mostly italy
Oliver had signed onto Puddlemere United and his training schedule looked insane for the entire summer. The only good thing about it, besides how muscular Oliver looked all the time, was that Percy also now had no distractions and could throw himself entirely into living horcruxes.
“Ew,” Ron had said when he saw him reading a rather nasty documentation of living horcruxes in the form of animals. It was impractical; animals didn’t tend to live long, much less with another soul fighting theirs.
“Nasty business,” Percy muttered in agreement. He took another long sip of his coffee. “Oh, to confirm, can Harry speak to snakes?”
He can feel Ron’s side-eye. “What’s it to you?”
Which is really just confirmation. Great. So Harry does have a bit of Tom bloody Riddle’s soul attached to him. There’s only one saving grace, and that’s that the extraneous soul is both a sliver and not entangled — in fact, it barely touches Harry’s soul at all, hovering like oil on water. He turns back to the animated live horcruxes dying off. The only way a soul container can be destroyed, and the only way a soul can be removed from its container, apparently. The Killing Curse might be the kindest removal. The kindest end. He just… doesn’t know enough.
The Killing Curse forcibly rips the soul from the body, unnaturally mimicking the natural order of death. Is it possible to just target the horcrux soul — could the curse be modified to be able to distinguish a foreign body? Alternatively, could a dementor control itself enough to suck out just the horcrux soul? Because Percy doesn’t want to track down a dementor and beg, but he will if he has to.
Well. He puts a tracking spell on the extraneous soul in Harry, and for good measure tags it bright purple the next time he sees him. Better to have a horcrux he knows about than to have to track one down because the latter wasn’t working out very well about a year ago. And he’s going to Italy, to study under Vivia Greco, the leading expert in soul magic; really, this is ideal. Percy’s not sure if he’s just trying to convince himself, because, well, ideal would be if Riddle only made five horcruxes and Harry wasn’t one of them. But alas.
“Percy, how am I supposed to eat now,” Ginny groans as she walks in and catches a glimpse of his book.
“I’m not sure either,” Percy says, starting to feel a little anxious and a lot like he might be sick. There’s a lot of pressure on him, understandably. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
Then, in a month, he’s in Italy. Vivia Greco tells him to call her Vivia the moment they meet; she reminds him of McGonagall, a little. In the eyes and the hair and the way she told Percy to call her Minerva three minutes after graduation. Within a week, she says, “If I hadn’t heard you talk about soul magic for Patronuses, I would’ve thought that you were only here to deal with your Dark Lord.”
It’s both. It’s always both, Percy’s always in it for the war effort, or at least for rendering the war effort useless. Before the brochure — before he was prefect, he’d been working towards the Ministry, eventually Minister, so that people like Lucius Malfoy didn’t become Minister. And now, he’s delving into soul magic to hopefully scatter You-Know-Who’s bloody fucking ashes (metaphorically speaking, as You-Know-Who will not have ashes to scatter, hopefully) to the ends of the earth.
He throws himself into the research. In his first month, he works through (and returns, to reference) several foundational readings that suffer his severe neon-pink highlighter, marked up to the point that they are near-memorised. Vivia Greco allows him to speed through his safety procedures course (not that it’s very long, as most of it is common sense in any case, and in cases where labmates are approaching volatile points of their experimentation, there are five pages of documentation on setting up wards and otherwise cordoning off the experiment) so Percy enters labs a week and a half in. The week that he enters, two students who are wrapping up their dissertation have managed to force magic to manifest itself (it keeps trying to flicker out of reality, sparking violently every hour on the dot, and they’ve moved it to the wall and framed it there as a clock), and in the back corner someone is working on the effects of time warping to modify the Animagus process so the entire back wall has been decorated by a runic circle that spawns a time vortex in the middle of the lab ceiling. A couple of potions are always left under Stasis, no matter what time it is, and the cupboards are always just half-full of rune-carving materials. Someone has managed to preserve the majority of a human soul and left it unattended under the weakest wards Percy has ever seen. Percy would be enthralled, would be willing to stay in those rooms and hallways for forever, if he didn’t keep thinking about the bloody not-yet war. It’s tiring. He doesn’t keep a schedule so much as he just works as long as he can, until Oliver calls him, or a friend urges him to get dinner with them, and then he sleeps until the sun rises (early, still), and then he repeats.
