Fic: Weasley Once More
Title: Weasley Once More
Author: lyras
Recipient fauxkaren
Prompt: Percy reintegrating with his family.
Warnings or notes: Apologies for the delay in posting this, which was due to me breaking not one but two computers over the past couple of weeks! I hope you enjoy it anyway.
Wordcount: Just under 3,000 (this got away from me a bit).
After the battle, after the dead have been arranged like toy soldiers ready for their funerals, Percy goes home with his family. The sun has just passed its zenith, and the mood is sombre, but muted - unlike the grief so openly expressed during the long night.
Fred and George should be the ones cracking jokes and generating light relief, but Fred will never crack a joke again, and George - George walks silently apart, and when they arrive at The Burrow, he disappears upstairs. They all watch him go, but no one comments.
Fleur and Hermione (when did Hermione and Harry become part of the family?) begin preparing lunch, communicating in hushed voices. Percy's mother joins them, peeling and chopping carrots by hand with frowning concentration. When what passes for a meal is ready, they line up by the counter and ladle out their food. His mother departs, presumably to fetch George, and returns a few minutes later with tear-filled eyes. George does not come downstairs.
The meal is a silent one. Nobody seems able to rouse enough from exhaustion and shock to muster the merest of polite conversation. Percy knows he should be making an effort, making amends, but every time he tries to come up with something to say, he sees himself holding Fred, who was still Fred despite the ravaged mess of his chest, and who a second earlier had been laughing at his, Percy’s joke. Percy does not appreciate this irony. Perhaps if he hadn’t said it, if Fred hadn’t been distracted… perhaps.
Bill and Fleur depart after clearing up, murmuring something about catching up on sleep. Ron, Ginny, Harry and Hermione leave as one, presumably heading for Ron or Ginny’s bedrooms to sleep or talk. Percy envies their closeness. He wonders what Penelope Clearwater is up to these days (did she survive?), and Oliver Wood, who turned up during the battle and then disappeared again just as abruptly.
As the younger contingent files out, Percy’s father says thickly, “We’re very, very proud of you. All of you.”
The effort of speaking seems to undo him. As they nod and then shuffle from view, he gulps audibly and lets his breath out in a groan. Percy's mother turns towards his father with her arms outstretched, and an instant later they are sobbing messily on each other's shoulders.
Horrified at this outpouring of emotion, Percy takes a step towards them and opens his mouth, but Charlie catches his arm and shakes his head.
He follows Charlie into the garden. It’s warmer outside than in, the sun unhampered by brick and mortar, unshadowed except by the flowers that bear its name. Percy feels a stab of joy at being back here after so long for one more summer’s day - a stab, because it brings with it all the guilt he’s been repressing about his family. Bill and the bite he’d heard about but ignored. The attack on his father (ugh, that disgusting snake!), which he’d likewise ignored. His sins line up before him like sunflower shadows, their reproaches pressing in on him until standing is an effort. Somehow, this hurts less than thinking of Fred, so he concentrates on facing them down, one by one.
“The first Christmas I came home from Hogwarts,” Charlie says, shocking Percy from his reverie, “Fred and George turned my room upside down. Apple pie bed, flobberworms in my Cannons outfit, dungbombs on the threshold and under the pillow - you name it. I went to have it out with them, but they were furious; wouldn’t talk to me at all. Just kept shooting sparks at me with those toy wands of theirs. It wasn’t until Fred said, ‘That’s what you get for leaving us,’ that I realised they were upset. He didn’t cry, but I remember his face was all red, and there were tears in his eyes, and I remember thinking, they’re still my little brothers. I thought I was too old for them, you know?” He stares over the hedge at the yellowed fields beyond.
“I’m sorry,” Percy says helplessly.
Charlie lays a hand on his arm. “Don’t be. You’re part of this family; you’ve got a right to grieve, too.” He jerks into a crouch by the strawberry patch, and comes up holding a struggling gnome between thumb and forefinger. “Gotcha!” He swings it over the hedge and wipes his hands. “Well,” he says, “I’m going to turn in for a bit. Need to send a few owls later, and no doubt there’ll be a hell of a lot to do here.”
Next morning, Percy is up before everyone but his parents. He has prepared a long, careful speech listing all his deficiencies and a number of apologies, but he gets no further than, “I’m sorry,” before his father stops him.
