Forgiveness

Percy Weasley was in a dark place.

Realistically, all he had to do was turn on his bedside lamp and his room would fill with light.  But it wasn’t the physical realm that concerned him.

His mind was in a dark place.  His very soul was shrouded in black, cloaked in despair, sheathed in the bleak absence of hope.

He hadn’t spoken to Audrey in nine months.  Who knew if she was even waiting for him?  He certainly didn’t.  It had been even longer since he’d spoken with his family.  His last attempt at that had earned him a smart slap on the cheek and a resounding chewing out courtesy of his sister.  The worst part about that last meeting was that he knew that he had absolutely deserved it and more.

Life at the Ministry was hellacious.  Editing those anti-Muggle pamphlets was killing a part of him, but it had come down to killing a part of himself or killing all of himself, and he wasn’t yet gone enough to want death.

Yet.

For the moment, Percy was content to just lay in his bed at night, trying for eight hours of sleep and receiving two.  Those two hours were hard to come by, and so tonight, like every other night since August, he laid in utter darkness with his toes sticking out from under the blanket as he waited for his dreams to begin.

When a shining creature pranced its way through his window, he thought his dreams might have arrived early.

“Get on up here to the bar and fight, boy!” it snarled.  Every hair on Percy’s body stood out at the shock of hearing Aberforth Dumbledore’s voice in his bedroom.  “They’re fighting!”

Percy scrambled for his glasses as Aberforth’s Patronus looked at him with what he imagined was disapproval and faded away.  He didn’t recall clothing himself and jumping from the bed, so surreal was the call to battle, but somehow he was wearing jeans and his last Christmas jumper and his favorite traveling cloak when he Apparated into Hogsmeade.

An alarm sounded around him, but he ducked inside the bar before anyone could apprehend him.  The room was empty but he saw a staircase where he had never before seen one, and so followed it three stairs at a time.  Aberforth was pacing the room, muttering to himself and waving his hands dramatically.  “Aberforth!  Where’s the battle?!”

“Up at the school, of course,” the old barman grunted, never ceasing his path or his motions.  “Take that tunnel there above the mantel, it should lead you straight to their stronghold.”

“Aren’t you coming?”  Aberforth stopped in mid-gesture to glare at him.  Percy didn’t stick around to ask why.  “I’ll see you later, then.”

“You’ll be damned lucky if that’s true!” the old wizard shouted as Percy pulled himself onto the mantle and into the tunnel.  “Damned lucky!”

Ordinarily, the pace at which he set himself would have taken his breath away, but Percy’s adrenaline was already in full-blown action mode.  He could feel pure energy pumping through his veins, replacing his blood and making his senses sharper.  The tunnel climbed higher and higher, and his spirits followed suit.

Tonight would end his bleak existence, one way or another.  Of that, he was sure.

He would have liked to have the chance to kiss Audrey once more, or see his family long enough to apologize, but he knew that neither option was possible.  In a way, he kind of preferred it.

It gave him reason to hope that it would merely be the bleakness of his existence that ended rather than the existence entirely.

As the tunnel began to flatten out, he gripped his wand more securely and shoved his glasses up his nose.  He had no idea whose stronghold he would be appearing in, after all, and he had no idea just how deeply entrenched in battle said stronghold would be.  For all he knew, he would be immediately deluged with an onslaught of curses, jinxes, and hexes, and he couldn’t afford to lose his focus thanks to a wobbly wand or fuzzy vision.

A door finally appeared to signify the end of the tunnel.  He hadn’t heard the sounds of battle, but the Death Eaters could be lying in wait for anyone to climb through the door.  He had to make a strong, brash entrance.  It could be the only way of staying alive.

He clambered through the door with aplomb.

Perhaps aplomb was a bit much to clamber with, as he found himself immediately off balance and, to his horror, fell flat on his face.

All was still silent as he pulled himself up with a chair and looked around wildly.  His glasses were hanging askew, and he corrected them as he saw several blurry shapes staring at him from across the room.  “Am I too late?  Has it started?  I only just found out, so I-I-”

As his eyes adjusted to his glasses once more, he was able to focus on the faces staring at him.  And he was dually elated and mortified that the faces largely consisted of Weasleys.  The adrenaline in his veins turned immediately to ice water.

