Chapter Text
During the first years of their marriage Molly, who did all of the cooking and housework, delegated the baking to her husband the tinkering scientist, who had enjoyed it as a hobby long before they’d met, and was happy to continue it now. When Arthur began to work longer and longer hours to support their larger and larger family, she turned instead to her older sons. It became clear, after a fair few burned batches of biscuits, that Bill and Charlie were more interested in flying and preparing for their swiftly approaching Hogwarts years, and no one in their right mind would leave Fred and George in the kitchen unattended, so seven year old Percy, the quiet, obedient middle child who had the time and the willingness, learned, first at his mother's side and then his father’s, how to bake.
He enjoyed it, in a way that he would never enjoy cooking, or any other sort of housework, because it was methodical and clear, and involved set instructions that he could follow to reach predictable results. He found it soothing in its reliability, but interesting in the endless controlled variability, and he had both the diligence and the innate talent to surpass both his mother and his father before he turned nine. For the first time in his life his patience, his quiet nature, and his natural strict attention to detail was rewarded without the slightest bit of mocking from his family. Even his brothers, who were happy to be relieved of the duty, had nothing to say against him, as he moved on from simple biscuits and bread to more elaborate experiments. It was always delicious, even during the rare times when he went wrong, and they were happy to eat his failures as well as his successes.
Despite the quiet encouragement of his family, he didn't keep up during the school year for the first few years, because he didn’t want to accidentally break any school rules, and being in the kitchens at all, let alone for the amount of time it would take to make something properly, is definitely against some rule somewhere. However, when he made Prefect and was allowed to roam the castle with some authority, he found himself in the kitchens again.
It was a good time for him to rediscover his love of baking, because he was entering into what would end up being his most stressful years at Hogwarts, from OWLs and NEWTs to Harry Potter and every bit of chaos he brought with him without even trying.
In September of his fifth year, he learned that he would need to change his ways. The common room was deafening on a good day, he kept running into his younger siblings when he tried to study in the library or around the castle, and he was a Prefect, which meant that if a professor or a younger student saw him, no matter what he was in the middle of doing, it was technically fair game for them to ask him for help. By October, he’d had enough, and went in search of peace, which he ended up stumbling upon behind a picture of a fruit bowl and a ticklish pear.
The kitchens, where the house elves were happy to give him ingredients and a workbench over in a corner, were a refuge that he desperately needed, and it turned out that when a troll breaks into your school and attempts to eat your little brother beating frozen butter into a cooperative square to wrap pastry dough around was a great way to not curse— or curse out, frankly— every adult wizard in a square mile radius who couldn't do what three eleven year olds could.
Though it became something of a hiding place from the rest of the castle, he was never entirely alone. He appreciated that perhaps most of all, the ability to be by himself without being completely set apart. It reminded him of working in the kitchen at home, where there was always noise happening somewhere just out of view, and people were always flying in and out of the door, snagging hunks of raw dough and shouting suggestions as they went past.
The house elves were his cheerful supporters, happy to give suggestions or simply leave him be when the situation called for it. He stayed in his little corner, and they gave him space while they bustled around preparing the enormous quantities of food that were necessary in a castle full of growing children, but they sang and talked and laughed as they worked, and when he was in a good enough mood, he joined in. When he couldn’t muster up the energy to speak, their cheerful conversations washed over him, and made him feel just a little less like he was going to shake out of his skin.
Oliver ended up tracking him down mid-way through his fifth year and, without consulting Percy whatsoever, made a home for himself in the kitchens as well. On good days, he ate his body weight in biscuits and got Percy to look over his Quidditch strategies and give tactical suggestions. On bad days, he sat quietly and let Percy vent, or commented on inane things until Percy felt able to vocalize exactly what he was feeling. On the days when Oliver was convinced that he's going to lose the best seeker he's ever seen because someone let a Dark Lord into the castle grounds and sent eleven year olds off into the forest to find him, he lay in front of the fire and stared at the ceiling and Percy experimented with new and potentially ill-advised flavor combinations and got him to taste test them until he broke out of his bad mood in outrage.
