InsaneJournal

A gift for redcandle17!
Author: ???
Giftee: redcandle17
Title: Dart
Pairing/Characters: Percy Weasley, Marcus Flint, Kingsley Shacklebolt, Penelope Clearwater, Marcellus Bole
Rating: R
Word Count: 5,831
Warnings: dark!fic, references to non-con/dub-con, torture, blood, DH compliant
Disclaimer: all of the characters here-in belong to J.K. Rowling, Warner Brothers, et al. I use them without the intent of profit and merely for creative expression
Summary: On his sixty-fifth consecutive business day before the Wizengamot, Percy testified against Marcus Flint, alleged Extractor. This was his day. Percy/Marcus non-con and torture, Percy/Kingsley comfort, mentions of Marcus/Bole, random conversation provided by Penelope Clearwater.
Notes: I hope that I managed to do your kinks/genres/special-requests proud and that you enjoy the fic. I love jagienka and bad_influence forever for help with my grammar and britglish betaing. Cheers.


Percy lay awake in the darkness of his living room, his thin and lanky form almost stock straight on the ill-fitting couch. He didn’t blink for nearly five minutes, the cooling September air drying his eyes out until they felt like they were made of abrasive powder. One bony wrist attached to a wiry limb rose up to rub at his dry mouth, a knee following sky-wards as if it were attached by some thread to his palm. The simple motion seemed to unravel him slightly, softening the rigor mortis he held himself in. His remaining leg slid off the couch and suddenly he was lounging, reclining, in repose.

The alarm in his bedroom echoed down the corridor, a sweeping cascade of wooden chimes. It didn’t cease.

The tightness came back after its minute-long reprieve.

****

It was his sixty-fifth consecutive business day before the Wizengamot court. The routine should have been stale by now, the honesty in his oath worn by the treads of verbal repetition, but Percy’s mind and tongue remained sharp as ever as he took the stand in his bottle-green robes.

Dolores Umbridge’s trial was the first one scheduled in the procession that would later come to be known as the Phoenix Tribunal. Percy Weasley, scribe to so many deficient politicians, was the first witness called for the prosecution. Memories still so freshly imprinted, he stood before the full panel for nearly two weeks delivering a monumental account of atrocities delivered by her order, her signature, her wand. He could see her eyes widen, her mouth, held in a mould of grinning hope, melt into despair to hear details she had imagined concealed, deeds she had buried connection to in the frantic hours before The Order reseized the Ministry. Percy violently tore through her leaden soul and spilt the contents out with cold efficiency, the same tone and measure she had once commended him upon leaving the defence without recourse.

It took every fibre of his being not to obliterate Augustus Rookwood as he passed his caged body on his way to the witness stand, fingers gnarled around the metal as if they might steel something inside of him.

Pius Thicknesse pleaded loudly, tearfully, extensively as Percy delivered the case against him until Shacklebolt had the cage he railed inside of silenced. Still his body strained with the effort of proclaiming his innocence, his unfortunate position, his time under bewitchment, face twisting in horror as each question answered described a memory he did not have. He was later acquitted, but not by any testimony Percy gave.

He had spilled every detail he could, every memo he stole in transit, every conversation overheard.

Except this.

****

The shower knob had been turned completely to the left and pulled forward, making the elderly, lime-crusted shower head spew scalding hot water from its needle-like punctures. Percy stepped inside, bleary-eyed only for a lack of spectacles, and immediately jumped back against the vivid red tile of the shower. It shocked his system and made him suck in a breath of steam, sightless eyes skittering for purchase.

It took a few moments, but finally Percy darted under the spray, the spitting jets pounding at the top of his shoulders, the front of his chest, the sharp hollows of his throat. It was scalding, but the unbearablity melted quickly into release, the sharp pricks of heat opening him up, loosening what another uncomfortable night attempting to sleep had wound him into. He bowed his head as it poured in thick rivulets from the base of his scalp to the tail of his spine and he could forget everything in the heat of this moment.

