The Tragedy of Errors

The Tragedy of Errors

Whilst Perry drowned, Percy read a bad book called The Pygmy Puff Circus. It had been a July day with a light summer breeze, and Perry had made fun of Percy for wearing his favourite black-and-white argyle sweater vest that he had received that Christmas along with a new set of sugar quills, some parchment paper and a bad book called The Pygmy Puff Circus. 

“Another book,” Perry said to Percy when they reached the lake near the Burrow. They were ten years old and were due to receive their Hogwarts letter that summer. “Do you just want to win the most boring person award or what? Don’t you ever have anything interesting to do?”

“Interest is subjective,” Percy said. “And you read plenty too!”

Perry mimicked him. “Interest is subjective,” he said in the highest-pitched timbre he could muster. Percy would bet the three Galleons, twelve sickles and twenty knuts he’d been saving for five years that Perry didn’t even know what the word subjective even meant. “Yes, I read. I read plays. That stuff is art. What’s your stuff? Pygmy Puff Circus? Merlin, Perce.”

“It’s not that bad,” Percy lied.

“You hate it. I can tell. You just don’t know how to throw a book in the bin without reading the whole thing, don’t you? What a waste of time,” Perry said.

“It’s not a waste of time,” Percy said, his ears turning red.

“Let’s go for a swim then, Granddad,” Perry said, staring at the lake. “You’ll feel so much better if you take a lap around.”

“You know perfectly well—”

“—you knowperfectly well—” Perry mimicked.

“—that I can’t swim,” Percy said.

“Sure you can! I’ll show you how! Because that’s what twin brothers are for!” Perry said.

“What?” Percy said, stiffening.

Perry grabbed Percy by his hand and pushed him to a standing position from where he was sitting reading. They both started to sway despite them only being one pound apart in weight. Percy hated looking at Perry because they had the same face and his voice. They even wore the same kind of glasses.

“You’re not going to die. Don’t be so dramatic,” Perry said. “Big boys like you need to learn how to swim. You can’t go on being such a complete prat all your life, Percival. It’s not nice to others.”

“I’m not being dramatic!” Percy did not want to get wet. If he got wet, it would ruin his day, and he would hate himself. “And what do you know about being nice to others? You spend your whole day making my life harder for no reason!”

The more Perry pushed him closer to the water, the more Percy pushed back.

“Please don’t,” Percy’s voice was getting louder. “I-I don’t want this. Please.”

“Godric, you’re such a baby,” Perry said. “I can’t believe I’m related to you. That has to be a joke. You’re such a bloody joke. I hate you so much. I don’t understand why you’re Mum’s favourite.”

“I’m-I’m not anyone’s favourite.”

“Yes, you are. You know you are.”

“I’m-I’m not,” Percy stammered. “I just don’t give Mum any trouble like the rest of you lot.”

“Shut up,” Perry said.

But then Perry bit his hand, and when Percy was wincing in pain, he shoved him deep into the water. Percy seized in fear, his hands flailing everywhere to grab the nearest piece of stone to pull himself back up to the ground.

Salty water went into his lungs. His heart pounded so fast it drowned out Perry’s laughs.

“This-this isn’t funny!” Percy shrieked, not caring how pathetic he must look like clawing at the water's surface.

“You’re right! This isn’t funny. It’s… it’s… it’s hilarious! Look what I have, Perce!”

That was when Perry started throwing things that Percy owned into the water. He noticed some things: his new quills, his new parchment paper, and his favourite new jumper, which he only managed to wear twice…

“I’m-I’m telling Mum! I’m telling Mum that you-you did this!”

“Do you think Mum cares, mate? Do you think that anyone cares about you? I shared a womb with you, and I hate you!”

He couldn’t grab any of his things, and when he got up to the deck, he felt his head swirl.

“What’s wrong, Percy? Are you going to start crying now? Ickle Perfect Percy lost his favourite things?” Perry said.

“I-I-I hate you,” Percy said, shivering from the cold. He had grabbed his copy of The Pygmy Puff Circus that was still on the ground and headed off to another corner to sit and read by himself. He didn’t care if anything bad happened to Perry, he thought. If his twin wanted to be so clever, he could figure out a solution to every problem he encountered.

They were the first set of twins to be born in the family. Percival and Peregrine were brought onto this earth on the twenty-second of August 1976 through home birth. His mother didn’t know that they’d be twins. Percy was the first to be born; he was puffy, congested, and pink, and Perry after him, emaciated and blue. There were no twin-to-twin transfusion syndromes in a tiny wizarding village in Devonshire at the time. Their umbilical cord was somewhat greyed, and the placenta ischaemic. The fact that they were both alive was attributed to magic, unnamed herbal remedies and the kind of sheer luck that only came from a Felix Felicis. They both spent ninety-six days in the NICU in St Mungo’s. Molly named the first baby Percival, and it took her approximately three days to name the other Peregrine. 

Since then, Perry had decided that his only goal was to make Percy’s life miserable. And he had succeeded in doing this for ten straight years. As a toddler, Perry bit him. He spat at him. He told him off for being boring constantly as if that was the worst thing that anyone could ever be. This only escalated in their preschool years, with Perry hogging most of the blanket in their shared bed and punching him in the stomach when they were supposed to be playing. By the time Percy was six years old, Perry had beaten him with a spatula, a Beater’s bat, a broomstick and his mum’s favourite vase.

Percy spent precisely forty-eight minutes away from Perry, reading the very boring book (though he would never tell Perry that he was right, that he was wasting his time). Then his world changed.  

When Percy went to look for Perry when he was done reading, his mild frustration quickly turned to sheer panic. All he could find of Perry was a pair of tattered sky-blue plimsols they took turns wearing. He spent ages looking at the glistening water, feeling his stomach knot with anxiety as he ran up and down the lake’s length, looking for curly red hair.

“Perry, this isn’t funny!” Percy had said over and over again. “Come-come on, Mum’s going to be mental if we don’t head home. It’s going to be dark soon.” He was suddenly freezing, still wet, and he was starving.

His throat hurt from all the yelling.

“Perry, please.”

“This isn’t funny anymore.”

“It was never funny at all to begin with.”

“You’re at home, aren’t you? You’re not really lost. You just want me to get in trouble for coming home late…”

“Ugh! You’re the worst brother ever!”

“Perry? Perry? Are you… are you okay?”  

He had been sure by then it was a cruel trick. If he headed back home, he would be there, feigning shock at how late Percy had come home or throwing more of his things in the rubbish bin.

But when Percy returned home without Perry, his mother had whipped her head out from the kitchen and the first thing she’d asked was, “Where is your brother?”

“I-I don’t know,” Percy said quietly. “We fought, then I left him alone so I could read, but when I went back to get him so that we could get home, I couldn’t find him. I looked everywhere. Honest, Mum, I didn’t think that…”

“You didn’t think what?” Molly asked, her voice rising. Then he heard the first round of angry shouts, the same ones he would hear for a month before he finally decided he had to do something or he would die from being so sad. “Percival, you’re the older one. You’re supposed to be the responsible one. You should be looking out for him. I don’t know why you can’t have a normal relationship. Just look at Fred and George! Look at how close they are! Do you think Fred will leave George alone just to read a book? Or the other way around? Are you telling me you’ve left your brother alone in the woods and have come home without him? Godric, if anything’s happened to him, I’ll make sure you’re sorry about it…”

The next few days, his neighbours—Arthur and Bill, too—were in and out of the house all day. Everyone was looking for Perry, even Percy. A part of him hoped they’d find him just so his mother could stop yelling at him, and a part of him hoped they never would because he wanted to have his bed for himself.

Things had changed officially on their birthday a month later. They were eleven, and Percy didn’t get a birthday cake because his mother couldn’t give Perry one too. His mother was busy crying all day, and Ron, Ginny, the twins, Charlie and Bill kept looking at Percy like he was a dungbomb about to go off.

He waited all day for something, but nothing came.

“Father, am I going to get any gifts?” Percy asked that night before he went to bed.

Arthur looked surprised by the comment that he’d made. How he looked at him made Percy flinch. “Percy, you can’t be serious,” he said. “Your brother is missing, and you’re thinking about gifts?”

It took a few moments to register that Arthur sounded angry. His father never sounded angry.

“I just… I thought… it’s my birthday,” Percy stammered.

“You seem sadder about the fact that we’ve not got you anything more than the fact that your twin brother is missing,” Arthur said, and Percy was sick of hearing about how his twin brother was missing. Even when Perry was gone, he was destroying his life. “I’m not going to talk about this anymore, Percy. I thought we raised you better than this.”

Percy didn’t think he was being impolite. “But… but it’s my birthday,” he said.

“Didn’t you hear me tell you I won’t talk about this? Go to YOUR ROOM!” Arthur said, his shout so loud that it shocked Percy. He felt as if he’d been slapped. His heart was beating so loudly. And even when he’d run upstairs and closed the door behind his shared room, he couldn’t stifle out his father’s sobs. He couldn’t make his heart stop racing either.

That night, Percy cried, too, but he wasn’t crying for Perry. He thought it would be better if Perry were gone, but this was much worse. Even though nobody was physically hurting him, his chest burned all day long, and he didn’t even want to read any of his books because his mother kept putting him down whenever she opened the door and saw him reading.

“Reading again, Percival? Shouldn’t you be out there looking for your brother? Your twin brother?” she would say, and he would feel bad enough to put his book down. But he didn’t know how to look for Perry anymore than he already had, so he just sat there on his bed doing nothing because doing something only elicited comments from his family.

If he read a book or washed his hair or took a long bath, it didn’t bring Perry any closer to home, so why was he made to feel bad for any of those things? Why was he expected to stop doing things that he always did just because Perry got himself lost? And he was sick of them asking, the same questions, in rotation:

How could you be doing that whilst your brother… Percy, aren’t you scared… do you want to go down to the lake and have another look? I’ll come with you. Maybe you’ll remember something. Have you been thinking about what the Aurors have asked you to think about?

He had thought until he wished he had no more thoughts, but they didn’t change anything either.

When Percy’s Hogwarts letter came, but Perry’s didn’t, his father yelled at Ron for wearing the same red t-shirt for three days. That same evening, Fred had even asked Percy if he wanted to play with them, but they didn’t even finish the game of Exploding Snap. Ron had been winning. Percy went to bed starving that night because nobody else ate and they expected the same of him. As if him eating or not eating dinner meant he was reaching the right way, the appropriate way. As if he couldn’t be sad whilst he ate.

“You do understand what you did was wrong, didn’t you, Percy?” his father told him calmly, “And it’s why I can’t let you look after the twins, Ron or Ginny. I can’t trust you anymore. And I don’t want you to be sad—I don’t, Percy—but you never ask about your brother. It’s uncanny. He’s your twin brother. Don’t you feel sad he’s not around?”

“Yes,” Percy lied. But what did he want from him? Did he want Percy to be crying all the time? Shouting? Angry? 

“Then why don’t you ask about him?”

“I just thought that if there was something different, you would’ve told me,” Percy said.

But neither him nor his father were convinced by what he’d said.

A month and a week later, Perry was officially declared dead. They never found Perry’s body, so they had to have a funeral with a closed casket. Percy had worn grey because he didn’t own black.

That was the day that he had ceased to be Percy. He had become the Perry clone. Just before the funeral, his mother had made him repeat what had happened until he was sick of the taste of what he had said, and when he was done talking, she just nodded her head. He didn’t know what that accomplished other than making them both ill.

His father had picked out a photo of Perry for the funeral. It was when they were on holiday in Bath, but it wasn’t really a picture of Perry. It was one of the few pictures of Percy beaming like a bloody idiot, and he happened to be wearing Perry’s blue Appleby Arrows sweatshirt. Percy didn’t say anything when his father framed it over the casket. Nobody else noticed.

That was when Percy realised that they could only tell them apart because they had such distinct personalities. But they could tell Fred and George apart no matter what they wore, said or did. It wasn’t fair.  But what did he know about things being fair? He was a monster, a monster, a monster. Perry was blue, thin, and gone, and Percy was curling up in the blankets they were supposed to share, keeping himself warm.

