The Perils of Being Percy

Percy and Penelope went on quarreling very bitterly early Christmas morning after the inevitable occurred. Penny, about to leave the flat for her shift at St. Mungo's, asked Percy one last time to come with her and visit with his father on the holiday.

Percy refused her, and continued refusing her for over an hour, while she stalked him all over the flat, chastising with every step. "How can you say you won't go?" came the thousandth wail that morning, to add to the thousand of the previous night. "On Christmas Day? Percy, what on earth has gotten into you lately? I don't care what sort of argument you and your father had. Surely it's not so terrible that you can't make it up to him when he's ill on Christmas?"

"Yes, it is." Percy gritted his teeth to keep from shouting back for the thousandth time. Penny's voice grew louder. So loud he wanted this year's Weasley Christmas sweater back more than ever so that he could wrap it around his ears and deaden the sound of her nagging.

"You know I'm beginning to feel ashamed of you, Percy. Really, I am. And I never imagined I'd ever hear myself say that to you," Penny yelled, truly very angry with him for the first time ever, and meaning every word.

Giving up on keeping a cool head, Percy found himself saying something on a sore subject between them. He responded sharply, "Give up on it, Penny, and just butt out of this! It's not your business if I neglect my sick father." Whirling on her. Fists clenched. So suddenly that Penny backed away, he added with invective, "You have no rights to be ashamed of the way I treat my family since you aren't even a part of it! We aren't legally married, and that's been your choice. So stop playing at being Mrs. Weasley and leave me alone!"

Penny's expression altered rapid fire. Switching from anger to stunned silence, then deepest heartfelt hurt in the space of about three seconds. Percy watched her eyes filling up with tears, stubbornly clenching his jaw. He was so furious with her he couldn't bring himself to take it back. Lips trembling, too distressed to Apparate without the risk of splinching, Penny grabbed her coat and bag running as fast as she could out of the flat and away from him.

Percy had plenty of time to beat himself up while she was working. Wandering around the flat, cleaning, he heaped emotional abuse onto his own head. He cleaned the kitchen and the lavatory. Made their bed neatly, tucking in the four corners, and fluffing the pillows. Put away all of the clean laundry. Folding everything neatly in the drawer, left side for his things, right side for Penny's.

Percy definitely seemed to have the mindset of a married man even if he didn't believe he actually was one. Scrubbing the kitchen floor, he rebuked himself, Very nice, Percy. You were truly brilliant this morning. Wake up early on Christmas morning, and send your girl off to work, just make sure she has a really good reason to cry all the way there before she goes.

Dusting in the bedroom he heaped guilt upon his guilt, mixing it with his misery and just a touch more guilt, until roughly the noon hour. Before that time arrived, Percy had officially made himself disconsolate. When it passed, he slid down onto a chair next to the scrupulously clean kitchen table and buried his head in his arms.

Penny should have been home before noon. At ten minutes to one, Percy got up from the table, grabbing his jacket on the way out, determined to find her. He had to make things right between them. If it meant following her around the hospital, running into his suspicious siblings, his sobbing mother, and his wounded father all in the one day, he was prepared to do it.

Officially married, or no, they had a committed relationship. For Percy that meant Penny sleeping in their bed with him every night that he was home. It also meant sticking it out with him through thick and thin. Right now things were thin. He acknowledged the problems in their relationship and that his forced reticence was the primary cause, but if she kept pulling away from him every time they quarreled there would be no relationship left to salvage when this was all over. He was bound to force this conflict to its inevitable conclusion, that is to say, his own inevitable conclusion. Penny belonged in his life, and in his bed. He would lock the two of them up in this flat with an "Ensnaro" charm to make his point, if he had to.

Apparently coming to some logical conclusions of her own Penny walked in to the flat at five minutes to one bumping into Percy, who she couldn't see over the bag of groceries she carried. Awkwardly working around one another he shifted to one side, she slipped by and set the groceries on the table. "Christmas dinner," she said nodding towards the bag, and pulling off her coat and gloves.

"Penny," he said filling with relief, "I was just coming to find you. I wanted to tell you that---"

Pausing in his train of thought he realized she wanted to hear things now that he couldn't possibly tell her. There was no explaining the real reason he wouldn't visit his father, or the real source of the quarrel in his family, and he refused to lie to her. Finally, pulling her into his arms, he said, "I'm sorry about our quarrels lately. There are things I want to say to you that I just can't right now. And I need you to believe that I'm doing the right thing, even though I can't explain it."

