Revelations
It’s quiet a long, long moment. It feels like hours, but it was more likely just seconds. Audrey drops Percy’s collar like it physically burns her and steps back.
“Molly-,” Percy tries to say, but he loses his courage quickly. What if anything, that may make this scene comprehensible to a child. Godric, how messed up was that? It was wrong; both Audrey and Percy knew it. And now they had to explain it.
“Molly, love-,” Audrey starts to say, all the heat in her voice that was just there having evaporated. She’s trembling. “Daddy and I were just having an adult conversation.”
Their daughter bends down and picks up Percy’s glasses. She examines them for a moment before walking over and giving them to her dad. Percy shoves them back on his face desperately, wishing to whatever power above his daughter hadn’t just seen what she did.
But when he blinks, trying to clear his vision, he can see its Molly, all right. And she looks- Merlin. Percy never wats to see that expression on his daughter’s face for as long as they both live. She looks devastated; scared and horrified and somehow angry all at once.
“You hurt him.” She says simply, voice stony.
“I’m alright, darling.” Percy says, sucking in a deep breath of air. “It was just an-,”
An accident
Charlie’s voice rings through his ears all the sudden- when Percy had hurt his eyes, and he had blindly called him. He felt so small in his brother’s arms. So weak.
“If you tell me it was an accident, I am going to scream”
Percy stops himself from saying it was an accident. Molly’s young but she’s not stupid; she would have heard them yelling. He wonders where Lucy is in all of this.
“I’m going to go.” Audrey says suddenly. Percy whips his head around to see her walking out of the kitchen and to the door where her bag is packed. She doesn’t have to leave until tomorrow for her work trip.
“I’ll be back in a week. We can talk about this then, Molly. I love you.”
She waits a moment, but Molly doesn’t say it back. Still, Audrey takes her bag and walks out of the open doorway, leaving him and his daughter alone in the kitchen. Percy can only stare. She was just ditching him- leaving him here to try and pick up the pieces from their argument and somehow explain it to their daughter.
“Molly,” Percy says turning to her after long, long moment of silence. “What happened between your mother and I was not okay,” he licks his lips.
“We’re working through some things right now and she just gets upset, sometimes.” He tacks on the end lamely.
His daughter stares up at him with wide, unblinking eyes. Percy gets down on his knees to see his daughter at eye level. He moves to place his hands on her shoulders but finds himself trembling and withdraws them. Instead, he places them on either side of her.
“But you always say to not hit when we get upset. That we need to use our words.”
Percy bites his lower lip. Gods, how was he to explain this to a mere child? His own child?
“I know, sweetheart,” he says carefully. “Sometimes adults need to remember that too. Daddy’s alright, see?”
He takes his hand and points it at his face, where he feels a bruise already starting to bloom. With a flick of his wand, he vanishes it with a wordless Episkey. He turns his cheek to his daughter so she can see the now smooth, unmarked skin.
“I’m okay, Molly, really. I’m sorry, you should have seen such a grown-up conversation.”
His daughter turns away from him, not looking at Percy. He feels his heart break a little.
“I love you, Daddy.” She says quietly.
“I love you too, Mols.” He says, just as soft. “Are you hungry? Would you like to eat-,”
Without another word, his daughter walks out, face blank. He lets her go, not even trying to stop her. She’s certainly about to tell Lucy what she saw.
He knows he should be scared. Shaking all over, unable to or function, but instead he finds himself rummaging through the cabinets and pours himself a measure of FireWhiskey
Merlin, he wanted a drink. He wanted to drink and drink until the world faded away into blissful, dizzying numbness. But he couldn’t, could he? He couldn’t get black-out plaster like he used to when he needed to hide from his problem. He had the girls.
What if Audrey was having the same thought and was finding her way to a bar? What if she came back? What if Percy’s unable to protect the girls from Audrey?
He stares at it for a long, long time. The heavy glass with he room temperature amber liquid. Just one sip and he’d feel better, wouldn’t he? Maybe he wouldn’t feel like his world was crashing around him and his daughter had to see something no child should ever have to see.
The girls never come in for their supper, so Percy stands plates up a portion for each girl before placing a stasis on it. He writes a little note, inviting the girls to eat if they were hungry.
Then he leans over, picks up the glass dumps it out into the sink. It’s strangely liberating and terrifying in the same sense.
He finds the bottle and upends that into the sink as well. He finds a few bottles of expensive wine, uncorks them with his wand and dumps them, too. When he’s done, he vanishes the empty bottles and starts on the dishes from the meal they did not eat. It goes through the motions numbly.
