Just a short view of Percy's time at the Ministry this chapter - enjoy! xx
By the time he's worming his way up the Ministry, in those awful months cleaning up the Crouch affair, the headaches are daily occurrences. He wakes up with a tight feeling across his nose, pulsing above his ears, and the polystyrene cup of coffee, tasteless and steaming, from the vendor outside the Headquarters, only serves to stretch his skin further across his bursting skull.
The air in his cramped office is muggy and close, and the houseplants his mother sent him are withered and neglected, decaying gently on the sill of the smeared window. The day's a stream of paper clips and crumpled memos and wrinkled coffee rings on documents that should have been signed and sent weeks ago. He remembers Hogwarts, the knots he tied in his own stomach worrying about NEWTs – exams, and useless, crammed knowledge, with a war brewing outside, and concerns of far greater magnitude than Benson's Fourth Law of Transfiguration. The futility of it chokes him, and, not for the first time, he rues the hours he spent in the library, throwing away his childhood.
It's still a minor distraction, taking off his glasses and cleaning them, but every second is mapped out in admin and reports and rows of blinding figures, and he can ill afford the time spent staring into an incoherent distance. So his glasses stay obediently on his face, lodged in the natural ridge of his nose, the grime of London filmy across the lenses. At home – a rattling flat with a spotted mirror above the tiny sink, in a non-magical building with the stench of steam and cabbage floating up the stairwell – he takes off his glasses to brush his teeth, because his reflection looks younger that way. Almost dreamy, with the edges hazy – a mirage, a memory.
He doesn't feel like himself, these days, with the gnaw of guilt plaguing him, and the memory of his father's face still painful. He has things that carry on into his new, lonely life – the same hair, the same glasses, a paperweight Penelope gave him once, a postcard of Hogwarts. Oliver, when he thinks of him, belongs to the other life, the one of lumpy, colourful jumpers and rowdy family meals and silly, inconsequential things like exams.
Next chapter: The Battle of Hogwarts, through dusty, skewed lenses. Some actual P/O interaction, too!
