Chapter Text
Percy stares, seething, at the sight of chaos before him. “I am literally going to kill them.”
The flat, usually the picture of perfect cleanliness under his watchful eye, has somehow, in the mere thirty-two hours since he has last been home, turned into a pigsty that rivals the disorderliness of Fred and George’s childhood bedroom.
The floor is a mess, littered with empty pints of fire whiskey, ashtrays full of cigarette butts, and plates of half-eaten junk food. Steeling himself to glance at the kitchenette, Percy sees that someone has magicked the words ‘ Puddlemere Motherfuckers ’ onto the cabinets in bright red letters, and that the poor self-cleaning sink is working overtime to get all of the dirty pots and pans washed and hung on the drying rack. The singular plastic garbage bag that they have in the flat—Davies, in his never-ending quest to get them all to use more muggle items, had gifted it to Cedric as a birthday present—hangs limply over the countertop, split down the middle and filled with what looks like live maggots.
Wrinkling his nose, Percy turns his attention to the giant gold celebration banner that Oliver had hung up the two nights before. Evidently, the spell that he cast was wearing off, because instead of screaming out “Quidditch League Champions” every 30 seconds, it had started to hiccup and smell of some mixture of parsley and cockroach clusters.
“I stay at the office on overtime for one night—one night—and this is what happens,” he mutters to himself.
Ordinarily, this madness could be solved in a jiffy with a quick cleaning spell, but, having stayed up for the past two days straight lost in trial preparations, Percy doesn’t even have the energy for it at this point. Slowly navigating his way through the mess, he makes his way to his bedroom door, just imagining how wonderful it will feel to finally get some sleep.
…And then how wonderful it will feel a couple of hours later when he tells off his idiot roommates and his idiot boyfriend for throwing this rager. Why they insist on throwing these awful parties over and over again, Percy will never understand. They all just end up with killer hangovers afterwards anyways.
If they had just followed my idea for a celebration bash, this entire mess could have been avoided , he grouches, carefully sidestepping what looks like a half-eaten, somehow already moldy treacle tart. Grab beers with the team at The Leaky Cauldron, maybe see what the deal is with those muggle carry-oak bars that Davies has been going on about for weeks, listen to the highlights from the match one more time, and then we’re all in bed by 10 O’Clock.
Oliver had promised that he’d at least consider Percy’s plan before organizing one of his more traditional parties, even saying that a more low-key event might be just what the mates needed. But looking back on it, Percy should have been a little more suspicious when his boyfriend had downright insisted that he work overtime the weekend after Puddlemere United won their first championship game in seventeen years. That had clearly been a recipe for disaster.
Too caught up in self-deprecation, Percy nearly slips in a puddle of spilt butterbeer just outside his bedroom door. Swearing, he steadies himself by shifting his weight onto the oddly squishy blanket laid out like a welcome mat over the threshold.
“Hey, watch where you’re stepping, jag-off!” The blanket says.
Startled, Percy glances down to find Oliver’s highly irritated-looking face peeking out from under the duvet that is usually folded neatly at the end of their bed.
“Shit, Perce, it’s you,” Oliver whines, covering his head with his arms. “Don’t look at me, ok?”
“Jag-off?” Percy chides his boyfriend, smirking slightly. “Do I really deserve that?”
“You woke me up,” Oliver moans, curling back in on himself. “And now my head is killing me.”
“I don’t think that you have me to blame for that, Ollie,” Percy says, squatting down closer to the ground. “But maybe you’d have more luck finding a culprit if you thought about the copious amounts of firewhiskey that you’ve no doubt been ingesting, or the fact that you spent the night on the floor. You do have a bed, you know.”
“Beds are a social construct,” Oliver counters, taking advantage of Percy’s position to snuggle up to him and use his leg as a pillow. “Plus, you weren’t here, and I knew it would feel weird sleeping in our bed without you.”
Percy shakes his head, trying to suppress the smile forming at his lips. It’ll always be a mystery to him how, whenever the two of them inevitably find themselves in a situation like this one, Oliver somehow always manages to say the sweetest things. “Were you really waiting out here all night for me to come back?” He asks.
“I was,” Oliver mumbles, tracing circles on Percy’s ankle with his pinky. “And it was gonna be really romantic until I fell asleep and kind of killed the mood.”
“I think that the state you left the flat in was a bit of a mood-killer to begin with,” Percy snorts, gesturing behind them to the common area. “I mean, what is that in Cedric’s garbage bag?”
Oliver groans. “That’s Lee’s collection of Argentinian beetle-somethings. He brought them back from zoologist training or whatever. They taste like Christmas, I’ll tell you that, but according to him they’re supposed to make you shit like a hail storm.”
Percy wrinkles his nose. “And look at that, the mood is dead again.”
Oliver opens his mouth, but before he can elaborate, both his and Percy’s attentions become diverted by a sound emanating from Cedric’s room, the next door down. The wood floor on the other side of the wall creaks softly under the weight of tip-toeing feet, as if Cedric is trying to sneak out without anyone hearing him.
