It goes like this:
Molly Weasley loves all her children, and she instills a strong feeling of family loyalty to them. It’s ironic, seeing as how their family status in the Wizarding World is “Blood Traitor”. But she loves them more than life, more than death, more than anything.
When Bill leaves to be a curse breaker, she cries for months. But she sends him letters weekly, and once she stops begging him to come home, he starts sending her letters back.
When Charlie runs away to be with dragons, she cries again, but she thinks she knows what to say, this time, and Charlie begins sending letters back faster than Bill.
When Percy leaves… well. She had yelled when Bill left, and frowned with Charlie left, but they had left with dreams in their heads and smiles on their faces, and Percy is leaving with neither. The Weasleys are hotheads, not just because of their flaming red hair, and the argument that sends Percy out the door is brutal. It’s hard to tell if he left or if he was kicked out.
No child of hers is ever going to be kicked out, really, but Percy was closer to Arthur than her, and it made their relationship break all the harder.
She sends Percy letters, of course, but the words that ensured Bill and Charlie responded do not have the same effect on her third son. She keeps sending letters anyway.
But weeks turn into months, and now it is the holidays and she has never been without all her children for Thanksgiving before. And it hurts.
He sends a letter. It wishes her happy holidays and nothing else, and it gets her hopes up and she sends Percy his Weasley sweater. It breaks her heart when it gets sent back and she breaks into tears at Christmas at the dinner table, much to the dismay of her six other children.
She instills a strong feeling of family in her children, and is dismayed when, instead of begging Percy to return, it turns her children against him, especially Ron. Ron, who Percy wrote a letter to back when he hadn’t written her a single letter yet.
Ron won’t tell her what the letter said. When she asks, choosing only to call his older brother names. She doesn’t ask again.
She… she doesn’t understand. Percy was the first son who didn’t move out the second he got a job. He stayed. He wanted to stay, she was sure of it. He wanted to come home.
She’s not sure that there’s anything else she can do but keep sending letters. And then Arthur gets attacked at work.
“Arthur,” She says. “Please write to Percy. Please write to him.” Her husband frowns at her, wrapped in bandages at the kitchen table.
“What am I supposed to say?” He demands. “He said he was ashamed of me.”
“Anything,” She begs. “I can’t bear the thought that one of us might die and we wouldn’t all be there. Please,” She cries and Arthur’s shoulders sag.
“Alright,” He says. “I will.”
To say that Molly is shocked would be an understatement, when there’s a knock at her door and Percy stands there, looking uncertain.
“Percy!” She screams and wraps him up in her arms. He’s taller than she remembers, or had she forgotten? And so thin, was he remembering to eat? He has bags under his eyes, and looks exhausted when he finally escapes her embrace.
“Dad was attacked?” He asks, straight to the point, and she realizes she had forgotten to tell him. It must’ve been Arthur.
“I’m so sorry,” She begins to apologize, but Percy steps into the Burrow and finds his father with frightening accuracy. Arthur looks up from his book in the living room, and Percy stands in the entryway to the room. The pair stare at each other for a long time, and the air turns awkward. Then the pair try to speak at the same time.
“I’m glad you’re alive,” Percy blurts out at the same time that Arthur says, “I didn’t think you would come here.” They both fall silent again.
“Will you be staying for dinner?” Molly asks, and Percy’s face changes from something fragile and uncertain to flat. She hadn’t realized how anxious he had looked until it was gone.
“No,” He says. “I don’t think I’ll be welcome.”
“What?” She demands, righteous anger sparking to life in her chest. “You are always welcome here.” Percy looks… fond. And it quells most of the spark.
“I’m afraid that isn’t an opinion shared by my younger siblings,” He says wryly, and she’s missed his wit, even as her heart breaks a little. Percy turns back to his father and steps forward and clasps his father’s hand.
“See you around,” He says, and before Molly can say anything else, he apparates away with a sharp crack.
Ron stomps down the stairs.
“I heard talking,” He says. “Was someone here?”
“Just a firecall, dear,” Molly lies, chest aching.
Percy showing up doesn’t change much, but it also change everything. He starts responding to Molly, writing to Arthur, writing to Ginny, writing to all his siblings, though when Molly takes the mail from Errol she sees he only tries to write Ron and the twins once.
He writes her once a week, short, clipped summary of his days. Of random office gossip. It’s short and awkward, nothing like the passionate letters about dragons she gets from Charlie or the pages of office gossip that she gets from Bill. She knows this means something, but she doesn’t know what.
Voldemort shows up at the ministry and the ministry is forced to acknowledge that he is back and alive, and the atmosphere in the Wizarding World turns darker. Minister Frudge resigns but Percy remains the minister’s assistant for Scrimgeour, too, and Molly supposes with some pride that that means Percy does his job well.
“Suppose this one wants to use Percy to spy on his family too?” One of the twins snorts during dinner, and the other chuckles.
“How can he, if no one here talks to the pompous prick?” Molly assigns them extra chores, but she’s sure all that does is teach them not to have those kinds of comments in front of her.
He doesn’t come to Bill’s wedding. Percy doesn’t come to Bill’s wedding.
