for anyone that always skips to the last chapter, i just wanted to remind toy this is a 4 chapter update. i think the chapter after this is actually a court chapter (i can't remember but it's all done as well), just needs editing, which i'm being less stringent about for the purpose of uploading these chapters. but to be fair, this would be the 4th/5th edit for most of these...
Little Glass Houses
Chapter Twenty-One
Intersection
Two hours after Percy had left, Arthur had somewhat calmed down. Of course, remembering the cost of the wedding had really sent him fuming, but he'd become slightly consoled whenever his marvellous daughter reminded him that money wasn't everything. You taught us that, remember? Ginny had said before they'd left the Burrow. Ginny had even managed to talk him into visiting the probably-now-broken-up couple with a bottle of firewhiskey to soothe their woes. Wonderful, more money being spent, he'd thought when he'd picked up the bottle. But he did feel like he needed to apologise to Percy, because he looked an absolute state when he'd left. And apologising would feel less awkward if he had something to give.
Did Percy even drink firewhiskey? Arthur had to wonder. He'd not seen him even indulge in wine during Christmas. But he'd also hadn't seen him eat a whole meal in months, much less a tipple or two.
To be honest, Arthur was embarrassed about how he'd handled the situation. That morning, Percy had been a panicked wreck before he'd left. He'd not heard a kind word from the whole family that whole morning, which was unusual for them. For the past half year, they'd been walking around eggshells when it came to Percy. Even Ron was very careful about what he said to him, or about him. They were scared of his personality. Wouldn't you be? If your loud, obnoxious son had somehow started being worked up into a panic the second he heard his mum yelling at George to start washing the dishes? Percy had acted like going back to his flat was a death sentence, like Penelope was going to murder him! Arthur thought it was ridiculous at the time—a grown man that was terrified of telling his wife the truth, but now, all he could think about was how heart-breaking it was that they'd sent him away like that without at least giving him a Calming Draught. Or a couple of nice words, Arthur thought. All he could talk about was money! Really?
He shouldn't have been shocked at this admission anyway. Because Arthur remembered that months back when they'd started meeting up again, Percy didn't seem very keen on the idea of marrying Penelope. He'd never outright said it, but he'd always been finnicky about meeting up for the wedding arrangements. He didn't seem to enjoy the dress robe shopping, the cake tasting, finding and booking the venue, trying to book the catering, none of those things. He acted like he was preparing for his funeral half the time. Arthur just kept telling himself that Percy had just become like that, that he was 'just jumpy'. That this was his new personality and that they just had to accept it. That for some reason during the time he'd been away, his son had started to walk through the world with wide blue eyes and instruction manuals on how-to-behave-politely-at-all-times. He'd even seen Percy chew at his fingernails all by himself for ages, until they were just stubs. He didn't even think Percy knew that he did that half the time. He seemed so distant most of the time.
"If you ask him a question and the answer is no, he won't say it," Penelope had explained that Christmas evening. "He's not very outspoken these days. I can't imagine why he's so afraid of refusing…"
He never understood that. Percy's fear of refusing something. He'd really thought that Percy had changed because of the death of his son, which was a horrible, horrible thing. No parent should lose a child, but no parent should lose a child that young. Losing Fred had been catastrophic, and Percy had to deal with two deaths near one another. And before they'd gone into Hogwarts, Fred had known that there was a chance that he would die (nobody thought he actually would thought). He'd made his peace with it, but infants didn't even know they were dying. They were just limp and blue and gone before you'd even realised what had happened. But even knowing all of this, it didn't explain why Percy had become so ridiculously frightened of saying no. What did that have to do with anything?
Now, they were stood in front of his flat. Arthur was clutching the firewhiskey bottle so tightly that his knuckles had went white. Ginny was beside him, knocking onto the door. "Percy! Percy, it's us!" Ginny called out.
No answer. "Percy, I know that you must be fuming, but-but you have to open the door!" Ginny yelled loudly. "Dad's…dad's bought you firewhiskey! Mum's making dinner tonight. It's…it's rather nice and we'd love for you to be there! You shouldn't be alone."
"I doubt that he's angry with us, love," Arthur told her. The thought of nervous Percy fuming was unfathomable to him. "I imagine he must be frightened."
Ginny nodded his head. "Yeah," her voice was low. "But he would've been angry. Normally."
Arthur agreed, but Percy wasn't himself these days. Maybe he'd never be like himself ever again.
He knocked on the door himself. "Percy?" he called out as loudly as he could. And he raised seven children, so he knew that the whole city probably heard him. "Percy! It's okay… it's alright! Everything's fine," he tried to tell him. "It's alright. Nobody's…nobody's upset with you. We're just worried about you and want to pop in for a little chat or...a tea or..."
