Hello Again
Things are okay for a while.
Audrey surprises him at work one day, showing up at office and inviting him to play hooky. It’s not something he’d normally do, but she looks so happy he tells his boss he’ll be out the rest of the day (the man nearly falls over in his chair as Percy has never done anything like this before but allows him to go). They go to a muggle movie and snog in the back row like a couple of teenagers and get an early lunch in Diagon Alley before picking up the girls from school together and taking them out for ice cream.
They’re sitting in front of Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlor, the late afternoon bustling with movement and noise. The streets are crowded with afternoon shoppers. Audrey is eating from a small cup of ice cream. Molly is getting hers all over his face and her sister’s shirt. Percy puts his own cup down and stands as Audrey asks him to hand her a napkin to wipe Molly’s face.
They’re a team.
“Percy?” comes a voice behind him. It sounds warm and familiar, and it reminds Percy of late-night study sessions and early morning Quidditch. He turns around.
The years have been more than kind to Oliver Wood.
The gangly teenager Percy had once roomed with at Hogwarts is gone. In his place is a tall, tanned man with short brown hair and the warmest eyes Percy has ever seen. He takes Percy’s breath away.
It’s like time has gone still as the memories flood-, meeting when they were eleven, Percy helping him study, Oliver helping him fly. Oliver, comforting Percy after he had to write to his parents that Ginny had been taken to the Chamber of Secrets and may be dead. An ill-advised, drunken kiss after they won the Quidditch Cup their final year. The last time Percy had seen Oliver was during the Battle of Hogwarts, flying in through the sky on brooms. Right before they had lost Fred.
Percy’s felt like he’s just taken a stunning spell to the face. The he remembers he’s standing outside an ice cream shop staring like an idiot for a few long moments. He blinks back into himself.
“Oliver?” he asks, unable to hide his growing smile. The one the other man returns is just as bright.
Then, he’s being enveloped into a tight, warm, gripping hug and it’s like Percy is sixteen all over again.
“Oh my-, I haven’t seen you seen-,” Oliver pulls away as he remembers the last time they had been face-to-face.
“How are you?” Percy asks.
He knows a little bit about the answer. He’s been checking in about Oliver occasionally. They had once been best mates, after all. If he sometimes scanned The Daily Prophet to check for Quidditch scores, looking for Oliver’s name, he’d never admit it.
“Good. Great. Playing for Puddlemere now as their first string-Keeper.”
“That amazing!” Percy gushes.
There’s a voice clearing from behind them, and Percy turns around, seeing his family sitting there. Audrey is smiling politely at Oliver.
“Oh! Of course. Oliver, this is my wife Audrey and our daughters- Molly and Lucille. Lucy.” He amends at his daughter’s sour face at being called by her full name. “Guys, this is Oliver Wood. He was one of my roommates at Hogwarts.”
“Pleasure to meet you,” Oliver says, and he looks like he genuinely means it.
“Same. I’d shake your hands but,” Audrey wiggles her sticky, ice-cream laden fingers. She looks at the napkins still in Percy’s hands. He blushes and hands her the napkins.
“You’re tall!” Lucy exclaims, chocolate on her face. Oliver tilts his head back and laughs as Audrey frowns at her daughter.
“Lucy!”
“It’s fine,” Oliver says, still smiling. “I am pretty tall, aye.”
“Only a bit taller than me.” Percy adds, crossing his arms dramatically and his daughters descend into a fit of giggles.
“Oh, we’re going to do this again, are we-,” Oliver starts to say
“You were standing on your tiptoes-,”
“I was not!” Oliver finishes, despite full well knowing he had been had the time. He’d been denying it for ten years, he wasn’t going to start now.
Percy’s smiling brighter then he has in a long time- Merlin was it good to see him. Oliver checks his watch.
“Oof. I’ve got to run, but listen-,” Oliver digs in his pockets for a moment and pulls out a scrap of paper and produces a muggle pen from somewhere and writes something down on it. When he’s done, he hands it Percy. “That’s my address. Write me some time, won’t you? I’d love to catch up.”
Percy pockets the slip of paper, feeling Audrey’s gaze in his back. “Sure,” he says. Something in Oliver’s expression dims, like he’s remembering something from a long time ago, but his bright smile doesn’t leave his face.
“It was wonderful meeting you, Audrey. You girls as well.” He says in farewell to the twins. He offers his hand and Percy takes it. It’s broader and more calloused than he remembers, but it’s just as warm.
“I’ll see you around, Percy.”
“See you around.”
Oliver gives his hand a final, tight squeeze and lets his hand go. He disappears into the afternoon crowd. Percy sits back down and goes back to his ice cream. Audrey is still looking at him.
“What?”
“You were awfully familiar with him.”
Percy shrugs, suddenly feeling irrationally self-conscious. He runs at his shoulder. Merlin, he should see a healer about it. “We were close during school. I haven’t seen him since the-,” he glances down at his girls. “He knew my brother well.”
“Uncle Ron?” Lucy asks curiously.
“No, dear.” Percy says, his heart squeezing a bit. Having twins… that had almost broken him beyond repair. Sometimes seeing their faces…
“Your Uncle Fred. He died before you were born.”
“Oh.” Lucy says and goes back to licking her ice cream cone. “Uncle Fred seemed nice. So, his friends are too, right?”
