Chapter Text
Percy Weasley has always played by the rules.
He was a good son; one who kept his younger brothers in line and listened to the older ones and completed every chore his mother assigned him and those his siblings never got around to, nursing a quiet hope that one day they would acknowledge this as care instead of duty. He was a good student—Gryffindor prefect, Head Boy, fancying himself a beacon of support for his overworked professors. He was a good employee, despite his oversights—he wrote more papers than anyone in the department, edited drafts of more policies than most bothered to count (although he could, and it was six hundred twenty-seven), and on the whole devoted himself to the Ministry with the same fervour he had applied to his family and Hogwarts.
Now he is sitting in his chair at the Ministry, his freckled knuckles quite pale from the death grip his hands have on the desk in front of him, rocking his slight frame back and forth in an effort to calm the blood rushing to his head. Twenty-four hours ago he had announced his promotion to his father and was met not with the vague acceptance he had garnered for most of his life, but burning, sharp disdain, and he had shouted his father down before banging the door of the Burrow shut for the first and last time. The hours after the fight are a blur to him, a series of wand-trunk-owl movement that concluded in his lying on a broken-down mattress in what must be London’s dodgiest apartment, whispering retorts he never vocalised to the empty ceiling above him, Arthur Weasley’s bespectacled face (so like his, didn’t everyone say Percy resembled his father more than any of them?) clear every time he shut his eyes.
So here he is, Junior Assistant to the Minister with no one to call in the wake of an accident, slumping over Cornelius Fudge’s first bit of mail with an uncharacteristic look of defeat on his thin, prematurely lined face. He begins to write a response in the ostentatious, verbose style he’s been taught, but is interrupted before he can print the first line. The door to his office (a wide room in front of Fudge’s, but an office just the same) swings open, smacks against the wall, and reveals a witch clutching a sheaf of papers, her long dark hair slipping out of a bun held together by her wand, wide eyes looking around the room with frenetic energy.
“Is the Minister here?” she asks, and her low, melodic, decidedly not British accent is as much of a surprise to Percy as her sudden presence.
“Um, not at the moment,” says Percy, who was instructed by a frazzled Fudge less than an hour ago not to let anyone through unless it was Dumbledore himself. “Can I take a message?”
The witch frowns, then drops the sheaf of papers on his desk. “This should be sufficient,” she says, “although do stress to him that it’s of the highest importance.” Percy glances down to find the top page scrawled over with calculations, which the witch runs her finger down in a manner resembling a caress. “The findings are summarised at the end, but he can get back to me if he has questions. I’ve tried to provide an answer key for ones I imagine will come up.”
Percy shifts the last page out from beneath the stack (Merlin, there must be more than fifty pages here, how does this witch expect Fudge to fit maths into his busy schedule?), and finds it contains several dozen lines of cramped writing, which indeed resemble the answer key she had described.
“Who should I say the message is from?” he asks.
“Audrey Fairfax, Theorist.”
“You work with Muggle science,” says Percy, more for his benefit than hers. He remembers McGonagall touching on this career path in their fifth year meeting, a highly complex field dedicating to analysing and re-interpreting Muggle laws of physics to fit accepted notions of magic, particularly Transfiguration. It was the endpoint of Percy’s favourite Arithmancy topics, but he hadn’t had sufficient interest to spend a lifetime on it. He glances back down at a few papers dislodged in his shuffling, which are filled with complex diagrams and cramped explanations, and an impressed expression flickers across his face.
“Wizard science when we’re done with it,” says Audrey.
“Of course,” he replies, hastily looking up and shoving his spectacles up his nose, “I didn’t mean to imply—”
But the extent of her offence is conveyed in the lack of a reaction; instead she skims her fingers across his name plaque as if testing its veracity. “Percy Weasley, Junior Assistant to the Minister,” she says, trying out the words, “I’ve never seen you around before.”