After the funeral, things just kept getting worse. Nobody seemed to talk to him, the Perry clone, anymore. It was as if Perry's absence meant Percy's absence, too. Sometimes, whole days passed by without anyone disturbing him. Sometimes, they ate meals without him. Sometimes, Percy would lose himself in a book for hours and look up, wondering when his mother was going to come in and tell him off for things that he had no control over. Sometimes, he was in so much pain.

“Mum, nobody’s called me down for dinner,” Percy remembered saying one of those nights. “I was sleeping.”  

“I have,” Molly said, unfazed. She avoided looking straight at him. He’d become Percival to his mother. “You’ve eaten dinner, Percival. I have no idea what you’re saying... if you’re still hungry, I think there’s still some chicken in the pan.”

When Percy opened the pan, he saw a lone piece of chicken breast and green beans in lemon sauce. It looked so small that he felt sadder. Something about the lone chicken breast made him want to shout and cry. Even as he ate it, it tasted acidic, sour, and unpleasant; the sauce congealed around the cold chicken and the green beans stringy.

Once, his whole family spent the whole day at Diagon Alley, and Percy stayed home alone.

“You’ve been with us, Perry—Percy,” Arthur said, smoothing the mistake. His cheeks went red. His apology sounded insincere. “All day, you’ve been with us. What are you saying?”

No, I wasn’t, Percy thought, feeling himself deflate. How could they think that he was there when he wasn’t?  

Percy was sick of people refusing to look at him when they talked, thinking of his dead twin brother when he was alive. He, Percival Ignatius Weasley, was very alive and very much there, but nobody seemed to care about that anymore.

Nobody had even bought the trunk he needed to head to Hogwarts that year, and Percy was scared that if he didn’t do anything, he would be living in his room until he died—which was ridiculous to his future nineteen-year-old self but it had once been a very real fear to a scared eleven-year-old boy.

I have to do something, Percy thought one night, lying in bed with his heart thudding in his ears. Something. Something. Anything.

That was when Percy decided to use the Galleons and sickles he’d been saving every birthday (hidden in the stitched-up back of a small blue stuffed dragon so Perry wouldn’t steal it from him) to do something drastic. He never had anything to do, so he spent his summer reading Bill and Charlie’s old textbooks, whatever he could find. While reading Bill’s copy of Advanced PotionMaking, he discovered a potion that could simulate the erasure of memories just like a spell could.

They wouldn’t always be so sad if they couldn't remember Perry. And if they didn’t remember Perry, his mother would look at him again, and Bill would hold his hand when they walked down the streets.

Three days before he was due to head to Hogwarts, Percy had used Bill’s old cauldron and Charlie’s potion ingredients to create it himself because the potion on the market cost significantly more than the three Galleons, twelve sickles and twenty knuts that he had saved up all his life.

The same night, he had laced his mum’s tea with it and took Perry’s unmoving handle from the Weasley grandfather clock. They would all drink it and go to bed early. The next day, he had his new family that knew nothing about Perry. Fred and George made fun of him, and there were no extra sausages after breakfast.

“What are you looking at us like that for?” Fred said, looking at Percy.

“Nothing,” Percy said. It was one of the few times that he couldn’t stop smiling. That night, he only thought about Perry for half an hour before he fell asleep, and his fingers weren’t numb when he woke up.  

“Mum, Percy’s face is weird,” Ron complained.

“I’m smiling,” Percy said.

“Well, stop it,” George said, nudging  Percy with his arm, but Percy’s smile widened.

“Someone’s slept well,” Molly said, ruffling his hair, which Percy hated, but at that moment, he had loved nothing more. He hadn’t had his mother touch him affectionately in so long. It made him want to cry so badly, but he held himself.

“What did you dream about, Percy?” Charlie said, smirking at him. “A very good book?”

It could’ve been. Boy’s abusive twin drowns in a lake. Boy erases the family’s memories because they blame Boy for not saving brother. Boy and family live happily ever after.

He didn’t know then that he had just made one of the biggest mistakes of his life.

By Percy’s thirteenth birthday, he started to feel a hole in his heart. By his fourteenth birthday, it got bigger. By his fifteenth, it had gotten even bigger. By his nineteenth birthday, Percy felt like the hole was so big that he could never get out of it, that he was so deep into the hole that he couldn’t hear anyone or see anything around him.

A few months after the anxiety of Perry’s death had passed, it had come back tenfold one winter night. He awoke from his sleep, crying, shouting, with a sudden aching, crying grief that had taken hold of Percy so suddenly that he felt like he could not even breathe. A night terror, his paediatric healer had said when his mum had taken him to the healers the next day because the sound of his wretched cold screaming had woken the whole family up in the middle of the night. But why? His mother had asked, concerned as she placed a hand on his eleven-year-old shoulder. We’re a very happy, normal family.

The tragedy had made Percy a better person, even though the thought made him feel so sick because he felt that he would still be a selfish prat if Perry had been alive. He had become responsible, just like his mother had told him he should’ve been when he’d come home without his twin. He noticed everything around him, from the subtle frown on his father’s face when he returned from work to the new plastic orange polka-dotted curtains his mother had put up in the kitchen. He often found his mother staring at the clock as if something was missing, but the look on her face told him that she wasn’t sure what it might be. He could see Ron sometimes spacing out. He knew then that he had done something very bad.

When he was in Hogwarts, he swore to himself that he’d make sure the twins didn’t kill themselves and that Ron and Ginny didn’t get themselves expelled throughout the years. His responsibility. But the bad things started happening again.  

He couldn’t help Ginny no matter how hard he tried, even though he swore he paid attention. He told everyone else that there was something funny about how Ginny acted, but never in his wildest dreams could he have guessed what was going on. He thought that she was just homesick! He didn’t think the world's evillest wizard was targeting her. How was he supposed to have figured it out? He wasn’t Perry. He didn’t have a wonderful imagination. He didn’t read muggle Shakespearean plays and re-enact lines from them whilst wearing a white towel over his body. And even if he could’ve, what was he supposed to do about that? How could he stop wars when he couldn’t even swim? But then his scrawny twelve-year-old brother and his even skinnier abused best mate, Harry Potter, saved Ginny’s life. So he could have done something, somehow he could’ve, but he didn’t. Just like when they lost Perry’s body to the water.

Perry would've been fine if anyone else from the family had been with him. Charlie. Bill. The twins. Ron. Even five-year-old Ginny. He wouldn’t have drowned. Knowing that left this constant taste of bile in his throat. Perfect Prefect Percy, indebted to children too young to get a pass to head down to Hogsmeade for the weekend. How could he live with that and not expect to wake up in the middle of the night with drenching cold sweats? How inhuman would he be if he didn’t always feel so scared? Something was broken and missing inside him, something that his Gryffindor-sorted brothers had so naturally. How could he achieve that? How could he be bold when he was scared of his own shadow?

How proud he acted sometimes. Anyone could read a bit of text and ace exams. He was powerless against anything that mattered. Not the rest of his family, though. They knew exactly what to do come the war. They all went out, wands blazing, whilst Percy stayed in bed at night. In his head, he kept to the sounds of the water from the lake near the house where Perry drowned. He often wondered if his other brothers stayed awake. If Gin did, after what happened to her.  

He had to keep making the same mistake over and over again by dosing his whole extended family with the same potion when they came over for Christmas. Once, his Uncle Bilius looked at him funny and had once asked, “Wasn’t there two of him?”

“Uncle Bilius, that’s us,” Fred said, rolling his eyes.

“Man, you should lay off the booze,” George scoffed. “As if Merlin would be so mean as to bless us with two Percy’s.”

But Perry was nothing like them, he wanted to say. He had come out without the twin manual. They always fought. Perry kept picking on him up until the day that he drew his last breath; and even in death, he was laughing at him with Fred and George, Ron and Ginny, and the rest of the world every time they looked at him and called him Perfect Prefect Percy. Perry lived on in every insult that he had ever heard, and most of those had come from Percy’s own mind.

You should just kill yourself, Percival. You should just...  

He had nearly had a heart attack that very year when they’d used Ron in one of the Triwizard Tournament challenges. He felt like all the oxygen had gone out of his lungs when he thought that Ron had drowned. He didn’t even care that he still couldn’t swim; he was the first one running to his brother, even if Ron did think that he was an overdramatic prat.

And whose fault is all this, then? Percy told himself. After finishing school with top marks, he’d realised what he’d done as a child was so incredibly dangerous, and it was by the grace of Merlin himself that he hadn’t given his family permanent brain damage. Though hearing Ron talk sometimes, Percy had a slight suspicion that maybe he hadn’t escaped unscathed.

Percy wondered what subjects Perry would’ve liked and what music he would listen to, though he knew him enough to guess. He’d play as a Beater in the Quidditch team, love Herbology and listen to The Weird Sisters. He would read Hamlet over and over ag ain, as he did when they were young. He would make friends that liked to do the same things. He would try something illicit at lest once. In his wildest dreams, Percy imagined Perry being sorted in a different House. Because maybe then Percy would’ve let the Sorting Hat put him in Slytherin or Ravenclaw, as it initially wanted to. He imagined them growing into mates, playing wizarding chess on the weekdays and watching Quidditch matches on the weekends. They would drink butterbeer in Hogsmeade and talk about things that they never talked about, like why Perry felt so threatened by him and why Percy was such a stick in the mud and how they could fix their awful personalities.

Percy thought about when Perry had given him his sticky toffee pudding when he was sick, even though Percy had already eaten his and how he’d screamed at a bunch of kids in Diagon Alley when they started making fun of Percy for how much of a loser he must be for talking nonstop about what happened in the latest instalment of Martin the Mad Muggle.

“What?” Perry had said after the boys had scurried away. Percy had his jaw open in surprise. “I’m not a monster, Percival. The only person that can call you a boring old prat is me—I won’t even let Frigid and Gorge do it, either. That’s the privilege of having shared housing with you forever.”

Percy would’ve done anything to have shared housing with him again.

There were days he flipped to his side and imagined Perry lying beside him, snoring, dressed in a zipped white fleece jacket and black pyjama bottoms, which he often wore for days until his mother would forcibly make him take them off so that he could wash them. His bed, which had always been too small, was suddenly too big and cold. Perry had been due to get his adenoid surgery that very year, just like Percy had the other year before. It’s a shame, Percival, Perry had said. I wouldn’t get to keep you up all night with my snoring, and then you’d lose your excuse for being a total tosser. There were days he thought of how alone he must’ve been when he died, how alone he might still be in the ghost world where nobody knew who he was.

Percy wondered if with time, his mother would’ve forgiven him, because he wanted to forgive himself so badly but nobody could ever give him the permission to. How could he know for certain that his sins had been forgiven? That he was absolved?

Percy had kept an album of their photos together, yellowed and aged with time. He often flipped through them, reminiscing for days or even weeks at a time. Somehow, all the memories of all the horrible things Perry had done to him had dissolved with time. He could barely see the scars of them. If Perry were alive, he would’ve done so much with his life. He would be a Quidditch player, a musician, an actor, a traveller. He would go to so many places. He’d have girlfriends and conquests. He would be popular. Meanwhile, Percy was wasting away by filing reports about cauldron bottoms that he loved to write but he knew nobody cared about. That truth hurt him just as much as what he had done and he didn’t know what kind of person that made him. Everything felt too real, too sobering, too cold.  

He’d completely botched everything up in the Ministry, too. He was supposed to have noticed when an evil son replaced his boss, but he was so busy trying to impress him that he hadn’t noticed the difference. He supposed his diligent notice-all personality did not extend to work when he was busy kissing his boss’ arse just like everyone said he did. And he had always felt like he had given everything to his job, but he hadn’t. This was the proof of it.

“Percy?”

Percy whipped his head towards the doorway, seeing Ginny standing by the door wearing teeny-tiny denim shorts. Her even tinier green crop top exposed her flat stomach. He bit his cheek to prevent saying anything about either.

“Mum says to call you down because we’re cutting your cake,” Ginny said. “I also wanted to give you this.”

Ginny handed him a tiny black bag that he was almost certain was a bunch of new quills. He hated to say that he always enjoyed getting quills. A boring gift for a boring git, he could imagine Perry saying.