****

Seeing him again wasn’t vindicating like he thought it would be. Percy thought that sitting on the dais, looking down upon Marcus Flint’s gaunt body weathered by Azkaban, would feel akin to victory, to the feeling of striking down Augustus Rookwood after he’d killed his brother, to the feeling of scoring high on Professor Snape’s exams despite being a Gryffindor Weasley, to some feeling of earned superiority.

It wasn’t there. Flint’s eyes were as dark and sharp as their namesake; they hacked out with ease his resolve and composure in a way no one had done in the last 66 days. In that span of seconds, when the rising cage from the depths of the Holding Cells clanked and rocked to a halt, Percy could feel every organ inside his body drop to his knees.

****

He was out of the shower and dressed now, at least somewhat. His tie hung limply around his neck, mingling with the fluttering edges of his dress shirt as he filled the kettle with water at the kitchen sink. It was a practised measure of movement- hand shuts off the water, top goes on, kettle goes to the fire, cup is retrieved, followed by the tin of English Breakfast. It left his mind so much room to wander, drifting off in the banality he hardly knew he started before he was in the memory.

****

Consciousness hit him so fast, he barely had enough time to process the situation. It hit him like a flood: his glasses gone, his body stripped of clothing, his body, carelessly spread, immovable under his own power, a single candle illuminating the blurry darkness somewhere to the left of his vision.

“I’d wondered how long it would take before I got ahold of you, Weasley.”

There was a glint of something in the darkness, then suddenly a face so close to his, myopia meant nothing.

****

“Mr. Weasley, it is hardly requisite by now to remind you that you are under oath, and that you are bound by law and magic to speak only the truth to which you have experienced with your own senses.” Percy didn’t look up to Minister Shacklebolt, simply bowed his head, breaking eye contact with the cutting glare coming from the centre of the hall. It wasn’t a simple moment’s pause to regain what had been so easily stripped from behind his eyes.

“The court will go into recess—“

“I understand. We can proceed.” It didn’t even sound like himself in his head, mouth working of its own accord as his hands clench harder into the fists he didn’t remember making, the edges of his fingernails biting into the well-moisturised palm of his hand. They tightened harder and it made it so much easier to remember.

****

“We’re going to go straight to the breakin’,” came Flint’s thick Welsh accent, saliva flecked for the maze of teeth the words had to come through. Then there was a feeling of pain, slick and wet and throbbing as something foreign found a home in his ribcage. It came and stayed and then twisted, the scream cut off as air deflated wetly from his left lung in murmured sucks.

The object slid out of him; the only reason he knew this action occurred was the strange sensation of the flesh knitting back together, pain subsiding as the unidentified weapon was removed in a slow motion. The pain was gone and was replaced by fear, confusion, panic.

“You can’t-“ he began to protest, voice rough from the sudden lung puncture and high from worry, but it was cut off again as the object found a new home, this time straight through the junction of radius and ulna. Then it slowly began to slide up towards his elbow, sinew and muscle rippling away from the point of penetration only to close in its wake. Everything was wiped from his mind again as he screamed, unable to mount any sort of defence.

The progress of the weapon stopped and Percy could feel him press harder, then release, standing the object up just shy of the joint of his elbow. His screams became punctuated with gasping breaths as the constant pain became pulses, giving him space for air.

“I can. Got permission and everything, just the way you types like.” Suddenly there was a piece of parchment with letters even the proximity couldn’t bring into focus. “These are suspicious times, eh Weasley? Never know when someone who’s turned his back on his family is going to turn round again.”

His heart, unfettered by the spell, dropped like an anvil into his stomach, the motion boomeranging until he thought it might spill out of his mouth. His first thoughts were to his mother out of habit, but the more pressing ones soon followed, his father at work, his brothers in hiding, his sister at school and Ron… god, what did he know? He didn’t know anything about them, he’d never—

But then there was no more time to worry, or wonder, or even breathe. Flint was at work on him again, this time with a second tool that was starting to peel back his flesh. The pain made everything go away.

****

“I lost consciousness after that. When I awoke I was back in my office as I had been before,” Percy concluded, eyes focused forward on Flint’s, skirting the swallowing dark at the centre of them for fear of being swallowed as he was upon Flint’s entrance.

