Entry tags:

character: percy, genre: angst, genre: gen, rating: g

Chroma (Percy, G)
Title: Chroma
Characters: Percy Weasley
Rating: G
Word Count: 623
Warnings: None.
Disclaimer: Not mine. JKR's.
Summary: It's the brightness Percy can't stand.
Notes: Written for westwardlee for the 3fanholidays 2007 exchange.

There is a flash of red.

Percy blinks and looks again at the crowd. There's nothing there that's not black or white, nothing bright, nothing standing out in the late November drizzle. Just anonymous Londoners with dark hair or light, each dressed like the next in black, from fashionable hats down to fashionable shoes.

Percy squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them and looks down at his own shoes. He is standing in a puddle.

***

At home there are patches of brightness and for a moment Percy can't stand them. The kilim pillow on the sofa is too red, too blue. The mug he left on the draining board is too yellow. The teakettle is too silver, reflecting Percy standing there in his wet shoes.

He pulls his robes over his head and for a moment everything is black. He pauses with the robes halfway off, but his eyes adjust and light filters through.

Percy makes his way to the bedroom, where he knows everything is one colour.

***

Brightness creeps in, and Percy turns his face away. It starts small. An evergreen on a street corner, tinsel in the window of a shop. And soon the Londoners begin pinning sparkling brooches to their black overcoats and wearing jaunty red caps. And Percy can't stand it.

He winds his way from his flat (the least expensive one he could find that was still liveable, and therefore far from any destination he might ever have) to the Ministry and is swept up in the crowd again, but this crowd is noisier, brighter. They talk to each other, unlike the anonymous Londoners near Percy's flat. Percy presses his lips together until they form a thin white line and walks the length of the beige hallway to his office.

He lets out a breath he hasn't realised he's been holding as he settles into his chair. Everything around him is a tasteful dark blue. Even the charmed windows show sedate weather.

Here, he can relax.

***

December is like any other month, really. Percy has a job to do, and he does it. Some days are better than others. Some days no one brings in fluorescent green and red biscuits, some days he doesn't hear snatches of carols as he makes his way from office to meeting to office again.

It builds. And then comes the jumper.

***

It is a riot of colour—shamrock green with an enormous violet initial on the front. The brightness would be quite bad enough if the jumper didn't attack his other senses, too. It smells of the Burrow, of biscuits and Sunday roasts and his mum's powder. The feel of the yarn under Percy's fingers is familiar, too—it's the same yarn his mum uses for every jumper she's ever made.

Percy closes his eyes and puts the lid back on the box. He rewraps the package and sends it off by owl.

Behind his eyelids there is a series of small explosions, red and yellow and brightest white.

***

A few days after Christmas, London begins to change back to its black and white self. The bright brooches and silly hats disappear, holiday-themed sweets stop making their way into the Ministry on holly-printed paper plates, and there are no more carols in the air.

Percy thinks he can live like this. He stands on the street corner across from his flat and ignores the flash of red he glimpses out of the corner of his eye.

He steps carefully around a puddle and tells himself it was only a forgotten ornament stuck in a shop window. He buttons his black cloak up around his white throat and hurries home.

***