“Thank you,” Percy said.

“Well…”

“Yes?”

“Aren’t you going to see what I got you?”

“Quills?” Percy said.

“No,” Ginny said. “Look.”

Percy wasn’t comfortable getting presents, but he felt cornered. He peered into the bag and slowly took out a box that had to be slightly bigger than his palm. Flashcards. 100 Tips for the Prefect In Your Life, the box had said. “Thank you,” he said.

“Godric, Percy, you couldn’t look any more depressed.”

Percy tried to beam at her.

“Now, you just look like you’re going to cut me up and store me in mum’s freezer.”

“Hardly,” Percy said. “There’s no room in mum’s freezer. Have you seen how many just-in-case-of-an-emergency meals she’s stored up in there? If she freezes anymore spaghetti bolognese, we’d be ready for a new wizarding war.”

“That’s true, but I was just kidding.”

“Oh.”

“You know, you might be the least charming Weasley ever but you’re also the only one in the family that’s had a relationship with a girlfriend for more than a week, so that says something,” Ginny said, sitting beside him on the bed even though he hadn’t invited her. “Perce, can I ask you a question? And don’t say that I already have, or I’m going to clobber you with that gift I just gave you.”

“Yes,” Percy said. He was genuinely smiling then.

“Okay, so, what’s the deal with you and birthdays? Is it because you’re one step from getting older? I thought you would like that. I mean, like more responsibility because you’re a nutter,” Ginny said. “You don’t open anyone’s presents. I know you shove them somewhere in your closet and forget about them. There’s that chocolate bar I got you when I was eleven, and it’s probably melted and expired now.”

“I don’t think wizarding chocolate expires like muggle chocolate,” Percy said.

“You’re not answering my question!”

“It’s complicated,” Percy said. “Maybe someday, I might even tell you, but today is not the day.”

“It’s not as deep as you think it is, Percy,” Ginny said

“Perhaps not,” Percy said. “Now, can I ask you something?”

“You already have.”

“Very funny, Ginevra.”

“I see you… a little bit jumpy sometimes. Alert, I’d say,” Percy said, rubbing his neck. “I-I know you’ve had a hard first year. I'm not so foolish as to think that that sort of thing wouldn’t have an affect on someone, even as someone as…well, as confident and as tenacious as you are,” he smiled. “I just wanted to ask you if you’re alright.”

“I’m fine, Percy,” Ginny said, rolling her eyes. “But don’t you think it’s weird?”

“What is?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes, it feels like there’s someone moving around the house in the middle of the night,” Ginny said. Percy had that feeling too. He knew that Ginny wanted to pretend like nothing ever bothered her but that was proof enough. “I swear I smell things, weird things sometimes. I don’t know. It’s just odd. It almost feels like our house is haunted sometimes. Plus, our stuff just keeps disappearing all the time.”

“Our house?” Percy echoed. “With its multiple stories that Dad keeps adding on every year is haunted? Who would’ve thought? And what do you think? The ghoul just keeps eating mum’s lasagne or Ron sneaking down for extra portions?”

“You are such an arsehole,” Ginny said, rolling her eyes. “I’m not being paranoid, Percy. You’re the paranoid one.”

“Can’t we both be paranoid? Gin, what you went through was something terrible,” Percy said with a smile. “What cake did mum make?”

“Victoria sponge,” Ginny said. “And yeah, I went through something hard, Perce, but I don’t think talking about it is going to make it un-happen. It’s something that I went through and I’m trying to get over it now. It’s nice that you care but sometimes, I think things are bigger in your head than what they are in everyone else’s.”

“Very smart,” Percy said, then grimaced. “I suppose that’s why I don’t like my birthday.”

“I don’t know why she keeps thinking you like Victoria sponges. Aren’t you allergic to strawberries?”

“Yes, but it’s not as if I’d die eating them,” Percy said. “Not like my peanut allergy anyway.” 

“It’s so weird. You tell her every year, and she magically forgets it next year,” Ginny said. “She even tells you off most of the time for eating strawberries if she sees you eat them. The rashes you keep getting bother her more than it does you.”

Because a Victoria Sponge was Perry’s favourite cake. Percy supposed that was what happened when you tried to do a very complex memory erasing potion at a very young age—and he really was extremely lucky that was the worst of it.

An hour later, he headed downstairs to pretend to eat the cake he hated with the rest of his family. He did not want to deal with a flaming rash all over his skin when he hadn’t slept twenty-one hours in the past week. Then he would go to try to sleep and forget this horrible day even happened so he could face the next horrible day that was awaiting him.

Well, that had been the plan at the very least, but after he’d cut the first slice of cake, he’d heard the doorbell ring. Percy had decided to answer it so he could escape the cake-cutting. He had opened the door with an indifferent expression and swore that he practically had a heart attack right there on the doorstep.

“Hello, Percival,” Peregrine had said.

Percy blinked a few times, trying to rationalise what he was seeing and who he was hearing. “You…you…” he swallowed the lump in his throat and stepped outside into the humid summer air. He closed the door behind him, ignoring the sound of his father loudly asking for more cake. “You’re not supposed to…”

“Supposed to what?” Perry’s voice was so cutting that Percy flinched.

“How? H-h-h….how?” Percy stammered.

“Godric, Percival, I’ve come back from the dead, and the first thing you want to ask is how,” Perry said, rolling his eyes. “You stupid, stupid prat. Didn’t you miss me? Didn’t you think about me all the time?”

“S-stop calling me that,” Percy felt like he was back to being ten years old again.

“Are you crying? Godric, you’re the same, aren’t you? Always with the crocodile tears.”

Percy rubbed his eyes and noticed that there were tears in his eyes. How embarrassing. “Crocodiles can’t cry,” he said.

“It’s like you bring it on yourself.”

“Bring what onto myself? Perry?”

Percy didn’t understand how he was brought anything on by himself.

“Never mind about that,” Perry said, holding onto the doorknob. “Let’s go see Mum and Dad.”

“No, wait, I have to…” Percy could not explain why there would be two of them walking through that door.

“What’s wrong, Percy?” Perry said. Hearing him call him by his nickname was somehow even worse than being called by his given name. He said it like a joke, like there was something funny about what everyone else called him. “You don’t want Mum and Dad to see me? Is it because they’ve have a coronary if they see two of us? Because they don’t know me anymore, do they?”

“How did you—”

“For fuck’s sake,” Perry swore.

“Peregrine, I don’t understand,” Percy said, feeling the same pit in his stomach he had all those years back, except it was amplified. He bit down his lower lip. He was sure he was going to either pass out or throw up soon.

“You don’t, do you?”

Percy’s breathing was getting shallower and more hitched, like when he had a panic attack. Maybe he was having a panic attack, but his brain couldn’t process that and the fact that his dead brother was alive at the same time.

“No,” Percy said.

“Would it make you happy if you knew how? Is it so bloody important? I’m here, aren’t I? So sorry to ruin your bloody party, Percival,” Perry asked, raising an eyebrow. “Well, if you insist… that day, I decided to pretend to run off and see what you’d do if you couldn’t find me to take me back home. I did come back home, but then I saw Mum yelling at you for ages, and I thought it was the funniest thing in the world.”

Percy’s eyes widened. “You weren’t…you…”

“No, I wasn’t dead.”

“You didn’t drown.”

“That’s what I said, didn’t I?” Perry said.

“Where were you?” Percy said in raspy tones. He was barely able to get out the words. He had so many questions.

Where had Perry been? How had he stayed concealed for this long? Why did he come back today? What was on his mind?

“I stayed in the house. I went upstairs to eat and get whatever I wanted, pretending to be you—they can’t honestly tell the difference between us if I dress up like a societal reject like you do,” Percy said. “It’s laughable. Did you notice how Dad picked a picture of you thinking it was me for my fucking funeral? Of course you did. You’re probably the only one that clocked that one.”

“Yes,” Percy said, blinking. He remembered how his parents had insisted he’d been with them at dinners and at that outing to Diagon Alley, and he had told them that they weren’t. He had always thought that they’d just been neglecting him, but he quickly realised that it was because Perry had been with them.

“And you didn’t think that it was important to correct him?” Perry asked. “Do you know what it’s like, Percival, to attend your funeral and see someone else’s photo on your casket?”

Godric, Percy didn’t even want to imagine how that might feel.

“He was so sad. And they all blamed me,” Percy said. “I thought…I didn’t want to make him any more upset.”

“You’re so kind, Percival. So very kind,” Perry said.

But Perry was right. Percy should’ve said something. He tried to imagine what he’d feel if he’d died, and they’d chosen a picture of Perry instead of his. Perry must’ve been in so much pain. He must be in so much pain.

“I slept in the attic with the ghoul,” Perry said. He thought back to just an hour ago with Ginny mentioning that the house was haunted. The house was haunted. She hadn’t been paranoid. “Dad keeps so much shite crammed in there; you could find anything. It’s probably better stocked with mattresses, toys, and books than the whole house. And it’s not like the ghoul will ever say anything. I walked around the house whenever I wanted. Everyone always thought it was you. All day, I kept hearing them talk about me. Did you know, Percival, that that was the first time I felt like Mum and Dad cared more about me than they did you? It just…I couldn’t stop. I’d even nicked my Hogwarts letter from the post just to see what would happen!”

“You’re ill,” Percy could not believe Perry had done that intentionally. “Mum and Dad spent days crying, and you were there?”

“Oh, I’m the ill one, Percival? I’m ill?” Percy echoed. “What did you do now that you weren’t the centre of the universe?”

Percy paled.

“And Mum and Dad spent ages crying, but they don’t know me enough to tell us apart, do they?” Perry asked. “Not if we look the same. Not when it matters. Fuck, you know, once Mum mistook me for you, and she said the nicest things I’ve ever heard. She said that she was proud of me. But she thought I was you because I was wearing your ugly fucking jumper that day. After all, she hadn’t done the washing yet. Fuck, why doesn’t she say things like that to me?”

“Perry—” Percy tried to speak but was cut off.

“Fuck Mum, Percy. Fuck this whole fucking family. They never cared about me. Not really. And now, they don’t even know me, but it’s not like it matters. It’s not like they knew me back then anywhere,” Perry said.

“Godric, Peregrine, nobody knows you because you’ve made your whole personality about terrorising me,” Percy told him.

“If that helps you sleep at night,” Perry shrugged.

“I don’t sleep at night,” Percy said stiffly.

“I feel so sorry for you. Do you know want to know how I found out?” Perry asked. “I went up one day and saw everything was back to normal. I thought that I must’ve had the worst family in the world. So, pretending to be you, I asked Mum and Dad about me, and they acted like they had no idea who I was. Then I asked everyone else—they were bloody clueless, too. I thought that was strange. Then, once, I came up to you at night when you were asleep, and I swore I thought you might’ve had a heart attack looking at me. You recognised me—you probably thought it was a dream or a nightmare, so it didn’t matter much. But I knew that you knew something. You’re so bloody transparent. So I stole your brick of a diary and read it—every single fucking page, and behold… I knew what you did. And believe me, Percival, I have never been so angry in my fucking life. But I just thought I’d wait and see. See if you feel so bad you’d fess up.”

Percy’s cheeks flushed deeply. “You waited to see if I would fess up for eight years?” he couldn’t believe it.

“You thought that I was dead, so you’ve made everyone else forget about me,” Perry told him. “You take the fucking cake. How fucking narcissistic do you have to be to be so upset that you weren’t the centre of attention for once?”

“We were just children!” Percy said quietly.

“You’ve erased me from my family. What kind of a fucking child does that?”

“I don’t know,” Percy said. “I apologise. I forgive you for everything that happened back then, too. I would like to move past this. I just don’t understand what were you doing all this—”

Percy was shocked when Perry slapped him across the face. Percy froze from where he stood.

“I don’t want nothing to do with you. None of you,” Peregrine said before brandishing a letter. He noticed the Ministry stamp on top of the letter. “You know, Percival, it’s so hard to live in the same house when you weren’t supposed to be here, but do you know Mum and Dad are practically always out of the house when you’re not here? Oh, I’m the one that keeps stealing your money, not the twins, but they managed to snag a few sickles. They were telling the truth when they said they’ve not taken any. I’ve heard you yell at them too. And I might not have taken any exams, but I’ve read all the assigned material. I was bored out of my skull, but you’re right. I did wait for eight years, thinking about what I would do to you. I wanted something that would feel just right. I want to fucking destroy you.”

