Chapter Text
Imagine. 1/2 The war has ended & the Wizengamot are currently holding court & reviewing Dumbledore's memories that he saved. In the span of months they find many containing Death Eater spy Severus Snape, & Ministry spy Percy Weasley. With one dead & the other Missing the British wizarding world is thrown upside down as they review the Memories & realise just how much Percy Weasley was a Mastermind Schemer in saving the lives of many Muggle Borns, Goblins, Half-Blood's and Blood Traitors.
2/2 The Wizarding world are looking for where war hero Percy Weasley is. Especially his family (In this story Percy saves Fred’s life & then vanishes). They see that Percy Weasley had worked as an informant during his entire Ministry career, also being the one who thought out Dumbledore’s death (Shocking the courthouse) “You’re already dying Albus, why not have Severus strengthen his position with the Death Eaters by being your killer?” ‘He used every situation to his advantage to end the war’
Ah, the reveal of the wronged hero, what a simple and satisfying trope. It gives us angst, the bitter taste of not being appreciated mixed with the sweet sauce of late recognition, and regret.
But Percy doesn’t care about that or any other tropes because he is exhausted. Winning a war is a tiring job and he was doing more than winning. So, as soon as Voldemort keels over and dies, Percy checks that his family is alive (they all are, good job there, Percival) and he makes himself a portkey and goes away.
One wizard can’t make a portkey, you say? It takes at least four? Barty Crouch Jr had to imperius three other wizards to enchant the Goblet of Fire? And portkeys don’t work in Hogwarts under normal circumstances?
Well, these are not normal circumstances, there was a battle and Percy has a lot of practice making portkeys, all right? A lot.
(There are less than twenty goblins in Britain right now and it is all Percy’s doing).
He goes to East Asia because Percy is vaguely aware that a single white man in need of enlightenment and self-discovery should go climb a mountain on Asia. Percy doesn’t climb any mountains, though, because he can never do things as he is supposed to. There must always be a twist. In this case, he gets food poisoning twice and spends over a month trying to learn how to play a plucked string instrument. He is harassed by a flock of geese and meets a talking dragon. He fails to realise that there are no accounts of talking dragons in history (at least the history badly learned and repeated in wizarding Britain). Dragons do not talk nor do they speak. Your brother works in a freaking dragon reserve, for Merlin’s sake, Percy. You should know this.
After that Percy goes to the Caribbean, because he feels that his stress-relief and self-discovery journey should also involve a stay in a tropical beach. He doesn’t particularly enjoy the experience because he is a red-head. Also, sand is annoying. He freckles all over, eats a lot of pork, learns to play the maracas, to the locals’ amusement, and leaves.
By the time Dumbledore’s memories are uncovered Percy has made his way to a Greek island. He dresses almost exclusively with a t-shirt tied around his waist, like a loincloth, and a pair of trainers. He also carries with him a bag made from a t-shirt like some sort of wild instagrammer. He has all kind of knick-knacks in his bag that he uses to create himself a house at night, as if transfiguring a nutshell into a bed were a normal thing, Percy, you utter maniac.
From time to time he goes to a wizarding community and offers to do some chores or magic in exchange of goods. If a goblin woman sees him, she will give Percy a loaf of bread. He has no idea why they do that but it’s very good bread, so Percy is happy to take it. One time Percy met a male goblin and he gave Percy some salt, that he still carries with him. It is possible that for the last seven months Percy had been eating goblin bread and whatever fresh produce the Greek witches offer him in exchange of doing chores.
It is at this time that the Puddlemere United goes to Greece to do some pre-season training.
(This is something that football teams around Europe do. Go somewhere outside the country to train for a month or two in different conditions. The Manchester United often goes to Malaga, in Spain, for a warm-weather training. I don’t even like football, I don’t know why I know this.)
When Oliver Wood sees Percy Weasley standing around in little more than a loincloth, he naturally assumes that he is having a hallucination, a combination of the relentless training under the hot and punishing sun, the hours spent fighting the wind (they don’t know what it is with the wind there, but it will try to kick you off the broom. They are all coming out of this with iron abs) and the constant stories in The Prophet about yet another plot Percival Weasley had conducted saving a dozen lives.
“Percy?” Oliver asks, sweaty and thirsty and half mad from training.
