A gift for pastelninja! (Part 2 of 2) November 1997
“Um.”
“Hello.”
Tonks fidgets. “So. How y’doing?”
“Fine.”
“Er. Well. Um. I know you don’t know me, but I know your family pretty well.” She pauses. “I’m Nymphadora Tonks, but, er, everyone just calls me Tonks. Nice to meetcha.” She sticks out a hand.
“Right.” Percy shakes her hand and gets back to his parchment scratching. He hopes she’ll get the hint.
“So… I’m married.”
Percy glances down at her hand. A plain gold band. “Alright. That’s good.”
“You probably know him, it’s –”
“Remus Lupin, right?”
She blushes. “Um, right, you were a student of his… blimey! You’re not much younger than me!” Then she thinks about it for a moment. “Wait, you don’t keep in contact with Remus. How did you know?”
“Wedding.”
“What?”
“I saw you at Bill and Fleur’s wedding.”
“But you weren’t there!”
Percy glances at the clock. She’s slowing him down. “I was. I watched from a distance.”
“When the Death Eaters…”
“Mmm, I had my mask there. Those close to the Minister have Auror training. I went in.” He acts like he went in for biscuits and a spot of tea: not the bloodshed that actually went down that afternoon.
“Oh. Well. Cool.”
Percy physically reins in his temper and then peers up at her. “Is there something you need?”
“Um, right, that. So… your dad, uh, he asked me to give you this.” She hands him a brown bag. He opens the top and finds several sandwiches inside. Percy gives Tonks a quizzical look. “Don’t look at me! I’m just the messenger! He says Molly, er, your mum, thinks you need to be fed.”
Percy scowls. But he takes the bag and shoves it into one of his drawers. “Tell her thanks… but tell him nothing.”
“Arthur?”
“Yes. Him.”
She winces. “Er, not that I want to get into the middle of any family stuff and all that, but eh, didn’t the argument start about Fudge? I mean, Fudge is like, out, right? So why not make up? It’s been a bit of time, isn’t it?”
“It’s not that simple.” Percy feels like slugging her. But he won’t. She means well. That’s the worst part. She honestly means well.
Tonks stares at him, doubtful. “It isn’t?”
“No.”
“Maybe you could, I don’t know, eat dinner with them first? Just to see?”
“I just thought, maybe, you’d, maybe, go into town and, and have, have a drink, or, or dinner? With them?”
Penny’s voice still echoes in his head, sometimes.
“If you don’t have any business with the Minister, then please, leave. I’m quite busy here.” About cauldron bottoms and substandard newt eyes. Same old, same old.
She looks miffed. “Well, I didn’t mean to intrude on you like that. I was just saying, that if, if you want, it wouldn’t be hard to give them an owl. I reckon –”
“Tonks.” Kingsley’s voice echoes a warning note. “Go. You’re bothering the Minister’s assistant.”
“Wha? Kingsley? I didn’t do anything!”
“Go.”
She mutters and throws the Auror a cranky glare. Tonks says, “you eat those sandwiches!” before her hair changes into a snapping red to match her temper. It’s quite pretty.
Percy hasn’t seen Kingsley in weeks, not since the first chaotic month after the quiet takeover of the Ministry. Scrimgeour died a nasty death and while on official reports the events – him being killed by half-crazed Muggle witches and wizards – match his wounds, Percy knows what really happened. He risks digging Kingsley out with the egg-communicator and warns him about the impending Ministry takeover. It had been a close call, a very close one. If he hadn’t been at the wedding party when Kingsley’s Patronus had come in…
The new Minister is Pius Thicknesse and Percy has managed, by the skin of his teeth, to keep his job. Everyone believes the fact that he hates his family. Too many people have seen him in the hallways and the contention between father and son. Percy inwardly snorts. It doesn’t hurt that the proprietors of the popular Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes tells anyone willing to listen that their third older brother is a bloody stupid prat and traitorous arsehole.
