Welcome
by Silvia

This is your life.

You wake up to the sound of eggs sizzling downstairs and a wand swooshing through the air, and you think, 'I bet those would taste glorious right now,' and you don't get to eat any of them.

You floo to the office because you never have once made it up for breakfast, and you'll grab a biscuit from Miss Greenway in Magical Catastrophes, but you can't do that if you Apparate, because it always makes you queasy for approximately three hours afterward. It's like your stomach is tied into knots.

Your name plate says Ronald Weasley, etched in gold, because there was already a Mr. Weasley, because he is your father, and there was already a Weasley, because he is your brother, and your first name is what you have left, and no one will listen to a man who can be summed up in one syllable. At least, that's what your wife said, and she's never wrong.

Your wife was still your girlfriend, secretly, in your head for the first two years, just like you're still Ron, you'll always be Ron, even if you now know how to answer to Ronald, and it almost doesn't feel weird. You love her so much that you don't remember the last time you said it. She's just so damned beautiful.

She shares charms with Shirley Longbottom to wink out the gray that you've never seen in the first place, though she swears there's a hint of it, and makes supper on the weekends. Her hands are cramped from her quills and her shoulders are hunched like all librarians' are, and so you ask to do it every day, but she won't hear of it.

"I couldn't possibly," she says, very loudly and with that wide 'o' she makes that forces you to kiss her.

You married her in the spring, because Dumbledore had coughed -- he had been doing too much of that lately -- and said, gravely, "Then she will bring springtime with you, wherever you go."

You have an office on the sixteenth floor, and a picture beside your inbox of the twins standing proudly in India across from one of their shops. George winks mischievously, and waves, but Fred just looks tired. You always mean to owl them, and your mother, but you never do.

You bring Percy his lunch when you think of it, because he never does, and you have to wade through oceans and rivers and tributaries of parchment just to come close enough to lay it into his lap. He never looks up, and you often have to tell him, "You have a eagle post waiting," and the poor starved bird squawks.

He says, "So I do," so surprised, and blinks, and then feeds the eagle his lunch in exchange for the message.

You can't help but laugh.

This is your life, and you wake up one morning and realize this is a not a dress rehearsal, this is not getting ready, this not is preparing, this is not growing up. You're living it.

You can make a casserole.

You own a house -- like it's yours and you don't just sleep there -- and it's only a little rickety. There's a rug in the front room that Hermoine hates and your parents hate and your friends hate but you picked it out. You clean the gnomes out of the garden on Saturdays with the sleeves of your robes rolled up and dotted with Stay Fast. 

You have a routine.

You weren't second best. You weren't even third, or fourth, or tenth. You never won the Quidditch cup.  You never held the House Cup. You never made Head Boy. You never looked good.