Percy Weasley

“You were incredibly lucky, if your friend had brought you in any later . . .”

Hooded eyes followed around the pink scrubs, gave the impression that he heard the words and wasn’t lost in a world of his own. Everything burned inside him, the weight of the events heavy on his chest. There were only flashes to everything that happened, fragments Percy couldn’t piece together in order for it to make sense. The courtroom. Selwyn’s face, the twisted smile that brought phantom pains to the surface. Felix’s voice that twisted in with Kingsley’s words . . . 

“Under the agreed provision that he works in our auror department, one M. Selwyn is released and cleared of all charges against him.”

Percy choked on the sob, buried his face into his bandaged hands as it all came down on him though he had nothing left in his memories, nothing but the monsters in his head screaming. He had been close to succeeding, fear in the realization but anger that he had been saved; that people wasted energy to make sure he lived. 

“Percy?” Andromeda looked up from the potions, a tremble in the always steady hands. Doe eyes widened, her face screwed up to words he didn’t say but felt like he didn’t need to - she understood, heard the brokenness deep inside him. “Would you like me to get your mum?”

His head shook, a pitiful attempt to regain control over himself. He didn’t know how to explain what happened, how to tell his mother he had tried to take his own life, that the man who tortured him for months had been set free and would be working just a level below him. That he was so weak he couldn’t fight; not for what was right or his own life. 

“No, I don't want her anywhere near me.” Percy swallowed hard, the thoughts that refused to rest attacked him relentlessly. He wanted nothing more than to see his mother, that even in her anger he would know that deep down she still loved him despite all his mistake. “I’ve done enough damage already, I've hurt her enough. I don’t want to burden her with my issues. She . . . please don’t tell her. I don’t think she would forgive me. I don't know what I'll do if she turns on me as well.”

“What do you mean?” She glanced at the door for a moment, a look of distress, clearly flustered. Her voice was as kind as her face, someone who had their entire life ripped from them by the war but stood tall in the fight. A face that reminded him so much of his childhood, the face of his mother’s best friend who watched him grow, helped save him once before. Now, Andromeda burned loneliness into his heart, the reminder of what once was for his family. “Forgive you for what?”

It was the prod to get him to open up, for all the words he had been keeping to himself that were killing him to break free. He had so much he wanted to say but believed no one wanted to hear it. Everyone still looked at him differently, treated him like he was an extension of the family and not one of them. They didn’t see that he was bent so badly he was broken, that he knew none of them cared he wasn’t okay; that he finally broke. It was the ultimate cruelness of the war, the way it pushed him to the brink of death but kept him at the end of his rope, just alive enough to feel the pain of loneliness. 

Their eyes met, one set wide to the vacant stare of the other. Percy’s smile appeared, the same mastered appearance that hid everything wrong with him. Percy knew she knew even if he didn't know how she did. Andromeda always seemed to know, clicked faster with what someone was thinking. It was in the way she looked at him, the pain he had buried long ago that all came together to form a sheet of ice that kept him under, forced his head down until he drowned. “You should have let me go.”