Arthur Weasley had always loved Muggles. He loved to watch them walking about the streets of London, loved to muck around with their artefacts, and he loved to read about them. Something he’d read recently had really stuck with him, and he’d been thinking about it for some time.
Wizard dads, he knew, had hobbies like home-distilled firewhisky, building enchanted cabinetry, constructing ships in bottles that actually sailed, and sitting at the pub having a smoke and a gossip with their friends. His father, in fact, smoked a pipe and was a longtime habitué of the local magical pub. Arthur was now a father of seven, and he rather thought his beloved wife Molly would kill him stone dead if he left her alone in the evenings with all seven of them while he went to the pub. She didn’t approve of smoking, either, so that was a habit he’d never picked up. He did, however, enjoy tinkering about in his shed.
Muggle fathers, as he’d recently read, also enjoyed tinkering in the shed. Dad Hobbies, it was called. Unlike his father-in-law, they weren’t repairing old flying carpets. No, Muggles did something far more fascinating: they restored automobiles. Upon discovering this intriguing tidbit, Arthur had been fascinated with the idea of trying out a little car repair of his own. He’d bought an old blue Ford Anglia for very cheap, and found a Muggle book about repairing them. The book he could easily hide in the shed. The car, however, had been hidden under a tarpaulin behind the shed where with any luck his wife wouldn’t notice it right away.
Molly wouldn’t approve of his plan to rebuild the engine any more than her mother approved of her father’s antique flying carpet repair hobby. Mr. Prewett was still at it, despite his wife’s objections. Only last week Arthur had got a look at the Axminster he was working on, which was technically illegal but Arthur didn’t have the heart to tell his father-in-law that.
Besides, he wasn’t sure he had a leg to stand on there, given his own plans for the Ford Anglia.
Christmas was swiftly approaching, and Arthur had an excellent plan to take his darling Molly out in the car (just like Muggles!) once it was operational again. Getting time to work on it around the holidays was a bit tricky, of course. They were quite busy, and most of his spare time was eaten up with corralling the children so his wife could get on with her own work, or doing small repair jobs around the house. All the usual sorts of things cropped up - repairing a malfunctioning toilet, patching a hole in the stairwell wall that had probably been put there by someone’s foot, repairing the glass where a Bludger had gone out the window in the parlor. He spent every spare minute out behind the shed, working on the car with his nose buried in the book, using magic whenever he didn’t understand the Muggle instructions, but nevertheless feeling like quite the Muggle father for his newfound car repair hobby. He was very close to having it running again, he felt certain.
Once the weekend before Christmas rolled around, he tried to get a little extra spare time with the car without tipping Molly off about exactly what he was doing. He was still hoping to surprise her with a drive in the car, and a little experimentation with a delightful-sounding Muggle custom called parking.
He rather thought Molly would be on board for that concept.
Unfortunately, she was not on board for him spending the day out at the shed. Admittedly, he could have approached her at a better time, but she’d spent the morning cleaning the house, during which time he had ensured the children cleaned their rooms (or at least did a close approximation of cleaning, the youngest ones probably having shoved everything under their beds) and generally kept out of her way, and so he’d had no choice but to bring it up as she was in the kitchen simultaneously doing the washing up from breakfast and preparing foods for their upcoming Christmas celebrations.
“What do you mean, you’ll be out at the shed?” she demanded when he mentioned it. The kitchen around her was more chaotic than he’d ever seen it. She seemed to be making at least a half dozen things at the same time. There were three different dishes preparing themselves behind her, along with bread and some sort of pastry proofing on the counter nearby.
“There’s just a little project I’m working on,” he told her hopefully, dodging a pot that went past from the wall where it had been hanging to land on the hob. A bowl nearby began pouring a fragrant mixture into the pot, and Arthur leaned closer for a better sniff. Mincemeat.
“What project?” Molly asked suspiciously.
“It’s just a small surprise I’m working on. For you, my darling.”
She threw him a look, but the cheese she was charming seemed to need more of her concentration than she felt he did. “Arthur, I’m very busy right now.”
Well, that much was patently obvious. The Yorkshire pudding tin flew past him, headed for the sink, and he dodged it neatly. “Yes, dear, I can see that. I was just hoping to have a few minutes with the carburetor, you see-”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Molly said irritably as she turned to him. “Can’t you do something useful, like having the children put away the clean laundry? I’ve already folded all of it.”
