The Perils of Being Percy

Fudge was busting Percy's hump at the office, again, just before Halloween. Percy was fairly certain Fudge was about to do his nut. He paced the length of his office, day after day, rubbing his stubby hands together and muttering nonsense phrases like, "It's the glasses. That's what it's got to be. Those specs are enchanted, I'll bet." Ending his paranoid rant in favor of an actual thought, Fudge bellowed, "Weasley! I want you to go to the library and look up the registration for every single pair of magical spectacles on the planet. Copy them out in triplicate and bring them back to me."

I wonder if I could convince Penny to find a Healer at St. Mungo's suspicious enough of Fudge to evaluate him for the Closed-Ward? Percy pondered vindictively, sitting at his desk, copying registration slips. He took out his wand, pointed it at an incriminating slip of parchment and muttered "INFERMIO". The slip torched itself into nothingness on his desk.

"What in creation are you burning up out there now, Weasley?" Fudge roared, quite used to seeing Percy's desk in flames, but feeling very jumpy lately. "Haven't you come across anything about Dumbledore's specs, yet?"

"No, sir, I'm afraid not," Percy apologized. Scraping the ashes of Dumbledore's spectacle registration into his palm and tossing them in the rubbish bin under his desk, he added, "I'm terribly sorry, Minister, but there is no existing registry that incriminates Dumbledore's spectacles."

"Damn it, Weasley!" Fudge wailed marching out to confront Percy at his desk. "You must help me find something on that man! How does he do it? Dumbledore's been second-guessing the actions of this administration for months now; it's positively uncanny. Keep working on those registrations for me."

"Yes, sir," Percy demurred, glancing up at Fudge between scribbles, watching him fret to and fro in front of the desk.

"Lucius Malfoy put me onto looking into those specs of his. Malfoy thinks they're illegally enchanted and give Dumbledore prescient vision. I was certain he was right about that." Pontificating into Percy's bespectacled face, Fudge advised, "Never trust a man wearing glasses, I always say."

Handily having dealt with that crisis, Percy arrived home from work with enough time to help Penny decorate the flat for Halloween. "Hi, sweetie." He greeted her swinging her around when she wrapped her arms around his neck.

"Percy!" she squealed, " I'm so glad you came home. Look what I've got for our decorations." Releasing him she pulled a small cage out from under the table, and presented it full of squeaking little bats.

"Oh, those are great, Pen." Percy smiled, "I see you've been going batty without me."

Opening the cage door, letting a flutter of tiny winged rodents out to soar around the room, she enlightened him, "Bat's are wonderful animals you know. Very good for the environment, they eat disease carrying insects, poisonous slugs, some of the large ones will even eat snakes."

"Couldn't find any larger ones, huh?" Standing back, Percy watched little winged fuzz balls swoop floor to ceiling in the flat.

"Well, that's all right, isn't it? I'll have to fix something for these to eat as it is. I've bought them some nice caterpillars." Taking out a container of caterpillars, and Percy's best chopping knife, she started dicing them on the kitchen counter.

"Penny!" Percy protested. "Use a cutting board will you? How many times must I ask you do that?" Marching over he grasped her hand over the hilt of the knife. "And give me this knife. I'm going to have to decontaminate it now." Eyeing the knife with revulsion Percy threw it into the sink. A small bat landed on his arm, peering at him discontentedly. "I think it must be hungry," he said, scratching the bat between the ears. It blinked beady eyes at him, showing its fangs.

"Here, give it a caterpillar then. Maybe they'll just eat them whole, " Penny said impatiently, placing a black squirming one in Percy's palm. It devoured the insect, except for the tail: that part the bat heaved back onto Percy's palm, partially chewed. The whole experience was rather revolting.

"I thought you liked animals." Penny reproved his look of horror.

"I do like animals," Percy answered carefully wiping the caterpillar guts off of his hands, and scrubbing them with soap and hot water beneath the faucet. "Everyone in my family likes animals. Take Charlie, he even likes the ones large enough to roast his face. I do have Hermes, remember?"