“That won’t make you happy, Perry.”

“What do you fucking know about being happy? You’re the most miserable person I know.”

Percy couldn’t digest what was happening. His brother was so vengeful that he waited eight years after his fake death to plot out… a revenge scheme. He kept staring at Perry with his mouth wide open. He just couldn’t believe it. But he was right. He could understand why Perry had felt so angry. He had been erased.

“I’m sorry, Perry,” Percy said, and he had meant it more than anything.

“I’m sorry too,” Perry said. “There can only be one of us, Perce. That’s the bar you set.”

“What do you mean? What is that?” Percy asked, nodding towards the letter.

“It’s a letter, Percival,” Perry said. “Congratulations, you’ve been promoted.”

“Promoted to what?” Percy echoed. Why on earth would he have been promoted? How could he have been promoted? Then he noticed Peregrine pulling something out of his pocket. Percy’s wand. Percy reached to feel for his sleeve where he’d always kept it, but it was gone. “And what are you doing with my—”

“Stupefy.”

Percy could hear things being said upstairs that he would never have said. He blinked, trying to move against his restraints. It was a week since he’d been held captive in the attic, and he could feel his shoulders ache with every breath he took.

“Why aren’t you happy for my promotion, Father?”

“We’ll talk about this later—”

“We’ll talk about this now.”

“Is that any way to talk to your father, Percival?” he heard his mother say. “This is really unbecoming of you.”

“No, mum, it’s not that unbecoming of the git,” the voice could’ve belonged to any of the twins or Ron. “He always thinks he’s better than everyone else.”

“That’s not true,” Perry said.

“That’s no way to talk to your brother,” his mum said.

“I don’t want to talk about this,” his father said again.

“Well, I do! I want to talk about the fact that this is all because you don’t have any ambition! That’s why Ron can’t have any new school robes and why we’re stuck in this house!” he heard Perry say from the floor above him. “And I can’t be a part of this family anymore if you’re going to continue believing in this-this farce.”

“If that’s how you feel, Percy, then you should leave,” he heard his father say so very calmly, but his voice was clear even through the hardwood floors. “It seems like I can’t change your mind. But you know as well as I do that the Minister just wants to spy on this family.”

“Is that what you think? And even if he did want to spy on the family, do you think I would’ve said anything? Is that how lowly you think of me?”

“That’s not the point, and you know it,” Arthur said. “I just…I want to make sure that you’re safe.”

“You don’t think I can take care of myself, is that it? But Bill and Charlie could go galivanting all around Europe and Asia doing Merlin-knows-what with Merlin-knows-who,” Perry had said. Percy shivered because, in another timeline, he could imagine having this same fight with his father. There was nothing that Perry had said that Percy hadn’t thought about, albeit fleetingly. “You’ve always thought so little of me, and I will prove you wrong. I’m going to prove you all wrong.”

“We’ve thought so little of you?” Fred or George said. “You’re the one that’s always got a broomstick up their arse!”

“Listen to what Dad is saying for once instead of just making up things in your head!” George or Fred said. “There’s no conspiracy against you for bloody’s sake, Perce.”

“Things don’t have to end this way, love…” Molly said. “If you’d just apologise—”

“He should apologise to me,” Perry said, his voice so loud that it rang into Percy’s ears.

“I am not apologising to you for wanting to make sure that you’re safe. And you know as well as I do, Percival, that this family is more about than just Galleons and that you are not like Bill and Charlie. You’re more reserved, you’re more…you’re more…”

“I’m more what?”

“You’re more vulnerable. I’m frightened for you, I really am. You’re so soft, Percy. You’re so…you feel so much pain so quickly, ” Arthur said. Percy blinked and smiled, realising that what he said was true. Would Bill and Charlie be held captive by their own deranged sibling? Would anyone else? “And after all that Harry’s done for us…”

Percy didn’t know what he believed, but he didn’t think he deserved that promotion more than his father. But what Perry had said was the truth, too. He desperately believed Dumbledore should’ve kept the school safer for his brothers and sister. How did a known convict get in? And how did that diary get into his sister’s hands? If Dumbledore made the school safer, then Percy didn’t have to try so hard. Ginny wouldn’t have been taking into the Chamber of Secrets. Ron wouldn’t be used in a pawn in the Triwizard Tournament. It’s Harry’s fault, he wanted to tell himself, but deep down, he knew better.   

Harry’s relationship with Ron was putting Ron in horrible situations, but it was hardly Harry’s fault. They were just mates. Percy wished he had someone that was just like Harry was to Ron. The closest he had to a relationship like that was what he had with Penelope. 

He felt such stabbing, crushing guilt because Perry was right about what he thought about his father, too. He had always thought his father lacked ambition, but he had never said it out loud. He knew that that wasn’t important to his family, not as important as it was for him. He knew that that was the part of him that the Sorting Hat had wanted to put into Slytherin. I see the ambition of Salazar Slytherin in you, the Sorting Hat had told him, and Percy had been both terrified and exhilarated.

He had always wanted to be something. What had the Hat seen for him? Could he have been more than what he was? Instead, he was sorted in a House he didn’t belong in. He was neither courageous nor bold. He was trapped in an attic and he had nobody to talk to anymore. He wished he had told Ginny about Perry. He wished he hadn’t been so bloody stupid.

The attic wasn’t anything like Percy remembered before. He used to remember it as very dark and disgusting, but it was cleaner than it had been when he was a child. He supposed that having the space for eight years made you want to tidy it up. There were mattresses all over the floor, with different pillows and bed setups. He focused on the plants immediately. He had been right. What a big help that is, with you tied up down here, Percy sarcastically thought.

Perry had kept most plants alive in an attic with only wizarding lamps set on high. There was a radio playing what Percy would deem as “experimental music” on low. There were boxes filled with snacks and a plate of his mum’s defrosted spaghetti bolognese along with a glass of lemonade. There were stacks of magazines, some Percy recognised as his own that had disappeared, his collection of Mad Martins and Charlie’s muggle Superman copies. There were rolls of Bill’s Weird Sister albums and Ron’s Chudley Canon memorabilia, all scratched or burned or torn into pieces because if there was one team Perry couldn’t stand, it was that one. There were scrolls of tightly bound Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice. Much Ado about Nothing. Macbeth. Hamlet. Romeo and Juliet. A Midsummer’s Nightdream, colour-coded, and a piece of skull sat along with vials of neon-coloured potions. All things that had disappeared ages ago, that each brother blamed the other for taking. Percy had also been right about the substances too—he could smell pot. He knew the smell because Penelope sometimes used it, though this was a fact that only he knew about her. He thought it was vile. He remembered hearing voices in the dark. An undead ghost explained all the mysteries of the Burrow.

As his eyes kept darting from one corner of the room to another, he realised that this was the home of someone who did not have a single responsibility in the world. This was a perfectly curated space to do nothing in but smoke pot all day long whilst listening to bad songs on the radio and jerking off (Percy just knew, even though the thought made him feel even more disgusted.)

He started to feel his anxiety rising again when he thought of how Penny had once put a nude photograph of herself in one of his textbooks, much to his surprise. They had had sex a few times, but Penelope had been much more into it than she had. In all the literature that he had read, he thought it would be harder for a woman to achieve orgasms, but he had never had a problem helping Penelope reach hers. It was his that was so impossible. He could never let go of himself long enough, and he found it hard to maintain an erection with his ongoing list of things to do circulating in his brain.

Knowing that there was a chance that his twin brother had seen a photo of his girlfriend naked made him feel suddenly overprotective over her. Her privacy would have been violated in such a profound and unacceptable way. He thought of how much he hated himself, how many times he’d regretted what he’d done and how often he thought of Percy had written it his diary. The diary that Perry had admitted to reading. He knew just how bad Percy felt, but he had decided that it didn’t matter. Because every story had to have a villain, and Percy’s was the one in Perry’s story.

He heard the Perry pronouncing around the house, monologing….

Since mine own doors refuse to entertain me, I'll knock elsewhere, to see if they'll disdain me.

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly.

He heard the sound of the door opening and Perry heading downstairs with bags of Percy’s things. He could smell their mother’s lemon tart as Perry approached him and the smell of musk from his cologne. He had placed his things on the ground. In front of him, Perry had opened the container of lemon tarts and started eating them.

Percy’s stomach protested. He hadn’t been fed so long that he was becoming delirious from the hunger. He tried to shift closer to the lemon tarts.

“These are your favourite, aren’t they?” Perry asked, and Percy nodded, trying to open his mouth to speak even though there was tape across his mouth. “Mum insisted I take some just before I left. I’ve decided that we’re going to a nice flat in London, live next door to the Ministry so that we can suck the Minister’s arse just that much more every single day.”  

Percy felt tears burning into his eyes. All he could think about was his mother humming as she made those tarts. He could see her standing in front of the polka-dotted curtains, the new ones that only she and him had noticed, as she looked outside into the recently de-gnomed garden. She would’ve been so happy making these that morning. But Perry ruined her night. He could hear her crying in her bed, just like he had all those months when he was a child. He wished he could stop his mother from being in so much pain.

Perry started smoking one of his joints as he ate. “I don’t want to hurt you, Percival,” he said. “I don’t.”

Percy cocked his head to one side. He was being bound and starved in an attic whilst Perry systematically destroyed his life bit by bit. In believable ways, that was what was crushing him so badly. Percy knew he had it in him to have that fight with his father and to say those words.  

“Godric, it’s even more boring when you can’t talk,” Perry said, moving to him and tearing the tape from his mouth. It was so painful that the first sound that Percy made was a shriek, though he knew that Perry had put silencing charms all over the attic. He didn’t know how he was able to cover up the smell of pot all these years, but he’d used charms for those ever since he was of age. He had his wand from the money he’d stolen from Percy, but he liked using Percy’s wand just to torment him because they had such similar wands. “So?”

Percy cleared his throat. “So?”

“What? You don’t want to make your case?” Perry said. “Try to convince me to let you go?”

“You’ve already read my diary,” Percy said. “You know everything that I’ve ever thought. You know my case.”

“Very smart of you. This captivity thing is doing wonders for your critical thing, Percival,” Perry said, nodding his head. “Yes, I’ve read everything you’ve ever thought. I’ve read about how bad you feel about what you did to me. I’ve read about…about how much you hate yourself and those other thoughts… you know which ones. I’ve read about those things that you thought about me—pot isn’t an illicit substance as you think it is, Percival, and I’ll have you know that this is the muggle kind, too. Very mild.”

“Seriously?” Percy said, rolling his eyes. Penny used the muggle kind, too, considering the wizarding kind was so strong that there had been reported cases of cardiac arrest within the first night of smoking it.  

“Yeah, considering you like being so particular about points like this,” Perry said with a raised eyebrow.

“Then why can’t you just let it go? Why can’t you just forgive me?” Percy didn’t understand.

 “Because,” was Perry’s thought.

“That’s not an answer,” Percy said, his voice hoarse and raspy.

“Yes, it is.”

“No,” Percy shook his head. “No, it’s not.”

“I don’t know who I am if I’m not making your life miserable,” Perry said, and Percy felt like that was the most honest thing Perry had ever told him. Perry was so angry that he didn’t know who he was without that, just as much as Percy didn’t know who he was if he wasn’t Perfect Prefect Percy. “I’ve attributed all the failures in my life to you. I’m smart, you know. I’m just not as smart as you. I could be organised too, but I’m not as organised as you. And every time I looked at those other fucking set of twins, I felt so angry too because they complete each other, and I fucking hate you.”

“Why do you need to swear so much?” Percy was tired of every other word of Perry’s being a variation of fuck.

“It’s just how I talk, Percival,” Perry said.

“Despite everything that has happened, I’m still glad you’re alive,” Percy said. Even though he was held captive down in the attic and a million questions kept circulating in his mind every day, he no longer had as many nightmares as he used to have. He could sleep longer every day—though he supposed the starvation also made it hard for him to stay up for too long.