Not surprising him, she tried to pull away but he wouldn't let her go. One arm remained hooked firmly around her waist. Penny placed both hands on his chest and pushed, increasing the space between them and commenting, "We need to talk, Percy."

All of her efforts didn't budge his hold an inch, and the last thing he wanted to do was talk. Talking only caused trouble. "Penny, this has been the worst Christmas Day of my entire life, ever. And I'm including the year that Fred and George destroyed my working model of the universe as soon as the last sticking charm stuck. The only thing I want to do is go to bed and pretend that this day has already ended, and I want you to be in it with me while I do that."

Percy had the advantage. The constant battling left Penny's nerves raw. She hadn't grown up in a large family where squabbling and bickering between siblings occurred every day. Quarreling with Percy this way, and especially this often shook her clear to the roots of her good-natured soul. She felt so alone, and missed him so much, and here he was standing right in front of her. So she let him lead her by the hand into the bedroom, not forgiving, and certainly not forgetting, but at least seeking peace.

He sat down on the bed, tugging her with him until she stood between his long legs. "I want to watch you undress yourself for me." Penny expected that, and although she wasn't in the mood for a strip tease it beat arguing, so she peeled off her clothes article after article. Tossing them onto the floor between their feet knowing that Percy would pick them all up later. If she really got lucky he'd take them to the cleaners for her.

Leaning back onto his elbows, Percy watched her undressing for him, thinking she was very much like his favorite story. Revealing secrets to him every time he read her right. Her hands were shaking. A dangerous distance had grown between them, she was nervous, so was he, and he hoped it didn't show. Even when she was petrified at Hogwarts he knew it was only a matter of time before he had her back. Things weren't so simple this time, no magic potion was going to heal this breach, and he didn't know how big of a bridge he could build between them using only his own body, but he was about to give it his best shot. He had read once that sex was the glue that could hold a relationship together. These past few months he'd been reapplying that glue to the broken edges of their romance as often as he could, but even strong glue wouldn't hold together something that shattered. Grasping her wrists in one hand he pulled her down with him, rolling them both to the middle of the bed. Using his mouth and his hands he began pleasing her with all the ways he knew best.

He had been behaving strangely, but the familiar hands on her body grounded her. This was her lover, and Penny tried to capture a kiss, but he avoided kissing her lips. Feeling him touching her intimately and long-fingered, she gasped, giving up the kiss for the moment, and settled for wrapping her arms around his neck. Eventually, though, his clothes against her bare skin chafed at sensitive areas. She wanted to feel his bare flesh against her own. Moving her hands to the buttons of his shirt he startled her by shoving them away. She tried reaching lower and was rewarded with a gruff, "Stop it." He held her wrists away from touching his body. She realized then, too late, that Percy didn't want to make love. He was waging another battle, this time in bed.

Penny, already heart sore, chilled to the bone from this treatment. Going to bed with Percy meant being set ablaze, now he was purposely giving her the freeze. Being naked made her more vulnerable to his emotionally frigid touches and she knew he knew it. Struggling to sit up, she attempted to catch his eye, but he refused her that intimate contact as well. Trying to squirm away he pinned her firmly with one long limb and deep reaching fingers.

Percy meant to his point home. Ignoring her mounting distress he kept going with it and she stopped fighting. It was a losing battle in any case. He knew just how to touch her, and where, setting her body on fire, even though her heart was on ice. She came hard against his hand, crying out, and he let her go.

Feeling as though their cozy connubial bed had just been turned into a slick surface of shivering unemotional consciousness, Penny wanted no part of him. Curling herself into a tight ball, she avoided his touches altogether. Not exactly what he had intended. Reaching out and grasping her shoulder, Percy demanded, "Turn over and look at me." His heart was slamming hard against her naked back letting Penny know he'd feigned indifference on purpose. That knowledge hurt even more and she refused to respond to him.

He wanted to make her stop withdrawing from him, to show her how he felt when she did. Apparently the Prefect's Guide to Committed Love 101 was the mistaken course. When did words speak louder than actions? That was a tough lesson to learn for a young man who made his way in the world using a sharp quill. Feeling frustrated, but sounding very harsh, he demanded again, "Penny, I mean what I say now. Turn yourself over for me."