When he didn't answer, Ginny paled. "Dad, I think there's something wrong," she said. "He'd have answered the door by now." She paused. "Do you think she really did something to Percy?"
"Of course not," Arthur couldn't imagine that Penelope had done anything. She was a five-foot-three female that weighed at around eight stone. "It's ridiculous to even think that." But he remembered the look that Percy had given him before he'd left. His face had been drained straight out of its colour. "They're probably just still fighting," he tried to reason with her. "The wedding did cost a lot of time and money, Gin."
"Who cares about that?" Ginny's voice was breaking. "Dad, what if she's done something to him?"
After nobody had opened the door after another few knocks, Ginny looked even more alarmed and apparated inside. Arthur tried to take a deep breath. Everything's going to be fine, he told himself, and then apparated after her. Ginny was stood in the middle of the living room, which was emptier than a Hogwarts' library on a Sunday evening. "Percy?" Ginny called out anxiously. "Percy, are you here?"
"They might've gone out," Arthur reasoned, but his stomach was starting to do flips. It was eerily quiet, the kind of quiet that you'd imagine before something devastating had happened. "Merlin, what is that smell?" Suddenly, he immediately hit by a strong, sweet metallic scent.
"Dad, it's blood, it's blood," Ginny looked even whiter.
Arthur wanted to tell her not to overreact, but the second she'd said that it was blood, he'd recognised it as the very same thing. There was nothing else it could've been.
He heard something from the kitchen he thought.
Ginny sped into the kitchen and he followed her, rather awkwardly. He could barely register Ginny's ear-shattering shriek because all he could hear was his heart racing when he took the scene before him. The kitchen looked like a bloodbath. The table had been shattered into pieces and Percy was lying into a pool of his own blood. His lids were heavy, and he had very laboured breaths. His jumper was torn in very strange places. He had three thick shards of glass piercing through the right side of his chest.
"Percy?" Arthur collapsed down onto the floor, placing a hand on his damp jumper. "Percy?"
Percy barely responded to him, but he blinked a few times. He was just whimpering, his hands were clutched together, covered in blood. There were splotches of blood all over his face and neck, thick and dry. He was coughing, coughing blood everywhere. There was so much blood it was hard to know where to look.
Ginny was on the other side of him, her hands on his arm. "Dad, she did this to him," she said. "He said that she was going to do this to him. He said that she was." She gripped Percy's hand as tightly as possible.
"I…" Arthur felt like his mind was working in slow-motion. "We have to take him to a hospital now."
"Percy, Percy, listen," Ginny watched him look up at her. Percy seemed quiet as he breathed. His eyes glossy and his face drained of colour, and they'd been lying in an absolute pool of his blood. "Percy, we're going to take you to the hospital now. You're going to be okay, okay? We're going to help you."
"Okay," Percy closed his eyes, no hint of anger in his voice, no irritation, nothing. It pained Arthur to see that he acted like he didn't mind that that he'd been sent back to his flat to be butchered like this.
He didn't even know how he was supposed to pick him up because there was just so much blood everywhere. It was all he could see, everywhere that he looked. Everything was so slow, but so fast. One minute he was crouching over his son's practically lifeless body and the next minute, he was in the triage room in the A&E.
"You have to help me," Arthur immediately said, even though all the nurses had gotten up with their pink scrubs. "It's my son, he's been…he's been hurt…he…" he didn't know how to condense this story into a sentence, but one of the nurses led him inside to the resuscitation room.
Ginny was beside him, actively talking to the nurse. "He said that she was going to kill him," she sounded mental, but it was exactly what happened. "When he went off to the flat, he said that she was going to—"
One of the nurses had seen Percy and ran off, shouting about a TRAUMA CODE. They'd taken Percy to the resuscitation room where they laid him flat onto the hospital cot. Arthur almost wanted him to be unconscious because Percy looked like he was suffering being awake. He was breathing so quickly, his face sucked of colour. His arms laid limp by his side, and he was still bleeding somehow. Like he'd still had blood in him left to lose.
A crying, sobbing Ginny suddenly went quiet when they'd put Percy down. "Hey," she tried to talk to him. "Percy, it's going to be okay." She nodded towards him. "It's going to be just fine." There was blood in his hair, dried and matted, and in clumps. His mouth was dry and cracked. Had he been shouting?
Percy smiled weakly at her, but he looked a little delirious, like he didn't know where he was.
"I'm going to check your vitals now, Percy," a voice came from behind him and he realised it was a nurse. A nurse talking to his son when Arthur hadn't even told her his name yet. How did she know?