He’s putting the big pot away in the lower cabinet when he sees a speck of red on the floor. It looks like blood. His blood, the blood at Audrey had drawn from his face when she slapped him. His back twinges- he’d only gotten rid of the wound on his face. His wrist aches from where she’d grab him when he was trying to push her away. His shoulder- long since healed, feels raw and aching like he’d just hurt it. He decides against healing himself anymore. Instead, he cleans up his blood and sets everything right before wandering into the living room.
It's half-past eight by now, and thought the girls aren’t due for bed until 9, they’re not in the living room, the den, or Percy’s room. He hears movement from their bedroom, the door to which has been shut. There’s some quiet talking. Percy places a hand on the knob, hoping to say something to both of them, but finds himself at a loss for words. He can’t think of anything to say at all.
So he drops his hand and goes into the den, sitting on the couch. He stares at the flower wall-papered walls. He’d hated the pattern, but Audrey had insisted on it. Audrey insisted on a lot of things Percy didn’t agree with; like not taking Lucy to a professional for her eating habits and routine-obsessed behavior, or the pattern of their dishes, or what school the girls went to. When Percy thinks back, each time they’d disagreed on something Percy always gave in. It was easier to let Audrey have her way.
He was getting sick of it. He was sick of letting Audrey do whatever she wanted. They were supposed to be a team, weren’t they? So why did Percy feel like he was the only one trying to get them across the finish line?
He thinks about that look on Molly’s face.
His watch chimes and he looks down at it. It’s a crappy, cheap watch he’d gotten on sale. When wizards became of age, they were given a watch as sort of an heirloom. When Percy had turned 17, there had been talk of war and his relationship with his family was already strained. By the time Percy realized about the watch, it was already too late. He’d burned too many bridges. Even after he and his family reconciled, he’d never bothered to bring it up. He’d just gotten this cheap watch.
It had hurt when he saw Harry pull watch from his own pocket. He recognized it as being his late uncle’s.
He loved Harry like a brother. In fact, he was sure Harry liked him more than some of his own brothers. It had still hurt, nonetheless. To see Harry with a watch that was undoubtedly gifted to him by his parents.
Percy finds his mind wandering to the war. It always came back to the war, in the end. He regretted a lot of it. Not refusing to join up with the Order- but what his choices had meant for his relationships. During the war, he’d been a nervous wreck. Every single step of his was monitored. One slip up, and he’d be executed without jury or trial. Or locked up in Azkaban. Or held in the cells and tortured for information. He wasn’t a strong man- he was sure he’d break if they had interrogated him. It wasn’t unheard of for people to be tortured for information and them dropping names left and right just to try and get some reprieve.
Percy would never admit this to anyone at all, but he’d been the one to leak the news of the Muggleborn Registration Commission to the Daily Prophet.
He knew of it early on, of course, being a scribe. But after actually seeing what it was like-, he knew it was wrong. He knew that his dream for peace through government and laws and order was dead. That was why he’d copied all the documents he could, complied them into dossiers, and sent them to every single reporter he knew in the Daily Prophet that weren’t being paid off. There were unsurprisingly very few.
That was one of the things he didn’t regret. One of the very few.
After that, came scrutiny. More regulations, and paperwork became more and more important. But since there was now so much of it required, that meant one wizard whose case was being looked at which would have before taken just a few hours now took days or weeks to review. That had been enough time for Percy to fudge the names a bit. Forge a few signatures. Arrange for some less-than-legal international Portkeys.
But it hadn’t been enough. He’d gotten sloppy and desperate, and people died. Because of him and his failures. And when the ministry fell during the wedding he wasn’t invite to and his shoulder was cleaved in pieces by a bone-breaker spell, it had felt like penance.
He stares at the watch numbly until it chimes again. He’d been so lost in his thoughts about Audrey, about his family and the war and all the people he’d let down that it had been nearly another hour.
Percy stands from the couch and walks over to the girl’s room. The light is now off, so he braves himself to gently push the door open. He sees the two lumps of sleeping figures in their beds, breathing softly. He quietly walks over to Lucy, pulling the sheets up a little more securely around her. Then he goes to Molly’s bed and brushes the hir out of her face. She’s getting older, but she’s still so young.
He knows what he has to do, even if it’s literally the last thing he wants. Percy shuts the door behind him as he leaves his girls sleeping restfully in their beds. He walks up to the hallway just outside the kitchen. He picks up the phone, takes a breath and dials the number he knows by heart.
It rings a few times and Percy think maybe this was a bad idea, and then:
“Hello?” says a voice on the other end when they pick up. He sounds groggy, like he’d just been asleep. Given the hour, he must have been.
“Oliver, I want to leave.” Percy says into the phone. He knows he doesn’t need to explain what he was leaving or why. There’s a moment of stunned quiet, and then:
“Okay, Perce” Percy can hear something like pride leaching into Oliver’s voice. “Let’s make a plan.”