Percy scoffs. Fat chance of anyone escaping the flat unscathed this morning.
“Cedric, is that you?” He muses, reluctantly extracting himself from Oliver’s embrace and standing up. “Don’t you dare think I’m letting you out of here without first making you clean up this mess.”
Percy stomps over to Cedric’s door, yanking it open with a smirk. Already he’s planning what disgusting corner of the flat he’ll make Cedric clean. The bathroom? That always gets absolutely wrecked whenever they throw a party. Or perhaps the balcony, which no doubt is splattered with piss and throw-up.
Maybe he’ll just split the difference and make Cedric deal with both.
Percy’s pomp vanishes the moment he sees what—or rather who—is on the other side of the door.
“Cho?”
She blushes a deep crimson color, clutching her wand and heels closer to her chest. “Hi, Percy.”
Percy couldn’t have thought of a less likely person to be sneaking out of Cedric Diggory’s bedroom. He doesn’t have the best sense of Cedric’s love life, certainly--Cedric is a private person who normally treats girls well enough so that they’re not forced to do the walk of shame like this--but if Percy knows one thing it’s that that Cedric could never be convinced to give Cho Chang so much as the time of day. To hear Davies tell it at least. But as the seconds tick by and it remains clear that it is in fact a hastily dressed Cho Chang standing in front of him, the evidence piles up pointing to Davies being dead wrong.
“Percy, uh, could you move?” Cho asks, clearing her throat quietly. He can see the blush of her mortification seeping further down her neck as he goes longer and longer without having said or done anything.
“Wait, ‘Cho’?” Oliver calls from his resting spot in front of Percy’s door, his sleep-addled brain finally processing the interaction. “Did you just say ‘Cho’?”
Percy and Cho wince at the same time, and the former shoots a death glare at his boyfriend.
Oliver, catching on, slaps his hand over his mouth. “Shit, sorry.”
Cho bites her lip. “Listen, umm, I…well, obviously, I didn’t expect anyone to see me leaving,” she says, smiling tightly as if to try and make light of the situation.
When both Percy and Oliver fail to respond, she reiterates. “I just—look, if Cedric asks, just tell him that I’m sorry--believe me, I am--but…it just wasn’t right, it was a--a mistake, really a mistake.”
After an eternity of stupefied silence, both Percy and Oliver manage a curt nod in reply, which Cho takes as all of the assent that she needs.
“Thanks,” she breathes, sounding relieved. Giving both Percy and Oliver a final appreciative smile, she slips on her heels, squeezing past the boys and back into the main room. Muttering a spell under her breath, she clears a slight path through all of the muck before quietly scampering out the door.
Oliver jumps to his feet the moment she leaves, as if some silencing spell has just been lifted from the flat. “What the fuck was that?” He yells.
“Keep your voice down!” Percy hisses. “Cedric and Davies are still asleep, you nitwit.”
“Sorry,” Oliver says, and then repeats, more quietly this time, “what the fuck?”
Percy chuckles humorlessly. “That was certainly not expected.”
“Well…” Oliver begins.
“ Well ?”
“Well, I mean, I knew that she was here last night, but… I never thought—I mean, I didn’t see—“ He gestures wildly in the direction of Cedric’s room. “I had no idea about any of that.”
Percy leans his back against the wall, sliding down to the floor to join Oliver. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but that was the same girl who, you know, broke Diggory’s heart into a million pieces—”
“And let the shards sink to the bottom of the Black Lake?” Oliver finishes. “Yup, that’s her.”
“But why would he—I mean, if she really destroyed him that badly, why would they—?”
“The straight man’s sexual drive is a mystery to us all, Perce,” Oliver sighs. “But it is absolutely none of our business.”
“Should we…should we tell him, though? That we saw her?”
“Let’s see how today goes,” Oliver shrugs. “For all we know, when he wakes up he’ll have convinced himself that it was all a beetle-induced hallucination, and the whole thing is bygones by tomorrow.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Percy replies, struggling to stifle a yawn as he leans into Oliver’s shoulder. “Or, no, I’ll sleep to that.”
Oliver smiles, kissing Percy lightly on the forehead. “Baby, that’s not a thing that people say.”
“Well it’s a thing that I just said, and I’m people, aren’t I?” He asks, the yawn escaping this time despite his best attempt at keeping it down.
“I think it’s time that you get some proper shut-eye, Mr. Magical law Enforcement.” Oliver says. “You’ve had a right 48 hours of saving the world, I bet.”
Percy chuckles. “Oh, you’re in no position to be sweet-talking me, Ollie. This flat is a pigsty right now and if you don’t think that I’m going to throw you a mop and broom in a few hours—yes, I’ll make you do it the muggle way, shut it—and have you scrub this place top to--”
“Shhh,” Olives shushes, putting a finger to Percy’s lips. “You need to nap, not devise punishments”.
Percy yawns again. “Oh very well then.” He allows his eyes to close and his mind to wander away from the continued question of Cedric’s love life as sleep begins to take him. “If you insist.”