Chapter Text
After Percy went to a thousand funerals and memorials, and sat in silence with his grieving family, and held his mother’s hand, and handed his father a handkerchief, and helped clean up the Burrow, he moved in with Oliver Wood.
He loved his family, and he knew that he was welcome with them, but there was a whole lot of hurt still left behind, and it wasn’t just from the most recent years of estrangement. He hadn’t been comfortable at the Burrow for years before he left it, and according to the therapist that he spoke to in the aftermath of the war, it would be better for both his own sake and his family’s to maintain a physical distance, even as they tried to close the emotional one.
The therapist was originally assigned as part of his court sentence. There were grief counselors offered to the people who fought in the Battle of Hogwarts, but his was assigned for a threat evaluation first, and then as a government-approved monitor of his mental state for the next two years. After all, he’d worked extremely closely with Death Eaters for years, whether or not he knew it. He’d helped further their small bureaucratic agendas when they asked it of him, because he was good at his job, and he wanted the recognition. Two of his immediate bosses had been under the Imperius curse during most of the time that he’d worked for them. He’d killed one of them on the battlefield. Therapy was, for so many reasons, non-negotiable.
On the whole, he was rather surprised by the leniency of his sentence. He was hardly the most pressing matter to address in the aftermath, but he was a very visible target, and he knew going into the trials that he would end up being made an example of, as one of the unwittingly complicit members of the government during the Death Eater infiltration. No matter how many of his family were war heroes or how many boys who lived were effectively his adopted siblings, the precedent that was set by his punishment was important. The therapist was one part, as was his support and assistance compiling a full report on everything he’d done in his various positions. This was, perhaps, a simpler and less painful task for him than for others like him, as his record keeping, even during the most difficult periods of his short lived career, was impeccable.
The last piece of his sentence was one that he thought was probably meant to be the most egregious, and certainly would be for most of his colleagues. Harry had visited him the night before his trial, looking windswept and exhausted, to check to make sure that he would be okay with it, because it was in the power of the boy who lived, twice, to argue sentences down. He’d declined. It was important for him to set this example, it was probably the most important thing that he would ever accomplish in government, he pointed out wryly, and the best way to hopefully prevent such an insidious takeover again. The naked relief on Harry’s face was almost insulting, except that after everything he’d dealt with over the past few weeks, he found it difficult to summon up much outrage. He felt rather like he was living in a dream, his brain felt wrapped in cotton. Nothing seemed real, which was good, because if he had the capacity to feel the emotions that he’d had only a few months ago, he’d surely be in the depths of despair.
He was banned from public office. He could not work in the government, or in any associated position, for at least five years, after which, if he so desired, he could appeal to a board, which would review his records, the professional opinion provided by the court mandated therapist, and his own application.
The career that he’d worked towards for most of his life was over, or at least on a very hard pause. He was not as upset as he should have been, he suspected. His therapist, whose opinion he was coming to respect very highly, said that he would likely experience quite a few delayed responses to the subject in the coming months, and assured him that he could contact her at any point in time to help with the fallout.
Well into the summer, the fallout he was expecting still hadn’t hit. On the contrary, he felt lighter than he had in a very long time. Oliver, who knew him better than anyone in the world, often including himself these days, bought him a gorgeous new oven and suggested that he might start looking for something to sink his mind-teeth, in his own ridiculous words, into, because he was never happier than when he was working towards something. Hermione Granger, who arrived early in the morning two weeks before the beginning of the Hogwarts school year to sit at his new kitchen table with manic eyes and a Dict-a-quill and interrogate him on what he remembered from his NEWTs year, gave him a once-over before she left, and pulled out a bundle of little booklets.
“Sometimes it’s good that the magical world is so insular,” she said abruptly, and before Percy could ask what she could mean, she continued, “The trial only happened in wizarding court. There’s a whole world out there. You have options.”
Percy stared at her, and she stared back, scowling slightly. “Just consider it,” she snapped, and whirled out of the door.
The booklets were informational brochures on Muggle universities and transferring credits from Hogwarts to suit Muggle education standards. The university brochures were clearly mass produced Muggle things, shiny paper full of cheerful pictures of smiling students and with plenty of exclamation points interspersed with the explanations of various courses one could take. The ones detailing the transition from the magical to the Muggle world, however, were handwritten. He recognized the handwriting, and that, more than anything, made him take a second, and a third, look, because if Hermione Granger had taken time out of her obscenely busy schedule to make him a personalized packet of information, he was going to read it.
There was more to think about than he thought there’d be. She hadn’t just looked at the practical measures of how to seamlessly move from magical to nonmagical education, but she had also pointed out the programs that she thought he’d most prefer, the ones where his skills and interests would transfer over most easily, and from there the books that he would need to study in order to excel in his chosen field.