“Do you remember what the initial inquiry was pertaining to, Mr. Weasley?”

Percy stalled, eyes darting a little in response to Flint’s attempt to catch his eyes, whole and encompassing. “There was no initial inquiry. Just the torture.” His voice was clipped and terse, too distracted with evading Flint’s direct glare to strengthen his words with a measure of control.

“When did this change, Mr. Weasley? Would you please speak toward this point.”

****

It was the knock on the door rather that took him out of his reverie rather than the burning of flesh to kettle. He looked down at his right hand, fingertips a deep crimson from where they touched the metal top, his left hand clutching the box of tea expectantly. He removed them from the metal and gave them a curious look.

The knock came again and this one nearly put Percy out of his skin, his hand reflexively jamming into his pocket, covering up the imperfection. He set the tea down and went to the door, checking the peephole before pulling open the hulking mass of oak to reveal a Penelope already in mid-knock. The suddenness of his appearance chastised the annoyance on her face, the frown falling into something more slack-jawed, more concerned.

“I just had the kettle on,” Percy said after a moment, the tone as solid and impassioned as his door.

Penelope gave him her usual appraising stare and if she wasn’t so good at not saying anything all, he might be worried that she would press on about his appearance, the faint circles under his eyes the Pepper-Up Potion hadn’t completely rid him of, the way he moved as if his joints were tight with rust.

But this was Penelope and she simply gave him the same worried but disapproving look she gave him every morning before using his fireplace to get to work. She held out a white bag with the tell-tale grease stains and sticky marks of a bakery. “Eat at least one, please.”

He took the bag with burnt fingers without a thought. The paper was too rough against the shocked skin and he had to tighten his grip to keep from dropping the bag and dropping the façade of a consciousness collected.

Penny sat next to him on the couch that he’d attempted sleep on the recently concluded night. She held her mug of tea and tore at the croissant in her hand with her teeth, her eyes examining the blistering skin on Percy’s fingertips closest to her. “What did you do there?”

Percy gave her a curious look then followed her eyes down. “Oh,” he said, tone hollow. “Burned them on the kettle before you came in. I’m sure I’ve got something in the cabinet I can put on it. Later.” He raised his eyes along with his teacup, giving himself something to focus on rather than Penny’s disapproving worry.

Instead of acting on her worry, she launched into a description of her day ahead of her working with the International Confederation of Wizards, mindless appointment quoting and biography-perfect background information on faceless politicians from Greece and Macedonia and Turkey. He ripped off a piece of his own croissant sitting on a plate in his lap and hoped that if he drank his tea fast enough afterwards, it’d be mushy enough not to give his nervous stomach any trouble when it made its way down there.

Mind tiredly filing away the names and places and objects Penny recounted, it occurred to him that some day he might be facing his ex-girlfriend in his bid to become Minister. He’d have the upper hand there- she had hidden during the war. He hadn’t.

He licked the gossamer crumbs from his fingertips and found out that saliva stings something awful.

****

It had been decided (by who, no one would say) after the first session that things would be more effective if Percy could see what was being done to him. This accounted for the reason Percy could clearly see Flint unfurling a roll of parchment as he fought to catch his breath despite the intense pain of the action itself. Whatever the spell was, it was now Flint’s favourite; every breath shot sharp pain straight to his heart regardless of how heavy or shallow he breathed.

“Think you’re good and ready for some questions now, eh? Yeah,” he nodded in agreement, then climbed onto Percy, sitting heavily on his pinned hipbones. In his other hand was a chef knife.

“Let’s cut to the chase, Weasley. I’m going to free up your tongue and you’re going to give me answers. The words out of your mouth aren’t answers to my questions? You get to experience the joy of vivisection.”

Blue eyes burned in return. That was apparently the answer Flint wanted; he smirked as he undid a small part of the petrifying spell.

“What is your father’s purpose within the Order?” he read off the parchment.

Blue eyes burned quietly in return.

Flint looked almost pleased. “Yeah?” he asked expectantly. Seconds later, he buried the full length of the blade into Percy’s stomach.

