Raindrops trickled in constellations across the window pane and dripped through the gaps left by the broken glass. The wind chased them through the holes, sweeping through the room searching for the last few remnants of warmth that it hadn't yet stolen from the ramshackle shack that had once been a home.
Broken glass from the windows mingled with smashed photo frames on the wooden floor. Drops of rain splashed into puddles of muddy water where Ginny had once kept her dolls. The scorch marks of ricocheted curses finally covered the burn on the wall where Fred and George had set Percy's hair on fire. Knitting needles lay snapped in two on the floor, wool still attached, straggling across the floor now.
They had been prepared, but not enough. A traitor in their midst and the family evening, safe in front of the fire and almost all together had become a bloodbath, a slaughter. It had been harder on the survivors.
Ron had been with Harry, searching for horcruxes across the country and out of contact with his family. He hadn't even found out what had happened until the final battle was over. It was hushed up, and nobody that knew dared to tell him when he was about to risk the only family he had left in the fight against Voldemort.
Ginny had been at school. They told her that it had been done to set an example, to enforce her good behaviour and to threaten her classmates. She refused to be intimidated and stepped up her activities with the DA. When the battle came, she channelled her grief into the fight and died on the front lines because she had no reason not to.
And so the Burrow had become a ruin. Ron refused to return after the battle, and with good reason. Harry went once to bury Ginny's ashes with those of her family and never went back after. What had been the hub of a busy family had become nothing more than a ruin overnight.
Percy moved in when it was still mostly a ruin, mere days after the final battle. Ron had ignored him throughout the memorials. He knew he deserved it. He hadn't even come to the final battle. Hadn't done much of anything except drink since he'd heard of what happened.
He didn't change anything when he moved in, except add whiskey bottles to the smashed glass on the floor. What was the point in fixing the house when the family that had lived there with him would never see it again? Molly wasn't around to get angry at the state of the floor or the walls. The twins weren't around to compete to re-scorch the walls even darker. Ginny wasn't here to 'tidy' the communal space by moving everything into her brothers' rooms.
Even the windows didn't get fixed until Tracey Davies and Pansy Parkinson moved in a year later, straight out of prison. Roger Davies and Percy had kept in touch after Hogwarts, becoming firm friends once they'd forgotten house differences and realised that they were both ambitious young wizards who wanted to succeed in life. After, Roger had been a willing ear for Percy. He was neutral. He wasn't one of the Hogwarts kids who had seen the final year and moulded themselves into soldiers with the DA, an exclusive unit that blocked out contact with any and every other person who had been around at the time. He'd been a junior clerk at Gringotts. He understood exactly how it had been, trying to toe the line in those dark days.
And so when he contacted him asking if his sister and her girlfriend could stay with him for a few weeks after they were released from prison for 'undisclosed crimes associated with He Who Must Not Be Named' he said yes. Mostly to repay the favour. Partly because Roger said he needed the company- there were some weeks where he didn't speak a word aloud, not even a spell. Partly because the house was hell and they deserved to see what they'd done.
The ministry had cleaned off most of the blood after the massacre. The rest of the damage had been left. Percy slept curled up on the decent half of the most broken sofa. There was no other unbroken furniture in the house, at least on the ground floor. He hadn't been upstairs in the year that he'd lived there, not even to his old room.
When the two Slytherin (Death-eater scum) girls arrived they explored and they fixed and they changed. They fixed the windows, banished the broken glass, repaired some of the furniture. She hated them for it.
When they fixed the stairs he climbed them just so he could push Pansy down and watch her blood spreading where his family's had. He liked to think that it washed out some of the debt he owed them.
Not that he could ever really fix it.
Tracey fixed her. And then they left to sleep on the floor of Roger's inner city, one bed apartment. Percy was glad. He liked to live alone with his ghosts. Roger stopped writing after that. Percy barely noticed.
Hermione brought him some flowers and a few books on grief once, sitting in the front room, concern warring with anguish on her features as she looked around the still mostly-broken living room. She said she'd been trying to reach the house for years but the wards hadn't let her in. She hadn't been welcome, he wanted to say, she still wasn't, but she'd married ickle Ronnie so now she was technically a Weasley and couldn't be kept out. She tried to make conversation, telling him inane stories of the happiness of the people they'd been at school with.
Angelina Johnson had married Oliver Wood. They'd called their baby Freddy-George because they couldn't pick just one.
George had always had a thing for Angelina. If not for circumstances, that baby could have been his. His nephew. His mother's grandson.
She told him that this was unhealthy, that he needed to leave the house, that he needed to start living his life again, get a job, talk to some of his friends. She told him that she hadn't heard of anyone speaking to him in over four years. He wanted to scoff. It was more like five. So long that even the words she spoke seemed like an alien tongue. He could always understand what his ghosts meant. He just needed to look at their expressions.
Disappointment. Anger. Blame.
He threw her out and set the books on fire. She tried again, but he'd strengthened the wards. He must have hurt her badly. She never tried after that.
Then the ministry started calling.
Did he know what was happening to some of the old Pureblood families in his area? No, sir, would you care to enlighten me?
Random attacks in the middle of the night? Clearly magical? Property damaged but nothing stolen? Vigilante justice? Of course I'll be careful officer. Thank you, officer.
There were still enough things in the twins' room to make plenty of trouble for sympathisers. For those who had aided and abetted him in his rise to power. Those who hadn't worked hard enough to defeat him. Fire and water and explosives. He could be just as creative as them when he stopped caring about the rules. And why would he care about the rules of the world that had let his family be murdered in cold blood?
Why would he fear punishment when nothing could be worse than the hell he was living?
It was Ron that caught him in the end. Of course. Too many Weasley products. Any Gryffindor who had been around at the same time as the twins would have recognised most of the things he'd put to more violent uses. It didn't take a genius to figure it out, and his baby brother just happened to be married to one.
He'd thought he would go out in a blaze of glory when they came for him, set the house on fire and go down cackling because there was no reason not to, take as many of the corrupt sons of bitches with him as he could.
But this was Ron. Of course, that's why they'd sent him. Some notion that he wouldn't kill the only family he had left, wouldn't risk the Weasley name forever. It was stupid to rely on sentiment. The Dark Lord had manipulated it so well in the previous war, killing families to get students to fall in line at school, using friendship and family and love to get to people's weak spots.
And yet when he was facing down his little brother in the dark basement of some Pureblood's mansion somewhere he couldn't do it. Of course he couldn't. His ghosts had started following him years ago, and they stood now, arrayed behind Ron, telling him what he should have known for years.
He had no right to avenge them. He hadn't fought for them to begin with. They were Ron's dead family. Ron's reason for fighting. For him, they were his ghosts and his guilt, but he had lost the right to grieve them when he had walked out. And he couldn't steal from them the only man who had the right to grieve them.
He dropped his wand, letting it clatter to the floor and welcoming the stunner that ripped through him, enveloping him in the velvet darkness of oblivion.
And the Burrow sat unoccupied as it had not been in hundreds of years, overlooking seven mounds in the earth that told a story more powerful than any words.
And somewhere, in an unmarked grave on an island more commonly thought of as hell, Percy Weasley lay, set apart in death as he had been in life, forever sundered from the family that he had given his health, life and sanity to avenge.