Hermione Granger was many things, almost incandescently brilliant in many ways, but understanding people had never been her forte. In her notes, though, he found himself analyzed to a startling degree of accuracy. It would have been unnerving, but he realized, in leafing through page after page of her tiny, precise writing, that he was not the only Hogwarts graduate who might be interested in exploring the outside world, particularly after the awful prejudice demonstrated by the wizarding world during the past few years. Hermione was not the sort to be finished with school just because the standard seven Hogwarts years were over, and she would never stick up her nose at knowledge, no matter what the source. He wondered how many of the brochures she’d given him were from her own collection, and what, if any, she’d withheld.
Whether it was just a matter of their tastes aligning, or if she genuinely was better at judging him than he’d expected, there were several programs underlined in her notes that seemed promising. Oliver was convinced that he should go into culinary school, though there was no brochure for that, because Oliver thought that everyone deserved to be paid for their passions. Percy, who knew himself well enough to know that anything he did as a career would end up being an obsession, and not one that he could completely control, disagreed. Baking was an excellent outlet, and he needed to let it be an outlet. He was more interested in the pamphlet on engineering that he’d found tucked in the back of the pile. It reminded him of being very young, and sitting in the garage listening to his father explain what he was doing, clear and slow, as he took apart various little Muggle items to see how they worked.
When he explained himself properly, Oliver agreed, but only on the condition that he continue to bake things, no matter what his new program required.
Oliver was another matter altogether, at this point. He’d opened his house, his home, to Percy without question, and had yet to make any noise about that changing. The longer he stayed there, cocooned in the warmth and peaceful atmosphere of Oliver’s flat, the less Percy was inclined to listen for any noise, and he was slightly concerned about when he would eventually overstay his welcome.
It was supposed to be a temporary measure, a place to stay in the city, near enough to his family that they didn’t feel that he’d abandoned them again, far enough away that he didn’t feel smothered, just until he figured out what his next step was. When Oliver came to the kitchen table the evening after Hermione left, and helped him sort through his various options, however, he’d started by placing them in order of how close each university was to the flat. It seemed to imply that he assumed that Percy would continue living with him through university, which was not something that Percy himself had considered.
There were many things about his current living situation that he hadn’t expected. He’d underestimated just how much professional Quidditch players made, for one thing. Oliver’s flat was massive, a whole floor on the top of a building in Muggle London, just a few blocks away from the entrance to Diagon Alley, but far enough out from the magical world that Percy rarely saw anyone familiar as he walked down the street.
Familiar from his past, that is. He’d come to know their neighbors quite well. Their friendliness was equal parts interest, at his being new and slightly mysterious, as Oliver put it with a grin, as well as the heaps of baked goods he ended up shopping around after training season began and he could no longer rely on Oliver to smuggle the excess into his teammates.
The kindness of his neighbors was also unexpected. They seemed to genuinely like him, which was bewildering to say the least. They greeted him in the lobby of the building, and in the street outside, and when they saw him in the local Tesco, musing over whether two or three bags of flour would be necessary. They remembered his name, though some of them, particularly the older women who reminded him rather uncomfortably of his mother, also called him, “Young Mr. Oliver’s boy,” and delighted in the way his ears went bright, flaming red, every single time. They asked after his family, and he asked after theirs, and none of them had the slightest idea who he was, or who his parents were, or whether he’d fought in the war, or how pure his blood was. It was incredible. He loved it, fiercely, in a way he’d never have guessed for himself, after years of attempting to climb the political ranks. He revelled in his anonymity.
He hadn’t expected how much he would love the place, either. His bedroom could have fit the whole of his old pathetic flat in it, and Oliver had insisted on furnishing it himself, with an amazingly comfortable bed, and a massive, beautiful desk pushed up to the windows, overlooking the city street, so that Percy could people-watch when he wanted a break from work. The argument that Oliver had used about the furniture was that, one day, it would still need to be a guest room, though Percy was very suspicious of the implication that Oliver wouldn’t try to gift him all of the furniture anyway the minute he tried to set up house somewhere else. Percy had at least won the argument about the bookshelves, which were the only decent, and intact, piece of his old flat that he’d brought with him. They were filled to the brim with everything from old school books to compendiums of magical treatise to the flimsy paperbacks of rather terrible detective novels that Ms. Eileen in 4H kept pressing onto him in exchange for a weekly supply of muffins. He would never get rid of a book, of course, and though the plots were awful and the writing only marginally better, he still diligently read them all the way through. It would be rude to disrespect a gift, of course, though that explanation fell rather flat after the third time Oliver had come home to find him curled on the couch next to the fire, so absorbed in his reading that he didn’t even notice the door opening.
The living room was lovely and comfortable, with a fireplace large enough to fit two people at once if they ever needed to floo anywhere, though it was rather garishly decorated in red and gold, as expected of a former Gryffindor, with various bits of clashing blue and gold, where Puddlemere United merchandise littered the shelves and draped, in the case of one blanket, across the back of the couch. The whole of the flat was sunsoaked and stunning, with carefully concealed charms on the skylights and the windows to amplify the weak British sunlight, so that on all but the rainiest days Percy could find a sunbeam to read in. The houseplants, which had been nearly dead before Percy moved in and put them all on a strict watering schedule, flourished.
