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“You’re still here?”
Percy sighed, dropping his forehead onto the table next to his half-finished breakfast. “Hello, Charlie.”
“No, really,” Charlie insisted, “why is he still here?” The words months after the rebuilding of Hogwarts was completed and his days stopped being occupied were left implied, and Percy ignored them just as hard as he was ignoring the rest of the question.
Percy could hear George snicker from somewhere behind him. “Well, Charlie, good old Perce here is still around because his career is over and his prospects are gone! ” Percy considered sitting up and telling his brother where he could stuff the exaggerated whining, because he did not sound like that, but could only really muster the energy for a few incoherent grumbles instead.
There was a hand on his shoulder, and Percy turned his head just enough to see Charlie looking down at him, brows furrowed with concern. “I’m sure you have plenty of career prospects, Percy, you’re incredibly smart. Just because you didn’t get your old position back-”
“It’s not about my old position,” Percy sighed, sitting up and resolving himself to explain this all yet again . “It’s about my life plan! I was supposed to work my way up, prove my competency, and then become Minister for Magic, but then I spent 90% of the war against Voldemort estranged from my family who were all actively supporting the bold heroes that defeated the darkest wizard magical Britain has ever produced, and only reunited with them at the very last second, and everybody in our generation knows it! They all think of me as either a turncoat or a coward, and either way they’re not going to vote me into office! It’s hopeless!” He leaned back, slumping as dramatically as he could while keeping all four of the chair’s feet firmly on the ground, because hopeless he may be but he’s not an animal like some of the hooligans he grew up with.
“I’m sure nobody thinks of you like that,” Charlie placated, and Percy snorted in disbelief. Changing tactics, Charlie continued “Even if they do, you can change their minds! There’s plenty of time, you can still work your way up.”
“But Charlie, ” George said, snickers still in his voice, and Percy’s irritation is tempered a little at the sound because of how rare it had been in the wake of Fred’s passing. “Everyone loves Schacklebolt as Minister, and they even liked Scrimgeour better than Fudge, so clearly a successful political career requires becoming an Auror, and Perce just isn’t cut out for that!”
Percy just groans miserably.
“He’s kind of right, even,” Ginny pipes up as she descends the stairs. “I mean, Dumbledore was never the Minister for Magic, but he totally could have been if he wanted to. Nowadays the best thing you can do for your political career is be seen as strong, capable, and heroic, and the best way to do that is to defeat a dark lord.”
“Which we’re fresh out of,” George tacks on.
“I still…” Charlie starts, but whatever optimism he was about to express is cut off by Ron’s voice as the boy walks into the kitchen.
“What if we weren’t though?”
The whole family turns to face the youngest boy in unison, and he holds his hands up in surrender. “I’m just saying. Hermione lent me this book last year, see, about muggle magic -”
“That’s an oxymoron,” Percy pipes up, and is flatly ignored.
“And it’s all about misdirection and distracting people and lies, right, because they don’t actually have magic, and I wasn’t all that interested, but what if it’s like that? We don’t actually need a dark lord, we just need people to be really sure there is one, and that shouldn’t be all that hard really.”
“Not that hard?” Percy repeats, aghast, and is once again flatly ignored.
“Besides, since the dark lord is gonna be made up, there’s no way anybody else can defeat him before Percy does! So.” Ron ends his little speech with a shrug.
“ Not That Hard?!” Percy repeats. “How on earth do you plan to get people to believe there’s a new Dark Lord running around already?”
Ron grins. “C’mon Percy, it’s like you’ve forgotten how I spent my school years already! I’m very familiar with the press.”
Percy stared down at the copy of the Daily Prophet in his hands, the bold headline reading The Concerning Rise of Dark Lord Kotuneijo: His horrific origins and dastardly goals!
“There’s absolutely no way,” he muttered, absolutely baffled at the nonsense staring back at him from the paper. Behind him, George was humming the song that had been stuck in their heads all month, ever since Ron had outlined his entirely absurd plan. “How? How on earth did you manage this?”
Getting the media to print an article or two about a new dark lord wasn’t difficult at all - they’d been friends with Luna for years, and therefore were all well aware that she would believe anything if it were unbelievable enough. A new Dark Lord that had no evidence of his existence, and yet whom the muggles had already become aware of? The bait was perfect, and with the boost in popularity from the war the Quibbler would at least be read even if it was unlikely to be believed about something this absurd and unpleasant.