“If you don’t shut up, I’m going to tape your mouth back up,” Perry said.

“What is your plan, Perry?” Percy said, his voice cracked. “You can’t keep me in your attic forever. I will eventually die here of either starvation or dehydration.”

“Yes,” Perry finally said. “That’s what I want to do.”

“You want to kill me and take over my life,” Percy echoed. He felt so detached saying that, like he was reading the plot on the back of one of Ginny’s murder mysteries or Perry’s plays. “That’s what you’ve spent eight years planning?”

“Yes,” Perry said, shaking his head. “Mum and Dad will forgive you. I know they would, but I need time alone so that I could…” he looked up and down at Percy without looking at him at all. Percy was sure that Peregrine was not capable of actually killing him. He might hate him, and he might want to hurt him badly, but he didn’t think he could kill him. “Why don’t you shut up for once, Percival? Not everything is about you.”

“I haven’t said anything,” Percy said.

“Yes, you did,” Perry said, shaking his head. “You’re always in my fucking head.”  

“You too,” Percy said quietly. “I… I could tell them the truth.”

“You’ve had eight years to tell the truth,” Perry shook his head. “And you know what’s the first introduction our parents have of me coming back, Perce? What? You’re going to tell them I started a fight with Dad?”

“If you want me to tell them it was me, I would,” Percy said weakly.

“You just don’t get it,” Perry said, shaking his head. “The only reason Mum and Dad will forgive me is because they think I’m you. If you get out of here, you’re just going to tell them what I did to you; then they’re never going to forgive me. They’re never going to think that it was just me being even. They’re never going to like me. They never did like me. Nobody ever likes me. Even when the twins make fun of you, they’d fucking kill someone if they think that they’d hurt you and-and I don’t have anything like that. I don’t.”

Percy felt so tired and lightheaded, and he could see Perry putting the lid back on the container of lemon tarts. “I made them forget about you after you died,” he tried to say. “I did bad things too.”

“You don’t understand,” Perry said, looking back at him.

“Yes, I do,” Percy said. “You’ve had eight years to think about this, and you’ve not thought this through, have you?”

“I have thought this through. All I have to do is kill you, and…then everything will be okay,” Perry said.

“You won’t stop hearing me in your head,” Percy said, though he suspected Perry already knew. “You’ll see me every time you close your eyes, just like I used to see you every time I closed mine. But you’d know that you did it on purpose. But do you know what I’m going to do, Peregrine? If this is what you want, I will do something for you that I wished so hard someone else did for me… I forgive you.”

“What the fuck did you say?”

“I said,” Percy said, puffing his cheeks up and looking at Perry straight in his eyes, “That I forgive you.”

Perry had put his joint on the ashtray next to him after stubbing it out, and Percy didn’t think much of the dark look in his eyes. Then suddenly, Perry was on top of him, punching him over and over in the face, and his punches were so quick and violent that Percy could feel his bones break underneath his hands and his mouth go numb.

“What do you say to me?” Perry’s voice was hurried and frenzied. “What do you say to me?”

Percy swallowed the blood in his mouth, and he could hardly see when he opened his mouth and, in a whisper, repeated, “I forgive you.”

Perry grabbed Percy by his arm and dragged him across a tiny door near the corner. He opened the door and it was dusty and full of cobwebs. Percy recognised a plant that he didn’t knew the name of that had to live in absolute darkness, and he was shoved inside by Perry, who shut the door behind him.

“I don’t need you to forgive me,” Perry said, his hands trembling as he slammed the door behind him. “I don’t need it!”

“Yes, you do,” Percy said to the empty dark room that he was kept in. It was funny. There was one time that he swore that he might be claustrophobic, but he wasn’t. And in the darkness, he felt almost at ease with the fact that maybe he was going to die.  The consequences of your actions. He thought back to reading one of his favourite books, A Wicked Afternoon, and in his mind, he was floating. If this was the end of his story, then he didn’t have to worry about anything anymore.

He could just be until he wasn’t.

Perry opened the door again a few minutes later and helped him up from where he was lying. Percy’s eyes felt unfocused as he removed his binds. Percy flinched as he saw his skin peel off with the tape. Raw and red.

“Mum made chicken escalope,” Perry said after some time. “You…you like that, don’t you?”

Percy’s world was slightly unfocused, even though he wasn’t smoking like Perry was, he felt like his brain was made from mush. He was stuffed so full he felt like he was going to start throwing up. He’d eaten more lemon tarts in one sitting than he had ever had in his life.

“Why couldn’t we be like Fred and George?” Percy suddenly asked.

Perry scoffed. “What? You want to have shared brain circuits? You don’t want to be an individual?”

“Fred and George are individuals. They just do things to annoy other people,” Percy said, sighing deeply. “If you start seeing them as separate beings, you will start to realise that they are vastly different from each other.”

“Your idea of vastly different is probably different than everyone else’s.”

“To start with, Fred is straight and George is not,” Percy said.

“Really?” Perry seemed interested, looking at Percy with peaked interest. “Does Fred know?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve caught George doing things before with Lee Jordan. He’d made me swear up and down not to tell Fred,” Percy didn’t realise that he had kept so many secrets until then. Nothing was as big as his secret about Perry. “He also believes in astrological forecasts and reads his horoscope on a daily basis. Fred always thought it was a load of hogwash.”

“It is a load of hogwash. But Merlin, if you start reading astrological forecasts, I’d think you were a bender. It seems like Freddie isn’t so bright.”  

“That’s not a politically correct term,” Percy said. “And I’d reckon Fred is actually smarter than George.”

“Whatever,” Perry said. “That bird you’ve got is really interesting. What’s her name?”

“Penny,” Percy said.

“Seriously?”

“What?”

“You couldn’t find a bird that doesn’t have a name like ours? I mean, come on. Percy. Perry. Penny. It’s like we’ve come straight out of Tales of Beedle the Bard.”

“Have you read any of those tales? They aren’t your typical children’s stories.”

“You were always the smart one,” the way that Perry said that was wistful. “This is nice.”

“I agree,” Percy said.

Percy froze when he saw Perry do something that he had never seen before. He saw Perry cry.

“Fuck. Why did it take so long?”

“I don’t know.”

“This is the worst thing that’s ever happened, because now, I feel bad. I feel bad for wishing you dead and for stealing your money and beating you when we were kids. There’s no excuse for that now. I’m just a fucking bad person,” Perry said.

Percy raised an eyebrow at him. “I erased you from our family’s memories when I thought you were dead because I felt like nobody noticed me anymore and I might as well be dead too.”

“I know how that feels,” Perry said. “I would’ve done the same thing.”

“Really? The very same thing that you wanted to kill me for?”

“Yeah… but I could never kill you. Not really.”

“I know, Peregrine. You’re not a murderer,” Pery said, then he looked over the attic. It was someone’s dream. It had all of these things. Perry wasn’t dead for eight years. He was flourishing somehow in a tiny attic, and he had learned things all by himself. “I can’t believe you spent eight years avoiding responsibility here.”

“That’s what I’m good for,” Perry said. “I did nothing all the time. It was the best thing ever.”

“That sounds horrible. But I doubt you did nothing,” Perry said, nodding off to the literature. “You learned magic.”

“Yeah, I did. I did my O.W.L’s too. You can do it from the post too. There’s a way to figure out if you’re cheating or using books. That’s the best thing about a magical system. I got five O.W.L’s.”

“I think that’s the hardest working five O.W.L’s anyone had ever earned. Five O.W.L’s you’ve taught yourself.”

“Yeah whatever,” Perry said, obviously unsure how to react to being complimented, so he smirked instead. “Hey, you know. Nobody knows that there’s two of us. Mum and Dad are angry at me—well, angry at you for being self-centred. I mean, I can still act like that. It’s not hard to pretend you’re a pompous prat.”

“Thanks,” Percy said, rolling his eyes.

“I mean, there was never a point in your life as Perfect Prefect Percy that you ever just had no expectations,” Perry said.

“I like expectations,” Percy said.

“You’ve never tried it any other way, Percival. This is the time to do it.”

“I think I preferred it when you were plotting to murder me,” Percy said. “I just want it on the record now that I’m not smoking anything.”

“Your loss.”

Percy discovered that living in an attic with no expectations was a nightmare. He felt himself sink into a depression with nothing to do. Even though he read all the books that Perry had kept for him downstairs and he went out regularly with Perry for walks to the lake where he supposedly drowned. He felt so sad that he wanted to cry most nights that he went to bed until there was nothing left of him. His night terrors still plagued him. He saw his whole life up until that point play in slow motion every time he closed his eyes; the cumulation of every bad decision that he had ever made and he wished for that reprieve he had in that tiny dark closet with barely any air.

He didn’t have the Ministry anymore. He knew deep down that there was some truth to what his father had said. He couldn’t go back to the Ministry. Upstairs, he could hear Perry further destroy whatever relationship that he had with his family, not intentionally as much as how angry he was at everything. He’d sent back his mum’s Christmas jumper to make a point, a thought which made Percy flinch when Perry had told him after they sat down eating biscuits together.

“How do you know if what you’re doing in your life matters?” Percy said, draining the tea from the thermos that Perry had bought him. He took all the biscuits he liked and set them aside, and Perry stole a few custard creams from him. “I supposed what I was doing was some really important proper work in the Ministry. That’s what I thought anyway. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t as important as I thought it was, and it’s ruining my family. I might never had said what you’ve said to our Father, but I believed—or believe—in them in some way or another. How does that work out?”

Perry raised an eyebrow at him. “Do you ever just stop thinking so much about everything?”

“Err… no,” Percy did not know who he was if he was not constantly thinking of everything. “How do you know that you liked acting? You’ve never even tried it professionally. And if I wanted to be a professional actor, I think I’d just die, because being a professional actor is so hard to get a job listing for. Even if you’re wonderful.”

“I don’t want to be a professional actor,” Perry said. “But I do want to act.”

“Act in what?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not a very logical thing that you’ve just said. Where are you going to find plays or something to act in?”

“The point of this, Percival, is that you sit down and do nothing,” Perry said, lying back down on one of the mattress that was just beside the one that Percy had staked as his own, simply for the fact that it smelled less of weed than the others. He took out a regular cigarette much to Percy’s gratitude, and started smoking it. “You cease to think about things. Hey, your girlfriend is really smart, you know. She took one look at me and told me I wasn’t you. She asked me questions about some kind of date you went to somewhere that I don’t know and when I couldn’t keep up, she just told me to tell her who I really was. So I did. I told her that I was keeping you captive and letting you do nothing. She thinks it’s good you taking time for yourself. She thinks if you hadn’t, you’d probably have killed yourself.”

“I’ll kill myself here instead,” Percy said, staring at the ceiling and wondering where his life had disappeared. “I’ve never been so restless in my life.”

“Yes, you have. And I’ve not even been around to see most of your life.”

“How can you tell someone not to do something that defines them?”

“You think this is what defines you?”

Percy thought about that for a moment. What made Percy himself? Was it the fact that he could never calm down? He didn’t think so, but his reluctance to do so was still a trait of his. “No,” he said. “But I can’t seem to let go of it.”

“That’s because you don’t want to,” Perry said. “It’s your coping mechanism.”

“It’s a very bad coping mechanism.”

“Most people have bad coping mechanisms. But you’re not your coping mechanism.”

“Maybe I’m not, but you are. I think that you, Peregrine, are very much just a useless stoner.”

“I’m a partially useful stoner. I’m very philosophical.”

“When we were children and you got lost, mum said that it was my responsibility to look after you,” Percy finally said. He was still running around in his mind. He’d not played a single Quidditch game, but he felt like an athlete when it came to the constant mental gymnastics he’d done on a daily basis. “You might have thought it was hilarious, but it wasn’t. For ages, she had blamed me for everything. If I’d just been a better brother, if I’d been thoughtful enough to stay or smart enough to figure out what you were doing, then everything would’ve been fine. But bad things kept happening everywhere. Gin got attacked on her first year, and I couldn’t do anything. But Ron and Harry—Harry Potter—that is could help her. But I couldn’t.”

“And?” Perry said.