“Yes, dear, only-”
“I don’t want the children going near any of your mad projects, either,” she added. “Don’t you recall that time the twins got into your enchanted nuts and bolts?”
Vividly. He got a little shaky any time he remembered it, in fact. There were still marks on the walls of the shed, and he could only be devoutly thankful that none of the children had been hurt, and that his wife hadn’t gone to stay at her mother’s house after that one. He wrapped an arm around her to turn her toward him for a hug, hoping to distract her from thinking about what had happened when Fred and George had got hold of the jar of nuts and bolts, and bent down to kiss her thoroughly.
She made a pleasant little hum of appreciation as he trailed kisses down her throat, the cheese apparently forgotten. It seemed to be carrying on well enough on its own. “Oh, Arthur.”
“I’ll have the children put the laundry away,” he murmured against her collarbone. “And then I’ll be out in the shed if you need me.”
“If you keep kissing me like this, I’m going to need you straightaway,” she said on a sigh. Her arms slid around his neck as he continued his attention to the soft skin of her neck. “Oh, that’s so nice…”
He was nibbling gently at her earlobe when one of the children shrieked from upstairs.
“Mum! Mummy!”
Molly’s sigh was very different this time. She pushed Arthur away when he would have happily continued necking with his wife, and her hand lingered on his chest.
“Go and see who’s injured,” she told him, sounding rather reluctant.
He held onto her hand for a moment. “Can I pick up later where we left off?”
She smiled at him in what certainly looked like a resounding yes, but then the children were screaming again and he had to go see who was at fault.
Probably the twins. It was usually the twins.
Once he’d separated the culprits from their victim (poor Percy, honestly, it was a wonder he hadn’t pounded his younger brothers into a pulp by now), Arthur took said culprits down to the car with him where he could supervise them while he worked. Of all his children, the twins could be trusted not to breathe a word to their mother about anything he was up to, after all. They spent half their time trying to avoid her noticing what they were up to in the first place.
When he pulled the tarpaulin off the Ford Anglia, the twins both looked highly interested in the state of the car.
“What have you been doing?” Fred asked, looking into the open bonnet.
“Can we help?” asked George.
Arthur surveyed the two of them. He’d only meant to have them sit quietly where he could see them, just to make sure they stayed out of trouble, but the twins did have a bit of a mechanical bent. They were only eleven, so they probably didn’t have the strength to do the more difficult bits of screwing things back together, but they could probably help him figure out that bloody repair manual.
“Well, boys, I’m working on the carburetor at the moment…”
Two hours later, with the surprisingly helpful input of the twins, Arthur had got the carburetor cleaned, reassembled, and back in the engine where it belonged. The twins had moved on to making excited suggestions for what else he could do to the car while Arthur reattached hoses and tightened bolts.
They were sitting on the rear bench seat that Arthur had removed from the car to clean up and repair the torn old upholstery. That he’d done entirely with magic, since it wasn’t addressed in the repair manual. It looked very small with just the twins sitting on it, and Arthur wondered if he could do a little spell to expand the rear seat. He did, after all, have a large number of children to accommodate in the little car. Even with Bill being out of the house, squeezing his remaining children into the back would be tight. Charlie was already the size of an adult man, though he was only barely seventeen. His youngest child and only daughter Ginny would no doubt ride in the front seat with her mother, since she was almost as ungovernable as the twins and Molly usually kept tight reins on her, but that still left five boys needing seats.
Expanding the seating seemed a wise choice. The boot had looked rather small too, now he thought about it. Some variation on the Undetectable Extension Charm was in order, he thought.
The twins, naturally, had less practical suggestions in mind.
“What if you could shrink the entire car and carry it in your pocket?” said George excitedly.
“You’d never need a car park,” Arthur agreed in amusement.
“What if the car used butterbeer instead of petrol?” Fred suggested.
There was a strange idea. Arthur wiped the grease from his hands and closed the bonnet. “Dunno if that would actually be cheaper.”
“What if the car could shoot laser beams from the headlights?” George’s eyes had taken on a maniacal gleam.
“What is a laser beam?” Arthur asked, a little interested but mostly bewildered.
“What if the car could fly?” Fred put in.
“Oh, that would be so cool,” agreed George.
“Now that would- hmm.” Arthur looked over the car. What if the car could fly, in fact? He was already considering enchanting it in a number of other ways, so what was one more spell in the grand scheme of things?