Anticipating the launch of a new attack, Penny flew at him in self-defense. Clinging so tightly to him that Percy didn't think he could squeeze a galleon between their bodies anywhere. Burying her face into his neck, the only exposed skin available, she pleaded brokenly, "Please don't make me do this with you anymore, Percy."

He wanted to clarify the point of the lesson but he might have done better just to stab her with his quill. "Hey, this has been your game, Penny. You started it. I'm just playing along."

Seriously debating a mad rush to the door, in the small likelihood that he wouldn't come after her, Penny decided to fight this battle to its brutal finish, instead. He might have started it, but she was ending it. "I don't enjoy being played with, Percy. It's making me feel perfectly wretched about myself, and even worse about you."

"I don't want to play games with you, Penny." Frustrated, he pushed her away and stood up leaving her to shiver, admonishing, "I'm trying to live my life with you. This is our life together. I don't ever want either one of us to feel worse about our relationship than we do right now. Don't you see that you can't keep holding yourself back from me just because you don't get your own way?"

Pulling the blanket tightly around her, Penny sat up to confront him. Tears threatened ominously, portending a total loss of control. But she held them back long enough to say, "So, what? You've decided I deserved to spend some time in detention with you? Getting me into bed was all about making a point?" It sounded very much worse coming from her in that tone of voice, and clearly had been a really bad idea, disconcerting her far more than he had meant to. "You wanted to punish me? Wanted to make me feel bad? Well, I do," she said, bringing home the depths of her distress. "I feel really, really bad----" her voice broke.

Roiling in the back of her mind there were more angry words. Nasty angry words she wanted to lash at him: ill tempered, pompous, unyielding and unashamedly arrogant were a few struggling to the forefront of her tongue, but not one of them would come out of her mouth minus a wail and crying would spoil the effect. For that all those things were true, true too was that he had always treated her lovingly, and solicitously, in bed. Had not ever treated her with intentional cruelty. Feeling that he was being cruel now, using their love to come out ahead in an argument, hurt her so much that her anger was a washout.

Recognizing the signs of impending emotional disaster Percy tried to subdue the tide by offering up his body for her solace. Taking off his own clothes, he flung them over the bedposts and climbed back into the bed with her. He sat beside her, hunched against the bed rails. Rubbing his bleary eyes with his palms, feeling so despondent, and so wretchedly upset with himself and the state of his life that he couldn't believe he was only twenty years old. He was tired of his job, tired of being heartsick, and especially tired of displeasing Penny whom he loved so much. They'd been intimately involved for four years and suddenly he was finding it impossible to communicate with her. A man who wrote for a living shouldn't have that problem.

Huddled under her side of the blanket, Penny was giving him the "touch me and die" look. No touching. No healing words that didn't require him to lie, so no talking. He didn't have much to steady their relationship with. The fact that she was still sitting in bed with him though, said that she believed he might make it right. She did love him and that was worth quite a lot.

"Penny, I am so sorry," Percy said, turning to her, trying to make her look at him. "I was just trying to show you that---sweetie, don't cry. I didn't mean to make you cry." He choked up for a minute, swallowing hard to dissolve the hard lump clogging his throat. Knocking his head hard against the headboard, he croaked out, "I am such an idiot. Penny, please believe me. I wasn't trying to hurt you this way. I love you. You know that I love you, right?"

She nodded, wiping a tear off her cheek with the back of her hand. Trying to pretend he didn't have the power to make her cry, still refusing to look at him. Pulling back everything hard inside. Away from that awful ability he had to hurt her so much.

He shifted a little bit closer, wanting to hold her, but settled for tugging the blanket up around both of them. A horrible strangled sob escaped through her lips despite her best efforts, and Penny laid her head on his shoulder, desperately needing to be consoled and unable to hide it any longer.

He tried to comfort her. Blinking back tears as laid his head against hers and twined his arms around her shoulders. A casual brush of his hand her breast caused her to flinch and it occurred to him that her cycles, of which he scrupulously kept track, were due any day. Probably this day, explaining a lot about her current emotional state. If he hadn't been so damned worried about his father and consumed with his stupid job he might have noticed it before. Penny was sensitive and easily upset by their quarrels, but much more so in the days surrounding her periods. He was also reminded that this was a once in a month time opportunity to make love to her the way he really wanted to, so he coaxed her, "Sweetie, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Don't let's leave it this way, okay? Let me make right for you. Please, Penny. I love you and I want to make it right."