“You’re our son, Percy,” he says. “There was blame on both sides; I’m sorry, too.” He glances at Percy’s mother, who is approaching the table with two heavily laden plates. “You’re back, that’s all that matters.”
“But I-”
“Yes, dear.” His mother lays one of the plates before him. Her eyes are heavy, but she looks more determined than she did the previous day, and less broken. “As your father says, you’re back, and that’s the important thing. We could have lost…” She does not finish.
As Percy reaches for a fork, it occurs to him how much he has missed hot breakfasts. He’ll have to get back to his flat in a few days, but in the meantime, he may as well enjoy his mother’s cooking.
Bill allows him to get out his full apology when he drops in for elevenses. At the end, he nods. “I understand, Perce,” he says, and Percy thrills to hear the old nickname, “but you’ve got to understand that Mum and Dad have got bigger things to deal with. You’re back, you’ve said you’re sorry - I think that’s all that matters to them now.” He glances at the clock, where Fred’s hand has disappeared. Did it vanish the moment he died, Percy wonders, or did someone remove it? “Shouldn’t you be at work?”
“Shouldn’t you?” retorts Percy. “I, er, resigned.”
Bill grins briefly. “So I heard. Directly to the Minister, eh? I shouldn’t worry too much,” he adds in response to Percy’s downcast expression. “No doubt you’ll be offered a job in the new Ministry very soon.”
It was one of the hardest things Percy has ever done, not going into work this morning. He knows he should have done. He would have done until two days ago. But two days ago he left work, and now he thinks that perhaps his family needs him more. So he stays.
It’s impossible to corner Ron on his own; he’s always with Hermione or Harry. In the end, it’s Hermione who brings Percy into the conversation and dances the discussion through suitable topics until he blurts out another, “I’m sorry.”
He was right, he thinks as the silence lengthens, to fear that his two youngest siblings would not forgive him. Ron stares at the table for too many heartbeats, but when he looks up, it is straight into Percy’s eyes.
“I’m not going to forgive you for those things you said about Dad, and about all of us,” he says. Hermione draws breath, but Ron hurries on. “But you turned up and fought for us. With me and Fred.” His eyes turn glassy with tears; the knuckles of his fingers whiten where they are wrapped around Hermione’s hand. “So that’s what I’m going to remember, right? Not all that stupid stuff.”
Percy nods. In his mind, he hears himself crying out as he tried to shake Fred back to life. Ron had been there, too; his little brother saw their brother die. “Are you all right?” he manages.
“Yeah,” Ron lies, his face stiff with unshed tears. “Better than he-” His voice breaks and Percy lunges forward, pulling him into a hug. He never shows affection easily, but this is instinctive. They hold one another for a few seconds, taking and giving solace.
Then the moment is over. Ron’s arms drop to his sides; Percy backs away, not quite looking at his brother, meeting instead Hermione’s tearful gaze. They exchange a brief nod of complicity, and Percy leaves the room.
Ginny is the hardest. When he catches her eye, her expression is flat; not even a challenge, just uninterested. He remembers his sweet little sister with anguish. He has missed her growing up.
When he enters her bedroom, she waits for him to speak. She’s curled up on her pillow, directing a quaffle around with her wand, playing a passing game between two imaginary chasers. He isn’t fooled; her puffy eyes and blotchy face can’t lie.
“You shouldn’t be doing that,” he says and then wishes he hadn’t.
Her expression is almost pitying. “I don’t think anyone’ll care.”
She throws the quaffle onto the bed anyway. She’s so mature in some ways, and yet still so young, with her intransigence, her certainty in herself. He’s heard the others talking about what she did this year; she’s a hero in her own way.
“Did you take Fr - the clock hand down?” she demands. At his blank stare, she shrugs. “I thought it might be the sort of thing you’d do. Seeing as he’s not technically part of the family now.”
“Don’t say that,” he implores her. “How can you say that?”
“I didn’t mean it.” The hysterical edge in her voice reminds her how young she is despite her studied aloofness. “I just meant - I was taking the mick.”