He feels stagnant, even though he’s making fast progress. He tries modifying soul-splitting rituals, lure spells to get animal horcruxes to hop containers, and way too many explosive rune circles given that he wants to keep Harry in one piece.
It’s not until Vivia invites another student to lecture on their research — Dementors — that Percy sees what might be his break. Ying Liuyi has essentially written her thesis on a comprehensive guide to the Dementor, with a focus for what a Dementor can do and how. It’s an ambitious thesis, more impressive since it’s in its final draft form, because the most extensive research anyone has done on Dementors has been an observation on how long they live (presumably forever). It’s difficult to research Dementors, for various reasons — prolonged exposure is dangerous and awful, and it’s so hard to catch and tag them like you might for dragons and other wildlife, and also no one is quite sure how intelligent or humanoid Dementors are, which brings into question the entire ethics of consent around experimentation. The last issue is not necessarily an issue at the forefront of most research committees, especially those based in Europe, but Percy thinks it deserves mentioning.
The abbreviated version of Liuyi’s thesis, as Percy understands it, is that Dementors are a unique combination of wizarding and soul magic which enable its visibility to wizenkind but not to Muggles. Distantly related to lethifolds (there’s barely any more research done on those), a Dementor’s skin (their cloak) is similar enough that no magic repels it — except magic which projects the fight to soul magic, transforming itself. Animagi can disguise and escape, Patronuses — the soul, mounting an aggressive defence — deflect. And when Dementors can simply be satiated by consuming enough joy, or enter the Muggle world to take a soul or even fractions of souls, why would they fight a Patronus? But that means that Dementors can, in fact, distinguish between and fragment souls, and that’s what Percy needs.
Well, it’s not all that Percy needs; he needs to detach or otherwise consume the soul. The way Dementors hunt and consume souls is entirely different from how they consume joy, so the consumption of souls falls under the purview of soul magic while joy falls to dark magic specialists. Understandably, the field of soul magic, especially when faced with Dementors, quickly devolves into metaphysical debates. Percy has read entirely too many papers that devolve into metaphysics, recently. Metaphysics hardly matters to him; it’s the recreation of the effect that matters.
Percy rushes into the lab to start playing with runes, experimenting with various charms and rituals. He has never played much with spell or ritual creation, but plenty of his labmates have, and Minerva brings his questions to faculty meetings to replace the under-the-table poker games they (apparently) used to play when Dumbledore monologues too long. Professors Flitwick and Snape contribute heavily to the spoken components of his most promising experiments, and Professor Babbling’s input on runes is invaluable. He barely leaves for the next two months. Doesn’t even reply to his family’s owls, not until Bill takes a sick day to Portkey over and literally hauls him, kicking and screaming, back to his apartment. Vivia laughs at him, the traitor.
“This is so rude of you,” he grumbles.
Bill, successful and grim, nods. “You’ll thank me later,” he says, tousles Percy’s hair even though they’re now the same height, and adds, “Oliver owes me so many favours for this.”
Percy stops struggling, and Bill quite easily lugs him into the kitchen. Indeed, Oliver is — cooking. Percy hesitates. Percy has never seen Oliver brew even a simple potion without some minor accident, so he’s understandably wary about Oliver making dinner.
“Do you need any help?” Percy hedges.
Oliver glares, not necessarily cutting. He points a dripping spatula at one of the stools. “Sit,” he says and then moves the spatula back over the pot before anything actually drips. “You’re overworking yourself again.”