“Perhaps you haven’t been looking,” he offers, somewhat lamely, but she looks up with interest.
“Did you go to Hogwarts?”
“Class of 1994,” he says. “You?”
“‘93,” she says, a slight smile arising on her chapped lips, “we just missed each other.”
“Gryffindor,” he says.
“Ravenclaw,” she responds.
“Of course,” says Percy, gesturing at the drawings, “the only non-Ravenclaw I’ve ever met with this level of interest in physics is my—”
The word father boils his tongue, cuts his words away, and he sits for a minute with flapping useless lips before shutting his mouth entirely. Father, a safe place to hide, scribbling answers to his schoolwork while Dad tinkered with the Ford Anglia, occasionally asking for an answer in Charms or Transfiguration. Father, the first person to beam when Percy had received his prefect’s badge, father, the red flush on Mr. Weasley’s face when he told Percy he was no longer welcome at the Burrow.
Audrey watches him with avid, not unkind interest, but he ducks his head to puzzle over a couple more lines of equations, an occasional variable jumping out at him with familiarity. He can feel his ears burning, keen to avoid her gaze, and nearly smudges the fresh ink on one of the theory’s newer editions. Its disconsolate pieces are beginning to make sense to him, and despite the mounting pile of mail on his desk, he finds himself oddly interested.
If final velocity squared equals initial velocity squared plus average acceleration multiplied by time, it stands to reason that the wizard (seeking to force the object from its rest position and develop acceleration without touching) must exert pressure with his wand equal to…
“You’re Arthur Weasley’s son, aren’t you?” asks Audrey unexpectedly.
“Yes,” says Percy, a curt, non-committal response. If today weren’t his first day at the Minister’s office, and if he weren’t so keen on making an appropriate first impression, he might have added onto this with will that be all, the politest imaginable dismissal.
“He’s got the right idea about flying cars,” she says, “but he needs to factor in air resistance.” Her wand slips out of her hair and clatters to the floor, and she draws it closer to her with her foot, her protuberant dark eyes fixed upon his own.
“Flying cars are illegal,” says Percy, whose throat has gone rather dry.
“Only”—Audrey stops to pick up her wand, twirling it between her fingers and setting off errant red sparks—“only if you get caught. See you, Weasley.” And with that enigmatic final note, she turns on her heel and bustles out of the room with the same energy she entered with, humming a vaguely familiar tune under her breath.
Percy stares at the space she had exited from a moment, then returns his attention to puzzling out the first page of her notes. The equations serve no apparent purpose, nothing has been invented or discovered, but laws of nature have been proven—laws of magic. It’s inexpressibly interesting to him, and even though he’s forced to rifle through the pages rather quickly on account of his incredible workload (two owls fly in and drop new assignments on his desk before he reaches page seven), he can tell Audrey Fairfax knows what she’s talking about.
Too soon, he reaches the answer key. Instead of ‘frequently asked questions’, Audrey’s written ‘Fudge’s Annoying Questions’ across the top of the page, and despite the scandalised huff Percy lets out he’s quietly amused. The very first one, conveyed in looping script, reads:
Why should the magical community be concerned with laws they already abide by through instinct; why should anyone fund research into the limitations of magic?
It was a question Percy had posed to himself more than once while reading her work, and he skims the answer eagerly for clarification.
The only way to break the rules is to be aware of what they are.
Despite himself, Percy smirks.
————————————
“And here’s to Percy Weasley,” says Oliver Wood, slurring his words and drowning out most of the conversations in their vicinity, “the youngest ever assistant to the Minister of Magic himself and the first one to magic it their only conversation topic.”
“Hear, hear,” says Edith Newton enthusiastically, clanking her frothing tankard of Butterbeer against Oliver’s significantly less full glass of firewhisky. Around them the Leaky Cauldron bustled with its usual hub of activity, packed to the brim with witches and wizards engaged in open conversation over drink, food, and the cheerful knowledge that they were tucked away from Muggles, completely safe to utter words such as ‘Quidditch’ and ‘Hogwarts’ without a furtive glance over their shoulders.
