A/N: Sorry for the delay! And Merry Christmas from Edie and Percy... who are a little unpleasant right now. Bah Humbug.

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Smarts

Arthur Weasley liked Muggle things, just like his namesake. He was, however– quite unlike his grandfather– highly knowledgeable about and adept in their usage. He could successfully navigate the Internet, build a rudimentary crystal set radio (to the delight of his younger cousins), and even attempt to explain (to the delight of the first Arthur Weasley) how airplanes stayed up. This would all have been perfectly natural if Arthur was a Muggle, or endearingly eccentric if he was a wizard, but Arthur was neither. Arthur Weasley was a Squib.

Having had a Muggle education, Arthur studied science in school– particularly interesting to him was biology and, more specifically, genetics. If magical ability was a gene, he mused during the long lectures at Eton, he could represent the inheritance of magical power with the conventional Punnett Square, the tool used to predict the outcome of cross-breeding experiments. (He might have disdained his older brother, but if they shared anything in common, it was reverence for logic.)

Like this:

Represent magical ability with M, he scribbled in a notebook. Lack of magical ability will be m, lower-case. We will assume the presence of magical ability to be a dominant gene, since Squibs are even rarer than Muggleborn witches and wizards.

Mum is a Muggle, and so much have the completely recessive gene: mm

Dad is either MM or Mm.

If Mm, then possible offspring will look like this (statistically):

3/4 Mm

1/4 mm

If MM, then:

All Mm

This was a gross simplification, of course, but Arthur liked the clarity of his theory. Of course, beyond this point things became a little murkier.

Magical ability, he knew, was not equal across the board– even among witches and wizards. It was like any ability– intelligence, for example. His father, Percy, was extraordinarily intelligent– magical ability aside. His mother Audrey was bright as well, as was Ignatius. Kate, bless her heart, was on the ground floor of the mind, so to speak. And Arthur was in the stratosphere.

It annoyed him that the fact that he scored in the ninety-ninth percentile of IQ tests gave him no credibility in the magical world, the world he was born into. Rose Weasley was probably genius-level too, but what was more significant was that she was a brilliant witch. Arthur was a Squib. He was worse than a Muggle, who simply had no magical ability whatsoever– he was defective.

Because Squibs and Muggles were not equivalent, Arthur realized: it was not simply a matter of cultural difference. Squibs did have magical ability, but at such a low level that it wasn't even efficacious enough to perform the most basic first-year charms (and Arthur had tried).

It made the boy think that Squibs didn't have the recessive gene, mm, but the mixture– Mm. In his theory, after all, "M" meant magical ability, not magical power.

Magical power was a different thing altogether, which had little to do with genetics or the bigoted perversion of wizarding genetics: blood status. Magical power seemed to defy expectation.

Which was how Arthur, son of a pureblood Weasley (and a Muggle) was a Squib and not a Muggle– he had the barest flicker of magical ability without any magical power.

It was worse than having none.

But he had an assignment for creative writing, and he knew that if he continued to think about this dreary topic he'd end up turning in some dreadful, self-indulgently melancholy piece on the vicissitudes of fortune and family. Good Lord, he didn't want to be that person. He decided to write a sequel to the short story he'd submitted the previous term– a dystopian fiction sort of story, in which a young woman accidentally discovers that the world she thinks she's living in is only a fragment of reality, that she and everyone she knows are being kept in the dark. And when she tries to follow up on this knowledge, she's threatened with loss of her memory (because the ruling class possesses extraordinarily advanced technology, naturally). In Arthur's version, her mind is wiped and she's none the wiser.

Arthur got the highest grade in the class, for his "tragic" ending.

"But it isn't tragic," he had insisted. "It's the best thing for the character– why would she want to live in a world that she can never fully participate in? Better that she doesn't know it exists."

But Arthur, growing increasingly impatient with himself for brooding, decided to see if he couldn't make his protagonist an integrated whole and just be done with it.

It seemed kind of sappy to him, on a peripheral level, and far less efficacious than simply discussing the issue with the real-life model for the fictional character– but even if Arthur was intelligent, he was a thirteen-year-old boy, and he didn't want a heart-to-heart with his mother.

"What?" he called irritably– someone was knocking on his door, lightly, as though not wanting to disturb him. If you don't want to disturb me, Arthur thought viciously, don't knock at all.

Tap-TAP. Tap-tap-TAP.

Arthur swiveled around in the chair at his desk. The sound wasn't a tapping at his chamber door, as Poe might say– it was at his window, and Arthur couldn't believe he had ever mistaken the tell-tale sound of an owl's beak on glass for the knock of one of his roommates.

"News from the Castle?" Arthur asked as he let in the bird and unrolled a small slip of parchment from around its leg, only slightly bitterly. Truth was, he was more curious than annoyed to receive a letter from the magical world– his father had strictly insisted that all post to Arthur be done the Muggle way, since he was, after all, at a Muggle school. Someone was in a hurry.

Arthur! the letter began. It's me, Kate. Well, I guess you can figure that out by my handwriting– Arthur smiled slightly; he liked his sister– Anyway, I have a mystery to solve and I need your help. I hate to bother you because I know you're busy and don't like getting tied up in wizarding things, but I can't ask anyone else. One, because I'm caught up in a web of secrets, lies, and double agency at the moment; and Two, because it's rather sensitive information about our family that I don't want too many people to know until we know for sure what's going on. I mean, Scorpius Malfoy already knows but that's because we snuck into the Library to look at old legislative documents when I was supposed to be sneaking into the kitchens with James. Get back to me soon! Love, Kate.