"Well, I forget about him, don't I," Penny chided. "When you leave him in the Ministry's Owlery most of the time? Why don't you ever bring him home?"

"Not much room for him here in this dinky flat," Percy grumbled washing his knife, getting it ready to use for their meal that night. "What happens to the bats after Halloween?"

"Can't I keep them?" Penny teased, chucking the one on his arm under the chin. "I think she likes you."

"How do you know it's a girl?" he said gesturing toward it with his head.

"Because she likes you."

"Well, you can't keep her, or any of her relatives," Percy said firmly. "When we buy a cottage I'll get you a dog. And you can't keep them flying around all night, either. Go close the bedroom door. I don't want to sleep with bats tonight."

Penny did as she was told, returning to the counter to help him chop vegetables for stir-fry. "Do you really want to get a dog?" I always thought of you as being a cat man."

"We can have as many of both as you like if we ever have the room," Percy promised her, whisking vegetables in the wok. "I just don't ever want another rat."

"I didn't know you ever had a rat," she said, issuing steam enough from her wand to soften the rice. "You've never told me about it."

"By the time I met you I'd already given him to Ron," Percy said. "When I made prefect my parents bought Hermes for me and Ron never had a pet."

"What did you call him?" Penny asked, setting the table, and pouring the wine.

"Scabbers," Percy replied. "I found him in the broom shed when Ron was a baby. My parents wouldn't let me have a pet, and I was a bit lonely. Charlie and Bill were always off doing something with each other. Fred and George, well I don't want to talk about them. Anyway, he seemed to listen to me when I talked to him. He sort of scabbered back like he might be talking too, sometimes."

They sat down to eat and Percy continued with his tale, "He became quite tame actually. Rode on my shoulder, eating the food right out of my hand. My mother felt sorry for me because I had to make friends with a rat, she let me keep him."

"What sort of things did you talk to him about?" Penny asked feeling a pitiful twinge for tiny Percy alone in the broom shed talking to a rat.

Percy shrugged. "Pen, will you pour me some more wine?" She poured and he said, "I told him the usual sort of thing you would expect a boy to tell a rat: I wonder when Fred and George's real mother and father are coming to pick them up? Ron hangs on my shirttail and won't leave me in peace. Ginevra cries all the time unless I carry her where ever she wants to go."

"Who's Ginevra?"

"I know we haven't visited with my family in a while, but you do remember my sister don't you? She's about this tall?" Percy held his hand level at sitting shoulder height, suddenly sounding snappish and sarcastic. "Red hair? Spunky? Wants to devote her life to unicorns?

"Oh, stop!" Penny protested, stung by his tone. "Of course, I remember your sister, Ginny. I didn't have a clue who you were talking about when you said Ginevra."

"Ginny's a nickname. You know Penny is short for Penelope. Percy is short for Percival. Ginny is short for Ginevra."

"I did not know that your real name was Percival." Penny giggled.

"I'd prefer that it wasn't. I refused to answer to it as soon as I was able to speak. Just one more issue I have to take up with my parents one of these days."

Penny sat puzzling over Percy's mother's sense of nomenclature. "Your mother named you and your sister after characters in the Legend of King Arthur."

"Didn't know you'd read it," Percy snubbed her, put into a funk over thinking about his family and feeling exhausted and overwhelmed by his failures at work. "Whenever your nose is in a book it's always got either a deep philosophical meaning, or horrifying photographs inside of it."

"Percy!" she cried a little offended. "Don't be so mean to me. I'm only curious about your family."

He wasn't being fair, Percy knew. But talking about his family frustrated him. He'd always been an outsider with them, no matter how hard he worked to fit in. He missed them dreadfully anyway, and was hardly making up for their loss in job satisfaction. Penny was the only thing right in his life at the moment, and in a bizarre blitz of self-punishment he didn't feel as though he even deserved her. Percy jumped up from the table, gathering the dishes with a clatter. Took them to the sink and started scrubbing them clean.