And after all, who would know? If he only ever flew it around in the neighborhood, and otherwise drove it like an ordinary car… Anyway, if he only enchanted it but didn’t actually fly it, there was a convenient loophole in the law that he thought he could get away with…
“I think we’d better make sure it can drive before we worry about it flying,” he said, taking in the looks on his sons’ faces. Probably best not to tell them yet that he was considering attempting their suggestion. “It still needs some work, after all. The fuel filter, for one. The boot is sticking, so I think it needs some sort of oil in the lock. A bit rusty inside, I suspect. And I need to put that seat back into place,” he added, pointing to where the twins were sitting.
They hopped up immediately. “We can help you get it back in,” volunteered Fred.
“Just like Muggles, right Dad?”
Arthur had been planning to levitate it back inside the car just as he’d levitated it out in the first place, but since they were both looking so excited to do it the Muggle way and his children hardly ever had much interest in Muggles the way he did, he went along with it. The bench seat was much heavier than he’d anticipated, but the twins were actually rather good help getting it back into place. Once it was bolted back down in the back seat, Arthur could hear his wife’s voice calling for him.
He surveyed the twins, who looked a little sweaty but otherwise clean. Molly would probably never know they’d been helping him with a project.
“We’d better go in, boys,” he said, aiming his wand at the tarpaulin so it leapt up and slithered over the car, covering it neatly. “And, erm, don’t tell your mother about the car.”
*
That night, long after everyone had been sent to bed, the twins woke up and as was their habit had begun having a chat in quiet voices. This was fairly typical for them, since any time one of them woke, the other generally did as well, and then of course there was a conversation that ought to be had. After all, when you had a built-in best friend in your twin brother, and you had to share a room, there was always something to talk about at any given hour of the day or night.
“Do you think the car will work?” asked Fred sleepily.
“I bet we could get it working if we finished reading that manual,” answered George. He had awakened first this time, and was a little less groggy than his twin.
“D’you think Mum and Dad have gone to bed yet?” Fred sat up and swung his legs out of bed.
“Dunno. Want to go and check?” George slid out of bed without waiting for his brother to answer, and padded silently to the door. He put his ear against it, and a moment later Fred’s face appeared beside him.
There was a brief scuffle while they each tried to listen to the same spot in the crack between the door and its frame, and then they both froze at the sound of footsteps on the stairs.
“Mum,” whispered Fred.
They listened a moment longer and then George agreed in a whisper, “And Dad.”
As their parents passed their room, the twins fell silent, waiting for the murmured voices of their parents to fade as they headed for their bedroom. Their mother was giggling a bit, surely a sign that she was in a good mood and would go straight to sleep.
Their father sounded a bit giggly too, come to that.
There was a sound of a door closing, and the twins let out a slow, simultaneous breath.
“Let’s go have a look at the manual,” suggested Fred.
George opened the door and stuck his head out, making sure the coast was clear. “Yeah, let’s go.”
They were halfway down the stairs when a little voice above them made them both stop in their tracks.
“Where are you two going?”
The boys looked up, peering out over the staircase above them. Their baby sister was leaning over the railing, rubbing sleep from her eyes and glaring down at them.
“You woke me up,” said Ginny.
Fred and George exchanged a look.
George looked back up at Ginny. “No we didn’t. Go back to bed.”
“Where are you going?” she asked again, ignoring his command. “I want to go with you.”
Fred assumed a superior air. “Go back to bed, Ginny, you’re just a baby. This is something for me and Georgie.”
Ginny’s brows snapped together. “I’m not a baby, I’m eight.”
In the twins’ eyes, that was quite clearly a baby, however if she didn’t shut up, their little sister was going to alert their parents, and then all three of them would be in trouble. They exchanged another glance, silent communication passing between them.
“All right, come on then,” Fred told her.
Ginny scurried down the stairs after them. At the back door, all three of them slipped their feet into wellies and pulled on their coats before tromping out into the cold night air. Fred grabbed a torch before closing the door silently behind them, though he didn’t switch it on in case their parents noticed the light.
“Are we running away?” Ginny asked once they were outside.
“Shhh,” said Fred, glancing up at the house. The light for their parents’ bedroom was still off, so she hadn’t tipped them off yet.
“We’re not running away, just shut up and come on,” George told her.
Ginny managed to stay quiet until they reached the shed, where her face crumpled with disappointment.
“Are you just stealing some junk out of Daddy’s shed?” She looked annoyed by the pedestrian nature of this, and George frowned at her.