“What do you mean and?”

“How many people do you need helping Gin? Two sound like a good number.”

“You’re calling her Gin but you call me Percival?” Percy said, raising an eyebrow.

“Is that what you’re focusing on? I call you Percival because it used to piss you off but now it’s a habit. Anyway, that doesn’t matter now. Listen for a fucking minute, mate. I’m just saying—you should be glad there is someone out there helping her out. You noticed that things weren’t going right. You’re obsessed with your fucking systems—what kind of government system does everything? There’s sectors for everything. I wouldn’t go to you if I want to have fun, but I’d come to you if I’m flat out on my arse and need someone to help me write my report before I fail.”

“I suppose so,” Percy did not think about it like that. “I just wish I was more than I am.”

“You don’t even know who the fuck you are,” Perry said, rolling his eyes. “I wished I was more like you most of my life, you know. I wished I was as good as you, but it’s so mental to see that you’re not happy either. It’s like everyone is miserable, but not really, because if everyone was this miserable and there was nothing to hope for, we’d all be dead. So there is something out there. Something good. And honestly, Perce, you know what I realised? I don’t need to be you and you don’t need to be me. What’s people’s obsession is with compartmentalising people into need little lines? Sure, you’re a bloody prat, but you’re also Perfect Prefect Percy, and you’re also a top student and you’re also one of Mum and Dad’s sons and you’re also my twin. And you’re so much fucking things, how can you put that down in one sentence anyway?”

“I suppose,” Percy said, crossing his arms over his chest. “You didn’t kiss my girlfriend, did you?”

“Oh, trust me I’ve tried and she punched me in the face,” Percy said. “I think I have anger management issues.”

“Do you? I’ve never noticed. I can’t believe you’ve sent Mum’s jumper back. She’s going to think I’m mental.”

“You are very mental, Percival. You know, I’ve read so much. Post traumatic stress disorder is a very serious thing.”

“I’m not a war victim, Peregrine,” Percy said.

“Who said you had to be a war victim? I’ve read all about it. It just has to be a life-altering thing. I think thinking that your brother is dead for eight years is a very life-altering thing. I think I’ve fucked you up forever. You know, sometimes that makes me happy to know you’re so fucked up and sometimes, I feel so angry at myself for being such a dick.”

“Godric, I would give my left toe to Merlin himself if you would stop swearing so bloody much.”

“I’m glad I didn’t kill you,” Perry said. “I mean, seeing you miserable over just lying in bed is much better. And I know that you say that you’re going to kill yourself, but I don’t really think that you want to do that. I think that you’re just fed up with things the way that they are, but they’re not as bad as you think they are. You always think it’s worse than it is.”

Percy rolled his eyes, but he understood the sentiment. “Is that what smoking that stuff all day does to you?”

“Yup,” Perry said, popping the ‘p’ and reaching in for a custard cream.

“If you keep eating like that, it’s going to be very easy to tell the difference between us,” Percy said.

“It’s already easy,” Perry said, nodding his head and very seriously said, “My dick is bigger than yours.”

“Do you like making reports?” Percy suddenly asked.

“I pretend that I’m playing you,” Perry said. Percy had guessed that too, among his many guesses. “A Shakesperean tragedy.”

“A what tragedy?”

“See, Percival, this is why you need time to do nothing. I think I’m going to be ironic and introduce you to The Comedy of Errors.”

They lived in that bubble for some time, Percy was unsure how long until he asked for a Daily Prophet and nearly had an aneurysm realising that months had passed with him sat there doing nothing and—well, nothing had happened. The world continued as it was. Perry had even gotten him to smoke one of his cigarettes and Percy coughed his way through it, swore that he was having an asthma attack and laid in the foetal position for several hours. But even then, nothing happened.

The world carried on no matter what he did or didn’t do, and none of his family members had suddenly died or gone missing. They didn’t need him to constantly be over their heads, shrieking at them to do their homework. Percy read some of Perry’s comic books, and decided that he could not be Perry. He did some of the reports that Perry had brought back home, and spent some time exploring everything that Perry had brought him: knitting, cooking, drawing, and had come to realise that he very much enjoyed playing a harmonica very badly for most of the hours of the day.

The happiness he felt when he had gotten one note right out of a thousand made him feel like a child again, even though he wasn’t sure if he felt like a child even then. He also had a strange talent for predicting Quidditch scores and helped Perry win a few bets, even though Percy was sure he shouldn’t do that anymore. Percy had a blind spot when it came to his favourite team, the Ballycastle Bats. He had perfected both his hair care and skin care routine and one very aggressively large pimple that was on his neck for several months had disappeared over night. He had written letters to Penelope and tried to write bad poetry that made her laugh. But he still had the nightmares and he still worried constantly.

He would worry constantly forever, but at least, he was something more than he thought that he was, which was all that he ever wanted. Percy had come to terms with the fact that he would always be too neurotic and obsessive, and maybe that the only major piece of advice he ever needed was to calm down, repeatedly, for the rest of his life. He might never be able to do it, but maybe he should try more before he’d actually end up killing himself, just like his favourite prefect from the Prefects Who Gained Power. He had written that it was all just so suffocating to mean so much to the world, a world that didn’t give him anything back. Percy felt that way often.

He liked seeing Perry come back down to the attic and sit down and actually do the reports by himself. He was very good at Percy’s job, and he had learned every magical system and law by himself. That was something that Percy could never do and he let Perry know this once when he had seen him leave for work at five in the morning.

“Shut up,” Perry said. “You’re so boring.” But he could hear the smile in his voice even with Percy being half-asleep.

They were very much like each other, but Percy supposed that could be said of any human being. He was sure he had so much in common with Bill, Charlie, the twins, Ron and Ginny. He was sure he had something in common with everyone, something that was so visceral and raw and real that it made him wonder why the world had to be so hard then, if they were all the same with the same neuroses and pain and sheer suffering. Why he had to be compartmentalised into Perfect Prefect Percy, and why it would be strange if he had walked up to the Ministry of Magic wearing a neon dress.

They never made plans of when the truth would emerge, but on the day that Arthur Weasley ended up in the hospital, both Perry and Percy both rushed down St Mungo’s hallways in the middle of the night. Perry dressed in Percy’s work clothes and Percy dressed in Perry’s orange sweatpants. Percy decided to stand outside as Perry went in and sat with them.

“Percy,” Arthur’s voice sounded surprised, but there was a softness around his face. Even though Percy had only been away from the world for some time, he felt like his father had looked ten years older.  

“Dad,” Perry said, adopting a very Percy-like expression to the point where Percy wanted to laugh.

Percy watched his mother hold Perry so tightly, wondering if some part of her would suddenly sense the discrepancy, but she hadn’t for the past few months and she hadn’t then—and why would she? She didn’t know about Perry.

You’re easily replaced, came the thought, but it didn’t make him feel anything.

“Percy, I knew you’d come,” his mother said in a low voice, her tone shaking.

“I’m glad you’ve come,” Arthur said. “This wouldn’t be the same without you. I’m doing alright.”

“What have the healers said?” Perry asked, and Arthur explained about his blood-replenishing potions. “You mustn’t have been so reckless.”

“Yeah, Perce is back and he’s fine,” Ron said with a roll of his eyes.

Percy watched from afar the reunion, and he had thought that there was no way that his father would forgive him, but they immediately had. Fred and George punched him in either arms, or said, “Took you long enough, prat.” And that was when he knew that Perry had been right and he had made all the bad things up in his mind mostly.

Maybe everything was going to be okay, Percy thought. Maybe it didn’t have to hurt so much all the time.

“I stole two Galleons from your room,” Ginny said. “Guess we’re ever.”

“Um…” Perry rubbed his arm. “I’ve something to tell you.”

“You don’t have to apologise,” Arthur said. “I’ve said some hurtful things too.”

Percy saw Perry look irritated for a moment, and he knew that despite them setting aside their differences, he couldn’t remove that deep-rooted idea in Perry’s mind that Percy had ruined his life. “Well, I did want to apologise, but that’s not what I was talking about,” he leaned forward, clearing his throat. “You’re not going to have a coronary, are you?”

“Percival!” Molly said. The twins burst out laughing. “I never thought I’d have to tell you off for being so tactless.”

“Your job must be more exciting than we thought it was,” Ginny started snorting. “If it’s made Percy forget his manners.”

“I’m just—well, I’m being cautious because I have some… err… very important news,” Perry said.

“You’re coming out,” Fred decided.

“No! I’m straight!” Perry said, and Percy thought he was speaking more for himself. Percy did not explicitly mention that he wasn’t straight. He had once kissed Penelope’s male cousin to see if he would like it, and he did find it appealing. Though that was neither here nor there. “Godric, you two really are fucking unbelievable.”

Percy swore he saw the blood come out of his father’s face. His mother suddenly turned beetroot red.

“Percival! Language!” Molly said. “You don’t want to have a bad impression on your brothers and sister!”

“Bad impression? On this lot? That’s impossible,” Perry was rapidly moving away from Percy-like territory. He had cleared his throat. “But it’s glad it’s come out like that because—well, Mum what is it that I want to say is that I’m not Percival. I’m…I’m someone else. That looks very much like him. A twin, you might say. A twin that maybe you’ve forgotten about because of memory spells. A twin that maybe in another life you thought had drowned to death?”

Fred and George burst into laughter. His parents went white and Ron and Ginny shared a look.

“What?” Molly said, her voice higher and more irritated.

“He’s lost the plot,” Ron said, shaking his head. “Bloody nutter.”

“I’m not hallucinating, am I?” Arthur said, running his hand through his hair.

“No, I’m serious!” Perry said. “I’ll prove it to you!”

“How?” Ginny said, shaking her head. “You’re not serious.”

“I am,” Perry insisted. “There’s two of us. There’s Percy and then there’s me—my name is Peregrine. Perry. Whatever.”

“You’ve gone mental,” Fred said. “That’s what’s happened. All those quill feathers you’ve accidentally eaten throughout the years have finally rendered you barmy. The broomstick up your arse has dissected your bloody brain.”

“Perce, we’re the twins in the family,” George told him. “I know you’re jealous—”

.

“Why would I be jealous of you lot? You share like one brain cell,” Perry said, rolling his eyes.

“Well, how are you going to prove it then?” Ron said.

“He’s not proving anything,” Arthur said. “Percy, this job is not good for you. You’re not yourself. I think-I’m very glad you’ve come to see me but I think you should…I think you should…”

Perry scoffed, shaking his head. Then both he and Percy noticed in front of Arthur a package of MRS CRUMBLE’S PEANUT BRITTLE on the table. Percy winced, just thinking about how swollen his throat would be if he had eaten that.

“I’ll prove it to you,” Perry said. “I’m not Percy and this is going to be the proof.”

He grabbed the peanut brittle in front of him, snapped it in half and Percy heard his mother’s loud shriek. Before she could dive in front of him, Perry stuffed the peanut butter down his throat and swallowed a whole piece whole, wincing.

“I should’ve chewed that more,” Perry said.

“GET A NURSE NOW!” Molly said, shouting so loudly that Percy thought that the whole of Britian had heard her.

Percy let out a sigh of relief. Watching Perry eat that peanut butter practically made him come out in hives. He reached out to check his throat just to make sure he wasn’t dying of anaphylactic shock. The last time, he’d swollen up in less than a minute and he was near death and comatose in less than two minutes. If he hadn’t had his Epipen, he would’ve died.

“Mum,” Perry said very loudly and clearly. “Listen to me, I’m NOT Percival. I do NOT have a deadly peanut allergy. But I’m not a Death Eater. I’m not impersonating him—if it was Polyjuice, it would’ve worn off by now, you know. I’m just… my name is Peregrine.”

“I don’t think that’s Percy, mum,” Ginny said, the voice of reason. “Percy would’ve collapsed and died by now.”

“Get out,” Arthur said, his hands shaking. “I don’t know who you are but—”

“For Merlin’s sake, I’m your son. Your other son,” Perry said, shaking his head. Then he flickered his head over towards the glass window where Percy was stood there. When he noticed his whole family turning to look at him, Percy flushed and slowly entered the room. Seeing themselves across a mirror, it was the most surreal thing that he had ever witnessed.