Percy licks his lips and spares a glance at Audrey, who is no longer looking at him and instead her ice cream.
“Yes. He is.”
Audrey keeps things civil until they get the girls fed, bathed, and put to bed. Percy is literally just gently shutting the door to their bedroom when Audrey takes out her wand and casts a silencing spell on their door.
“Want to tell me what that was about today?”
“What?” Percy asks, a bit blindsided. He looks back to his daughter’s closed bedroom door.
“Can we take this this somewhere else?”
Audrey scoffs but turns on her heels and walks down the hall to their living room. Percy follows her, dread building. The sun has barely just set.
“Why didn’t you tell me you knew Oliver Wood?”
Percy frowns at her. “What are you-, of course I did. I lived with him for seven years. I must have told you.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I-I’m sure I did. When you were telling me about Nora’s photography. I said I had a roommate,”
“You’re not remembering it right.” She interrupts harshly, her voice going up in tone.
“I-,”
“You let him meet our family like that?” she asks. “You let me meet your famous friend covered in my kid’s snot and ice cream?”
“I didn’t know he would be there, Audrey. Beside Oliver’s not-,”
“Oh, how would you know if he was like that or not? You said you’ve seen him since the Battle.”
“I haven’t!” Percy protests nervously. They’re getting quite loud. He spares another glance down the hallway, toward the girls’ rooms.
“You don’t think I know how to cast a simple silencing spell?” Yep, they’re yelling now. What had that book about conflict resolution go?
“Look, I think we both need to calm down.” He attempts. “I think we need to-,”
“Calm down?!”
“Baby, I’m just going to leave, okay?” he says backing away from his wife and trying to move around her to get to the door. “Just until we can come back with cooler heads.”
“You don’t get to do that, Percy! You don’t get to just walk out!”
She shoves herself between Percy and the door, keeping him from opening it. He tries to reach around her, but she steps in front of him again.
“Audrey, please. I just want to leave.”
“You want to leave? Leave us? Your wife and mother of your children?"
“No, Audrey!” he tries to say, but she’s already shoving him back with both her palms flat on his chest. She’s smaller than him, and he’d probably could have been able to stay standing if he’d been expecting it, but he isn’t. So, when she shoves him, he goes stumbling back and crashes hard into the living room coffee table that had been a wedding gift from his parents.
It doesn’t break, it’s been spelled against that, but Percy thuds into it hard enough that if it had been a muggle piece of furniture, it would have. The force of it causes him to twist and he nails himself in the eye with the corner of it. Light flashes in brief stars painfully in his vision. He leans on it heavily, winded, and puts a handout, trying to calm his wife down.
There’s a knock at the door. They both look up sharply at the sound of it and exchange looks, nervous. Percy holds his breath, hoping whoever it was would go away, but there’s another knock.
“Audrey? Percy?” calls a voice, muted but familiar.
Charlie.
“Shite.” Percy whispers, his heart racing in a panic. He had forgotten, it was the third Friday of the month. That meant having Charlie over for drinks. They had been so preoccupied with today, taking the girls out of school early, they had forgotten. Audrey realizes this too, because her eyes widen.
“Go to the bedroom!” she hisses at him, her voice low in warning. He does so, pulling himself off the floor on shaky legs just as he hears the front door open.
He doesn’t try to listen in, instead going straight their ensuite bathroom to look at his eye in the mirror. It’s already red and swelling, promising to bloom into bright purple. Percy feels around in his pocket for his wand to perform a healing spell, but when he goes to reach for it, his pocket is empty. Panic pulses through him- he had left it in the girl’s room after enchanting their dolls to read them to sleep.
He grips the edges of the sink in a blind panic. He couldn’t let Charlie see him like this. He rummages through the medicine cabinet and finds an old, tiny vial of dittany. He opens it, uncaring for the expiration date and puts some around his eye. His fingers are trembling.
There’s a knock on the closed bedroom door. Percy just about jumps out of his own skin.
“Babe?” Audrey calls, voice high and light. “Charlie wants to know you’re okay.”
Percy looks back at his reflection in the mirror, at his eye, and brushes his curls to do his best to hide the swelling.
“One second!” he calls back.
Then he shuts off the main light and turns on the warmer, and dimmer, nightside lamps. He goes to the bedroom door and opens it up a crack.
“Hey.” He says lamely. His brother is standing there next to Audrey, who’s got a small smile plastered across her face. Charlie is frowning.
“Hey Perce,” he says gently. “I heard you had an accident.”
“Yes, terribly nasty business. At work.”
Charlie’s eyes flick from Percy’s face, half covered by the door, and then back to Audrey. “Audrey said it happened when you were putting the girl’s playset together.”
“Oh, yes, um,” Percy’s really not in a good position to come up with any excuse right now. “Twice in a day, I suppose. Clumsy.”
“I see.” Charlie says a bit dully. “Well, I’ll leave you to recover. We can have drinks another night.”
“Right, another time.” Percy echoes weakly. He watches from the small crack in the door as Audrey walks Charlie to the door. When he hears the door open and shut, and the lock click. He sighs and puts his forehead on the doorframe, the swelling already going down.
Audrey walks back down the hallway, holding her wand and an icepack. She silently casts a healing spell and hands him the ice pack.
Percy shuts himself in their bathroom and doesn’t leave for the rest of the night.