“Oh, hi, Oliver!” Percy answers, and then, because Percy is simultaneously the cleverest and dumbest wizard alive, “oh shit”.
***
Percy has not been reading the news. He refuses to. He is on vacation, he is still tired and he has a white hair on his temple. Just the one hair, but Percy is twenty-two and far too young for white hair.
Oliver nods. He gets it. He is still telling the Weasley family that he has seen Percy and that he is not dead at all, only slightly insane. But he will wait until he is back in England. Oliver doesn’t know if all the things in the paper are true, but even if Percy has only rescued one thousand five hundred goblins instead of the fifteen thousand the papers claim, he is still entitled to a nice quiet vacation in which clothes are optional.
Did Percy Weasley stop a goblin genocide in his free time? Does he not realise it? How dumb is this boy?
Come September the owls start to arrive. Letters from the Ministry, from the papers, from his family. Percy watches the owls fly around and doesn’t allow himself to be found. He does read Oliver’s letters and even answers explaining that no, his family is not heart-broken. They were heart-broken five years ago when Percy very publicly acted like an asshole. They got used to it, so there is no need for this new sentimentality now that Percy is on vacation.
Percy might be acting a bit like an asshole now, but he has very complicated and ugly feelings over his family and he would rather not think about them. Mostly, he is irked by the fact that they were so quick to follow Dumbledore’s lead. Perhaps because Percy never worked for Dumbledore, he worked with Dumbledore and had the distinct pleasure of pointing to his face, on multiple occasions, what a sly bastard he was. He has little respect for people who never confronted Dumbledore.
(So basically Percy only respects Aberforth Dumbledore and Minerva McGonagall).
Also, Percy always did what he was supposed to: he washed his hands, cared after his siblings, got good grades and yet he was not the favourite son. This is all subconscious, of course, but he resents it.
Oliver keeps writing so Percy keeps writing back.
“Did you actually side-apparate a family with twelve members?” writes Oliver.
“I have no idea.” Percy writes back. “Wait, do you mean the Johnsons? How are they?”
“They are going to give you an Order of Merlin, 1st Class”.
“Surely they realise I don’t want one.”
“I think it is evident they realise nothing, Percy.”
By October it’s getting cold and Percy finds that he doesn’t particularly care about wearing clothes, so he is getting ready to portkey himself to Argentina when Ginny arrives. She has such a driven and purposeful look around her that Percy assumes that she must be in the middle of a very important quest, so he hangs back and follows her as she treks all over the island and vanishes a thousand year old monster. It doesn’t occur to Percy that her quest is finding him and that the monster was merely an unfortunate bystander.
Eventually he reveals himself to Ginny because she is screaming incoherently at the sky and Percy thinks that she might be suffering hypoxia and dehydration. Ginny throws the water bottle at his head.
“I’m not the jerk here.” Percy says. “I needed a vacation and if you hadn’t seen those stupid memories you would have been fine with me being out of the country indefinitely.”
Ginny hexes him seven times, but afterwards she lies on the beach next to Percy and they look at the clouds. They spend a week together, nicely quiet and wild. They go for walks, play on the beach, make a house at night out of random transfigured things (Percy doesn’t notice Ginny’s look of utter bafflement and awe) and eat goblin bread (this time Percy does notice the look but assumes it’s because Ginny loves the taste).
Percy refuses to go back with her but he promises Ginny that he will be there for Christmas. Two days later he does go back to England, the bastard. His correspondence with Oliver has become… heated, to put it some way, and waiting a week for the owl to arrive is intolerable.
Percy thinks this might be some sort of penance. It’s nippy in England and he can’t be dressed in a t-shirt/loincloth anymore. There is a flock of owls permanently following him, trying to deliver their messages from the Ministry and the papers and maybe, even now, from his family. Worst of all, Oliver writes him all kind of randy letters but refuses to shag Percy, even though he is right there, because of sports. Something about turning frustration into spectacular athletic performance, Percy doesn’t know. He is so frustrated that he goes and stops a plan to assassinate Potter all by himself.
On Christmas Eve Percy goes home and he is yelled at, cursed at, cried at and loved, very loved, it’s embarrassing. He is rescued from the madness by Potter who easily admits he has been fuelling the newspapers infatuation with Percy because that way they left him slightly in peace.
(And on Boxing Day he moves in with Oliver).