Yet two weeks later, the Prophet was spewing their same made up story unironically .
“Oh, I have my ways,” Ron says, looking smug where he sits across from Percy. Percy aims his most aghast expression at his youngest brother, and after being laughed at for a moment he finally gets a more satisfactory answer. “Hermione got some blackmail on Rita Skeeter our fourth year of school,” Ron tells him candidly. “I just asked her for a favor, and Rita sold the story to the Prophet of her own accord.”
“And…” Percy said, staring down at the cackling madman depicted on the cover, wearing an eclectic mix of muggle and wizarding clothing items. “The photo?”
“Got Harry to sign a chocolate frog card for Dennis Creevey,” Ron said, looking entirely too smug about it. “Did you know he took up his late brother’s hobby of photography a few months ago?”
“Ah,” Percy said, before wandering upstairs, not bothering to ask who is in the costume that got photographed for the Dark Lord. His departure is accompanied by George’s warbling of “where did you go? Where did you come from, Kotuneijo?”
“No, that’s not going to work at all ,” Ron protested. “We still need it to be believable!”
“Given that your example was Lockhart, I assumed just about anything would be believable!” Hermione’s voice snipped back.
Percy paused on the stairs, debating with himself whether it was worth walking into whatever was going on, before steeling his nerves and entering the family room. He’d gotten a fresh haircut, his robes were neat, and he was standing up straight, because you gotta look the part, Perce, you’re gonna be a hero after all . As ridiculous as Ron’s plan was, it seemed to be working so far, and Percy isn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. He can at least have the decency to maintain his reputation if his brothers are willing to go this far to restore it.
“What’s all this about then?” he asked, walking into the front room where his youngest brother and said brother’s girlfriend were pickering over a piece of parchment covered in her classically cramped scrawl.
“No need to pull out the prefect voice, Perce, we were all prefects once,” Ron tells him casually, not looking up from the parchment he’s scrutinizing. “As far as your question goes, though, the answer is you.”
“Pardon?”
“We’re writing your memoir,” Hermione informs him. “Ron thinks that having a bestselling book might help catapult your political career after Lord Kotuneijo’s defeat, and seeing as how we’re building a career based on lies the way Lockhart did, I think it’ll work just fine. Especially since you’ll likely not be regularly asked to defeat dark lords while in the Minister’s office, so it won’t be as glaringly obvious as Lockhart’s incompetence was when he took the defense against the dark arts position.”
“Though you could totally be the DADA teacher for a bit too. Probably just a year, until we’re sure if the curse is broken, but you’re capable and care about education and it’d keep your reputation as a badass intact so long as you make it clear that you can actually do the job, unlike Lockhart,” Ron tells him, before looking up and pausing. “Nevermind, actually.”
Percy straightened his collar. “What? What do you mean nevermind?”
“You cut your hair,” Ron tells him, dropping the paper he’d been reading and moving to sit next to his girlfriend instead of across from her as he had been before. “I was really counting on the whole long haired Weasleys look heroic and Bill and Charlie Weasley are So Cool factor, and when you were a bit disheveled we could have made it work but. Well. Part of Lockhart’s popularity was his looks.”
“I look fine!” Percy protested. He’d taken quite a bit of care with his appearance today, actually, and is feeling more than a little offended.
“Mm.” Ron hums, clearly skeptical.
“Ronald Weasley, we are not wasting three weeks of work just because your brother doesn’t look as good with short hair!” Hermione said, picking up some of the parchment and rolling it up to smack his brother with. Percy just gaped, tugging self-consciously at his hair, before turning to walk back up the stairs, loosening his tie on the way.
“Doesn’t look as good with short hair ,” he grumbles to himself, falling onto his bed and decidedly not pouting. He can just grow his hair out again. It’s fine .
“You’re certain this is safe?” Percy asked, looking skeptically at where his brother was fiddling with the rifle he’d gotten from a muggle munitions shop overseas. Apparently one of his coworkers had been incredibly amused at their little scheme, and had some suggestions for using muggle equipment to pull off a convincing staged conflict.
“Well,” Charlie said, wiggling his hand back and forth. “I mean, I’ve made sure that there isn’t any live ammunition, so I’m mostly sure. Still best to double check a few more times though, with guns. Dangerous things. The right ammo can just,” he makes a sharp pointing motion with a couple of his fingers, accompanied by a sort of thwip sound. “Right through a Protego.”
