Charlie doesn't bother replying, because he knows Bill will come anyway. And he does come, pulling on a jacket over the tanned gold of his skin, winking at Charlie as he admires the dragons, laughing when Charlie demands just how he managed to burn all the skin on his forearm and not one strand of his hair. "Had to shield my face, you know," he says, demonstrating, and then leans back with his elbows on the fence. Charlie has to look away to swallow the urge to kiss him.

It's a good month. Bill lounges while Charlie works; sometimes he follows Charlie to the job and watches him, sometimes he stays in Charlie's apartment and reads, smokes, sleeps. They fall into the routine of each other; Bill teases Charlie about his nonexistent cooking skills, and Charlie teases Bill about making a mess of the apartment; they sleep together and sleep together and it's almost like falling in love.

"Why, though?" Charlie asks one night, when Bill is shirtless against the headboard of the bed and smoking, watching Charlie fix a broken leather strap on his jacket. "I mean, is it a Weasley thing? Why not Fred and George? Why not Ron and Ginny? Why us?"

Bill exhales and shrugs, taps his cigarette, looks at Charlie from under hooded eyes. "I don't know. I don't ask why. I just tend to take what I get, be grateful for it, you know?"

It takes a moment for Charlie to nod and murmur "Nox" to the lights, which flicker and then extinguish altogether. He isn't sixteen anymore, a boy; he's not a smug teenager now; he doesn't still believe that the world can be theirs. But he's still Charlie.

"So you're grateful for me, then?"

Bill's body is warm when Charlie leans his head against the muscled solidity of Bill's stomach. Bill's cigarette glows in the darkness before he stamps it out. He's thoughtful for a moment, not really very long, before he answers; when he does, he runs his hand through Charlie's hair and sends an unseen crooked grin into the room. "Yeah," he says. "Yeah."

It's a good month. Charlie doesn't forgive time when it moves on, but he forgives Bill, because that's what he always does.






Charlie has his hands in his pockets when he meets Bill three days after Sirius Black's death, and he thinks irrationally of coins and cherries and foggy London mornings. Bill hasn't changed for years: still the ponytail, the fang earring, the golden tan that makes him look like some trickster god. But his face looks lined, tired. He says, "I feel old. Stuff just disappeared before I knew it, you know?"

It doesn't mean much that Dumbledore is over one hundred and still going strong, when Sirius Black can die at a third of that and the world not bat an eye. Everyone is suddenly old too soon.

"So, Fleur, huh?" Charlie says. They've both been unattached for years, have given each other that much of a promise. And now the silver-haired goddess has to give Bill a life before he misses it altogether.

"Yeah."

"Take what you get, huh? Be grateful?" It's an echo from years ago, when it was a different world, and Charlie feels like a sixteen-year-old version of himself for remembering the trivialities.

Bill hears the resignation in Charlie's voice, listens for animosity, finds none. He nods. "These are bad days. Bad for us all, you know?"

Charlie knows.

Later, Charlie stops at Bill's apartment in London on his way home (got to visit Mum before I head back or she'll never let me hear the end of it, you know how she is) and thinks about grass stains, about leather car seats, about freckles and patched sheets that smell of summer. They've been out of sync this whole time, in London, out of London, back and forth, daring time to resettle itself without them. Charlie puts his hands in his pockets and longs to be young.

"Will you cut my hair?" Bill says then, but Charlie doesn't see the hesitation in Bill's eyes through the moisture in his own. He has to blink fast so he doesn't cut unevenly, doesn't jab Bill's scalp, and when they're done he bends to kiss Bill's shoulder and slams the door like a sob as he goes.

When summer burns away, there is just the shock of red hair against a tiled kitchen floor and the too-sour taste of cherries and time gone wrong. The worst good-byes, Bill knows, are the ones you never say.