Percy sat down next to his shell-shocked father. “I can explain this,” Percy said. “But it’s not the best story.”

Arthur’s face was expression. Percy cleared his throat and started from the beginning.

Not the beginning on the day that Percy thought that Perry had drowned in the water, but in the beginning when they were born. Percy had brought the photo album with him, flipping through the appropriate photographs with his story-telling. He could feel himself growing more and more exhausted with every line that he said; every fear he’d ever had come to life as he carried on, especially when he had come to the day of Perry disappearing by the lake and what had transpired between them.

Percy didn’t think that his family would take the news lightly but he could never envision how horrified his parents would be at the thought that a ten-year-old boy had erased their memory of an entire human being. And that was when Percy knew that the night terrors could never end. When he closed his eyes, he would see their faces staring at him like he was a monster that had done a monstrous thing. And no matter what they said afterwards, the images would be in his mind.

And then it seemed very clear that things like expectations in society and who he was and who he could’ve been meant nothing, because all he would ever be was this ten-year-old boy that had done a very bad thing. And because of that bad things, more bad things had happened. And that it would be best if…if he… if he…

Perry had told him that things weren’t as bad in real life as it was in his mind. No, things were worse. If he had grounded himself in reality, then he wouldn’t feel this pain in his chest, this heaving sharp pain inside of him that was letting him know that there was no solution to the problem that he had created. There would be pain no matter what he had chosen.

He shouldn’t have left Perry because he was angry and read a bad book he couldn’t remember what it was about.

His mother wouldn’t have forgiven him, he had come to conclude. They would look at him and think of Perry. They would look at him and see someone that was capable of doing something that they wrote about in the newspaper. Angry Boy Erased Family’s Memories to Steal Galleons to Buy New Broomstick. He was that, except very real and irredeemable.

“Well… Percy or Perry or whoever you really are, I think you should leave right now,” Arthur said, his voice calm but he could see the anger in his eyes. He knew that he was trying not to say the words that he really wanted to say. He didn’t have to. Percy could imagine what they might be so easily it was as if he’d already said it. “I’m unwell and I don’t really want to think about this now. I don’t want to…” his voice was trailing off. “Godric, this is a sick thing you’ve both done. I’ve no idea who either of you are but I don’t want you here, is that understood?”

Percy swallowed the lump in his throat, the sound of his father’s baritone vibrating in his mind.

“I was a child,” Percy said quietly. “I thought—”

“You thought what? Do you understand how reckless it is, the thing that you’ve done? One faked his death and the other one erased the family’s memories? Is that a joke? It’s got to be. It’s not even real. It doesn’t even sound real. It sounds like a plot from a book,” Arthur’s voice was so loud that a nurse popped her head in to ask if everything is okay. He nodded his head towards her and nodded off towards the door, his jaw shaking.

“Or a play,” Perry said in a soft voice, smiling.

Arthur ignored him and said, “And I don’t want to think about it. And I don’t want to talk about it. I want the both of you out now.”

“Dad—” Fred stood up wanting to say something, but Arthur cut him off.

“You’re not involved,” Arthur said. Molly was so quiet, as if she wasn’t there at all but that spoke volumes to Percy. Her silence rang in his ears just like his words did. She was leafing through a photo album and looking at photos of memories she didn’t have. “Get out. Both of you. Out.”

“You didn’t have to talk to him like that,” Perry suddenly said. “You could’ve said the same things in a nicer way.”

“I am being nice.”

“No, you’re not,” Perry said. “You’re being a fucking arsehole. You’re the one that raised him like this. Have some bloody accountability for once, mate, don’t you? He’s bloody traumatised. He has PTSD or whatever it is, and everything you say stays in his mind forever. He’s never going to forget about this, and you’ve not said not a single nice thing to him. Do you know how sad a kid must feel to think that he has to fix his whole family by himself? Why do you think Bill and Charlie live on the other side of the world? Because they love spending so much time in this family, I’ll bet.”

Percy froze. “Peregrine,” his voice was quiet. “Peregrine, let’s go,” he said quietly.

“I’ve hated him all my life and I’ve done the worst things anyone could ever do and he’s forgiven me,” Perry said. “I don’t think anyone understands who he is. I don’t think he does. If I don’t say these things for him, nobody else would.”

He almost felt a pang of pity for Perry for saying those words. The world was so sick and there was no point of things like playing a harmonica very badly or sending poetic stanzas that children could write better.

Percy didn’t know how he managed to get out of the room when he felt so unsteady. The minute he had shut the door behind him, he felt tears burning up in his eyes. When he looked at Perry, he didn’t even looked surprised that he’d been thrown out, rejected again. He didn’t look anything except angry.

“You were wrong,” Percy told him, his voice cracking. “They won’t forgive me over anything. They won’t.”

Perry’s eyes were shining too. “Fuck them,” he said. “Godric, they’ve made us both miserable. I’ve figured it out, Percival. I have. We don’t need them anymore. That’s why I’ll be okay now. And you’re going to be okay too. I promise.”

But Percy didn’t want to. He wanted his father to smile at him, and for all the bad thoughts in his mind to disappear. That wasn’t going to happen anymore. Perry had just told their father to fuck off. And all Percy wanted to be able to sleep the night without worrying that the world would collapse if he slept the whole night. He wanted to feel more than he was.

“No,” Percy said, shaking his head. “I should just die. You should’ve killed me. I should’ve just died.”

“It’ll make me very sad if something happened to you, Percy,” Perry said. “It’ll make everyone sad.”

“No, it won’t,” Percy said. “I’m never going to forget what he said.”

“I know. But it doesn’t matter.”

“If that doesn’t matter, then what does?”

“You matter,” Perry said. “What you feel. That matters.”

“Okay,” Percy said. “What I feel is that I should be dead. What I feel is that I hate everything. That I wish I could erase it all again and fix it. I-I-I didn’t want it to be like this. I just wanted everything to be so easy. I don’t know how to…”

Perry grabbed him by his waist and held him so closely. Percy swore he was dying already. He couldn’t breathe. His face was hot and the tears were falling down harder and faster, the only thing he could smell was Perry’s cologne and the marijuana he continuously smoked. He was shaking but Perry was holding him so tightly he wasn’t falling.

“You should’ve killed me, I should’ve just died,” Percy kept saying. “You should’ve killed me, you should’ve…”

“Percival, just stop.”

“I’m never going to forget what he said and I can’t live like this. I’m so tired. I’m so tired.”

Perry had fallen asleep in the attic that night with Percy beside him on the mattress, who was snoring after he’d given him a Sleeping Draught. Before they’d fallen asleep, Perry had told him that about his favourite play, Hamlet, in great details, to which Percy had asked questions about the characters. Perry reminded him that he wanted to be an actor—not a professional one, just an actor-stoner hybrid that had an unsteady outcome—and Percy could write long-winded reports about things that only he cared about because those sort of things mattered too. That made him smile.

He hated himself for how much he had hated Percy, who woke up in the middle of the night shrieking so loudly that Perry was sure that his silencing charms wouldn’t work anymore. Perry was glad that in telling the truth, Percy had not mentioned that they were living in the attic together, though he had suspected that Ginny knew about it because she kept cocking her eyebrow, mentioning something about shadows in the darkness.

When Perry woke up in the dark in the middle of the night to take a piss, he noticed that the bed next to him was empty. He felt a sickening feeling in his stomach because he knew what had happened.

When he had walked upstairs to put on a pair of plimsolls to leave the house, he heard a voice in the kitchen. 

“Dad’s going to be mental if he knew you were here.” It was Ginny’s voice. Perry looked at her, noticing her eyes were red. She’d probably been crying too. He wondered all the feelings his family would have, but he couldn’t think about that then. “Which one are you? And you are living somewhere in the house, aren’t you? I mean, this house was haunted… by you or your brother, whatever it is. I can’t tell which one you are. I can’t tell the difference between you.”

“I’m not Percy. I’m Perry,” he said. “And I shouldn’t make it this easy for you, but I’ve got a birthmark on my wrist. Percy doesn’t. It’s not too obvious—barely actually, but it’s one thing I’ve got that he doesn’t have.”

“Oh,” Ginny said, suddenly staring at his wrist. “Percy’s sleeping?”

“No, I don’t know where he is,” but deep down, Peregrine knew. “Well, I do know, but I wish that I’m wrong.”

He walked over to the Weasley family clock, all of them were at Mortal Peril because of this stupid war that was going on that Perry didn’t want to think about. He cleared his throat and looked back at Ginny.

“I think he’s at the lake,” Perry said.

“Why would he be there?”

Perry didn’t want to say why Percy would be at the lake.

“So that he could kill himself,” Perry said.

“What?” Ginny echoed, her voice so high and her hands shaking. “Why-why didn’t you lead with that!”

“Because… because I don’t want to think about it,” Perry blinked. He kept thinking of how he and Percy were sitting next to each other, Percy asking questions about Hamlet. He thought of Ophelia in the water, drowned. He thought of his twin brother dead in the water and felt his throat swell. “He thinks about it a lot. Killing himself. But I never really thought he meant it means it. Well, I didn’t think so, but I think that he means it now.”

“I have to get Mum and Dad,” Ginny said, alarm in her voice.

“Why? They’re the reason that this is happening,” Perry said. He was angry again. He would always be angry.

A part of him thought that the reason that this was happening was because of Mum and Dad. Why couldn’t they tell how bloody fragile he was? He was one step away from snapping. Couldn’t they see that? He remembered holding him in his arms. Had that been a few hours ago? He remembered wanting to kill him just a few months ago. He remembered being ten years old and throwing him in the water and watching him claw for his life. He remembered Percy couldn’t swim.

“Let’s just go,” Perry said, then he noticed Ginny walking up the stairs. “Don’t fucking get those two to come downstairs, Gin. I swear to Merlin, I’ll kill them with my own bare hands. I will. This is… this is their fault.”

The night was so quiet, even though Perry could hear the sound of his heart in his ears. He remembered the clearing so well that it was etched in his memories, the sight of ten-year-old Percy running up and down and screaming for him, and how he’d hid in a corner, laughing to himself as his brother made himself go mental thinking he was gone.

This is just payback, isn’t it? Perry thought. You’re doing your own version.That’s very funny, Percy. Very funny.

I misjudged you, I have. But I’ll just bring you back home and everything will be fine. I’ve promised that. I have, haven’t I?

At the lake, there were Percy’s white plimsolls. Perry leaned down and he stared at the body in the water, frozen cold and blue and he felt his heart sink so deep into his stomach that he thought that he might genuinely die too. There was a note stuffed into the plimsols and it made Perry wanted to throw up.

“We should take him out,” Ginny said, but her face was white. She must have seen how blue he was. “We should…”  

Perry did pull him out but he already knew the verdict before he had. He was carrying a heavy wet corpse. Perry noticed his blue-tinged lips, his bloated stomach. His lack of Percy. His lack of anything.

“You know what he said to me?” Perry said to Ginny. “He said he wanted to be more than what he was.”

He wanted to be more so badly, the idea of it was so all consuming, that he had just chosen to be nothing instead.

“Look at what he’s written,” Perry said quietly, turning to the note he’d left discarded the plimsol. He had read Percy’s handwriting, looped and small. He wanted to throw it into the lake too.

“He wants to erase what happened, doesn’t he?” Ginny guessed. Percy was right. She was very smart.

Perry nodded his head. “He wants me to be him.” An acting role, he thought bitterly, just like he’d always wanted. One that he knew that he was good at. One that Percy’s job would pay him for. “He wants me to pretend to be him. He wants me to pretend not to have come to the hospital. He wants me to continue this stupid fight and come back and apologise and pretend to be him so that we can… both get what we want. But I don’t want that. I want him back.” His voice was cracking. He didn’t want his family. He hated his family. He hated everyone, except maybe Ginny right then.

“If that’s what he wants,” Ginny said in a whisper. “I’ll help you.”

“But I hate them,” Perry said, shaking his head. “They killed my brother. They killed him. It’s not fucking fair. They did this to him. I want them to know it every time they close their eyes that they did this to him. I want them to think about every time that they hurt him when they think about him, just like I will because this is my fault too. This is everyone’s fault. Except…except maybe you.”

