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♫ flume
- bon iver
"Only love is all maroon
Lapping lakes like leery loons
Leaving rope burns
Reddish rouge..."
✧
That year Christmas fell on a Monday, so the family was able to spend an entire week together before returning to school. Molly was thrilled to have a distraction from the growing danger surrounding them, especially after what happened to Arthur.
Her husband, however, remained slightly loopy from his medication as he fought off the rest of the snake venom from his system. It made for a rather entertaining Christmas; Arthur would say the most peculiar of things about different goings-on around the house.
He told Harry he danced like a two-legged gazelle one night while the children danced around Cilla's muggle radio. "Or what was your patronus, then? Not a gazelle, a doe?" Arthur asked. Harry only shook his head and explained politely it was a stag. "Oh, yes! Lovely creature, had a wonderful stag party myself," he replied with a wink and a chuckle.
One night, while Ron and Hermione bickered over prefect duties by the fireplace, Arthur said "you remind me of a woodpecker, Hermione. But oh, not an ugly woodpecker, more like... if a hummingbird were a woodpecker, you see," he explained with a warm smile. Hermione, not quite knowing how to reply, smiled awkwardly and nodded, thanking the patriarch.
Arthur continued to get the twins' names wrong, but not in the way where you accidentally call one the other like Molly sometimes did, he began calling them different names altogether. "Oi, oi, Bilius me lad, could you hand me the kettle?"
George turned around, horror in his eyes, before Fred and Ron tackled him onto the couch, shouting, "Uncle Billy! Uncle Billy!" Their uncle Bilius died only a few years prior from supposedly seeing a Grim. It's safe to say the nickname "Uncle Billy" stuck for the rest of the week.
Arthur also seemed to forget the concept of an animagus altogether -- whenever Sirius morphed into his dog form, Arthur would talk about the Weasley farm garden gnome dog from his childhood... he even called Sirius "Yippie" while patting him on the head once.
Sirius, of course, despised this. Cilla understood just how much he did when he preferred the company of Vader over that of Arthur. They lounged by the window in the sun during the mornings, tails swishing in harmony, and he spent his afternoons upstairs with Buckbeak. Sirius wasn't accustomed to so many people under his one roof after years of hiding out in his family's old house, so he preferred to keep to himself.