Percy just stared back at her with a vacant smile. The nurse came up to him and put all these wires on his body. His vitals had shown up afterwards, and everything didn't look right. He didn't know anything about the human body, but he'd doubted that a blood pressure of 50/70 and a heart rate of 150 was anywhere near normal. He'd not even realised that Percy was running a sky-high fever until they'd taken his temperature and it came up as 39.7. Arthur reached over to feel Percy's forehead. How'd he miss that? Percy wasn't cold. He was boiling. For some reason, that made him feel anxious to know that he was running such a high fever.
"He has a fever," Arthur told Ginny, as if this kind of information was ground-breaking when he'd just lost half his body weight in blood. He wondered if this meant that he was sick that morning before he went…
"Dad, he's just been stabbed by his fiancée," Ginny reminded him in a rather cold, icy tone. "Do you really think anyone cares about his fever?"
"Of…of course not," Arthur stammered, his cheeks reddening.
Percy's breathing was becoming more laboured, more frightening. He sounded like he was choking almost, his cheeks flushed red. He looked exhausted. When a nurse grabbed his hand to put an IV cannula in, Percy smiled at her lazily. She looked like she was struggling trying to look for a vein for him. After about two minutes, she'd inserted a cannula and was drawing out blood. Arthur wished that she could just snatch the bottles away from her, because Percy was bleeding out in a rather sickening way and they were taking blood?
"This one again?" a voice sounded out from the doorway and Arthur looked up. A woman was stood there, with white hair that had been put back into a very tight bun and gigantic, thick-rimmed glasses. "Keep his bed at thirty degrees. Put a non-rebreather mask on him and deliver high flow oxygen. Give him a litre of normal saline fast in fifteen minutes. Then I want you to cut his top," which was already drenched in dried blood. "Activate the massive blood transfusion protocol and give me two bags of O negative stat."
A younger girl peered from behind her and she was just staring at the scene with wide eyes.
"Lavender?" Ginny seemed to know her. She had a butchered face, like Bill's.
"Ginny, what happened?" Lavender sounded like a child when she'd asked that. "Did Penelope do this?"
"How-how… did you know?" Ginny asked, her eyes wide with surprise. Arthur was just wondering the same thing. How did they know about Penelope? "They were supposed to get married, but he-he doesn't even like her. We told him to go and break it off with her, but he…he kept saying that she was going to kill him if she went." She rubbed her eyes. "Dad and I went to see him and found him like this."
Ginny shook her head, rubbing her tears away. "He told me he didn't want to go alone," her lip wobbled.
Another nurse came back with a pair of scissors and had torn through Percy's jumper. The nurse that had been taking blood was now fixing a mask on his face, and he just stared at her tiredly, looking like he'd just collapse any time. A third nurse had come right behind him, securing a line.
More healers came in, and Arthur overheard someone say that this was the 'Trauma Code team was here'. Whatever that was.
Arthur's eyes might have bulged out of his sockets when he saw Percy's chest, which was absolutely filled with big patches of second and third-degree burns, old thick red-purple-white scars and gigantic black-yellow-blue-purple bruises everywhere. His arm was covered with a dirtied bandage. There was a wound across his abdomen that was sticky and covered in clumps of yellow-grey something. There were raised, swollen patches of red skin and scratches on his neck and chest that were still oozing bits of blood. There was so much to look at that Arthur had almost forgotten about the three thick pieces of glass penetrating his chest until he saw them.
"Dad," Ginny's voice broke him, literally shattered him because she looked so frightened. "What is this?"
They'd removed the glass with the wands, but Arthur was stunned, all he could stare at was Percy's chest. A couple of other healers came in, two of which looked young and two looked older.
"What's the case?" one of the older healers said as they came around. He waved around a purple-looking wand, an x-ray wand from what Arthur remembered, and it bleeped in frantic-looking red colours. "Looks like he has a massive haemothorax. Get me a chest tube kit. We'll insert two chest tubes now," he said rather angrily to one of the nurses.
He turned to Arthur, "Your son has a lot of blood in his chest. We needed to insert a tube to drain it."
Arthur had so many questions, but it was dizzying. He didn't know what to say.
Lavender came up to the end of Percy's bed. "Twenty-four-year-old male, known domestic violence abuse victim—constantly dodges social services and Auror investigators, presented with penetrating chest injury—found incidentally by his relatives," she gestured towards him. "Sent for blood now by the nurses."
"Has anyone given him anything for the pain?" a voice sounded out from behind him. "Sedate him."
"No!" Percy's voice was so loud that Arthur had forgotten that he was still conscious. "No!" he started sobbing, tears running down his face. And it stunned him. He'd rather feel the pain of all of this than be unconscious and that sat wrong with him somehow, that he didn't know why.
Domestic violence? Percy had never said a single thing about domestic violence. Arthur looked at him. He looked so ill and his skin was practically translucent from how much blood he'd lost. His chest was rising up and down, up and down, pretty quickly, and he was still letting out laboured breaths.