Penny knew about the kitchens, of course, but rarely joined him down there, even while they were dating during sixth year. Ravenclaw Tower had perfectly good study rooms, where even Prefects could expect peace and quiet, and the kitchens were a bit too warm and busy for her tastes. Besides, she said with a smile, she didn’t have much of a sweet tooth, and bread is "all carbs." When they broke up, amicably, over the summer, Percy wondered if that should have been a sign. He had never even gotten her a proper birthday present, because he didn't know what to give someone who wouldn't take baked goods as a gift.
He let the house elves have whatever Oliver didn’t eat. His siblings would have taken it gladly, but he didn't particularly want them to know that he was accessing the kitchens, because he still wasn’t entirely sure that he wasn’t not breaking any rules, and he also didn't really want to explain to them why he felt the need to master mille-feuille in the same week that his youngest brother disappeared into the forbidden third floor overnight and then came back with a head injury and a comatose best friend.
The day that Ginny emerged from the Chamber of Secrets, he made enough gingerbread for the entire school, until the house elves sent a quiet message and Oliver came down and gently took the rolling pin from him. Ginny, still in the hospital wing with their parents, had no idea that her favorite dessert was being served in the Great Hall, and even if she found out, she would never have guessed why.
He didn't get a chance to bake after he graduated. His kitchen at his new flat was barely big enough for him to turn around in. The space that he had taken for granted in Hogwarts and in the Burrow was gone. Oliver was in training dorms on the other side of the country where he had even less kitchen space, and he was on a training diet, anyway, which was ridiculous, Percy thought privately. He had been a phenomenal keeper for three full years of steady baked goods, after all. Surely eating nothing but spinach and plain chicken couldn’t improve on what was already arguably perfection.
The size of his kitchen no longer mattered fairly soon, however, as he didn’t have the time to bake, and after his falling out with his family, he didn't even have anyone to give baked goods to. He didn't want to share them around the office, they didn't fit the mold he'd cast himself into, it was too soft, too familiar, too homelike for the image he was trying to maintain.
Then the war happened.
After the war, when he was down a brother and a job and a life goal and an income and his tiny, shitty apartment, which had been too close to one of the Death Eater strikes in early spring and now had a gaping hole through the side, he wandered around Hogwarts for hours. His family had all gathered together around Fred's body for a while, but then Harry needed Ginny and Ron, and Bill and Fleur and Charlie and their father had gone to help shift rubble, and their mother scrubbed at her face furiously and made her way to the place where the healers were setting up tents, determined to make herself useful. George was nearly catatonic with grief, but Angelina and Lee Jordan were with him, and Percy, after holding his brother at arms' length for so long, felt like an intruder, so he wandered.
The kitchen was miraculously untouched, there in the depths of Hogwarts, hidden behind such an innocuous painting. The house elves were mostly out helping with clean up, but there were a few left, putting together quick meals for the workers and brewing endless cups of tea for the bereaved. They greeted him with somber smiles, gentle and understanding, and nodded towards his corner.
It was all there, untouched, though it had been nearly four years to the day since he'd last set foot in the Hogwarts kitchens. His recipe notes, which he hadn't thought to pack up, were still stacked neatly underneath a truly hideous pie-shaped paperweight that Oliver had brought back from a family trip to America. His favorite reinforced rolling pin, a gift from a house elf named Senny after the one he'd gotten for cheap in a second hand shop in Hogsmeade had splintered with one too many whacks on frozen pastry, rested on top of his marble pastry slab, as if he’d just set it down. His pots, his pans, his little jar of everlasting fire, still flickering merrily away, all untouched, tucked into their proper places. There was no dust, not even the lingering film of flour and grease that covered most things in the kitchen. His stool was pushed under the table, and just to the side, the cushion on Oliver's favorite chair was plumped.
He wasn't sure how long he stood there, taking it in. He didn't even realize that he'd started crying until a hand on his elbow tugged him around, and a familiar face, blurry with tears, swam into view. A familiar voice said, "Percy?"
"I think," he said, and the rasp of his own voice surprised him, as if he hadn't spoken to anyone for a long, long time. He cleared his throat, and swiped halfheartedly at the tears on his cheeks, and started again. "I think this might have been the last place I was happy."