“I —” Percy begins, then realises that he can’t give any excuse that Oliver won’t easily shoot down.
Oliver nods, knowing this. It’s a familiar conversation; Percy’s sure that they’ve had variations of it through Hogwarts. “Yes. Postgraduate studies are very busy. It’s been four months, though. Rest days are also important.” Oliver turns to look at him again, raising his eyebrows. “In fact, I’m taking a rest day right now!”
“I’m going to head out, you two. Be safe, you both got the talk,” Bill says, his voice a little too loud. Percy can feel the sudden flush up his neck, blotching across his cheeks.
“Bill,” he hisses. “Get out.”
“Yup, right, leaving pronto,” Bill says. The door thuds thirty seconds later, and Percy relaxes a little.
“How is your training going?” Percy says, still keeping an eagle eye on the two open flames that he’s not sure Oliver can handle.
“Good. I’ve missed you,” Oliver says, and he’s certainly not keeping an eagle eye on the flames because Percy can feel Oliver’s gaze, a heavy weight, across his cheekbone. He lets himself be distracted by it.
This is a mistake, as forty-five minutes later the smoke wards set off an incessant alarm.
Percy hastily throws on the nearest shirt, runs into the kitchen, and slides in his socks across the rest of the tiled floor to cast a modified Bubble charm — a Severus Snape invention, which can create a metaphysical vacuum strong enough to suck out a soul, but only when combined with a North Germanic runic circle that theoretically was used to ward against the Wild Hunt, and Percy’s still not sure what’s so special about that particular set of runes but he’ll worry about it after Harry loses his extra soul percentage — over the fire and suffocate it. Oliver, following more sedately, opens the windows and manages to fiddle with the wards enough that the alarm stops.
“I’ll cook,” Percy decides for them both as he vanishes whatever contents are left at the bottom of the pot and pan. Oliver has the grace to look a little sheepish.
The next morning is business as usual. Oliver kisses him goodbye and Percy apparates to the entrance of the labs, lets the wards taste his magic, and walks in, mostly reinvigorated. Just as well, because for the next two months, he cannot manage the strength and selectivity of his soul vacuum. If even Vivia Greco can’t see a solution… well. It’s fine! He’s not stressed at all, and not looking downtrodden and miserable in the labs.
His labmates do not believe him. In fact, Vivia Greco purposefully blindfolds herself and screams, “I’m not seeing anything! Go, go go!”, and the three labmates present that Tuesday lug him out during working hours. Percy does his best approximation of a sack of potatoes (unconvincingly) and in return gets hit with Cora’s Levitating charm, because it’s easier than physically manhandling an irregular lump of weight.
“What is this,” he says.
“We’re going shopping, nonmagical style,” Nero says.
Percy, who on principle never trusts anyone named Nero, turns to meet Octavia’s eyes. They’re siblings and their mother works in a nonmagical university teaching the history of the Roman Empire; Percy thinks that the favouritism is clear. Octavia just nods.
“Alright,” he says and slumps right out the Levitation charm, onto his two feet.
“Brilliant. When did you break it?” Cora — their only semi-expert on Charms — asks, stepping into a steady stride with him. “Did you use the Wiggenholm technique, or —”
“He doesn’t know who Wiggenholm is,” Nero says.
“He doesn’t need to know who he is to know the technique.”
“Nero meant that he doesn’t know the technique, either,” Octavia says.
Percy, affronted, says, “Pardon me?!”
“You’re pardoned,” Nero says.
Simultaneously, Cora turns on him. “You don’t know the Wiggenholm technique?” And then she’s off on an increasingly complicated, fervent explanation. They side-along her out of the country because she won’t be stopped once she’s started.