Save for his father, the only time Percy had seen his family since Dumbledore’s funeral was via Wanted posters.  Bad photographs could never capture the haunted look in his mother’s eyes, nor the horrendous, though healed, scars besmirching Bill’s face, nor the gaping hole in George’s head (he was surprised that he was still able to tell the twins apart, even after so long a separation).  Of the lot, only Ginny seemed the same, her eyes filled with the same mixture of bitterness, longing, and desperation as their last meeting.

Three faces stood out for their lack of red fringe and freckles: Fleur Delacour, though the rings on her hand reminded him that she was now a Weasley, Remus Lupin, and Harry Potter were all staring at him with the same expression of equal parts surprise and embarrassment.  Fleur said something loudly, but the ringing in Percy’s ears deafened it to nonsense.  Lupin responded in like after several moments, and Fleur and Harry crowded to him as dread, horror, humiliation, and every other bad feeling his mind could possibly contain pervaded the rest of Percy's body.  The volatile concoction of emotion collected in his stomach like an icy poison, which joined bile in climbing his throat at a speed that was impossibly fast and slow.

His family was staring at him with pure anger in their eyes.  If he’d had a mirror available, he would be doing the same, because he was angry that he’d alienated himself from the people who loved him most of all and been too much of a bloody fool to reconcile with them.

He had betrayed them, and there was no getting past that.

But he had to let them know now.  Now, before it was too late.  Before he let cowardice resume its hold over his Gryffindor courage and Weasley pride.

“I was a fool!” he bellowed.  His family didn’t react, so caught up in the moment they were, but Lupin, Fleur, and Harry all jumped in the corner of his vision.  “I was an idiot, I was a pompous prat, I was a-a-”  His typically encyclopedic vocabulary failed him as he struggled to convey just how terrible a person he was, although he knew that he was saying nothing his family didn’t already know.

“Ministry-loving, family-disowning, power-hungry moron.”  Unsurprisingly, Fred was the person who so aptly decimated Percy’s character and recent behavior.  In previous times, Percy would have snapped at him and threatened to curse his nose off.  Now all he could do was swallow as the words hung in the air and his mind, waiting for him to acknowledge them.

“Yes, I was.”

The air seemed a thousand times lighter, the room a million times brighter.  Fred tipped his head.  “Well, you can’t say fairer than that,” he chuckled, holding his hand out.

Before Percy could move to swat his hand aside and embrace him, his arms were full of his mother.  She sobbed and attempted to show her affections via strangulation, and instead of loosening her grip like the Percy Weasley of old would have done he patted her on the back and sought out his father’s eyes.

His father was staring at him with the blank expression that he often wore when they met at the Ministry.  Percy knew that this reunion was acting as a soothing balm to the hurt he had caused the family: good for a while, but not a permanent fix.  He wondered if anything would ever make his relationship with his father right again.

“I’m sorry, Dad.”  He smiled as the blank mask fell from his father’s face and quickly opened his arms to hold both of his parents.  His eyes watered as he felt the pure love emanating from his mother and father, and he knew then that someday, somehow, things would be okay between the three of them once more.

“What made you see sense, Perce?”  Perce.  Someone other than Audrey had called him Perce.  He turned to beam at George as his parents relinquished their hold on him, but found that he could hardly make out any of his siblings through the blur of tears.

“It’s been coming on for a while,” he said, deciding on the spot that he would wait until after the battle to explain just how long he had wanted this.  From the momentary look of devastation on Ginny’s face, he thought she now realized just how long he’d wanted to make things right.  Her expression morphed into determination when he wiped his eyes on his cloak.  “But I had to find a way out and it’s not so easy at the Ministry, they’re imprisoning traitors all the time.  I managed to make contact with Aberforth and he tipped me off ten minutes ago that Hogwarts was going to make a fight of it, so here I am.”

George grinned and puffed out his chest.  “Well, we do look to our prefects to take lead at times such as these.”  Percy had to laugh along with his family at George’s perfect execution of his mannerisms.  “Now let’s get upstairs and fight, or all the good Death Eaters will be taken.”

The Weasley brothers moved as one to the staircase at the end of the room, and Percy turned to reintroduce himself to Fleur.  She was definitely prettier when she wasn’t irate.

Outside the corridor was dark as night, with no lit torches in the sconces or moonlight in the window, but Percy no longer felt it.  His soul was free from the darkness of his betrayal.

The light of forgiveness filled him to the brim, and that was more suited to Percy Weasley than any adrenaline rush.