“God.” He sits down heavily on the bed. Ginny pulls her knees up to her chest. “God, Ginny, I’m so sorry. I wish it could have been me instead of Fred. It would have made things so much easier for everyone.” He honestly believes that last part, he realises with a pang.
“Percy,” she says, and for the first time her voice is gentle, “can you imagine how terrible Mum and Dad would have felt if you’d died without ever being reconciled to them?”
He can, and that only makes things worse. “I’ve been such an idiot,” he groans through his fingers.
He feels a small hand on his shoulder; then the mattress bounces as Ginny scrambles to wrap her arms around him. It feels right, but it’s not; she’s his little sister; he should be comforting her. That’s why he stayed, isn’t it? That’s why he didn’t go back to work, because he thought he might be a comfort to his family. Fat lot of use he’s been so far.
He looks around into soft brown eyes. “I should have looked after you better,” he says, thinking of all those times when he’d been so worried about Penny that he hadn’t noticed his little sister fading out of life.
She shrugs irritably. “You don’t need to any more. I’m grown up, almost. And if you apologise once more, for anything, I’ll show you some of the tricks I learned from old Carrow this year.”
He starts to reprimand her about the use of Dark Magic, but stops himself. She’s almost of age, and she’s Ginny - she knows the difference between right and wrong.
Pulling her door closed, he feels lighter than he has done in months.
He was wrong. George is the hardest. Percy waits out the silence that follows his knock, and pushes the bedroom door open.
The room smells sweaty and airless. George is sitting on the floor surrounded by what appears to be junk - although the twins’ junk generally turns out to be much more than that. Unlike the rest of the family, George does not look as if he has just been crying. He does look exhausted, and his greasy hair is plastered to his scalp. He hasn’t left his room since they returned to The Burrow, except to visit the toilet.
“Can I come in?” asks Percy belatedly.
“Suit yourself, mate.” George waves an arm at the bed, but Percy joins him on the carpet, stepping carefully over various abandoned mugs and plates.
“What’s this?” He bends over what looks like a small telescope, springing back when something erupts from the eyepiece and thwacks him in the face. “It hit me!” he says indignantly.
George hands him a small tub. “You’ll want this,” he says listlessly, “otherwise you’ll have a black eye for a week.”
“Oh.” Percy accepts the tub, which turns out to contain some kind of soothing balm. “Thanks. Are you - sorting things out?” He plasters the balm around his eye and hopes that he'll escape a bruise. Imagine having to turn up to his brother's funeral with a black eye!
“Not really.” George’s disengaged tone suggests that his thoughts are miles away from here. “Just things we left here. Stuff to work on when Mum’s Sunday lunches got too fraught.”
Percy glimpses something shiny in George’s hand. He reaches out and gently prises the fingers open to reveal the clock hand bearing Fred’s name. George snatches his prize away and shoves his hand in his pocket. Both of them gaze awkwardly at the littered carpet.
Against his better judgement, Percy seizes another stray article: a long, pliant tube topped with an eerily lifelike ear. It looks particularly eerie, he realises, because of his brother’s deficiency in that department.
“You actually got these to work,” he marvels. Of course, the Ministry of Magic has been using Fred and George’s products for nearly two years, but he has never really considered how much the pair of them achieved. They were just Fred and George, who had poor taste in jokes and tried constantly to injure his pride. Well, they succeeded in that better than they ever knew.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I was a pompous ass.”
“You said that already,” George points out.
“I feel it bears repeating,” says Percy dryly.
Another silence, this one broken by George. “Did Fred say anything, before…?” he asks, very quickly. He is still staring at the carpet.
Percy shakes his head. “I’m sorry,” he repeats. “One second he was laughing and the next there was this huge explosion, and then he - he wasn’t. Laughing, I mean.”
George nods for too long.
“Will you - I hope you’ll carry on with the shop?” asks Percy.
“I suppose so,” says George drearily. “It’s what Fred would have wanted.” He waves a hand at a crumpled parchment on the bed. “Verity Owled earlier. Said we’ve been inundated with orders, and we’re almost completely sold out.”
Percy takes a deep breath and says a mental farewell to his oldest dream. “You know, you’ve done some great work there. Perhaps I could help, at least for a while. I’m good with numbers; I could manage the administrative side of things while you and - Verity, is it? - work on the products.” He waits for George to accept, or to burst into derisive laughter.