Molly is furious until Scrimgeour’s Patronus shows up at the wedding to announce the fall of the Ministry, and the Death Eaters attack the wedding, and then it’s out of her head until much later, when she realizes that as Scrimgeour’s assistant, Percy was likely there when the Minister died and the Death Eaters took over. She cries into Arthur’s shoulder for hours. They aren’t at the Burrow, it’s location compromised, so she can’t check the family clock. She has no idea if her baby boy is alive, and it takes her a moment to realize that she’s shouted this out loud, and the walls of this safe house are thin. It keeps her children from saying anything bad about Percy for a while, at least. Ron and Harry are gone, too, but they have Hermione with them and she has to trust that the trio knows what they’re doing when they don’t return.
She shrieks when she picks up the mail one day and on the cover page, sees Percy standing behind the newest Minister of Magic, who is very obviously a Death Eater or one of their puppets. He looks paler and thinner and even more tired than last she saw him, but it feels like no one else sees it when Charlie catches a glimpse the picture and scoffs in derision.
“I can’t believe we worried about him for nothing,” He says to Bill, who nods, still angry about the wedding, and the twins look sour.
Percy sends a letter that week. His handwriting looks worse than usual, and this time he doesn’t talk about his week. He writes that he loves her. And then the letters stop, and all the letters she sends him get sent back unopened and, it scares her. The same happens to Arthur’s letters, and Ginny’s letters, and it makes her heart drop into her stomach. They’re all being watched by the Ministry, by the Death Eaters, so she has to assume he’s being watched too. She has to settle for scanning all the photos in the newspapers for glimpses of Percy, but the pictures are few and in-between, and Percy seems to be wasting away before her very eyes in each glimpse.
Ginny goes to Hogwarts this year, and Molly begs her not to go, but she goes anyway. Fred and George’s joke shop gets destroyed, and they have to stay with her, and she’s guilty that she feels so relieved that they’re here with her.
And then Harry Potter is spotted at the Ministry of Magic, of all places, and she receives a letter. It’s crumpled, poorly folded, no envelope.
Ron was here, it says in unsteady handwriting, but it doesn’t matter how messy it is. She’d recognize it anywhere. He used Polyjuice Potion but it wore off. I made sure he got away. Didn’t look like he was injured. But I’m afraid i-
Spilled ink covers the rest. She holds her breath. He never would’ve sent a letter like this unless, unless-
She cries, and can’t stop crying until Arthur finds her. He pries the crumpled paper out of her fingers and reads it, face grave.
“I thought we were waiting for him to return on his own, like we did with Bill and Charlie,” He says. “But we need to go and get him. We should’ve forced him home after the wedding.” She sobs out an agreement.
The children who stayed at home are not in agreement with their parents.
“Why would we risk out necks for that prat?” George hisses. “He’s probably just going to turn around and go back to work the second we bring him home!”
“Silent, ” Molly thunders, and her boys fall quiet immediately. “We are getting back your brother. No discussion, end of argument.”
It’s hard, to start finding a lead as to where Percy is. It turns out that the reason why their letters were being returned was because Percy’s apartment has been abandoned. Arthur reaches out to old coworkers, but his department was taken apart, and most of his coworkers are on the run for being considered Muggle sympathizers. He finally gets hold of someone, and the only reason they respond to Arthur instead of reporting the letter to their superiors is out of pity.
“They took your kid. Don’t know where. Don’t talk to me again.”
Molly doesn’t even have time to process this before the message comes in that the Battle is coming, the actual, face-to-face fight between the Death Eaters and everyone else is coming, and it will be at Hogwarts where her daughter is. Suddenly Molly is preparing for battle to protect those of her children that she can.
The actual fight takes a while, though it’s satisfying to enter Hogwarts and chase the Death Eaters out and watch Minerva fight Severus.
It’s an even better feeling when the battle begins and Percy shows up.
He looks terrible, shaking and covered in blood stains and he’s certainly in no condition to be fighting, but he’s alive and he only gasps in pain a little when she gives him a quick hug.
She loses track of him during the fighting, but there’s a reprieve in the fighting when Voldemort calls for Harry to sacrifice himself, and Molly hunts down her children to find Percy, Fred, and George hugging each other, sobbing. She hurries forward, fearing the worst, but all three seem to be in one piece and she manages to get some disjointed tale of Percy yanking Fred out of the way of a collapsing wall, of all things. It helps soothe their distance, and Percy apparently looks pathetic enough to the twins to agree that Percy had been in trouble at the Ministry after all and worthy of some measure of concern. It’s something, even if it’s not the right reasoning, and Molly fusses over all three of them and drags them back to the family.
She gets the story out of Percy, too. Apparently he helped Ron escape the Ministry, but it set the Death Eaters after him. He had been writing the letter when they first burst into his office, but he had managed to escape but ended up getting captured by them a day later. They had tortured him for a bit but when the Death Eaters left to prepare for the battle he managed to escape. He looks awful enough for the story to collaborate, but she would’ve believed him anyways. She doesn’t get to fuss over Percy nearly enough before Voldemort announces Harry Potter’s death, but then Harry is alive, and the battle continues.
Bellatrix Lestrange threatens Ginny and Molly tears that witch apart. That’s all she really recalls when she has to think back on the second half of the Battle of Hogwarts. All her kids are alive and that’s all she can really ask for. She closes her eyes and cries.
It goes like this:
Molly Weasley loves all her children, and she instills a strong feeling of family loyalty to them. And while it doesn’t work out the way she intended with some of her children, it works with others. It’s easier to be loyal to your family when you’re receiving letters from more than just one of them, and while helping his family gets Percy tortured for it, it’s also what brings him help in return. Percy’s siblings don’t always get along with him, but they all love each other, more than life, more than death, more than anything.