Fortunately, any answer that might have been stolen from his mind was gone in the refreshed wave. Percy didn’t have to look down to see blood spilling over the plain of his abdomen to spill and pool under his back. It was almost a relief to hear the question and Percy swallowed hard, biting back the irony of this situation: his father was right, he was still in government (alive, really) to be a spy unto his family and of all the things the dangerous things he knew, ‘his father’ was the subject he knew least about.

It made him want to laugh. His eyes closed and, if he could move, he would have tossed his head back and done it.

His eyes snapped open with the sudden grasp that Flint has taken on his cock, and for a short moment, he forgot where he was, what he was here. Flint shook his head at Percy’s suddenly wide-eyed, tenuous look and tutted right into his ear.

“Bad move.”

****

“The questions centred for the most part around my siblings, my parents. On occasion, there was an inquiry regarding the Order of the Phoenix as a whole. My actions within the Ministry, however, were never questioned.”

****

“Did you burn your hand?”

Percy looked up from his knees at Kingsley Shacklebolt, his large frame bearing enough girth to block out the magically generated sun. His breath rattled in his chest as he took in deeply and replied.

“This morning on the kettle. I was preoccupied with the day’s events. Thank you for making sure my father was well out of this,” he added as an afterthought to the first two statements, burying his burned fingers in the pockets of his trousers, leaning back on the bench to give his hands space. The soft cotton felt like sand paper.

He dropped his eyes again to his knees, focusing on a few leaves blowing past the magically-created grass instead of the weight falling gently next to him onto the bench. Japanese Maple, the hue of dried blood. Perfect.

Percy refocused his attention on Kingsley, head turning in an earnest fashion. Kingsley was looking back at him, watchful, cautious, waiting. There was no satisfaction to be had in any of his words so Percy stayed quiet, just as watchful, almost daring his boss, Minister #4, to speak his mind. There wasn’t a lever long enough to pry pity out of Shacklebolt’s eyes, but it didn’t stop him from searching for it anyways.

In the end, Kingsley spoke first. “What are you looking for?” It was another moment before dark eyebrows furrowed and suggested, “A way out?”

The words worked on his reflexes before they could reach his brain, contracting his thighs and lifting him into a standing position, hands still in his pockets. “There is only one door and it leads into your office,” Percy bristled, tone sharp and cold.

Kingsley reclined in a lazy fashion Percy could never hope to imitate and offered a hand up in peaceful gesture. Percy slowly folded himself in half, crisp as if he’d been starched, and retook his seat. The things he was expecting to hear were not coming from the man whose office and person he respected weren’t coming and it worked his already taut nerves. He longed to shake him, make him scream at him, anything to break the tranquillity that his active mind saw as a blank canvas. There was too much on his conscience, too much memory stretching out into the infinite silence. It rang with the silent hum of fluorescence.

“Whatever is going on in that spring-loaded mind of yours, Percy?” came Kingsley’s voice, but instead of crashing chaotically into the sine wave of silence, it merely added to it, made it more pronounced. The hum was no longer a hum, but a rumble perceptible in his bones, in the softer masses. He’d heard once the right frequency could explode the skull.

“Let’s just get this over with,” Percy said suddenly, not waiting for Kingsley to rise with him, not waiting for the pieces of his mind to explode from under his death-grip. If there was pain awaiting him, it was better than this.

****

The stones weren’t just cold. The heat of his body, the sweat beading at the base of his matted down curls, and the condensation of his pained exhalations made the granite slick enough that purchase couldn’t be had, no matter how hard his fingers bit into the rock.

Contrasted with the heavy heat of Flint’s hands gripping the back of his neck and shoulder to press him firmly and immovably against the wall, it made Percy’s skin clammy, feverish.

He thought none of these things as Flint used the force of his thrust to crush Percy’s rebellious hips into the uneven pavers. The surprising softness of the worn jeans still hovering at Flint’s thighs were half-way to rubbing the skin raw just under the curve of his arse, the sweat turning the barest friction into a rasp against the freckled white.

Jagged teeth made a puzzle piece out of his shoulder. Every edge of rock found a home in his bare flesh.