Arthur laughed aloud. He did like his sister– it was rather a shame she was so under their older brother's thumb all the time. But then, if she wasn't asking him for advice, then maybe they weren't so close as usual. She was sneaking around Hogwarts with someone named "Scorpius"? When she was supposed to be doing just the same with James Potter? Something strange was going on in Scotland that Arthur couldn't quite untangle from his sister's bizarre note. But he knew one thing at least, and it seemed to be the one that baffled Kate the most. He jotted down a quick note and tied it on the owl's leg. The bird hooted and pecked at Arthur's wrist.

"I'm a Squib," he said, incredulous. "Do you really think I just carry spare sickles around in my pockets? Consider this a collect call."

The bird skewered Arthur with a baleful glare and took off, bearing his hastily-written response:

Well of course they're not who they say they are. Three Broomsticks, Sat.

***

Edie saw the doorknob begin to turn and, hurriedly, picked up the book on her nightstand and began to read. Pretended to read—the words blurred and swam on the page in front of her, as she unfocused her eyes and practiced in her head, one more time, exactly what she would say to Percy when he opened the door. She composed her face into an anxious expression (it was about what she was feeling, anyway) and prepared to lie like her life depended on it.

She had some excellent prior experience.

"Edie?" Percy looked confused. It was his flat after all—his flat that she'd never visited before, let alone let herself in. As Percy Weasley's legislative aide, she visited his office; as Percy Weasley's fiancé, they ate dinner together at Diagon Alley, or at the Burrow, or at some inconspicuous Muggle restaurant; as Percy Weasley's charge under 'protective custody," she lived in a spare room in the Burrow. His flat was uncharted territory.

"Percy," she said hastily, sounding nervous, looking like she half-regretted coming after all, surprising him like this when he thought she was angry at him. Maybe he thought she'd come to trash his little apartment, or throw something at him—maybe he had a sudden flashback to getting on Ginny's bad side and getting a brutal Bat Bogey Hex to the face. Edie was a Muggle, of course, but a frying pan to the face wouldn't be particularly pleasant either.

But Edie's nervousness didn't betray any anger, and she'd been reading a particularly non-threatening book: Is It A Saint's Name? the title asked. Little pink and blue angels posed, stationary, on the cover. A book of baby names.

Oh, he looked confused all right.

"Percy…" Edie said, a little slower, just as nervous. She twisted her hands in front of her. "Look, Percy, I just wanted to tell you…"

It seemed to Edie that he could probably see right through her, probably guess exactly what she was doing and hate her for it. He'd get all pompous suddenly, patronizing, and never trust her again. Maybe she'd crossed that line already, after her outburst on the Filbertses' driveway. But she had to try, and chances were Percy didn't see through Edie's duplicitous little plan at all—as grossly obvious as her more paranoid introspection considered it. Experience had made her paranoid.

It also made her an excellent actress.

"I'm sorry," she finished quietly. She looked at her feet; she looked back up at his face. "I'm sorry," she said again. "I was stupid—I know it. You just wanted to protect me. That woman at the Ministry… that Dolores something-or-other… she didn't like me. Well, that's an understatement. I said there wasn't any danger anymore, but I was wrong. I was wrong. You were right, and I got angry because you're always right and I figured… well, I guess I just wanted to be right for a change."

Edie sighed; to her own ears it sounded contrived, but Percy looked thoroughly taken in. His own expression had already softened from shocked surprise to surprised delight. Forgiveness. Oh, how very kind of him to forgive the dear repentant little Muggle. How benevolent.

Edie hoped the bile in her mouth didn't come through in her voice.

"You're not mad at me, are you?"

It was something a little girl would say after eating a cookie before dinner, or letting the dog inside the house with all its muddy footprints, spilling grape juice on the carpet. Are you mad at me? Mad was such a silly-sounding word, but Edie hoped to God that no one in Percy's flat would ever be mad—because it was dangerous word too. She thought about Herbert Chorley quacking luck a duck, trying to strangle some Healer at St. Mungo's. It was the way Edie could easily end up, some day, if she went mad. As it was, she was only angry, and very very clever. To avoid being driven mad, she make up with Percy and make him imagine that she envisioned a future with the two of them together having little Weasley babies with names she'd pick out of an innocuous baby book with little cherubim marching along the spine.

He was smart, smarter than she was, probably, but like every other witch or wizard he underestimated her—hard to believe he could, after what she'd done, but he'd always been a little arrogant, hadn't he? George had said so—George, who filched his extra key and let her into the apartment. He'd said it would kill him to apologize to Percy first, but she was smart to do it. Percy had always been stubborn, he said, didn't talk to their Dad for years one stretch.

"Of course I'm not mad," Percy said, striding across the room to hug her tightly. "And I'm sorry too—I don't ever want you to feel like a prisoner, of any sort."

"Oh Percy," Edie said into his shoulder. He thought she hadn't noticed that he didn't say she wasn't a prisoner.

Percy was so clever with words.