He pulls himself from those thoughts and focuses on Kingsley who gives him a distant smile. Kingsley manages to keep his job too, though not quite as easily, if Percy believes the rumours. Everyone knows that the Weasley family is as pure as any purebood family. But Kingsley is an unknown entity. A week was spent on tracking down his family background. It took a great deal of research and a good bit of money to square things away. Percy figures that the two of them need to stay banded, if only for the fact that of the three people who knows about his ‘side job’, Kingsley is the only one still alive and trustworthy.
“Thanks.”
“It’s difficult to keep the overly curious out.” His tone suggests that Tonks is like an eager child, and Percy recognizes a cover. “The day is winding down. Why don’t we have some dinner?”
Percy looks at his papers. And then at Thicknesse’s new door.
“The Minister has already gone home.”
“What! When?”
“He snuck out two hours ago, I believe.”
A muscle in Percy’s cheek twitches. “Dinner, you say?”
“Hm. I know an excellent curry place around the corner.”
“Uh, right. Yes.” Percy scrambles to toss everything into his briefcase. This is the first time for Kingsley to ask him to dinner and Percy finds that he is curious and eager. Besides, all he has at home is a few bits of moldy cheese and a softening apple. Not appetizing in the least bit.
They walk in silence. The streets of London are filled with various witches and wizards on their way to one event or another. It’s evening, so the restaurants are buzzing with activity. Percy spots coworkers tossing drinks back and Fimular Fitch throwing up in an alleyway. His shoulders heave with the effort and the woman next to him pats him on the back. She has a sour expression on her face and edges away from the splashing droplets of green vomit.
“How have you been doing, Percy?”
Percy tears his attention away from Fitch and replies, “Um, good. You?”
“Very well.”
They lapse into silence. And Percy into discomfort. He can’t quite put his finger on it, but Kingsley makes him just a mite antsy. Just a mite.
“Your family still doesn’t know?”
Percy blinks. “Um, no. I don’t really talk to them.” At all.
“Ah. Of course.” Kingsley ushers them around a corner. “There it is.”
The curry place is tucked into a quiet corner of a smaller side street and the menu is handwritten. It smells delicious and the spicy scents that waft from the doorway are enough to make Percy weak in the knees. Though, Percy supposes, the knees might also have something to do with the fact that Kingsley has his hand on Percy’s back and is subtly leading him to the rear of the restaurant. Percy is not fond of being touched, but Kingsley isn’t too bad.
A cheerful woman sits them down with one menu and writes down Kingsley’s order without bothering to ask him. Percy eyes the two of them and considers the fact that he isn’t good at choosing something new, so he says, “same thing for me.”
She smiles and flitters off to find the cook.
Kingsley taps the table in unison to some invisible beat. “You’ll like it. It’s my favorite dish here.”
“That’s good… um, I’m just not very good at –”
“No, I know. That’s why I called in my order already.”
“Oh.” Percy tries to decipher that answer. “So… Kingsley.” He pauses, searching for something, any conversation topic. “How is, um, everything? At work?” Percy’s heard through the grapevine that Harry’s disappeared, Ron and Hermione have gone also gone loco, Hogwarts is under new management (he still can’t believe that Snape manages to worm his way into the Headmaster position with barely a murmur), and worse, no one else seems to see that the Ministry is starting to collapse inward and change. It’s a slow, inexorable change that puts Percy on edge. With the rate things are going, he knows a choice is burrowing its way toward him.
“Three birds were sent away, and work is fine.”
Percy unravels that sentence. Ron. “I, as well. Those birds are starting to drop feathers everywhere.”
“Hm, at least the nests are clean. No worries about them there.”
The conversation continues in that strange vein, but it relieves Percy to know that the family is okay and that as far as Kingsley knows, the trio of rule-breakers are fine too. Strange relief. He guesses that if he wasn’t such an arrogant, conceited prat, this would have been easier to figure out.
For the rest of dinner, they talk about cooking and pastries, a subject both are passionate about. A couple of times, Percy finds himself laughing and he marvels that he can laugh. The last time he’d laughed in front of someone else was when Fred and George sprouted chicken feathers at the dinner table, causing a minor earthquake as Molly ranted about ‘irresponsible behaviour’.
Dinner ends with Kingsley brushing his hand against Percy’s neck and the flush that streaks down his body shocks him. More.