“Oh come along- Weasley. Stay with me now,” Flint’s spittle-flecked words crashed raucously against the inside of his jaw as the hand that was once threatening to crack his shoulder blade in half squeezed Percy’s cock, fingers sliding down forcefully to grip the base and yank a sound out of throat.

And then he did it to get more than just a sound from his throat.

****

“Did you ever present yourself to St. Mungo’s after these interrogation sessions?”

Percy shook his head, eyes somewhere between his knees and the edge of the booth he sat in. “No,” he replied, his voice having lost its body and now was relying upon its shadow to get by. He pressed down on the back of one knuckle with his thumb, trying to hear the satisfying crack of pressure release. “To what end?” Percy added, unbidden.

To no end, he answered himself.

****

It wasn’t until Kingsley led Percy before a mirror that he realized how effected he was. Tired flesh draped over the bones of his face, so ashen veins spiderwebbed visibly and tricked his eyes into seeing plum coloured freckles dotting his cheekbones. His hand shook a delicate rhythm as it went to smooth out the skin over his trembling jaw.

“I’ll have a portkey made—“

“No.” The air skittered over his vocal cords, making the protest pitch in odd places. “I’ll Floo, it’s – fine. I’ll just go downsta--”

The shaking found its way to his tongue, its job no longer aiding speech but holding it back, his quivering fingertips doing their duty to aid and assist by pressing his lips closed. What could there be to say? These were tatters impossible to tuck in and Kingsley gripped his shoulders as if he was doing his part to hold down what little he could in the face of wind storm.

Oh god.

His hand gripped his mouth tighter and tighter as he stared down his reflection with unwavering eyes, silently hoping for the image to grip tighter, to reign in hard enough to just get out of here on his own power, to just get through long enough to take a sleeping draught, just long enough to make it through this night, the trial, the cross examine, the rest of his life.

A weight left his shoulder and he could see a dark hand disappear from the sharp green fabric it was clutching to disappear behind his mirrored form. Without the added pressure, his shoulder shook as his mind went immediately to where that hand had gone, that the back of that mirrored form was his back and –

His face was gone. In its place, a sofa.

His sofa.

Percy gasped as the air rushed back into his lungs after the abrupt Apparition, coughing it out as he choked on it. A hand pressed against his chest, arm wrapped from behind to keep him from pitching forward into the sitting room table as he struggled and failed to get any air to settle comfortably in him.

“Slow down, just slow down,” Kingsley’s voice followed him down as Percy got knelt onto the carpet. He set one fisted hand on the carpet as Kingsley let go, keeping the large mass of his torso carefully away from Percy.

He came to a full stop, body folding in half over his knees, the wayward curls of his hair skirting the carpet, hand still gripped over his mouth. Carbon dioxide began to burn patches of his lungs, spreading out to clutch his chest in one red-hot grip; he imagined it spreading out further, igniting his brain and raging through the forest there like some purifying flame. Nothing could stand up to it, not any thought, not any memory, nothing of himself- nothing would exist except the fire and he could deal with that pain. Embrace it.

Oxygen flooded back into his lungs despite himself. As the fire dwindled and his thoughts returned, he noticed there was a small circle of pressure to his back; he easily put together its origins.

“I didn’t mean stop.”

A rueful chuckle hacked to pieces by a violent set of coughs came from him and he tried to relax into sensation of being soothed. The wand-tip became a hand stroking along the back of his shoulders, bumping against the projections of his spine.

He still shook in place, still gripped his mouth until his fingers were white in ever spot except in the places he’d burned himself, but he felt dulled. The fire he’d spread left his limbs leadened and any tears that might have been shed evaporated, leaving behind thin veneers of salt to spiderweb along his purple veins.

Percy’s joints moved like rusty hinges, creaking as his elbows were flexed and straightened, knees done the same as Kingsley handled his taller but frailer frame onto the couch. He made for an awkward marionette, but it didn’t hinder the older man from weaving limbs out of shirt sleeves and trouser legs. Where his body was still in wooden recovery, his mind sharply followed the placement of fingers, the shift of weight on the elderly sofa; fear shook him as he predicted the next logical locations of Kingsley’s delicate touch, shook him hard. But every time, the fear was dissatisfied: stitches magically melted away, sweat-drenched fabric pulled off his bones with the sticky retention of burnt skin. Still, his mind and body were united in his hesitation, unable to shake off the implications of being undressed by someone. The memories bubbled too close to the surface.

