Come Fly With Me

[nyodrite]

Fandom: Harry Potter x Jurassic World
Rating: T
Pairing: Charlie Weasley/Owen Grady
Tags: Asexual Charlie Weasley, Queerplatonic Relationship, Dragons, Pack Dynamics
Notes: You should know that HP Canon is knocked a decade forwards to help with the timeline of JW Canon which takes place in 2015, thus Harry's first year is 2001.

Summary;

“Huh,” Charlie stepped away to let someone else see the flyer. “I think I’d want to visit, actually.”

“With what vacation days?” Jackson asked and he winced, because he had used up a lot of his vacation time the last couple years - most recently for his niece’s first birthday.

He shrugged, “Well, I’d have to save up for it anyways and with my siblings all settling down and having kids…”

“Yeah, niblings can really use up a lot of money,” his friend hummed while he mouthed ‘niblings’ to Rhoma who shrugged. “It’s all the birthdays and holidays -- Christmas is a killer.”

And that, was that.

...except...

Charlie couldn’t quite stop himself from setting some money aside; at first just a Knut here and there but once he started reading about dinosaurs, Knuts turned into Sickles. Quite suddenly, he was faced with a jar filled with Knuts and Sickles, proclaiming Join us at Jurassic World! with the flyer heading he’d stuck to it.

 

Charlie had been aware that the muggle world was going through a rapid series of advances in their technology, but it was only a peripheral awareness born from comments of friends whom spent time in the muggle world. Of course there was also the word of his father that both praised muggle ingenuity and lamented how difficult all the different things could make his job, not that Arthur Weasley loved his job any less due to the difficulty.

He didn’t follow the technological advances of the muggle world, though.

As a child he didn’t care and as a teen he was far too preoccupied with Hogwarts and NEWTs or OWLs or Quidditch to pay any more attention then casual interest. After Hogwarts he did actually catch up on a few advances- such as video games, DVDs and cell phones -- given he spent time traveling as he was job hunting until he was hired at the Romanian Dragon Reserve. Then, of course, Charlie was on the preserve living his dream as he worked with dragons and anything besides family was sidelined.

Even during his breaks from the preserve -- that steadily grew worse as Death Eater activity picked up followed by Voldemort’s return and the near disownment of a brother and then there was Fred’s funeral -- Charlie didn’t learn much about muggle technology or it’s capabilities, they could have been colonizing the moon for all he knew.

That, however, didn’t take away from the shock he felt when Rhoma came bursting into the mess, waving a flyer as she shrieked about “muggle dragons” of all things.

“Muggle what? ” he blurted, making his way towards the table she’d slammed the flyer down on. He wasn’t the only one to converge on the Bulgarian Smallclaw handler, he was the only one to take his food with him though.

Rhoma blinked at him, “You- but- San Diego?” The last bit came out sounding like a confused whine that reminded him of a young Ron when the twins hid his toys when his back was turned.

“No, Charlie was still in school when it happened,” Marcel, the man who’d been in charge of the Hungarian Horntail Harry had faced during the Triwizard Tournament, said. “And when he started working here the was the plague…”

He winced at the memory, it might have been the reason he’d been hired at such a renowned reserve with little experience but no one liked to think about the plague that had decimated the Hatchery. He was just grateful that Norberta managed to miss the entire ordeal, he’d have hated having to tell Hagrid that the dragon he’d smuggled for its wellbeing died within weeks of it arriving.

“And then we forgot he didn’t already know.” Rhoma finished, tone grim at the mention of the plague, before shaking her head and answering him. “Right, well. It’s not exactly a secret , but it was really only the body snatchers who knew since they it was part of their job.”

Charlie coughed at the name calling -- technically the group was the Relocation of Magical Remains and the workers were ‘relocators’ but, given that they’d had to steal the corpses or other remains of magicals from muggles, many just called them variations of body snatchers -- and got a unrepentant grin.

“But apparently there was a frantic scramble a while back when muggles started finding the bones of these great reptilian creatures,” she went on, “The snatchers initially thought that muggles were finding a bunch of dragon bones but it turned out they weren’t, they weren’t even some kind of extinct magical creature. No, these were entirely non-magical beings that were the size of dragons -- hence the decision the snatchers made to call the ‘muggle dragons’.”

Jackson, one of his friends whom helped him smuggle Norberta out of Hogwarts, huffed, “And wasn’t that a fun revelation when we were all scrambling to find out what idiot let loose a dragon in a the middle of a muggle city. My niece says that muggles call them ‘dinosaur’ or ‘dino’.”