They, somehow (with a few Confunduses), end up in Dyson headquarters. Later, Percy will believe that the fates were smiling down on him on that particular day. Like all good researchers do, they gravitate towards the lower floors where the labs are. Someone has plastered a laminated poster on the wall on how the speed of a fan in a vacuum affects the suction power generated. Other people have scrawled over it, otherwise defacing the poster with comments like “We fucking know, Jones” and “Jones this isn’t our problem with carpet vacuums and you know it” and a simple but effective “Fuck off”.
“Oh my god,” Octavia says.
“Someone catch Percy,” Nero says.
Cora is already in the lab, unfortunately, and Percy has quietly apparated back to the labs.
“What are you doing here,” Vivia says when Percy opens the door.
Percy is muttering frantically under his breath about fans and variable control and containing the flow of a suctioning force by literally encasing the soul vacuum in plastic tubing. Vivia lets him be.
On the sixteenth of May, Percy has gone through a whole mountain of foam and aluminium sheet and plastic parts. On the nineteenth of May, Percy successfully holds a rather thin worm-like tube that tapers and flattens out into a rectangular bar. It is rather unfortunately christened Soul-Sucker 3000 by the two students who made the manifested magic clock and have, in fact, already completed their dissertation, but hang around to see progress on the Soul-Sucker 3000. They engrave S.S.3000 on the handlebars of the tube.
“Can’t we call it something else,” Nero begs, on the verge of tears because Cora keeps wiggling her eyebrows and suggesting that he try using the Soul-Sucker 3000 to chill out each time he reminds them of lab safety procedures.
“Well,” Percy says, pretending to think about it. “It does sound rather unmagical.”
“What about The Neronian Satisfaction?” Octavia suggests.
“Quite grand,” Percy says. “Only, Belby and Greengrass have already engraved S.S.3000 on the Soul Sucker 3000.”
“No, yes, SS3000 is quite fine,” Nero says.
The SS3000 still sucks souls too intensely, though. This is unsurprisingly Percy’s last problem, given that the current state of the SS is magically fragile and any additions of magic tend to unbalance the magic’s current configuration.
Ying Liuyi visits their labs on the first of June, stares at the SS3000, and decides to not ask too many questions. She does, however, say, “Weasley, have you tried casting the vacuuming charm with less force? It’s balanced on the rune circle, right?”
He casts the vacuum with less force, but it slips right through the circle and splats on the floor, promptly beginning to circle around and voraciously eat up the dust in the corner of the room. “No, that’s good. I’ll minimize the rune circle, and that way even if the charm extends over the edge it should be able to centre on the circle and not tip over, anyway — do not eat that potion!” He runs over to stop their new vacuum from sipping some Draught of Living Death.
The next day, Vivia Greco pokes her head in, herding the vacuum charm with her foot — it has since manifested a body made mostly of dust encased with a protective plastic-magic covering — and asks, “Who got a wandering vacuum for the lab?”
“That’s Signore Bob. It’s Percy’s,” Cora says, jerking her head to where Percy is building the SS3001.
“Oh, that’s good, then,” Vivia says. “Keep it contained, please.”
On the thirteenth of June, Percy has calibrated the SS3001, which is capable of sucking out the extraneous soul in an animal Horcrux without leaving the animal soulless. Everyone claps, and then Nero asks, “Well, what if you need to suck out an entire soul? Have you considered giving the vacuum any settings?”
“Right, like vacuums have different strengths when they go over wood versus carpet,” Octavia says.
This is not something that Percy has heard, but Octavia and Nero are halfbloods so they’re probably right. Percy sets about messing with the construction of the vacuum spell so that its strength can grow or shrink with a single word. It means that he’ll have to add a separate magic pouch that can store or dispense magical potential directly to the charm without affecting the rune circle, so he’ll have to construct an SS3002.
On the twentieth of June, he figures out a way to feed magical energy to the charm and expand it. The next day, he reverses the process so that the charm can divide itself and send magical energy back along the plastic tube to the MEC (magical energy container). He begins constructing the SS3002 — with so many weeks passed, every once in a while people forget what the SS stands for and call it the Soul Slinger, the Soul Slurper, the Sucking Slinky, and more.