“No. Go back to bed if you don’t like it.”
“No, I want to see what you’re doing.”
They slipped around to the back of the shed where the Ford Anglia awaited under its tarpaulin, and Fred flicked on the torch. George pulled the tarpaulin back with a sharp tug, and Ginny looked over the car with interest.
“Grab the manual,” Fred told his twin, and George scurried into the shed to look for it. Once he’d returned with the book, they set it on the bonnet and began flipping pages and arguing in overlapping sentences, since they’d got through most of the book earlier that day while their father was disassembling the carburetor for the third time.
“Dad said it needs a new fuel filter-”
“It needs a new battery, too, that one is all rusted over-”
“But what about the intake manifold-”
“Won’t do any good without that battery, will it-”
“And then there’s the radiator hose-”
“And the fuel pump-”
A dull metallic thud sounded and they both looked up.
“Where’s Ginny?” asked Fred.
“Help!” yelled the muffled voice of their sister from the direction of the car boot. “Let me out! It’s stuck!”
“How did you even get in there?” asked George, baffled. “Dad said it was stuck.”
Ginny sounded very annoyed with them now. “I don’t know! It’s dark in here. Go get Mummy!”
“Oh, no,” said George in dread.
“Oh, we can’t do that,” said Fred.
“Mum will kill us,” George agreed.
“But who’s going to let me out?” Ginny shrieked.
Fred circled to the back of the car and tugged hard at the boot. It didn’t budge. George stepped up beside him, adding his strength to the job, but even with the two of them pulling, it wouldn’t open. Fred and George exchanged a look.
“We could wake Dad up,” offered George.
“I reckon if we smashed a window, we could find a way into the boot from inside the car,” said Fred.
“You’re both going to be in so much trouble when I get out of here,” Ginny told them both.
“What’d you even climb in there for, anyway?” George asked, unimpressed by both her threat and her decision to get in the boot.
“Maybe we should wake Dad up,” Fred remarked. “Reckon he wouldn’t like it much if we smashed the window.”
George had moved to the back door to look in, his hands cupped against the glass and face pressed against them. “Not sure we could get in the boot anyway, remember we bolted that seat in pretty good this afternoon.”
He looked over at his twin, and they both pulled a face. They were going to have to fetch someone who could do magic to get Ginny out. More magic than either of them knew how to do, anyway.
“Charlie,” said Fred.
“Charlie,” agreed George.
“Get me out!” yelled Ginny.
Fred dashed off for the house while George stayed to keep Ginny company. Charlie’s room wasn’t far from their parents’ room, and Fred tiptoed past, trying not to make any noise. There were little creaking sounds coming from their parents’ bedroom. Maybe one of them was rolling over in bed.
He made it to Charlie’s room and slipped in. Charlie was sound asleep, but woke up slowly when Fred shook his shoulder as hard as he could.
“What the bloody hell do you want?” Charlie demanded groggily, opening one eye.
“Ginny is stuck in the boot of Dad’s car, and we can’t get it to open,” Fred told him. “Bring your wand.”
His elder brother stared at him for a moment, then groaned, “You’ve got to be joking.”
A few minutes later, they were outside at the car, with Charlie still zipping up his coat over his pajamas, shivering a bit in the cold.
“Did you get Mummy?” Ginny demanded, her voice a little shrill.
“God, can you even imagine?” Charlie grumbled. “No, Gin, it’s just me. Hang on.”
He yanked hard on the boot. Charlie was solidly built, muscular if shorter than either their brothers Bill or Percy, but even with his extra strength applied to the problem, the boot wouldn’t open. Still grumbling under his breath, Charlie fished his wand out of his pocket and heaved a sigh.
“Unbelievable. I was having a really good dream about that Ravenclaw girl. Alohomora. You lot wreck everything.”
The boot sprang open, and Ginny climbed out, pushing her hair back from her face. There were tear tracks down her cheeks.
“Can’t believe you did that to yourself,” Fred told her.
“I can’t believe you couldn’t open the boot,” she snapped back.
“All three of you, get inside,” Charlie ordered them. “I’m going back to bed before Mum catches us. Come on, Ginny.”
She stuck her tongue out at the twins before following Charlie back to the house.
Fred and George looked at each other.
“I have an idea for the radiator hose,” Fred said. “And the battery.”
“I have an idea for the intake manifold,” said George.