“Shall we do this again?”
Percy licks his lips. The curry is fantastic. “Yes, er, of course. Whenever you’re free.”
The grin in Kingsley’s eye makes Percy’s skin tingle.
________
1998
The egg-communicator vibrates in his pocket and Percy looks around rather furtively before sneaking it out. Kingsley is getting into the habit of sending him random messages in this new regime. Whether a dry observation about an incompetent official or frustration over the so-called Muggle reform, the egg-communicator isn’t so much a device for reporting than a device for, well, communication. Percy presses the button and smiles at Kingsley.
Kingsley’s disembodied head pops out and he hisses, “Hogwarts is soon to be under attack. Your family is going to be there.” The communicator cuts off without any preamble and Percy sits with a frozen smile and a cold fire starts working its way through his body.
Your family is going to be there.
Percy stands up. His co-workers peer at him from their desks but he ignores them. He grabs his wand and knocks on the Minister’s door. When no one answers, he thrusts his head in and his expression darkens. A quill works on the desk with no one to guide it. A looping spell for automatic signatures.
Pius Thicknesse is gone.
Melinda Lokehart cranes her head around Percy’s arm and makes a soft sound of surprise. “Where’s the Minister? He’s supposed to have a meeting in fifteen minutes!”
There’s no answer and Percy considers the options racing through his head.
He could tell her what’s going on.
He could ignore what’s going on.
He could sit here and gibber.
He decides to go with D. Hell is a lot more fun when it happens all at once. He leaps for the quill at his desk and scribbles a note. He sets the parameter to include every single worker in the Ministry and ignores the question that wells up on the parchment about species.
Percy throws the note into the air and it explodes into thousands of tiny cranes. They zoom out the door and several of them fly to his colleagues. They open the note in confusion since Percy is right there, but he needn’t explain himself because all colour drains from their face as they leap up. He stuns two of them immediately and it tells about the dynamics in the office where the others dart their glances in between the still bodies on the floor and Percy. They know why he did what he did.
“I’m going to Hogwarts. The Minister is under Imperio. The rest of you need to secure the Ministry.”
Melinda hesitates for only a moment and then nods furiously. The others are in similar states; say what his family will about the Ministry, but most of the people who work for the Ministry are mostly good witches and wizards who will try to do the ‘right’ thing. And right now, with the power they have as the Minister’s assistants, they’re reconfiguring all the wards and spells. The passwords are changing, the Auror department is being activated, and Percy heads toward Hogsmeade. He knows of an entrance there that will get him into Hogwarts undetected.
He hopes.
________
Cruciatus is a curious curse.
It inflicts terrible and unbearable pain that scorches the nerves, wreaks the body with bolts of fire, tears muscle from fat after fifteen long seconds. It’s a curse that renders the receiver incapable of coherent thought. Once you’re under Cruciatus, it’s rare – if not impossible – for you to think of anything else. All that’s in your head is the idea that there couldn’t – shouldn’t – be something quite this painful, that the stars are multiplying tenfold in front of your eyes.
But Cruciatus is curious in the fact that it leaves no physical wounds. The pain is entirely in the person’s mind; you’re driven by the fact that unless the caster of the spell chooses to stop or is forced to stop, you will not be given a reprieve. The pain will be endless; it’ll go on until you’re quite mad with the hopelessness and the fact that you can’t even defend yourself against this so-called phantom pain.
And in the same way, Percy knows that he might have preferred this curious, curious Unforgivable to the fact that he holds Fred dead in his arms and his mother looks at him as if he’s a boogey monster with claws for hands and children on his breath. She breaks down in steps; the quick eye from her third son’s face to her fourth (fifth?) son’s body. Her nostrils flare. Her mouth opens, her hand reaches out. A tremble starts at her fingertips and it works up her arm, to her chest, to her neck, and then it hits her spine, a one-two-three punch that wipes her knees out.
Unintelligible sounds wrangle out of her throat and then Molly Weasley screams because as hard she tried, she had not protected all of her children.