And they were safe, Percy reminds himself, they had been safe for fourteen years, since He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named had died after his own Killing Curse rebounded on him, and people couldn’t come back from the dead, no matter what that attention-seeking prat Harry Potter had claimed…
“Percy,” says Annabel Entwhistle, nudging his shoulder with hers, “we’re on your favourite topic, and you choose now to go silent?”
“Sorry,” Percy says, glancing at her and hurriedly shoving his glasses up his nose, “cauldron bottom thickness is a serious problem among the youth of Great Britain, and if we’re seen to be lacking in the standards employed by most of the—”
“We were talking about the Ministry,” says Edith, “please shut up about the bloody cauldrons or you’ll give Oliver an excuse to go on a rant about Quidditch positions.” She says this with a laugh, flipping one of her untidy braids over her shoulder, but Oliver looks rather sullen.
“I’m not so sure we’ll get to play a season this year,” says Oliver, “not with”—he chances a glance at Percy—”not with the rumours about You-Know-Who…”
Percy stiffens. “He has not returned, so there should be no problems with Quidditch this year. Care to regale us with your plans for the team, Oliver?”
He wants to attribute Oliver’s failure to take this bait to the large amount of drink he has ingested, clear in his fluttering eyelids and wildly gesturing hands, but the wide expression he aims at Percy implies his focus is born of fear, not intoxication. Percy’s hand curls into a fist under the table and he bites his lip.
“Why would anyone make up something like that?” he asks in a hushed voice. “Why would Dumbledore want there to be such a risk to Wizarding society? What benefit does he get if it isn’t the truth—especially now that all his accolades are being taken away from him and he’s sticking to his story?”
Percy rolls his eyes, but Oliver barrels forward.
“What happened to Cedric Diggory if You-Know-Who didn’t return?”
Annabel sucks in a breath; Percy knows that while she was never close to Cedric, she was a housemate of his, apart from his vague condolences they’ve never addressed the issue head-on, and Percy hadn’t planned to. Edith’s knuckles have gone white where her hand is wrapped around her fork. Both girls have their eyes trained on Percy, waiting for his reply, looking for that comforting dismissiveness which propelled forward these biweekly dinners, his assurances that Dumbledore and Potter are lying, that everything is quite alright…
Has Harry ever seemed like the sort of person who needed more trouble in his life? echoes his father’s voice, loud as it was on the night Percy left the Burrow.
He is under no delusions that Annabel Entwhistle and Edith Newton, who were two of the most popular girls in their year, still hang about Percy Weasley because they like him as a person.
“Diggory’s death was a tragic accident,” says Percy, his voice strained. “That was why the Triwizard Tournament didn’t take place for so long, you know—the number of deaths. It was most tragic but certainly not an indication of You-Know-Who’s return.”
Annabel and Edith look instantly reassured. Edith’s knife, in fact, clatters against her plate as she drops it. Percy is reminded at once of her mad dash to Divination after breakfast, cutlery clanging in her wake, the warm ebb and flow of Hogwarts when he’d known it as a sanctuary rather than grounds for the inane lies of Albus Dumbledore to propagate across a young, impressionable population…
Oliver does not look convinced.
“He died, Oliver,” says Percy, quieter now. “You can’t come back from that.”
In lieu of responding to what Percy thinks is a very compelling argument, Oliver downs the remainder of his firewhisky and launches into a detailed explanation of Puddlemere United’s strengths and weaknesses, most of which have a lot to do with their Seeker. Annabel, who played Chaser at Hogwarts, eagerly pushes Oliver on in this line of conversation; Edith, who often couldn’t be bothered to turn up for a match, starts a tandem conversation with Percy on the topic of Transfiguration Today. The pleasant nature of these new discussions is interrupted only by servings of treacle tart and the occasional flicker of the light above their heads.