“Should we be calling dragons ‘drag’?!” Someone, Charlie wasn’t sure who as he was preoccupied with the ‘let loose a dragon in the middle of a muggle city’ part of the comment, hollered and earned themselves a rude gesture.

“Anyways,” Rhoma said, glaring first at the other -- presumably the one who made the ‘drag’ comment -- and then Jackson before focusing back on Charlie. “It’s true that a muggle dragon -- dinosaur, whatever -- -- wound up in a muggle city -- San Diego to be precise -- which was a big thing in both worlds. I’ve already told you why it was in the magical -- people thought it was initially a magical creature loose only for the snatchers to reveal it wasn’t -- but the reason for it being such a big deal with the muggles -- beside the destruction and panic it caused -- was that these ‘dinosaurs’ are extinct animals.”

He let loose a low whistle, that had to have be a great shock.

Rhoma nodded as if she knew what he was thinking, “Exactly. Turns out this muggle company found out how to re-make them somehow with their technology and science -- the muggle dragon was sent back to an island that had other remade species and the island is now a preserve -- but what I was shrieking about was this.” She rapped he knuckles on the flyer on the table and he paused in his absent snacking to look at it. “The muggles made a park of muggle dragons, for kids - - there’s a petting zoo!”

Join us, the flyer heading proclaimed grandly with a reptilian footprint in the background of the sentence, at Jurassic World!

Standard Pack: Get a value for the ages with the most thrills for the lowest cost. A favorite among college students, singles and dreamers alike!

Family Pa- his eyes darted from the tickets down towards the list of attractions.

• Gentle Giants Petting Zoo - feed a baby dinosaur!

• Cretaceous Cruise - take a kayak trip and discover over 100 different species!

• Aviary - visit our flyers!

• Innovation Center - come see where we create our dinosaurs!

“Huh,” Charlie stepped away to let someone else see the flyer. “I think I’d want to visit, actually.”

“With what vacation days?” Jackson asked and he winced, because he had used up a lot of his vacation time the last couple years - most recently for his niece’s first birthday.

He shrugged, “Well, I’d have to save up for it anyways and with my siblings all settling down and having kids…”

“Yeah, niblings can really use up a lot of money,” his friend hummed while he mouthed ‘niblings’ to Rhoma who shrugged. “It’s all the birthdays and holidays -- Christmas is a killer.”

And that, was that.

...except…

Charlie couldn’t quite stop himself from setting some money aside; at first just a Knut here and there but once he started reading about dinosaurs, Knuts turned into Sickles. Quite suddenly, he was faced with a jar filled with Knuts and Sickles, proclaiming Join us at Jurassic World! with the flyer heading he’d stuck to it.

 

i - this chapter mainly takes place in 2011, four years after HP Canon and four before JW Canon, which is the year (I have) JW opening. Charlie is age 28 (Owen is 22).

ii - there are OCs because I refuse to believe that Charlie is a friendless shut-in, if for no other reason then he was close enough to a group of people who helped him smuggle a dragon out of school in UK and bring it all the back to Romania at the word of his little brother. If that doesn't call for some strong friendships then I don't know what does.

 

• On an unrelated note: I so Headcanon that after Norberta was settled, Charlie wrote Bill to tell him that their youngest brother literally asked him to smuggle a dragon out of Hogwarts.
• On another unrelated note: I am part of the group who firmly believes that Tonks and Charlie were great friends at Hogwarts and am kind of wondering why Charlie wasn't named Teddy's godfather. I mean I get that it's important to both Harry and Remus but, like, Harry's barely an adult and when it was decided how could Tonks/Remus have known the war would end soon? They were asking a hunted teen to raise their baby during a WAR instead of Charlie whose an adult, not hunted and pretty safe from the war given that no one would attack a DRAGON preserve.

1: the dragon breed Bulgarian Smallclaw is not a canon dragon breed, I simply wanted more that would make more sense to be a reserve in Romania then something like a Chinese Fireball.

The Bulgarian Smallclaw is a venomous dragon that grows no larger then the size of a medium-sized dog, it tends to live in 'flocks' that range from ten to thirty and is named for the small, claw-like 'fingers' at the ends of it's wings that helps it climb.

2: the dragon plague is fictitious and was create both as a plot-device to explain why Charlie wouldn't have learned about dinosaurs earlier from a group of Giant Dangerous Reptile lovers and as an attempt to explain just how a recent graduate got a job at a - presumably - highly prestigious preserve that focus on the care of highly dangerous animals. but imagine if this happened and Norberta actually caught it and then died