Percy lives as if he is in a dream. The colors fade in front of his eyes and George is absolutely gray as he looks upon his twin and throws up. He tries to touch George on the shoulder, the boy – man – tosses him away, his eyes are wild with terror – terror for his lost twin – and he scrabbles for a base, for something to hold onto. Percy is the only one who can, Arthur and Bill are trying to talk hold of Molly and keep themselves from falling too, Charlie is passed out on the floor and Ginny, no, no, Percy cannot let Ginny be the one to do this. He hauls George up and holds onto his little brother’s flailing arms and legs. Tight. Fred is on the floor, still and he will never move again.
Later, Percy tells himself that George is half-mad with grief. Later, Percy closes his eyes and blocks out the sound of a mantra. Later, Percy pretends he never hears the words that George repeats over and over and over again.
“You did this, you did this, you did this, you did this, you did this…”
Percy remembers the way Fred thought of his poor attempt at a joke and the fact that if he had been a better big brother, none of this would have happened.
He looks around him. His family is in the midst of tragedy, but it’s not the only death. He can see Remus Lupin’s body on the floor, he sees Tonks next to him – ”you eat those sandwiches!” – and there are more, too many. Death Eaters and Aurors alike, students. Percy swallows. There are students, most of them older, some are young, and they all are dead.
A breath hitches in his lungs when he sees Oliver Wood. He hasn’t seen Oliver Wood in years, except for random articles in the paper about his growing prowess as a Quidditch player. The man is as stocky and muscled as he ever was, but he’s gotten taller. Brown hair curls around the collar of his shirt and he cradles someone in his arms. Percy recognizes Colin Creevey.
Oliver doesn’t even notice him. He’s concentrating on Colin and Percy suddenly wishes that Kingsley is here with him. He knows, as the most likely interim Minister, Kingsley is around and handing out orders. Hogwarts is secure, but Voldemort is still out there and alive. They need someone who is capable and in charge and Kingsley fits the bill to a T. It also doesn’t hurt that he’s the head of the Auror Department.
“Percy!”
He spins around; Kingsley is running toward him. Without any realization of what he’s doing, Percy picks up his feet and when the two meet halfway, Kingsley shoves a roll of parchment into his hands. “I know this is not the best time, but I need you to do everything on this list for me.” Dark eyes skirt past him and zero in on the grieving Weasley family. But Kingsley barely hesitates. “You know what I’m asking.”
Work is what brings Percy to the Ministry and ambition is what sliced his ties to his family apart. If he leaves now, if he goes with Kingsley now, if he does what needs to be done now, he’s pretty sure his family will never forgive him.
But the sight of all the bodies, of Oliver Wood carrying Colin Creevey, of Harry running past Neville and towards an end Percy can only guess at, he knows that there is nothing less.
“I’ll go.”
He turns to leave, to walk away from his family and the sorrow that threatens to overwhelm him when Kingsley grabs his arm and yanks him close. Lips brush Percy’s ear and Kingsley says, “I’ll find you. Later.”
Kingsley strides off, already shouting to a group of Aurors and notes are whizzing through the air. Molly looks up and locks eyes with Percy, sees the parchment in his hands and opens her mouth. But then, curiously, she seems to consider something. The pain in her eyes is fresh and she is clutching Bill and Arthur like her life depends on it. She looks around at the destruction and mayhem, death in every corner of Hogwarts, death in the arms of healers and even the house elves that litter the ground. And she nods. She nods at her third son and mouths, go.
Percy goes. He’s working.
________
Winter.
In the Wizarding world, you don’t bring flowers to a grave, because flowers wilt and die out and for all the magical theory and almost-quaint disdain of Muggle superstitions, wizards and witches are a very superstitious lot. You don’t bring flowers, not unless you want to say that the family is doomed to be a bouquet where one dies off after the other, singular and together. You don’t bring flowers unless you’re in the mood for a scathing sniff and erudite eye-roll about your irreverent faux pas. Muggle, the explanation can only be, and anyone else is either an idiot or a moron. Both, if possible.
Percy brings flowers because he knows Fred would crow about the funniness of being dead and the ironic juxtaposition of Percy and flowers. It’s a small consolation, to know that of all his brothers, a dead one would understand his actions more than anyone else.