Mourning for days gone by when Percy would have never intentionally hurt her, Penny was most inclined to tell him no. Even with her eyes closed, shut tight as a dam, tears leaked out either side and she was powerless to stop them.

At the point where his actions definitely spoke louder than his words Percy kissed away every tear that rolled down her cheeks. Heaving a ragged sigh, Penny relented. Turning her head and letting him capture her mouth for the long sought after kiss she had been wanting. They made love then by way of reconciliation, and if she wasn't quite happy yet, he did at least make her feel cherished and cared for again. Collapsing when they were through with his red head pillowed on her breast, Percy fell soundly asleep for the first time in weeks. Sleeping the sleep of a man who has been on redemptive quest. Secure in the knowledge that he has achieved it.

Twisting his red waves through her fingers, Penny stared out the window at a Christmas day sunset. Reminiscing the heart match that made her bed fiery, icy, or quite soggy, as it was now, dependant upon Percy's whims. Graduated at the top of her Ravenclaw class, Penelope Clearwater was nobody's fool. Yet some people who thought they knew Percy often wondered what it was she saw in him, his good looks notwithstanding. He gave off the wrong impression sometimes, fairly often lately, in fact. Seeming to be stern, too serious, and overly concerned with appearances. But Penny had access to a side of him that other people didn't. She held the key to his heart, and she was the primary source of his passion for life.

His younger brothers, Fred and George, often asked Penny what it was that she saw in Percy, but it wasn't what she saw that made her love him so much. She loved him for the way he made her feel when he touched her, beautiful, treasured, and protected. How to explain that attraction to his young teenaged brothers without explaining that sex is a kind of magic, too?

Sex, Penny believed, was the most powerful kind of magic and Percy oozed it out of every available pore in his long thin body. It wasn't easy to make people understand, especially her parents. Sure, she might have confided in her speculative friends at school that Percy frequently accompanied her into the prefect's bathroom and could bring her off in three minutes flat using only his tongue. That even Moaning Myrtle swooned at the sight of it. And that he would leave her there to bathe alone in the magnificent tub while he went to work double shifts, taking his watch and hers, so that she could relax. But then half the girls with brains in school would have lined up outside of the bathroom for him. Some things were best kept private.

Percy never left Penny doubting that he loved only her. He made love to her at every opportunity with such single-minded intensity that she never once questioned what he might be thinking about at the time. Penny didn't take his abilities for granted. She knew that capacity for physical devotion wasn't a common gift to most men. Although, the fact that his mother had seven children by his father made her wonder if it wasn't something that ran in the family.

She did believe that he loved her, and that their relationship was important to him. She also believed that she had better never give him reason to remind her of their commitment to one another again. And even though she still felt confused, and a little angry, she was definitely no longer frustrated.

Bearing his weight between her thighs was comforting to her, although her comfort faded while he slept. A telltale low backache and the painful tight contractions of her recently battered womb informed her that a trip to the toilet was in order. Plus, her stomach rumbled fit to kill. Penny decided Percy should get up and make her something to eat, which she knew he would do without a single complaint and that was another really good reason to love him.

Shaking him awake only served to find him making love to her again. This time mostly because he was only twenty and he could. Coming inside of her again, he said, "I hope you learn a lesson from it, Penny. No more holding back from me. It makes me feel very badly about myself, too, when you do it to me."

Finally forced to build a pillow barricade between them, she asked, "Percy, do you think we might come up for a bit of air and sustenance now? I'm starving. My stomach started growling over an hour ago and you didn't even notice."

"I noticed." Gasping from late efforts, Percy leaned back with a grin. "But I didn't think you wanted me to stop just then."

"Well, I didn't want you to stop just then," Penny answered, shortly. "But I do want to stop now." Really she was hungry and his arrogance annoyed her. Not to mention the racket his amorous activity had set up in her womb. Getting up she slipped her arms into the sleeves of the shirt he'd hung over the bedpost. Buttoning it up to the neck the shirt hung past her knees. Almost covering her properly, she thought. Percy thought she looked like a well-handled Christmas gift, wrapped up in blue and white shirtsleeves, but he didn't say so.

"Will you stop grinning at me in that way?" she snarled at him. "You're far too pleased with yourself for only being able to do what comes naturally."