Instead, George looks at him with a strange expression on his face. “Thanks, Perce,” he says, “but Ron’s already offered to help out for a while. I thought you’d want to be straight back at the Ministry, anyway?”
“Family comes first,” says Percy stiffly.
George stares at him for a long moment, and then nods.
The church is chilly, although outside the sun is still shining. Percy’s mother leans on his shoulder while his father makes a short speech in a sad, steady voice. Beside him, George is dressed in canary yellow robes which contrast sharply with the sober colours that surround him. Their mother gave him a sharp glance when he appeared that morning, but said nothing. Now George’s eyes are fixed on the coffin below the lectern: sober oak topped with red and gold hangings, and those topped with a chain of flags bearing the Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes logo. This evening, a fireworks display will showcase the best of the Weasley twins’ fire-raising efforts.
George’s gaze does not waver during his father’s address, nor during the quiet hymns and prayers. Only at the end, when their parents follow Fred’s body up the aisle and Bill hesitates, unsure whether to let George go next, does he look around. After a brief exchange of glances with Bill, he yanks Percy into the aisle alongside him and they set off after the others.
Percy is aware that onlookers must see him as an interloper, walking beside Fred’s bereaved twin. That’s all right. What matters today is George and Fred. He follows his parents, acutely aware of brightly-robed George to his left. He knows that behind him are Bill and Charlie, Ron and Ginny, Fleur, Harry, Hermione and all the other mourners whom he will shortly have to greet. And at the head of them all is Fred, whom he will never see again; Fred, who will never again crack a joke or play a prank in poor taste, but who will live on, because Percy, George and the rest of the Weasley family will never forget him.
The sky is perfect: deep blue, with cotton wool wisps too puny to deter the sun. As the procession emerges into the warmth, the pallbearers deliver Fred’s coffin into the first of several carriages; thestrals are harnessed in pairs, ready to draw the chief mourners on to Fred’s final destination.
Percy watches the coffin disappear; shortly he and his family will pile into those carriages and see Fred laid to rest. For now, he schools his features into dignified grief, and turns to accept the condolences of the wizarding world. He is a Weasley once more, and proud of it.
Author: lyras
Recipient fauxkaren
Prompt: Percy reintegrating with his family.
Warnings or notes: Apologies for the delay in posting this, which was due to me breaking not one but two computers over the past couple of weeks! I hope you enjoy it anyway.
Wordcount: Just under 3,000 (this got away from me a bit).
After the battle, after the dead have been arranged like toy soldiers ready for their funerals, Percy goes home with his family. The sun has just passed its zenith, and the mood is sombre, but muted - unlike the grief so openly expressed during the long night.
Fred and George should be the ones cracking jokes and generating light relief, but Fred will never crack a joke again, and George - George walks silently apart, and when they arrive at The Burrow, he disappears upstairs. They all watch him go, but no one comments.
Fleur and Hermione (when did Hermione and Harry become part of the family?) begin preparing lunch, communicating in hushed voices. Percy's mother joins them, peeling and chopping carrots by hand with frowning concentration. When what passes for a meal is ready, they line up by the counter and ladle out their food. His mother departs, presumably to fetch George, and returns a few minutes later with tear-filled eyes. George does not come downstairs.
The meal is a silent one. Nobody seems able to rouse enough from exhaustion and shock to muster the merest of polite conversation. Percy knows he should be making an effort, making amends, but every time he tries to come up with something to say, he sees himself holding Fred, who was still Fred despite the ravaged mess of his chest, and who a second earlier had been laughing at his, Percy’s joke. Percy does not appreciate this irony. Perhaps if he hadn’t said it, if Fred hadn’t been distracted… perhaps.
Bill and Fleur depart after clearing up, murmuring something about catching up on sleep. Ron, Ginny, Harry and Hermione leave as one, presumably heading for Ron or Ginny’s bedrooms to sleep or talk. Percy envies their closeness. He wonders what Penelope Clearwater is up to these days (did she survive?), and Oliver Wood, who turned up during the battle and then disappeared again just as abruptly.
As the younger contingent files out, Percy’s father says thickly, “We’re very, very proud of you. All of you.”