"Whatever is the matter with you now? Don't get yourself into a snit," Penny pleaded exasperatedly.

"I do not snit." Percy refuted his mood tersely, continuing to scrub, pursing his lips in a disapproving manner.

"Well what is it then? We were having a nice dinner, a nice conversation, all of a sudden you're cranky."

"I'm tired," he growled. "Tired of working all of the time. Tired of cleaning up after you all of the time. Would it kill you to pick up the flat now and again?"

"Being able to see my reflection in the kitchen faucet just isn't as important to me as it is to you," Penny taunted, watching him polish the fixture. "Life isn't all about work, you know? Would you like to see 'Percy Weasley, he cleaned very well and worked hard all of his life' carved onto your tombstone?"

Percy flung the dishrag aside and grabbed her wrist. His tone of voice startled her. "That isn't funny. Grow up, Penny."

Penny jerked her wrist away from. "You used to have a sense of humor. I'm getting damned sick of the sudden seriousness all the time. If growing up means working myself into an early grave, and forgetting how to laugh, I don't want it."

Percy retired alone to the bedroom early. Penny watched him through the open doorway. He lay silently on the bed staring at the ceiling. His long freckled arms crossed behind his head, his long legs dangling over the footboard. She tucked her bats back into their cage, folding their flapping wings gently, thinking about what Percy told her at dinner.

For the first time she had a crystal clear vision in her head of what his childhood had looked like. Surrounded by people who depended on him, Percy had still felt alone. His brothers had each other. His sister had her fondness for unicorns. Although, Penny's strong suspicion was that Ginny had a stronger devotion to a powerful young man nowadays than she did to unicorns. Now that she and Percy had each other, was she the only thing standing between him and loneliness? It didn't seem possible since his family was so large. Yet, he looked very lost and alone to her much of the time, despite his achievements and his confident demeanor. He always seemed to be judging himself against some invisible standard she couldn't see.

Going into the bedroom she blew out the light and sat on the bed beside Percy. Thinking he was asleep she bent to kiss him on the forehead. He wasn't sleeping. He grabbed her wrist again and tugged her down to lie on top of him. "I'm sorry I was cross with you." He apologized in a whisper, nuzzling her neck. "Take off your clothes and come to bed with me."

Typical, Penny thought, tendrils of heat spiraling up her body as his lips moved south. Nothing got in the way of Percy's libido. Sex was his stand-by solution to just about every problem that sprung up between them. A bigger problem might be that it always worked for him. Penny took off her clothes for him. He was well pleased by that. She sensed his dark mood lightening considerably.

No sooner had she crawled under the covers with him than he was moving inside of her, loving her from behind, his face buried in the curls at the base of her neck. He thrust deep. Penny purred, arching her back, drawing him in, every muscle tightened.

"Penny. Sweet girl," Percy panted, teeth clenched, holding back for her. "Is this good?"

Good? Good wasn't the word for making love with Percy. Sex with Percy was a transformative experience that beat anything Penny had ever seen in Transfiguration. From their first encounter onward, Percy convinced Penny that anyone who said sex was over-rated obviously had failed to put any decent effort into the enterprise. Penny's eyes rolled into the back of her skull so far they might well fallen out the back of her brain before he finished with climaxing her. This was their gift, their magic that they made together. She believed in it wholeheartedly, not only in the moment, but all of the time. Leaning her head back into the lee of his neck and shoulder she murmured, "I would have to be out of my mind to ever leave you. There isn't another human being alive that could make me feel this way."

"I know you're not crazy," Percy mumbled into his pillow as he released her, rolling onto his stomach, and preparing for sleep. "I was just reminding you of the reasons you wouldn't want to leave me."

Too true, she'd been tired when she came to bed, after a bout of lovemaking she was sinking into slumber fast. Still, she wondered confusedly as she slipped off to sleep: At what point had either one of them started to worry that she might ever leave?