Having heard this lecture before, Percy rather enjoyed it, so he said, "Really Pen? Do you think it's a talent I come by naturally? Hasn't three years of steady practice improved my ability any?" Folding lanky freckled arms over a narrow flat stomach he reclined back on her pillow, waiting for her reaction with laughing eyes.

Penny, despairing of being able to convince him to cook her something to eat unless she catered to his ego, answered irritably, "Very well then, Percy Weasley is my King. Does it satisfy you more to hear me say it out loud?"

Eyes still twinkling, he smirked at her. "Not so much more than I was to hear you be satisfied out loud three times already today."

"Honestly, Percy, I know better than anyone that you are insatiable, but that peculiar characteristic used to extend to food as well as to other things. Aren't you the least bit hungry?"

"I could do with some food," Percy confessed.

"Well, go then and make us something to eat, already!" she snapped. "I need to go to the loo."

"All right! All right! I'm going to feed you. Don't get crabby with me," he pacified her. Stalking naked into the kitchen.

Penny entered the kitchen, sniffing the air appreciatively. Percy was making her a very early breakfast. "Better?" he asked, quirking a red eyebrow and pushing a plate piled high with an enormous stack of buttered toast in her direction.

"Much," Penny managed, before consuming every piece of toast on the plate and licking the buttered crumbs off of her fingers.

He nodded to the bag of groceries and then to the clock that said it was almost midnight. Christmas Day was over. "I thought it was a bit late for cooking Christmas dinner."

"No, no, this is fine." Penny dug into the plate of eggs and vegetables Percy stuck in front of her. "Mercy, you're a good cook, Percy."

Smiling at her word play, Percy sat on the chair next to her, dipping into her plate with his own fork. "My brothers like to play Quidditch. I like to cook."

"I already know that about you. I'll take a man who knows his way around a kitchen wand over a man with the Quaffle any day." Grinning, she added, "Although, I must admit I've always rather admired your brother's dexterity with a Beater."

She was teasing him, Percy knew by her smile, but he didn't want to talk about Fred and George with her now. Or at any other time really, but especially not just now. "Don't Penny," he warned. Taking their plate to the kitchen, piling it into the sink with the other dishes and scouring them all clean with his wand. "I just now feel relaxed enough to go to sleep. I don't want to spoil the feeling by talking about my evil twin brothers."

"Oh, really, Percy, will you stop calling them that? They are not evil. Your brothers have always been very nice to me."

"Sure," he agreed peevishly. "They're nice to everyone who isn't named Percy Weasley. Penny, please, I don't want to quarrel with you anymore today."

"I'm not trying to pick another quarrel!" she protested hastily. "The last one we had has still left me feeling singed."

"I'm sorry. I've said so, haven't I? I know I shouldn't have said those things to you today. Especially the part about us not being married." Looking around the flat and then between the two of them, he added, "When obviously we are married in every sense of the word, but one."

"I don't see a point in a legal wedding without our families being there. Both of our families," Penelope said in the resigned voice of someone who has been done with making this argument for a very long time now and has been reduced to repeating it as a platitude.

Throwing his wand down on the counter Percy said, "Fine let's just go back to bed then and get some sleep."

"Not until I've told you what I did today," Penny refused nervously. Percy throwing his wand around was a pretty good indication that he was still annoyed with her. But she wasn't going to sleep without confessing something herself. "I visited with your father this morning and I---I told him about our quarrel," she admitted, waiting for the explosion to come. But it didn't.

"I thought maybe that's where you were today," Percy said truthfully, looking thoughtful and not angry. "I was going to check for you at the hospital first."

"You would have come to see your father today? But only to find me?"

"Only to find you," Percy agreed. "I felt terrible after you left this morning, Penny. I couldn't let you go on thinking I'd meant all those things that I said."

"Your father says that you have a bad temper, and you need to control it better."

"Does he now?" A quick grin flashed across his face. "I guess maybe he's said as much to me a time or two."

"I already know all about your temper, of course. And Fred and George are altogether too eager to fill me in on more of it."

"Oh, I'm sure they are. I am quite sure they are."

"But your father said---," Penny paused, weighing her words carefully. "He said that you have a hot head, but a loyal heart. And that you're courageous enough to stand up for what you really believe in. He told me---"

"He told you to come home to me and try to work things out," Percy interrupted her. "Because he knew I'd come to the hospital looking for you, if you didn't."

"That's right, he did," Penny gasped, genuinely astonished. "But how did you know that's exactly what he said to me?"

"Lucky guess."