“Live ammunition?” Percy asked, before amending his statement to “What do you mean the right ammo ?”
“Not this,” Charlie assures him, lifting up the box of what he’d called shells but which are clearly metal casings of some sort. “These are blanks. All the bang and flash, none of the dying.”
“Right,” Percy says, feeling a little faint about things.
“It was a good question!” Charlie assures him, “but I’m really being careful about it, promise.”
“Besides,” George adds, slinging an arm over Percy’s shoulder. “Asking things like if we’re certain something is safe is a surefire way to ruin the reputation of badassery we’re trying to construct for you here.”
“This is feeling like a worse idea every day,” Percy informs him dryly, tucking his growing hair behind his ear and walking primly back toward the Burrow.
“This feels decidedly unnecessary,” Percy insisted, already knowing it was a futile insistence.
“Shut up and look to your right for a moment,” Parvati insisted from behind him. Percy has absolutely no idea how she had been talked into their scheme; he doesn’t recall her being close with any of his family, and in fact remembers her being quite upset with Ronald and Harry’s treatment of her and her sister during the Yule Ball. Yet somehow, through no action of his own, she’s been talked into, if he’s understanding correctly, giving him a makeover?
Obediently, Percy looks to his right. The hands tugging at his hair shift position, and he can hear the tell-tale snipping shortly thereafter, though there isn’t nearly as much hair on the ground as he’d have expected for the amount of snips being done.
“Remind me what we’re doing here?”
“Looking the part, Percy,” Ron says, still flipping through that damned memoir he and his girlfriend wrote about Percy’s life. Percy has yet to read it himself, and is kind of dreading doing so if he’s being honest.
“I thought you wanted my hair to be long?” he asks, just to clarify. They’d made him take a potion specifically to grow out his hair more quickly after all.
“Long but styled,” Ron affirms, and Percy sighs, only for Parvati to pull more insistently at his hair for a moment.
“Look to the left now, if you would,” she says, and Percy obliges, because clearly he’s lost all control over his life and he’s already cooperated thus far, so really there’d be no point in putting up a fuss about it now.
From the backyard, there is an ungodly loud banging noise, and since this has been happening regularly for the past couple of weeks nobody in the living room bats an eye. “Dad again?” Ron asks.
“Yup,” George’s voice answers, the sound of the backyard door shutting following his voice. “What did you expect when Charlie brought in a bunch of muggle munitions? Even if they aren’t living bullets, they’re still muggle weapons. He’s fascinated!”
“We know,” Ginny says, jumping down the last two stairs and dropping a pile of clothes on the ground. Percy recognizes most of them from his own wardrobe. “Anyway, these are the ones that have to go,” she insists, pulling the top half of the pile off and tossing it carelessly next to the fireplace. The remainder of the clothes Percy doesn’t recognize, and he gets a smack on the back of his head for leaning away too suddenly when Ginny thrusts a couple of the garments next to his face.
“Stay still if you don’t want to look like a loon!” Parvati insists, and Percy dutifully sits straight again, cautiously eyeing the fabric Ginny is holding next to his face.
“What do you mean have to go ?” he asks, making air quotes around the phrase Ginny had used when discarding his robes. “Some of those are my favorite outfits!”
“Precisely the problem,” Ginny informs him, dropping the brighter red garment and patting Percy’s shoulder in a mockery of consolation. “They make you look far too put together to make this whole thing believable, and not nearly cool enough. We’re trying to make you swoon worthy.”
“I thought we were trying to make me a trustworthy political figurehead?” Percy insists, because hadn’t this entire scheme begun with his career woes?
“Same thing,” Hermione dismisses, passing another parchment over to Ron. “Oh, nice pick!”
“Thank you,” Ginny says, holding the burgundy - is that leather? - cloak up in front of Percy again. “I think it’ll do nicely.”
Defeating a dark lord isn’t easy. Percy knows this; he’s heard his family discuss the war from their perspective, he’s heard about Ron and Hermione and Harry’s year on the run, and he knows - deeply, viscerally knows - that it can take years of struggle to overthrow a madman once his influence has taken root.
It’s anticlimactic, then, how easy it is to fake kill their fake dark lord. The hardest part is dealing with the stagefright, because of course we can’t just fight him in our backyard, Percy, it has to be public! And People will admire you more if you take him down when he’s causing a ruckus and It’s fine, Harry and I are the on-shift aurors, we’ll make sure you don’t get arrested .