On the twenty-fourth of June, he has the SS3002 and attaches the engraved metal plate that Greengrass and Belby sent via owl. He grabs hold of those tracking charms he put on Harry’s extraneous soul over the summer and pulls.
With a crack, he finds himself in a graveyard, gripping the handle of a plastic and metal tube instead of his wand, which is tucked in a holster around his waist. He does not cuss — Percy Weasley does not curse, no matter what Harry will claim later — and he certainly does not curse when he sees the soul of Voldemort.
“What in Merlin’s name are you doing here?!” Percy whisper-shouts because he’s fairly sure that Harry should be in Hogwarts competing in the third task of the Triwizard Tournament.
“I don’t know!” Harry cries out.
“I think the cup was a Portkey,” Cedric says, being significantly more helpful than Harry.
“Great. Great. Behind me, both of you,” Percy says, because he can make out a very familiar soul. Pettigrew, it turns out, was not Kissed. He raises the SS3002. “On. Maxima.”
With a violent shudder, the SS3002 begins trying to pull Pettigrew’s soul out of his body. Apparently, if you don’t have a Dementor from the store, homemade is fine.
“What is that?” Harry says.
“Percy — er, do you have a wand on you?” Cedric asks.
“This is the Soul-Sucker 3002,” Percy says. “Coincidentally, Harry, I’ll be using it to grab Voldemort’s soul out of you. After we deal with this.”
“What?”
Percy ignores Harry because the SS3002 has just eaten up its first human soul. Percy is so proud of it — he pats it on the head and then heads towards the suspicious-looking cauldron and snake, which for some reason has a very weird soul. It takes three seconds before Percy groans. “Fucking hell,” he says and directs the SS3002 at the snake’s very suspiciously enmeshed soul. “Why are there so many horcruxes, when was this snake made a horcrux? Who the fuck makes living horcruxes, anyway, that’s an idiot’s move,” he mutters as he draws near the cauldron.
A terrible, high-pitched eerie cackle rends the air. “Ah, Harry Potter! My prophesied enemy —”
“I’m actually terribly offended that you think I’m a teenage boy mid-puberty,” Percy says, leaning his face over the cauldron to peer at a truly ugly homunculus. “Oh, ew.”
“Can I see?” Cedric, who has been so helpful up until this point, says.
“No. You can stab him, though,” Percy says. “He’s currently weaker than a nonmagical baby and has the magical core of a Squib. I’m going to deal with Harry first. Minima.” The vacuum power settles to a gentle, mild whirr.
“Er…” Harry says.
“No worries, I spent the past year developing this with the Headmaster and other faculty to get rid of the soul sliver stuck in your scar. It’s been tested on other living horcruxes, and their souls all survived intact.” Percy says, aiming for a gentle smile. He used to comfort Ron after the twins pulled pranks and he was Head Boy; he’s great at being reassuring.
In the background, You-Know-Who is hissing indistinguishably at a Cedric who seems more amused than anything. Harry’s eyes sweep the absurd scene of the graveyard, and then he shrugs. “Sure. Fine. Yeah.”
Percy blinks rapidly. “No other questions?”
“I think — if Professor Dumbledore worked on it, it’s probably fine, right?” Harry says, but his brave smile quivers a little.
Percy decides against saying that Dumbledore’s biggest contribution was being boring at faculty meetings to afford the time for other professors to help. “Of course,” he says. “If you’re sure.” He raises the vacuum. They watch in silence as the bright violet soul that Percy tagged last summer is wrenched out of Harry’s scar and whirls through the air into the vacuum to feed the rune circle.
“It didn’t hurt,” Harry says in a voice clouded with wonder. He rubs at his scar, which is no longer quite so red.