****

The alkaline cum burned where he bled rather than stung. The fingers splayed on his hips and chest felt rough as ropes but it kept him standing, kept his ravished body from over-extension and collapse. It’s not a hug he sharply pulled into, but it’s warm and close like one, the pressure on his bones unnoticeable under the breathing-as-knives spell, which is unnoticeable under the lingering press of being fucked and jacked off.

“Oh, we like our fun, don’t we?” Flint scolded into his ear. Suddenly, he was being dragged backwards and the warmth of Flint’s front on his back was briefly replaced by a cold rush of air following an impact on the familiar table. His face came into view as his glasses were gingerly shoved back onto his face.

There wasn’t much studying to be had of Flint’s face; Percy couldn’t think anymore than he could comfortably move. He was all raw nerve endings and abused flesh, his head a perfect acoustic chamber with no more comprehension than the walls of a theatre.

“Are you in there?”

Something must have sparked in Percy’s flat blue eyes because that Cheshire grin of jagged teeth flashed at some response.

“Yeah, you are. High time you and I had a good chat.”

There was a loud, high scraping sound of metal against stone as a chair was pulled into view. Flint sat on it the wrong way round, chin pressed against the padded steel back rest, his cheeks flushed and dark eyes keen.

“I know what you’ve been up to Weasley.” Flint tapped the side of his skull with a crimson-streaked finger. “I caught you, right in the act. I have to say, I’m impressed.” Leaning away from the back rest, he started clapping in broad gesture. “Bravo.”

Wariness started to hover somewhere inside of his psyche as the streaks of post-coital pleasure and pre-coital torture were starting to dissipate, leaving the ends of him tingling.

Flint leaned in with a triumphant snarl, getting so close so fast to Percy’s face he instinctively leaned back. Flint grabbed the back of his head and held it a millimeter away from his own.

“How many of those filthy creatures have you been hiding, Weasley? How long have you been intercepting those targeting reports?”

Percy’s nebulous consciousness coalesced quickly around the gravity of that statement. His pupils widened and mouth went dry.

“Your name names you an informant, but who would expect you to be a man of action? The snivelling servant. The paper-pushing Gryffindor relic. The Minister’s Bitch. You had to be an informant, there was no way in the world you’d be worth anything more.”

Flint set what was easily recognizable as Percy’s inkwell, with its swirled silver embellishments, onto the table after waggling it before Percy’s eyes.

“Black pigment in Polyjuice. You should have been in Slytherin.”

Then a small plastic bag with a few scant hairs inside was waived before his face. Flint set that onto the table next to the inkwell and stood up off of the chair, pushing it to the ground and giving it a kick some distance away. He looked down the line of his nose at Percy, dark eyes hard and impenetrable.

“How long have I been fucking you instead of Bole, hmm?”

****

Kingsley’s hand twitched to the rhythm of bone hitting tile, but he didn’t open the bathroom door. It was hard not to.

****

Death was freedom, Percy thought. He tried to be fearful of Flint and the boiling temperature of his glare, but he couldn’t. He knew and very shortly, so would Voldemort. It would be over.

All he felt was relief. Relief in waves that drowned out the guilt of being found out, the curiosity of whether they would ever be able to sort through the false data that peppered the Death Squad’s lists, the utter fright of how unending and torturous his death might be.

It was almost over.

His voice rang out surprisingly clear despite the difficulty of breathing. What was a little pain now?

“Six. Months.”

He took a measure of satisfaction as Flint shook his head.

“I’ve known that bloke since we were wee.”

Closing his eyes, Percy turned his body and made a push to pick up the upper half of his body from the table- that movement was easily crushed by Flint’s wand work, the body bind back on. Flint came back into his field of view and there was something tempering the heat in his glare. Percy recognized it- it was pain.

He tried to move his mouth and found that he could.