The effort of speaking seems to undo him. As they nod and then shuffle from view, he gulps audibly and lets his breath out in a groan. Percy's mother turns towards his father with her arms outstretched, and an instant later they are sobbing messily on each other's shoulders.
Horrified at this outpouring of emotion, Percy takes a step towards them and opens his mouth, but Charlie catches his arm and shakes his head.
He follows Charlie into the garden. It’s warmer outside than in, the sun unhampered by brick and mortar, unshadowed except by the flowers that bear its name. Percy feels a stab of joy at being back here after so long for one more summer’s day - a stab, because it brings with it all the guilt he’s been repressing about his family. Bill and the bite he’d heard about but ignored. The attack on his father (ugh, that disgusting snake!), which he’d likewise ignored. His sins line up before him like sunflower shadows, their reproaches pressing in on him until standing is an effort. Somehow, this hurts less than thinking of Fred, so he concentrates on facing them down, one by one.
“The first Christmas I came home from Hogwarts,” Charlie says, shocking Percy from his reverie, “Fred and George turned my room upside down. Apple pie bed, flobberworms in my Cannons outfit, dungbombs on the threshold and under the pillow - you name it. I went to have it out with them, but they were furious; wouldn’t talk to me at all. Just kept shooting sparks at me with those toy wands of theirs. It wasn’t until Fred said, ‘That’s what you get for leaving us,’ that I realised they were upset. He didn’t cry, but I remember his face was all red, and there were tears in his eyes, and I remember thinking, they’re still my little brothers. I thought I was too old for them, you know?” He stares over the hedge at the yellowed fields beyond.
“I’m sorry,” Percy says helplessly.
Charlie lays a hand on his arm. “Don’t be. You’re part of this family; you’ve got a right to grieve, too.” He jerks into a crouch by the strawberry patch, and comes up holding a struggling gnome between thumb and forefinger. “Gotcha!” He swings it over the hedge and wipes his hands. “Well,” he says, “I’m going to turn in for a bit. Need to send a few owls later, and no doubt there’ll be a hell of a lot to do here.”
Next morning, Percy is up before everyone but his parents. He has prepared a long, careful speech listing all his deficiencies and a number of apologies, but he gets no further than, “I’m sorry,” before his father stops him.
“You’re our son, Percy,” he says. “There was blame on both sides; I’m sorry, too.” He glances at Percy’s mother, who is approaching the table with two heavily laden plates. “You’re back, that’s all that matters.”
“But I-”
“Yes, dear.” His mother lays one of the plates before him. Her eyes are heavy, but she looks more determined than she did the previous day, and less broken. “As your father says, you’re back, and that’s the important thing. We could have lost…” She does not finish.
As Percy reaches for a fork, it occurs to him how much he has missed hot breakfasts. He’ll have to get back to his flat in a few days, but in the meantime, he may as well enjoy his mother’s cooking.
Bill allows him to get out his full apology when he drops in for elevenses. At the end, he nods. “I understand, Perce,” he says, and Percy thrills to hear the old nickname, “but you’ve got to understand that Mum and Dad have got bigger things to deal with. You’re back, you’ve said you’re sorry - I think that’s all that matters to them now.” He glances at the clock, where Fred’s hand has disappeared. Did it vanish the moment he died, Percy wonders, or did someone remove it? “Shouldn’t you be at work?”
“Shouldn’t you?” retorts Percy. “I, er, resigned.”
Bill grins briefly. “So I heard. Directly to the Minister, eh? I shouldn’t worry too much,” he adds in response to Percy’s downcast expression. “No doubt you’ll be offered a job in the new Ministry very soon.”
It was one of the hardest things Percy has ever done, not going into work this morning. He knows he should have done. He would have done until two days ago. But two days ago he left work, and now he thinks that perhaps his family needs him more. So he stays.
It’s impossible to corner Ron on his own; he’s always with Hermione or Harry. In the end, it’s Hermione who brings Percy into the conversation and dances the discussion through suitable topics until he blurts out another, “I’m sorry.”
He was right, he thinks as the silence lengthens, to fear that his two youngest siblings would not forgive him. Ron stares at the table for too many heartbeats, but when he looks up, it is straight into Percy’s eyes.