Fred’s gravestone is fresh, the only new one among others that are crumbling and old. It’s simple, but he knows that George has already given it several good curses so that people will be pranked when they touch it. Molly yells at him for it, but Percy finds it oddly appropriate. He thinks Fred would agree.
The air is clear and crisp, a marked improvement from the months previous where all he breathed was air made noxious with anxiety and fear. Now, the Ministry has strict rules about scents and a riot of scents, from buttery caramel to fragrant edelweiss, dots all the rooms. It’s become a battle of sorts to see who would get to choose the scent of the week. Productivity is up by almost thirty percent.
Percy is supposed to be in the thick of things. Kingsley has promoted him to his assistant and a high official too.
But he’s here, alone, because he is a Weasley again, but only not.
The rift is sharp and the chasm deep; Arthur seems to hate the fact that yes, a small part of him does blame Percy for Fred’s death. For a more beloved son’s death. The self-hatred translates into mutual distance and Percy knows this will be one thing that will never heal in their family. This is something larger than family civil war, than betrayal. This is one death versus another possible one. And the fact that Percy lives and Fred does not will always stand as a specter in front of them. He also knows that while Molly understands why Percy went to work though Fred was still cooling on the ground, Arthur does not.
Percy thinks Charlie does too. And maybe George, as hard as it is to believe. The final circumstances of Fred’s death are told to him by Harry and George is almost crazy in his happiness that Fred died while snickering over the fact that Percy made a joke. A real one.
But three do not make a family, and he understands that, something he might not have months ago.
Snow crunches behind him and he looks up to see Kingsley walking toward him. The man is holding another bouquet of flowers.
“You’ve found me.”
“I said I would. Been busy.”
“I know. I work for you.”
Kingsley laughs, a first time for Percy. “Mm, you’re doing a fine job. You’re one of only people to have worked directly under three Ministers, one after the other. I’ve heard you’ve become a bit of a legend in the breakroom. Percy, stickier than a sticking charm.”
Percy flicks a ball of snow at him. “Not as much as you. The first competent Minister in a century. Difficult to believe, really.”
“Oh, I have my moments. I think it’s time I signed that bill about making lemon drops the national food of the Ministry, eh?”
“Honeydukes would love that.”
“That they would.”
A lock of red hair tumbles down Percy’s neck and Kingsley snakes a hand out to tug on it. Percy bends his head a bit. “I see you don’t subscribe to the same superstition about flowers.”
Kingsley crooks a corner of his mouth and places the flowers on Fred’s headstone. “Didn’t you know my grandmama was a Muggle?”
“I gathered. How did you hide that?”
“Didn’t. But you know, Death Eaters aren’t very good administrators. Once the paperwork is gone… it’s gone.”
It’s not difficult to laugh at the glint in Kingsley’s eyes. His chest eases a little; his eyes don’t sting quite as much. Being able to laugh in front of Fred’s grave seems to be a step forward. Percy looks at the small offerings; tricks, little mementos, a lock of Ginny’s hair. He knows his offering will eventually fade away. It’s deliberate. People think he knows nothing about his family, but does know this. Fred would hate being sealed away in this one place, forever doomed to be the focus of other people’s tributes. Percy has no intention of binding him to their world. He hopes Fred will fly.
“I’m having dinner at the Burrow.” It’s no longer home.
“Oh, really.” Kingsley’s voice grows cool.
“Do you want to come?”
Kingsley is silent. Percy doesn’t look at him. He wonders whether Kingsley realizes what Percy is actually asking. Percy cannot say the word promise and love, so actions must speak as loud as words. It is all he has. All he has to give and he knows very well that it may not be enough. The years spiral around him and he realizes that even though the road is hard and he is now alone… he doesn’t think he could change many of his actions.
Kingsley’s knuckles brush against his cheek and stay there. Percy stills.
“You know… I do not like touching others.”
Long habit prevents Percy from grinning. He cannot say the word love and it seems, oddly enough, that Kingsley is the same. Actions must speak louder than words for both of them and he raises his hand to touch Kingsley’s chin.