“But that’s not what Percy wants,” Ginny said in just as soft of a tone.

“He was too good for them,” Perry said. “Too good for me. I was going to kill him and he forgave me. He forgave me. I don’t want to be forgiven. I am a bad person. I should know that when he said that he should’ve died that he was…I should’ve… I’m his twin. That means something, doesn’t it? We should have this bond that tells us everything, shouldn’t it?”

Perry never wanted to be near a lake ever again in his life.

“But at least he’s asleep now. For good,” Ginny said.

“Yeah,” Perry said, wiping his tears away with a smile. “That’s right. That’s very clever what you just said.”

“Why am I not crying?”

“You’ll cry later,” Perry said. “When it finally hits you what actually happened.”

“I don’t want him to be dead,” Ginny said, her voice quiet. “He was a really good brother. He was a good person. He cared about people. He used to think about me all the time. I could tell that he just wanted me to be okay.”

“I don’t want him to be dead either,” Perry said, blinking away the tears forming in his eyes. “Godric, we were children. I mean, I grew up and continued to be—well, a fuck-up, but he…he made a mistake and he regretted it all his life. And he thought about that too. In his last moments, he was thinking about that. That’s just not fair. He was…you know, he was learning how to play the harmonica. He was so bad. And he wrote even worse poetry. It was incredible. He was… incredible.”

“I know,” Ginny said.

“If we’re going to do this,” he said. “I don’t want to forget about him. Not for a single second.”

Ginny nodded her head. “I think everyone should know,” she said. “About what happened to him. He deserves a funeral. I think everyone should be sad forever. I think that that’s fair.”  

“I think that’s fair too. I think that’s the fairest thing I’ve ever heard…” Perry said. “I just can’t believe it. He told me all the time that he wanted to do this. I just never believed him… he was just so fucked up. And nobody helped him. I didn’t help him. Fuck, I don’t know how to help anyone. There was a time I wanted to fucking kill him and all that he could say was that he forgives me. Forgives me. Can you imagine that he forgives me?” his voice was high. “How could he?”

“I know,” Ginny said. “I knew he was so fucked up. I didn’t help him either.”

Perry had just the photograph in his mind to bury him with. “That’s how he feels,” he said. “When he thinks about you. It doesn’t help anyone.” He placed a hand on her shoulder. “My brother was a fucking lunatic and I loved him very much and I didn’t even know how much I loved him, not until now. I wish I knew before. I wish. If this is what he wants, then I want to do that for him because that’s all I could do, isn’t it? But you… you don’t have to help me. This isn’t your fault.”

“I’ll help you,” Ginny looked up at him, laughing, but the tears fell down her cheeks. Perry supposed that it was later. He could imagine her having a full breakdown. He was going to have one too soon. “I’ll even throw parsnips at you at Christmas. I’ll tell you you’re the worst brother in the world.”

Perry didn’t want to forget either. “They’re so fucking lucky,” he said. “Mum and Dad have such a good kid.”

He expected Ginny to defend them, but instead, she nodded her head. “You can never be him. Not really.”

“Yeah,” Perry said. “But they won’t know the difference.”

And it seemed to hit Ginny the actual truth that no, they would not know the difference between Percy and Perry playing each other. And that made her feel unwell. “I guess not,” she said. “Are we a bad family?”

“Maybe,” Perry said. “I think I should be more devastated. I don’t think this is the worst pain I’ve ever been in.”

“You will be,” Ginny assured him like he did her. “You’re never going to forget how this feels. And neither am I. This is the worst thing that’s ever happened. And Mum and Dad aren’t going to know—and I feel so angry. But I don’t want to forget. I don’t. And every time I’m going to look at you, I’m not really going to think about him.”

Perry nodded his head. “Yeah,” he said.  

“He’s so cold,” Ginny said, reaching onto touch his arm. “He’s been gone for hours, hasn’t he?”  

“Yeah, yeah, he was. I don’t know when he’s got up to head down here. I don’t…” Perry shook his head.

“He could be so quiet,” Ginny said.

“I’m going to erase their memories, and then we can make them scared for a bit, our parents,” Perry said. He was so angry that he sounded so calm. “I’ll let them think that he’s missing. I’ll let them worry for ages. I’m going to make them cry every day. I’m going to give them nightmares.”

Ginny blinked a few times, and when she looked at Perry’s face, she knew he was serious. 

“I don’t think that’s what he wants,” Ginny said.

“I know,” Perry said. “But it’s what I want. Does that mean anything?”

“Not now,” Ginny said.

“I hate that you’re right,” Perry said. “You’re too smart for your age, you know.”

“I know,” Ginny said. “I hate it too.”

Perry shook his head. When he looked down at Percy, he imagined how they came out of the womb. Perry thin, Percy bloated. But he was the pink one and Perry was blue. This wasn’t right. Nothing was right.  

“They killed my brother, Gin. He just wanted things to be simpler. He just wanted everything to be okay. He wanted you to be okay,” Perry said. Ginny nodded her head too, and she had started crying. Just like he knew that she would. “Our parents killed him, Gin. They killed him. And do you know what he did?”

“What?” Ginny asked, though he could hardly hear her from how loudly she was crying.

“He… he…” Perry rubbed his eyes. He didn’t think he would ever stop crying. “He forgave them.”  

The day that they buried Fred, George had gone into his room and not had come out for the whole week, not even to touch the trays of food that were sat outside his room. His mother told him to take a shower every day, but he didn’t open the door.

Perry had a photo album in his hands the day that he had walked into George’s room and saw him sitting by the windowsill, where no memories of Fred were at. He was wearing pyjamas that smelled, the same he’d probably been wearing for a wee. He’d become so thin. He was smoking a cigarette and coughing because it was probably the first cigarette he’d ever smoked. Perry sat beside him and took the cigarette away.

If he was Percy, he would throw it away but he wasn’t Percy—not then. He was Perry and he had lost his twin. It had felt like it was yesterday. It would always feel like it was yesterday.

“I don’t want to talk to anyone,” George said, his voice hoarse. He hadn’t talked to anyone in ages.

“I haven’t said anything,” Perry said, playing as Perry.

But he imagined Percy would’ve said the same thing too, just a bit more holier-than-thou and puffing his chest up a bit like a bird showing off his plumage.

The view outside George’s room was shite. He could barely see tops of trees, and there were a few houses that all looked the same. He couldn’t see much of the sky, even though it didn’t matter because the sky was grey. Perry almost exclusively owned black, but Percy didn’t, so he wore grey to a funeral. The only thing that made Perry feel better about the fact that Fred was gone was that his parents were crying all day long. Percy might have forgiven them, but Perry never would.

“It’s your fault that he’s dead,” George said.

And if he was Percy, it would’ve devastated him. But he wasn’t.

“No, it’s not,” Perry simply said.

“You distracted him,” George said. “You-you had to choose that time to be so stupid as to say something that was just so… why couldn’t you be serious? We were in the middle of a fucking war, and you’re the reason he’s dead.” There were big fat tears in his eyes. Perry wondered how many hours George had already spent crying.

“You don’t really believe that.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you don’t,” Perry said, and he could see the cracks in George crumbling. He remembered the conversation that he had with Percy, about how different they were. He wondered if Fred would be blaming Percy. Somehow, he doubted it. Somehow, he thought that Fred would be angry instead of weepy, just like Perry felt all the time. “You think that there’s something that you could’ve done. You think that you should’ve taken things more seriously. You don’t think things are funny anymore,” Perry said. “But that’s too hard to think about, so you’d rather make me feel bad instead.”  

“That’s fucked up. What you’ve said,” George said.

“I just said that that’s what you think,” Perry said. “I never said that it was true. But you wouldn’t believe if I told you it wasn’t true anyway, would you? So that’s why I haven’t. Told you that it wasn’t true. But I don’t think that it is.”

“You’re right. You must be so happy, huh, Perce? You’re always so fucking right,” George’s lower lip shaking as he spoke. “He’s not even buried the right way. They want to bury him with the rest of them, but he wasn’t like the rest of them, were they? He wasn’t a war hero. He was my brother.”

“I know,” Perry said.

“You don’t understand,” George said.

“I do.”

“No, Perce, you don’t understand what it’s like to lose—”

“I do,” Perry said stiffly, but he didn’t offer anymore explanation.

“But he wasn’t your twin,” George said. “You don’t know how that’s like.”

“I do,” Perry insisted. “What would he want you to do?”

“I don’t know,” George said. “Stop feeling sorry for myself. But I’m not like him. It’s so easy for him. If it were the other way around, he’d feel bad for a while. He’d feel bad maybe forever, but he’d still function. He’d probably be repairing the joke shop. He wouldn’t cry so much. He wouldn’t…he was a lot stronger than I am. I can’t…he was always the first one that did anything. He had all the ideas. I’m shite at that stuff. I just did the maths. I’m the boring one.”

“You are feeling quite sorry for yourself,” Perry said.

“Fuck you, Perce.”

“I was just saying what you were,” Perry said. “I think you’re probably more interesting than you think you are. And you can probably do those things—for him, but maybe not now. You don’t have to do everything right now.”

“What if I don’t do them ever? Then what would that mean? That I just let my and Fred’s dream just go to waste.”

“He’s not even cold yet,” Perry told him. “I doubt you’re letting anything go to waste.”

“I’m just scared that there are all these things that I’m supposed to do and I won’t be able to do them,” George said.

The truth, not him blaming Perry for distracting Fred. Not him telling him off for being a fucking prat. The truth.

“You can do them,” Perry said. “But probably not alone. Here. I’ll show you something.”

He flipped through the pages of the album that he had been carrying. It was the first time he’d seen an expression on George’s face that wasn’t anger, fear or sadness. He just looked confused, as he leaned forward to look at a photo of four-year-old Perry and Percy in front of a chocolate cake.

“I don’t remember that you had a twin, Percy,” George said. There was awe in his voice.

“Nobody does. I’ll tell you the story one day. It’s kind of a long one. It’s bloody mental, it is. I think I’m the Fred one of you two,” Perry said. It was the first time that he had played as Perry in a very long time that he had almost forgotten how it was like. He’d rather be Percy, he thought. He would always rather be him. “But I know how it’s like to lose a twin. And I was an awful twin. I wasn’t anything like you two were. You had something special. It meant something.”

“It meant everything,” George said, looking at Peregrine with a vacant expression. “Are you Percy or Percy’s twin?”

“I’m Percy’s twin,” Perry said. “But sometimes, I’m both. That’s the best when it’s like that.”  

“I don’t want to do the things that Fred wants me to do,” George said.

“Then I’ll help you,” Perry said. “I had help too. From Ginny, if you can imagine.”

“Gin knows about this? If I wasn’t so shut down, if I hadn’t become so mental after what happened to Fred, I’d be asking you so many fucking questions, but I just can’t,” George said, looking back at the photograph. “But I didn’t mean what I’d said about blaming you. I didn’t really blame you. I’m glad that you did that for Fred. That he was laughing. That he didn’t know what was happening to him. I think if he had to die that day in the war, then that was the best way he could’ve died.”

Perry nodded his head. “Thanks,” he said. “But do you really believe that?”

“Fuck no.”

Perry laughed, and the sound was so jarring that George whipped his head around, and he started laughing too.

“Mum is right,” and it so hurt for Perry to say those words. “You should take a shower. You smell. And maybe after that, you can actually—you know—eat something before you waste away. And maybe we can go downstairs to the attic.”

“What’s in the attic?”

“Either very bad decisions or very good ones.”

“Okay,” George said, but there was something of a smile again on his face. “I like lemon tarts.”

Perry whipped his head. “What?” he froze practically in place.

“I mean to eat. I like lemon tarts. I know Mum’s made some downstairs. She makes them practically every day.”

“Oh, I like those too,” Perry said, and he wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean.

It might mean nothing, but it made him think of Percy, just like everything made him think of Percy. And he wondered if that was a curse or a beautiful thing. But he had already known the answer. It was probably both.

“Can I ask you something?” George asked.

Perry smiled his most Percy-like smile and felt something inside him light up as he said, “You already have.”