Oliver listened. He liked that about Oliver, he just listened, sometimes, and didn't interrupt him to try to make sense of what Percy was saying, or try to talk him out of it. He just listened, and conjured him a handkerchief and steered him gently past both of their old seats to sit down in front of the fireplace, the small one that Percy had claimed as his own seven years ago, which had grown over the years to look suspiciously like the kitchen fire at the Burrow. It was clean, here, too, and the cushions that Oliver liked to use whenever he had a seeker-related breakdown were still just as soft and comfortable as they'd been in their seventh year, and Percy felt something settle into place that had been missing for far too long.
He kept talking, because Oliver had known where to find him and Oliver would understand, and he suddenly needed someone to understand what he himself was still trying to make sense of. "It's ridiculous," he said, choking on what could have, in another life, been a laugh, "It's absolutely ridiculous, because I got the job of my dreams and I left my family for it and I stayed there for four years and it was everything I'd worked for and wanted all the time I was in school, and it turns out the best place in the world was here all along!" He wasn’t really sure where he was going with this, but Oliver was watching him, and the tears had stopped, for the most part, now that he had started going somewhere, and so he kept going.
"It's been four years, and I'm back where I started, and it's. So much better. I think. Than what I just left behind. Everything I tried to build. It doesn’t even compare." He gestured at the table, staring fixedly in that direction, at his neat stack of pie tins and basket of cookie cutters. They felt incredibly important, for some reason, those cookie cutters. He used to use them to make gingerbread. "I have a place here. Look at that. I made that, you know? I made that place. That was mine, and I left, and now I'm back, and it's still here, and I don't think that's true anywhere else, is it. A place that's mine. All I've got anywhere else is a rubbish job, and a family that ha— that doesn't like— that I haven't spoken to in months, and a broth— and a dea— and people are gone and I'm still here and this is my place and I have it. I had it. Or something." He was fading, a little, he could tell. The tears had stopped but something awful and blocky lodged itself in his throat somewhere around the time he started talking about his family, and he didn't know if he could get much clearer than where he is now without a whole lot of floodgates falling down, so he trailed off, and glanced over, hoping that Oliver was still listening.
Oliver was watching him, with his knees drawn up, chin in his hands. In the firelight, which made the scrapes and bruises on his face and his fists look like shadows, he could be years younger, back in fifth year again, listening to Percy take his turn in their midnight venting sessions to complain about the lack of proper study materials for OWL students, before reassuring Percy that he’d do well regardless, and distracting him with the news of what new mischief his brothers had gotten up to on the Quidditch pitch that day. Percy’s stomach dropped, dizzyingly. There would never be new stories of his brothers’ mischief. He pushed the thought out of his head, because he didn’t want to cry again, and found that he had nothing else to say. The block in his throat was back, and his head was completely, utterly blank.
When it was clear he’d finished, or at least that he could speak no longer, Oliver unfolded from his position. His legs were long and his shoulders were broad, and as he moved he was, very abruptly, nothing like the boy that Percy remembered. They were no longer fifteen, they were no longer children, they were men, and they had just fought in a war. They had nearly lost a war. They had lost many things, and here Percy was blathering on about happy places. They weren’t at school anymore, Oliver wasn’t his sounding board or his adviser, he had no obligation beyond the polite acknowledgement of their shared history. This was the last of the threads of a bond that had long since stretched thin between former friends, or maybe even just former roommates, housemates, classmates. He wasn’t sure. It had become so hard to judge relationships from the past.
Oliver reached out then, and Percy didn’t even have the speed to reflexively flinch before he was being pulled over, gentle but firm. He followed along until he was held securely with his back against Oliver’s chest, a scruffy chin resting on his head, warm and secure, and he was suddenly very aware that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been hugged, or even touched with kindness. Perhaps it had been here, too, at the end of their seventh year, when he’d been determinedly cheerful at every graduation party, and then come down to the kitchen and churned out cake after cake until Oliver had dragged him down to the floor. They’d spent half the night in front of this fireplace, lounging on the cushions, talking about everything they’d enjoyed about the last seven years and everything they’d hoped for about the next.
Percy remembered, rather guiltily, that Oliver had sought him out on purpose that night, and left a raucous Gryffindor party to sit with him on the floor of the kitchens, and that perhaps it was uncharitable not to think that they might have been friends, at least at one point.
“Is it really so bad?” Oliver asked.
Percy was momentarily confused enough that the tightness in his throat was gone, and he tilted his head to frown at Oliver’s left shoulder. “What?”