His favorite place in the house, however, was the kitchen, where he’d been given free reign. It was huge, much bigger than his corner in Hogwarts, and after months of careful curating it had a collection of cookbooks and cookware that rivalled his mother’s, thanks in no small part to her various donations of baking books and implements that she no longer needed. There were plenty of cupboards, the appliances were all Muggle-made and top of the line, for authenticity, Oliver insisted, though who would be authenticating their microwave Percy had no idea, and the counter space was to die for. He said that, the first time he saw it, running his hands over the granite and sighing at how nice the finish was. “The counter space is to die for,” he said over his shoulder, and then he got distracted, thinking out loud about the usefulness of a cold, smooth countertop and the pastry that could be produced if it was charmed to stay a certain temperature, until he remembered that he didn’t actually live there yet and was technically getting his hands all over someone else’s kitchen.
When he turned, though, Oliver was just standing there, leaning against the doorway, watching him with gentle eyes and a soft smile. “Keep going,” he said, gesturing at the counters, and, “I’m glad you like your kitchen,” breaking into a grin. Percy hadn’t felt so at home in years.
He loved his kitchen, completely and unreservedly. He had lunch with George there, once a week, with bread he’d made and various odd cuts of meat and cheese and vegetables that George brought him, and they talked about what flavors would pair best with what joke spells, and how various spices would interact with the magic to produce interesting results. Harry and Ron showed up without warning for coffee at odd hours of the day, and he did his best to help them sort out their Auror applications and the small fiddly bits of their schedules that they couldn’t figure out themselves. Hermione, it seemed, before leaving for Hogwarts, had designated him her stand-in for keeping them in line. He was flattered, and a little alarmed at what that might mean in the future, but so far it mostly meant correcting his youngest brother’s innumerable spelling errors, and convincing the Boy Who Lived to avoid cursing out his profoundly patronizing instructors during his first day of training.
He worked on his own applications and the work for his Muggle mathematics and physics correspondence courses in his room at his beautiful desk, which he loved nearly as much as the kitchen, but the kitchen table was where he read all of his mail, the hurried scribbles from Ginny and Charlie, who had hardly spent any time in the same house together growing up, but wrote their Rs and Ws the exact same way, and from Fleur, who was expecting her first child, his very first niece, and sent him the French recipes from her childhood that she wanted him to learn to recreate “the British way,” so that the two cultures were properly united. Bill usually added a postscript to the end of Fleur’s lengthy reports, and after reading between the lines for a couple months, Percy sent over Hermione’s notes on transferring to Muggle schools, along with some brochures that he thought might interest his oldest brother, who once spent so much time traveling the world, and had yet to settle into life in one place.
Hermione wrote him too, and with her he could talk most freely about what he was learning from his various new pursuits, and expect a reply with genuine understanding and interest in return. His father, on the other hand, was thrilled that he was entering into the Muggle world, but had absolutely no idea what anything he said meant. He listened eagerly, though, when Percy went to his biweekly tea at the Burrow, and asked many confused questions afterward.
His mother’s first and most enduring olive branch, after she came to terms with the fact that Percy had chosen to move out of the Burrow and stay out for the forseeable future, was to offer to cook together. For their twice a week teas they traded off kitchens, Monday at the Burrow, Thursday at the flat that Percy was already coming to think of as his own despite himself, and his mother cooked while he baked, and they chatted about recipes and what Mr. Harvey in 7C was wearing last week and how well the new degnoming strategies are working. It was easy, in a way that conversations with his mother hadn’t been since he’d been seven and learning at her side for the first time.
Oliver was rarely around early in the day, but when he could he joined them for tea in the afternoon, and he charmed Percy’s parents just as well as he had when he was twelve and talking a mile a minute about Quidditch at their table during the summer holidays.
It wasn’t completely perfect. They were both fairly abysmal cooks, so on days when they ran out of leftovers from the Burrow or sandwich-making material they ended up ordering quite a lot of Muggle takeaway, and Percy was constantly suspicious that Oliver had a dietary sheet hidden somewhere that he was most certainly not following, which led to some long arguments about nutrition and supervision. Sometimes Oliver disappeared into the guest bedroom that doubled as his office and forgot to come out for hours on end, lost in all of his chalkboards of strategies and maneuver ideas.
Sometimes his family, even held as they were at such a careful distance, felt overwhelming, and then sometimes it felt as though he was the worst son in the world, leaving them all to fend for themselves while he played house with his best friend, and he ended up in the kitchen at four in the morning constructing his way through a series of elaborate marzipan centerpieces, until Oliver shuffled out of his room, took him by the shoulders, and steered him away from the kitchen. On those nights, he often ended up in Oliver’s bed, wrapped in the same soothing embrace that had convinced him, what felt like a century ago, to give this life a chance.