12 Grimmauld Place: Christmas at the Burrow

The Guest Room

"You know, we're really going to have to consider this for the future," Molly Weasley laughed, out-of-breath as she pushed open the door at the top of the crooked staircase.

Thelma looked up at Molly Weasley and smiled over the top of the homey hamper of blankets and mismatched pillows. She was getting just a bit too hot underneath her brand-new sweater, a deep aqua yarn piece with a 'T' stitched up the middle and a small rendering of the scales of justice behind it, but didn't think for a moment of taking it off. She had never expected that Molly would make her one of her famous Christmas presents, and was touched beyond belief that she had. Thelma had always felt accepted around Sirius and the Order -- they were her friends from young adulthood, after all -- but seeing Sirius in his new merlot-colored sweater with an 'S' and a hippogriff feather behind it, and then Felicity and Harry with their own sweaters, made Thelma think of home. Family. Enduring and unbreakable and connected. Amidst everything else in the world -- in all of their lives -- it was so nice to see. And just the symbol of the sweater, of being linked to Sirius and the twins like that, seemed to show that they had made their own family over the past two years. It felt like the biggest thing in the world.

Molly couldn't possibly have known that her own family had once had its own tradition of Christmas sweaters, but that memory made Thelma cherish her new sweater -- and family -- all the more.

It was now a few hours after the gift-giving and Christmas Eve dinner, and Thelma had been more than happy to give Molly a hand with whatever she could as sleeping arrangements were gradually sorted out for the night. She knew that Remus and Tonks were headed back to their place in London, but she and Sirius were temporarily without a room. Despite Thelma's protests that they would be perfectly fine on the couch, Molly had insisted on setting up a space for them upstairs -- Sirius, for his part, had been out cold in his chair and didn't stir throughout the entire conversation. Thelma was glad about that. The poor man always needed a good night's sleep, when the nightmares gave him a rest. Chatting one-on-one with Molly was always fun, too. Now, adjusting her hold on the basket of bedding, Thelma asked her host, "What, are you thinking about finding rooms for all the kids-in-law?"

"Precisely!" Molly tried the door handle, found it locked, and let out a quick sigh. "Oh, the boys Sealed it again...can't blame them, you know how Fred and George like to get...creative with their...free time..." Even as Molly rolled her eyes, Thelma saw a thin smile on her lips. She knew from Felicity that opening the joke shop in Diagon Alley had given Molly more of a sense of security that her twin sons were making their way in the world even as they made their own path -- that had allowed the mother of seven to laugh more easily herself that holiday, even with the anxious state of the wizarding world considered.

Adjusting her grip on the basket, Thelma asked, "So this is your eldest two sons' room? Bill and...?"

"Charlie, yes." After one last jiggle of the doorknob, Molly brushed back her sleeves, stepped back, and tapped the locked handle. "Alohomora."

Thelma bit her lip over a smile, but Molly caught it all the same, sending her own mischievous look back. "Well, they're both out of the country," she explained, pushing open the door and waving the lights on inside the room. "The boys wouldn't mind, in any case."

Thelma stepped through the threshold and looked around. The room was narrow, the long straight stretches of the peach walls squished between two twin beds. She grinned at the array of posters in the crammed space -- again, from Felicity's excited chatter about George's family, Thelma knew that Bill was some sort of wizard safecracker or something and Charlie worked with dragons, and their posters made it clear whose side of the room was whose.

The ceiling of the room was also somewhat uneven, marked by a series of low eaves from the Burrow's striking gabled roof, with the effect that Thelma found she could only stand straight in the doorway. She knew that Sirius would have to crouch, and the image made her smile again. He would gripe about it, but the break from 12 Grimmauld Place was doing him such a world of good, she knew any complaints wouldn't be sincere. She had loved hearing his laughter ring through the Burrow that evening -- she knew it meant that no thought of Azkaban was holding him captive. And his laugh wasn't his other laugh, either. That other sound she only heard when the two of them were talking with Kingsley about what he and Sirius referred to as 'the rats': the men who should have gone to Azkaban but escaped through cracks in the Ministry and were now at large. In theory, Sirius and Kingsley were working together as they could -- Sirius still mostly from 12 Grimmauld Place and Kinsley with his herd of apprentices at the Ministry -- to find the men and bring them within legal custody again. But Thelma knew that 'rat' title for the project wasn't a coincidence. There was truly one main rat who haunted his thoughts. Sirius thought of Peter, of revenge, and dipped close to the edge of his trauma whenever he laughed about finding the rats.