in a sitch like this you gotta think,
audreypercy

and i don't think you think about the way she thinks.
and i know you work hard every day,
but it all comes down to the way you're paid.
~"What Is Love?," Never Shout Never

They weren't ever going to be a fairytale ending.

Because Percy Weasley's sinfully talented at messing up good things, and Audrey is the most perfect of things, in the way that she smiles with painted red lips at him and her green eyes dance and shimmer when they catch the light. Her chestnut hair that falls in sweeping elegance down her back entices him, and everything about her just screams unattainable because he's bespectacled and ginger-haired and lanky and too Percy.

When they begin it's all sweaty palms wringing and glasses fogging up, but then they start to meld into each other, and she becomes more than the attractive waitress in that Muggle pub with the belly shirt and too-short skirt – she becomes Audrey with the tinkling laugh and the world-weary grins.

He really wants to love her, and that's what scares him most – he doesn't do this little thing called commitment unless it involves papers and deadlines and phone calls and business trips. It can't involve sweet kisses and interlinking fingers and baby girls and visiting the family at Christmas. He tries, you see, tries really bloody hard – he names their first after his mum like he cares, lets her do the same with their second, takes Audrey out to fancy restaurants with his paycheck, buys Molly all the books she could ever read and Lucy all the toys she could ever break.

But he's not a family man, even if he wants to be, and if he knows this whole thing will erupt in his face sooner or later – because Molly has Audrey's eyes and Lucy has her spunk, and Audrey keeps looking at him with so much love and it's literally eating him alive, the perfection of it all, because he knows he's going to mess it up.

And no one's really surprised when the divorce papers are lain on the table one rainy day in October.

They're just surprised it took so long.

And he is too.