He’s trying very hard not to think of what an abuse of authority that assurance is as he eats his ice cream in Fortescue’s, watching Diagon for the appearance of whomever they’ve selected to play Dark Lord Kotuneijo today. He still has absolutely no clue who has been in the costume for any of their photoshoots.
When the racket starts outside, the loud bangs of the muggle guns Charlie had brought to the burrow months back accompanied by flashes of light and the sound of concrete falling to the lane of the alley, Percy rushes out, feeling his heart pounding in his throat because that’s not just guns . The guns don’t hurt people; if the weapons Charlie had brought were actually dangerous, their father would have maimed himself a dozen times over. Wands, however, wands could hurt people, and property damage was not part of the deal! This was all supposed to be staged!
But when he gets outside and down the road - one of the few running toward the chaos rather than away from it - the front of Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes has been blown inward, rubble coating the joke products and peruvian darkness powder filling the air and lending an ominous cast to the entire scene. In front of the building is a man in Kotuneijo’s ominous mask and american muggle-style cowboy cap, the strange breathing noise echoing as the screaming dies down.
The muggle gun is aimed at Percy, a wand held in the fake wizard’s other hand, and Percy struggles to remember what he’s supposed to do for a moment before falling back into character. Ginny had rehearsed this with him a few dozen times over - he wasn’t going to mess it up now.
Raising his own wand, he yells “Your reign of terror won’t gain any more of a foothold in Magical Britain!” and casts a disarming charm. It’s a weak one - more finesse than power - and he catches the fake dark lord’s wand as it spirals out of his hand, and… this is Dumbledore’s wand, isn’t it? The one Voldemort stole? Hadn’t Harry insisted on returning it?
Percy is so intent on examining the wand he’s just disarmed from their fake dark lord that he almost forgets that he’s supposedly killed the man, at least until a giant piece of rubble falls directly on top of whomever they had selected to play the dark lord. Percy stares at the chunk of ceiling that had once been part of the roof of Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes, and thinks about whether Ron and Harry are really going to be able to avoid arresting him after this.
His disarming charm had not been strong enough to throw their fake dark lord back into the wall like that. It had been planned, hadn’t it?
Why does nobody tell him anything ?
Then he hears the cheering, and turns to face the crowd gathered behind him, holding his wand in one hand and definitely Dumbledore’s wand in the other. Recalling the purpose behind this whole charade, Percy raises both wands in the air to greet the cheers, trying to look stoic and charming instead of confused and pants-shittingly nervous.
It must work, at least somewhat, because nobody seems in the least put off - instead, he’s being clapped on the back by Florian Fortescue and complimented on his gumption, “Not many willing to run right to the danger in defense of others, good lad!” and watching people hug each other with nearly as much jubilation as they had when the real dark lord was defeated by a real hero.
Harry and Ron arrive not long after, and George comes out from the back room to help them “clean up” his shop and “deal with” the body.
The body that oh-so-subtly flips Percy off as it’s being hauled away, causing his shoulders to relax for the first time since the ceiling fell.
Seriously, somebody should have warned him about that.
Percy doesn’t become Minister for Magic straight away - he’s still young, and it’s not election time besides - but it turns out his family was right. Defeating a dark lord did do wonders for his career prospects.
The release of his memoir - which he still hasn’t read, mind you - did even more. Percy has been in the headlines more than Harry Potter has recently, and he thinks Harry might be even happier about that than Percy is. Happy enough to declare that he’ll publicly back Percy’s bid for Minister when he does, eventually, choose to run.
In the meantime, though, his family has not stopped meddling. Ron and Hermione teamed up to give Percy a 12-step “actual path to success, pinky swear” career plan, with numbers 1 (Defeat a Dark Lord) and 2 (Publish a kickass memoir) already crossed off.
So Percy walks into his first day at his new job, because he’s in too deep now, and he’s got a fresh reputation to maintain and a wardrobe picked out by his sister that he is expressly forbidden from altering.
“Welcome to Defense Against the Dark Arts,” Percy intones, one ankle resting on his opposite knee per Ginny’s direction at home for maximal coolness factor , a direct quote. “I’ll be your professor this year.” He waves his wand - just his normal wand, Dumbledore’s having supposedly been returned to his grave yet again by Harry after their scheme wrapped up - to reveal a syllabus painstakingly written across the blackboard. “Let’s get started.