“Hurts?” Percy returned in what he termed to be his final act of defiance. “His mind popped like a—“

His statement was finished by Flint’s fist plowing into his jaw. Again. Again. To his temple. To his cheekbone. Glasses shattered. Again. Again.

This was it, Percy thought as the influence of pain was starting to drive his consciousness in all directions, back into the ether for what he expected the last time. He tried to put what little focus he had on his family, in wondering if things would turn out alright in the end for them, but he found himself too preoccupied to care much.

The story of his life, really.

He swallowed gob of blood, maybe a tooth, and took his last conscious breath.

Everything dissolved.

****

Percy sat in the far corner of the stall, his legs haphazardly fitted into the small square of space. He kicked at a piece of shattered, cream coloured tile rather absently into the cold water stream, rinsing the blood from its corners. The motion jolted the hand that rested upon the knee, sending darts of pain up the length of his arm.

He held his hand in a slight concave fashion, cupping his knee cap; the position made the bones of his knuckles just visible through the holes they had made through his skin. His forefinger was bent under his palm because he couldn’t straighten it any longer.

He squeezed as best as he could into a fist, and slowly tipped his head back against the stall in bitter disappointment as the sensation went straight to his cock again. The purple hardness stood in uncoordinated relief against the faint redness of his bath-heated skin. Percy looked back down to see that all the cold water in the world couldn’t fight the programming in his brain. Not when every spike of pain seemed to bring it back anew.

Percy warred over the scenario in his mind at least a hundred times with his eyes open so the image wouldn’t be so easily discernible over the back of his eyelids. He stood on the outside of himself and argued that this wasn’t him, that this proof that Flint had won, that this deviancy was a sign of trauma and that he needed assistance, not indulgence. He wasn’t broken. Flint hadn’t won.

But still his hand twitched over his knee cap as he thought to grip his broken hand around his cock, knowing that it’d be so easy to just burn all of his thoughts away with the pain and leave nothing to hinder what his body has been taught to react to. To expect.

Doubt whispered into his ear. You don’t know it’s true.

Blue eyes disappeared behind red-lashed lids in temptation as the scenario re-ran itself in vivid colour on the back of his eyelids. He took a deep, skittering breath, jaw tightening in resolve, cock pulsing just a little in hope.

Don’t let him win. Don’t let him win.

“Kingsley?” he called out as loudly as he could without screaming, over-compensating for the sound of the rushing water. He saw the door open a sliver and Kingsley’s impossibly calm reflection by way of the mirrored medicine cabinet.

“I seem to have broken my hand.”

The door opened wider and Kingsley stepped inside. His robe and tie had been abandoned, and the sleeves of his khaki coloured shirt were rolled up to reveal thick and rather hairy forearms. Dark eyes skittered from his face downwards and Percy frowned as he tightened his frame up in a pointless attempt at modesty.

Both eyes focused on Percy’s bloodied and now bloated right hand. Then both eyes rose up to see the large gap in the tile wall between the faucet and the shower head. Blood was still fluid but not washed from the edges of plaster and ceramic.

Percy once again found himself waiting to see what move Kingsley would make. His eyes were just as lacking of pity as they had been in the Minister’s Garden and he seemed to be watching Percy just as intently as Percy was watching him.

“So it would seem. I don’t think sitting in the shower is going to help, however.”

The look of pure derisive loathing that crossed Percy’s face seemed to be exactly what Kingsley was hoping to see. A smile cracked his exterior and he offered a hand to help Percy out.

****

He was in his office.

He was in his office.

He was in his office.

Percy looked about the place with rising fear. He touched his jaw and while it hurt to the touch, it wasn’t the stabbing pain of broken bones. His teeth on his right side had been re-grown. He was clothed back in his charcoal gray work robes.

This couldn’t be happening. He was dead. He was supposed to be dead. He wasn’t supposed to be back in his office. He was back in his office.

There was a note rolled up into his palm. It took getting out his wand and removing the sticking charm to free it from its place, then another to remove the silvery waxen seal.

Percy read it. The colour drained from his face as his throat tightened with tears.

How far will you go to keep a secret?

This is only the beginning.