It occurs to Percy, sitting ensconced with his old school friends and eating enough to make him sick the next day, that in times like these it was no wonder most of the wizarding world did not believe that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named had returned.
————————————
Fudge barely glances at the mail summaries Percy sets on his desk, devoting a considerable amount of attention to an edition of the Daily Prophet. Upside down, Percy manages to make out ALBUS DUMBLEDORE DISMISSED FROM WIZENGAMOT and feels oddly cheered.
“Good day for the Ministry,” says Percy.
“I suppose,” says Fudge, “but any day the offices haven’t burned down is a good one at this rate.” He sighs, then picks up a cup of coffee Percy had brought him an hour before. “If Fairfax drops by your desk today, tell her to spend less time working out the mysteries of the universe and more figuring out what’s going to happen next Tuesday.”
Percy is bemused by this request, but doesn’t have enough faith in his seniority to press the issue. He does, however, notice that the fifty pages worth of parchment Audrey had given him two weeks ago lie in Fudge’s wastebasket, tucked away beneath his groaning desk.
“Will do, Minister,” he replies. “Will that be all?”
“All you can do,” snipes Fudge, and Percy takes this as a dismissal. He walks out of the office with a new sheaf of letters to reply to, including one from the Daily Prophet with several interview requests.
Stopping only to drop most of his work on his desk, he proceeds to collide with Audrey Fairfax herself as soon as he steps out the door.
“Morning, Weasley,” says Audrey brightly. Her crimson robes feature a number of burns, and the wand she grasps carelessly in her right hand is still smoking. Percy checks the front of his for damage, and, finding none, returns her greeting.
Tell her to spend less time working out the mysteries of the universe and more figuring out what’s going to happen next Tuesday.
Percy draws himself up to his full height, ready to make this pronouncement, but is cut off by the excited flapping of Audrey’s hands and the blur of her speech. Without waiting for him to reply, she launches into an explanation of the Impedimenta jinx’s applications to a wizard’s understanding of kinematics, and in her elaborate explanation she casts the jinx with such enthusiasm she knocks him to the floor.
“Good grief,” says Audrey, shaking her head and shoving her wand back through her hair, “I did not mean to do that, but I’ve never been good at controlling practical magic.” Muttering to herself, she helps Percy to his feet, and he casts a quick charm to collect his papers.
“You might want to factor intent into the Impedimenta equation,” says Percy, feeling harried but oddly interested. “It’s the difference between knocking against something and shoving it across the room—I have to assume you could measure the strength of convictions.”
Audrey’s eyes light up. “There’s a thought, Weasley, but it’s not been done before, you’d have to invent a whole new scale, and just think of the implications when it comes to accidental magic!” Her sentence takes sharp, unpredictable turns, but short of looking displeased with the amount of work Percy’s observation creates for her she looks enthused, scratching out the equation in midair with a finger, smiling to herself.
Now’s his chance to tell her what Fudge wanted; she won’t shoot a messenger who gave her an idea, will she?
“Did you want something from the Minister?”
“I was hoping to get a coffee, actually,” says Audrey, “only I’ve no idea where the machine is.”
“You could’ve summoned it,” offers Percy.
“What if it spilled?” asks Audrey. “Then again, half the charm in coffee is the company—at least at the Ministry, mind, because I’m sure the brew is made to dissuade you from drinking it, you waste less time that way—and company, it seems, has arrived.”
She beams at him, and Percy is distracted from Fudge’s instruction by the dense dark freckles across her nose and beneath her eyes, the gentle swoop of her dark bangs, the crooked front tooth revealed by her smile; her face, it seems, is possessed of character, and Percy is seized by the inclination to discover more of what that character is.
Besides, he can always tell her what Fudge said over coffee.
“It’s just to the left,” he says, “then three doors down. I’m right behind you.”