“Well, that was anticlimactic,” Percy says. He is already mentally fretting at how the rune circle works and why, and how he’s going to make these experiments replicable. He wonders what’ll happen if he uses the SS3002 on a Dementor. Does the SS3002 class as a weapon? Percy glances at the thin-tubed vacuum which does not look like a weapon so much as it does a shiny worm.
Cedric’s palms crunch the homunculus’ head in, and the sound echoes through the graveyard. “We should get back to Hogwarts,” he says. “I’m bringing You-Know-Who with me.”
“Surely we can call it Voldemort now,” Percy objects, gesturing at the smashed-in homunculus. “It only took me a year of Horcrux-hunting and another year of developing a new weapon.”
“I don’t think that’s a weapon,” Cedric says, gesturing at it.
“It is literally a homemade Dementor,” Percy says. “Please stop insulting the SS3002.”
“Please just grab onto the Portkey,” Harry says, sounding on the verge of a breakdown. “I — we need to tell the headmaster that Voldemort is dead.” So they crowd around the Triwizard cup (which... who decided to reinstate a deadly tournament at a boarding school full of teenagers? It seems like a categorically bad, evil, and awful move), and Percy feels the Portkey jerk at his navel and then he’s staring at the bleachers of the Hogwarts Quidditch pitch. It's a rare sunny day at Hogwarts, and the graveyard was ominously dark; he blinks and rubs his eyes a couple of times, trying to adjust to the sudden brightness.
“What in Merlin’s name is that,” Minerva says, stalking over.
“Minerva, meet the Soul-Sucker 3002,” Percy says. “It’s a homemade Dementor. Speaking of which, should Alastor Moody’s soul have extensive Dementor damage?”
The Headmaster, who is right by them because he’s been listening to Harry’s recounting of events, looks up. “What do you mean?” he says.
“You know. Dementor exposure causes strain on the soul,” Percy says. “It looks like he’s been in Azkaban. Better than Sirius Black’s soul, but he’s definitely had at least a year of continuous and significant exposure.”
“Harry, my boy — we’ll discuss this later,” Dumbledore says, pats Harry’s back, and strides off towards Moody. Percy’s not entirely sure what’s going on there, but that is very firmly not his problem.
“So you did it, then? He’s dead?” Minerva says. “Harry is —”
“Yes. We should ask Professor Snape to double-check, though,” Percy says. Minerva nods sharply and begins guiding them towards Snape, who has also been making his way over to them. The Dark soul bond that Percy used to wince at seeing is withered.
“He’s gone,” Professor Snape says very confidently. He glares at the SS3002. “What the fuck is that?”
Minerva sighs. “The Soul-Sucker 3002. It’s a homemade Dementor, apparently.”
Percy hands it over to Snape so he can inspect it. “I didn’t name it,” he says.
Minerva sighs again. “We know how labs are,” she says. “How are your studies going? Have you figured out why The Hunt rune circle would be necessary?”
The question is posed in such a way that Percy suspects that both she and Snape have already discussed and proposed, at minimum, three theories. “I’ve been… preoccupied,” he says instead of answering.
“This is excellent work,” Snape says, only now rejoining their conversation. His compliment is drawled so that it sounds unenthusiastic, but his eyes gleam. “It will make for a well-rounded dissertation.”
“Perhaps a bit too broad, though,” Minerva says. “The theory alone could be a lifelong endeavour.”
Percy escapes them as they begin to debate how broad the scope of his dissertation should be, and is immediately assaulted by the twins, Bill, and Charlie.
“I thought you were still in Italy!” Bill says.
“What is that?” Charlie asks.
“Merlin, it’s our studious golden boy —”
“— Head Boy Percy Weasley —”
“That’s enough,” Bill says, massaging his forehead.
“This is the Soul-Sucker 3002,” Percy says.
“The what?”
Percy revels in the twins’ flabbergast faces for the next two days, and escapes the country before they can execute any of their pranks on him. All is well.