“Liking it here. Is it really so bad to have found a place that makes you happy?”
Oliver’s voice was deeper than he remembered, and when he’d turned his head on his chest he realized he could feel the vibrations of it on his ear, his cheek, the corner of his eye, and so he stayed turned, addressing his shoulder, “It’s not what I’m supposed to enjoy, though. Nothing I’ve done for years has made me happy. It’s all been rubbish. All of it. My job, and my coworkers, and my flat, and my fam— my social life has been a disaster. Nothing that’s supposed to make me happy has worked.”
“Then it’s not supposed to make you happy.”
Percy was beginning to get annoyed. It happened, sometimes, when they discussed these sorts of things, because Oliver was so straightforward, and saw the world so simply, and Percy was not, and could not, and didn’t really understand how someone could look at the complicated mess of relationships and politics and economics that made up his life and their world and think that there was anything obvious about it all. “It’s easy for you to say, you found your passion when you were seven.”
“So did you,” Oliver said, and at that Percy decided that he had to turn around, because this was clearly going to be a face to face argument.
“I don’t know what to do now—”
Oliver hummed as he tried to shift, and clamped down on his middle, stopping him mid sentence. “You’ve found what makes you happy, right here, right now, you found the place that you have always been the happiest. You just told me that. Why can’t that be a good thing? Why try to make yourself do other things, when now you know you’ve only ever wanted to be here?”
Percy sat, wrapped in this stern hug, and tried to make sense of this, because Oliver always understood so much that he had to give him the benefit of the doubt here. “But I’ve wasted—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Oliver said, and pressed his chin down more firmly on the top of Percy’s head. “It doesn’t matter that you took four years. You had to go. You had to try. You had to leave, so that you could come back. You couldn’t have figured anything out otherwise.”
“But it should have—”
“It should have nothing. It was what it was, and no amount of effort will make it anything different. You tried, and that’s what matters, and you’ve learned, and that’s what counts. Make it count, Percy.”
There was a tone that Oliver used when he wanted to get people to listen to him. Percy was extremely familiar with that tone, he’d listened to him perfecting it in the mirror every night for weeks the year he’d gotten captain. He should be more immune, and perhaps on a better day he would be, but he was tired, and small, and sad, and Oliver’s blunt logic was compelling. He could feel himself folding, but he geared himself up for one last rebuttal, only to be interrupted.
“I’m proud of you,” Oliver said quietly, into his hair, and every bit of fight left him all at once.
“You’re— but why?”
“You figured it out. You followed your dream, you had a terrible time of it, you figured it out, and you made the right choice. You got out. You made it out, and now I have my best friend back. Of course I’m proud of you.” He said it with finality, like it was obvious, like it was just a fact, like it was something that Percy should have known all along, instead of something that was shattering his world open.
“I’m your best friend?” He had no idea when his voice started getting all high pitched and reedy, but he didn’t think he could change it now, there were more important things to focus on.
“Obviously. Honestly, what would you do without me,” Oliver said with a contented sort of sigh, and Percy responded without even thinking about it.
“End up almost fighting on the wrong side of a war, apparently.”
He froze, and then Oliver burst out laughing, so hard that Percy shook with the force of it. “Exactly! Clearly I can never let you go again.”
“That would be okay with me,” Percy said, because over the course of the night he’d lost any filter he’d ever had, and then he bowed his head over the arms wrapped protectively across his chest, and waited for the gentle rejection.
Oliver didn’t miss a beat. “Good,” he said. “I’ve just gotten a new flat, and it’s much too big for me alone.” He punctuated the last word with a forceful squeeze that made Percy’s face go hot and his chest feel funny, but not unpleasantly so, for the first time in a long time. He seemed to be determined to make good on his promise not to let go.
Nothing was fixed. Percy was not naive enough to think that because he’d found his well-preserved kitchen workbench and gotten a hug that anything in the wider world had changed. His brother was still gone, his relationship with his family was tenuous at best, he had no job, no real home, and no plan going forward. Despite that, as he sat in his favorite place in the world, surrounded by the quiet noise of a castle waking up after a very, very long night, in the arms of his oldest friend and, perhaps, newest something-else, he smiled. It was small, and not very bright, but it was there, and he thought that might be a good sign.