“I’m not going to forgive you for those things you said about Dad, and about all of us,” he says. Hermione draws breath, but Ron hurries on. “But you turned up and fought for us. With me and Fred.” His eyes turn glassy with tears; the knuckles of his fingers whiten where they are wrapped around Hermione’s hand. “So that’s what I’m going to remember, right? Not all that stupid stuff.”
Percy nods. In his mind, he hears himself crying out as he tried to shake Fred back to life. Ron had been there, too; his little brother saw their brother die. “Are you all right?” he manages.
“Yeah,” Ron lies, his face stiff with unshed tears. “Better than he-” His voice breaks and Percy lunges forward, pulling him into a hug. He never shows affection easily, but this is instinctive. They hold one another for a few seconds, taking and giving solace.
Then the moment is over. Ron’s arms drop to his sides; Percy backs away, not quite looking at his brother, meeting instead Hermione’s tearful gaze. They exchange a brief nod of complicity, and Percy leaves the room.
Ginny is the hardest. When he catches her eye, her expression is flat; not even a challenge, just uninterested. He remembers his sweet little sister with anguish. He has missed her growing up.
When he enters her bedroom, she waits for him to speak. She’s curled up on her pillow, directing a quaffle around with her wand, playing a passing game between two imaginary chasers. He isn’t fooled; her puffy eyes and blotchy face can’t lie.
“You shouldn’t be doing that,” he says and then wishes he hadn’t.
Her expression is almost pitying. “I don’t think anyone’ll care.”
She throws the quaffle onto the bed anyway. She’s so mature in some ways, and yet still so young, with her intransigence, her certainty in herself. He’s heard the others talking about what she did this year; she’s a hero in her own way.
“Did you take Fr - the clock hand down?” she demands. At his blank stare, she shrugs. “I thought it might be the sort of thing you’d do. Seeing as he’s not technically part of the family now.”
“Don’t say that,” he implores her. “How can you say that?”
“I didn’t mean it.” The hysterical edge in her voice reminds her how young she is despite her studied aloofness. “I just meant - I was taking the mick.”
“God.” He sits down heavily on the bed. Ginny pulls her knees up to her chest. “God, Ginny, I’m so sorry. I wish it could have been me instead of Fred. It would have made things so much easier for everyone.” He honestly believes that last part, he realises with a pang.
“Percy,” she says, and for the first time her voice is gentle, “can you imagine how terrible Mum and Dad would have felt if you’d died without ever being reconciled to them?”
He can, and that only makes things worse. “I’ve been such an idiot,” he groans through his fingers.
He feels a small hand on his shoulder; then the mattress bounces as Ginny scrambles to wrap her arms around him. It feels right, but it’s not; she’s his little sister; he should be comforting her. That’s why he stayed, isn’t it? That’s why he didn’t go back to work, because he thought he might be a comfort to his family. Fat lot of use he’s been so far.
He looks around into soft brown eyes. “I should have looked after you better,” he says, thinking of all those times when he’d been so worried about Penny that he hadn’t noticed his little sister fading out of life.
She shrugs irritably. “You don’t need to any more. I’m grown up, almost. And if you apologise once more, for anything, I’ll show you some of the tricks I learned from old Carrow this year.”
He starts to reprimand her about the use of Dark Magic, but stops himself. She’s almost of age, and she’s Ginny - she knows the difference between right and wrong.
Pulling her door closed, he feels lighter than he has done in months.
He was wrong. George is the hardest. Percy waits out the silence that follows his knock, and pushes the bedroom door open.
The room smells sweaty and airless. George is sitting on the floor surrounded by what appears to be junk - although the twins’ junk generally turns out to be much more than that. Unlike the rest of the family, George does not look as if he has just been crying. He does look exhausted, and his greasy hair is plastered to his scalp. He hasn’t left his room since they returned to The Burrow, except to visit the toilet.
“Can I come in?” asks Percy belatedly.
“Suit yourself, mate.” George waves an arm at the bed, but Percy joins him on the carpet, stepping carefully over various abandoned mugs and plates.
“What’s this?” He bends over what looks like a small telescope, springing back when something erupts from the eyepiece and thwacks him in the face. “It hit me!” he says indignantly.
George hands him a small tub. “You’ll want this,” he says listlessly, “otherwise you’ll have a black eye for a week.”