“Bring the book.” Fred picked it up off the bonnet, and George tucked it under his coat before they both dashed off after their brother.
*
Arthur was out at the shed the next afternoon, as soon as he could reasonably escape his responsibilities in the house. He’d managed to put Molly in an excellent mood last night, so much so that she had spent the morning smiling and humming to herself happily, even when the twins had got into a small scuffle with Ron during breakfast.
He was still congratulating himself over this (well done, you, he told himself again smugly) as he approached the car and pulled back the tarpaulin. He popped the bonnet and took stock of what needed doing next in order to get it running, and then in surprise realized a few things he’d expected to be on the list appeared to have fixed themselves since last night.
The radiator hose, for one. And was that a new battery?
Arthur frowned, took off his glasses to clean them on his shirttail, put them back on, and looked again.
That was definitely a new battery.
But where had it come from? He poked a bit further inside the engine only to discover that most of his repair list was already repaired. How strange. Cars, as he understood them, couldn’t heal themselves, and he’d been inside with various children most of the day, so unless he’d begun sleepwalking, he couldn’t see how this had been accomplished.
He glanced down the length of the car, feeling a little bemused, and closed the bonnet. The inside of the car looked much the same as it had yesterday, though there was a chocolate frog card in the back seat that he was sure had not been there before. He went round to the back of the car and opened the boot, which immediately popped open without any trouble whatsoever.
There was a bit of chocolate smeared on the carpet in the boot.
“Hmm,” said Arthur, glancing up to the house as he closed the boot back up.
At least one child had been present at the car today while he wasn’t looking. He couldn’t decide if he was pleased they’d saved him the time of repair work, because surely he could get the car in working order in time for a Christmas Eve drive with his wife, or if he was annoyed they’d stolen some of his Muggle Dad Hobby time.
On the bright side, as he understood it, cars broke down regularly and needed additional repairs done. He was bound to achieve Muggle Dad Hobby time rather often. He could always tinker with a few spells, anyway. Fred and George’s flying car idea sprang to mind. And of course, he was one step closer to convincing Molly to let him put her in an excellent mood in the car while parked somewhere romantic and alone and far away from their children.
“Hmm,” Arthur said again, but this time more cheerfully. He climbed in behind the wheel and turned the key, and the engine leapt to life with a small roar. Delighted and a little surprised that it was actually working properly, Arthur inched the car forward a bit, touching the nose of it right to the tree beside the shed, then backed up again and turned off the engine.
When he’d drove the car here after purchasing it, the engine had sputtered and nearly stalled several times. It sounded quite healthy now, though. Someone had saved him a few steps, and he rather thought he knew which child had done it.
Or more correctly, which children.
He went back into the house and located the twins in the parlor, playing Exploding Snap with Charlie and Percy.
“Boys,” he began with mock sternness. “Do you want to tell me anything?”
He’d aimed this at the twins, but to his surprise, it was Charlie who answered.
“It just needed a bit of oil,” he said, glancing up at his father. “The lock was rusty. I didn’t want Ginny getting trapped in there again.”
Before Arthur could respond to that revelation, thirteen year old Percy spoke up. “I promise, everything is installed correctly. It was quite simple rebuilding the fuel pump once I’d read the manual. Once that was done, the intake manifold was fairly straightforward.”
“Percy stole all the good bits,” Fred put in. “George and I had the intake manifold figured out, but he told us to get the battery instead.”
“I let you fix the radiator hoses, didn’t I?” Percy adjusted his glasses and laid a card down. “You’re only eleven, what do you know about fuel pumps?”
George and Fred made rude hand gestures at their brother in unison.
Arthur was amazed nearly into speechlessness. At some point during the morning, he’d seen each of them in the house, doing their chores with every appearance of actual diligence. He didn’t know when they’d managed to sneak out. Eventually he managed, “And who put the chocolate in the boot?”
“Ginny,” chorused all four of them.
“Wouldn’t stay out from underfoot,” muttered Charlie.
“I gave her the chocolate frog so she’d go away,” said Percy, “but it didn’t work.”
“Right.” Arthur looked round at each of them, but this didn’t seem to be the sort of thing he ought to punish anyone for. Certainly they’d been meddling in his project, which was against Molly’s wishes, but on the other hand, they’d helped quite a bit and no one had either been hurt or caught by their mother, so it was a job well done in Arthur’s paternal estimation.
“Well done, boys,” he said cheerfully, and went off to invite his wife out for a Christmas Eve date.