“Oh.” Percy accepts the tub, which turns out to contain some kind of soothing balm. “Thanks. Are you - sorting things out?” He plasters the balm around his eye and hopes that he'll escape a bruise. Imagine having to turn up to his brother's funeral with a black eye!
“Not really.” George’s disengaged tone suggests that his thoughts are miles away from here. “Just things we left here. Stuff to work on when Mum’s Sunday lunches got too fraught.”
Percy glimpses something shiny in George’s hand. He reaches out and gently prises the fingers open to reveal the clock hand bearing Fred’s name. George snatches his prize away and shoves his hand in his pocket. Both of them gaze awkwardly at the littered carpet.
Against his better judgement, Percy seizes another stray article: a long, pliant tube topped with an eerily lifelike ear. It looks particularly eerie, he realises, because of his brother’s deficiency in that department.
“You actually got these to work,” he marvels. Of course, the Ministry of Magic has been using Fred and George’s products for nearly two years, but he has never really considered how much the pair of them achieved. They were just Fred and George, who had poor taste in jokes and tried constantly to injure his pride. Well, they succeeded in that better than they ever knew.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I was a pompous ass.”
“You said that already,” George points out.
“I feel it bears repeating,” says Percy dryly.
Another silence, this one broken by George. “Did Fred say anything, before…?” he asks, very quickly. He is still staring at the carpet.
Percy shakes his head. “I’m sorry,” he repeats. “One second he was laughing and the next there was this huge explosion, and then he - he wasn’t. Laughing, I mean.”
George nods for too long.
“Will you - I hope you’ll carry on with the shop?” asks Percy.
“I suppose so,” says George drearily. “It’s what Fred would have wanted.” He waves a hand at a crumpled parchment on the bed. “Verity Owled earlier. Said we’ve been inundated with orders, and we’re almost completely sold out.”
Percy takes a deep breath and says a mental farewell to his oldest dream. “You know, you’ve done some great work there. Perhaps I could help, at least for a while. I’m good with numbers; I could manage the administrative side of things while you and - Verity, is it? - work on the products.” He waits for George to accept, or to burst into derisive laughter.
Instead, George looks at him with a strange expression on his face. “Thanks, Perce,” he says, “but Ron’s already offered to help out for a while. I thought you’d want to be straight back at the Ministry, anyway?”
“Family comes first,” says Percy stiffly.
George stares at him for a long moment, and then nods.
The church is chilly, although outside the sun is still shining. Percy’s mother leans on his shoulder while his father makes a short speech in a sad, steady voice. Beside him, George is dressed in canary yellow robes which contrast sharply with the sober colours that surround him. Their mother gave him a sharp glance when he appeared that morning, but said nothing. Now George’s eyes are fixed on the coffin below the lectern: sober oak topped with red and gold hangings, and those topped with a chain of flags bearing the Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes logo. This evening, a fireworks display will showcase the best of the Weasley twins’ fire-raising efforts.
George’s gaze does not waver during his father’s address, nor during the quiet hymns and prayers. Only at the end, when their parents follow Fred’s body up the aisle and Bill hesitates, unsure whether to let George go next, does he look around. After a brief exchange of glances with Bill, he yanks Percy into the aisle alongside him and they set off after the others.
Percy is aware that onlookers must see him as an interloper, walking beside Fred’s bereaved twin. That’s all right. What matters today is George and Fred. He follows his parents, acutely aware of brightly-robed George to his left. He knows that behind him are Bill and Charlie, Ron and Ginny, Fleur, Harry, Hermione and all the other mourners whom he will shortly have to greet. And at the head of them all is Fred, whom he will never see again; Fred, who will never again crack a joke or play a prank in poor taste, but who will live on, because Percy, George and the rest of the Weasley family will never forget him.
The sky is perfect: deep blue, with cotton wool wisps too puny to deter the sun. As the procession emerges into the warmth, the pallbearers deliver Fred’s coffin into the first of several carriages; thestrals are harnessed in pairs, ready to draw the chief mourners on to Fred’s final destination.
Percy watches the coffin disappear; shortly he and his family will pile into those carriages and see Fred laid to rest. For now, he schools his features into dignified grief, and turns to accept the condolences of the wizarding world. He is a Weasley once more, and proud of it.