"Alright, Percy, alright," Lavender tried to soothe him. "You'll be awake. Don't worry."
Percy visibly relaxed and then nodded his head. "Okay," he said, but his voice was so weak.
He couldn't take it anymore. Arthur left the room. He could barely walk, his legs felt like jelly as he sat down onto his chair. The idea that all this time Penelope had been abusing Percy had left him absolutely shook. Because they'd been together for ten years of Percy's life. That was nearly half of his life! Suddenly, he remembered the cut wound that had opened up that morning that he'd first seen him, the burns on his hands that he couldn't even make up a story for, and Merlin knew what else this woman was doing to his child behind closed doors. How else did he get all those horrible things done to him? On his body? The burns, the bruises, the cuts, the...
Arthur didn't even want to think about what else she must've been doing to him. And then she came to their home, and they welcomed her with warm arms and laughed with her. They'd sided with her. Arthur remembered, not once or twice, but often enough that he felt sick to his stomach.
How could Percy have trusted him when they treated his ex-fiancée like that?
"Dad? What are you doing out here?" Ginny asked innocently as she came to sit beside him.
Arthur shook his head. "Gin, I can't be in there. I can't look at him, knowing..." She'd done that to him. She'd destroyed his personality until it was that terrified little thing that was lying there in the resuscitation room. "I told him that he owed it to her to tell her that he didn't want to have a wedding." His heart was aching in his chest, remembering all the other things that had happened. "Merlin, Charlie told him that he was stringing her along and we just sat there, agreeing with him." He laughed vacantly, shaking his head. He didn't know how he could talk to Percy ever again. "We told him that he was lucky to have her." He didn't know if Percy were ever going to forgive him—or worse, that he would. And it would be like him nearly dying was an insignificant event in his life.
"I've done nothing for him, Gin, nothing," Arthur's voice broke. "And he's really ill. He's…"
Arthur didn't want to say that he wasn't even sure Percy would make it through this. He was never going to forgive himself if he'd died because his ex-fiancée had stabbed him to death when Percy had looked at him straight into the eyes and told him that she was going to do it. When he was terrified of going to see her. It was like they'd sent him off deliberately to be killed and were giving Penelope a pat on the back for it.
"Dad, he begged me not to go alone," Ginny's face was tear stained. Her voice was weak and tired. The whole night was a blur of tears and pain. Arthur didn't even know when he'd started crying. He didn't really think about it when he had his son being strapped to wires and monitors. "I didn't listen to anything he said to me. Nobody did." She shook her head, swallowing the lump in his throat. "We shouldn't leave him alone again." She nodded off towards the room. "He must be terrified. Thinking that-that he's going to die."
Arthur was terrified, thinking that Percy was going to die. When he'd seen the disastrous state of his chest, that dirtied bandage on his forearm, the discharging wound in his abdomen, Arthur genuinely thought that it was over. This was the end for him.
"You're right," he wished that she weren't. He just wanted to run off. "You—"
A healer popped his head out of the room. "Can you please try and talk your son into taking something for the pain?" he looked a little irritated himself that they weren't in the room with him. "We're going to put two massive tubes in his chest to try and drain out all the blood inside. It's going to be extremely painful. His heart rate is already sky-high without having to do a procedure like this."
"Of course," Arthur said. Numbly, he found himself walking back into the room. Percy, who was huffing and puffing rather erratically, kept shaking his head at them when the healers asked him questions. His eyes were wide, locked onto Arthur's. He looked noticeably distressed. They'd taken his trousers off and he had only a blanket to cover him up and they'd covered him to his chest.
"Percy, you have to take something for the pain," Arthur tried to talk to him as soothingly as possible. "It's going to be very painful." Percy nodded his head, as if to say that he knew, but then shook his head.
"Just let him do whatever he wants," a rather irritated healer said, and then pulled out a pair of scissors.
Arthur was terrified, watching him hacking away at the side of his chest and putting a tube in. Percy's face was impassive, as if it wasn't hurting him at all. He'd kept his arm propped up so that the healer could put in the tube. It took about five minutes, but Arthur felt like it was the longest five minutes ever. When Arthur knew that they were going to do it on the other side, he felt nauseated.
"Percy," Arthur watched him stare up at him with exhausted eyes. "Wouldn't it be better if you had something for the pain?" only for Percy to shake his head. He seemed terrified of the pain killers.
"Perce, what's wrong?" Ginny asked him softly. "Why don't you want pain potions?"
It was torture. Watching them put in the other tube and connecting it to the chest drain. By then, the three stab wounds he had had been healed by wand. His chest was being drained with two tubes. Arthur felt physically exhausted and they hadn't done a single thing to him. He hadn't noticed it then, but he'd been connected to a blood bag. There was a bloke sat at the edge of Percy's bed, looking like he wanted to fix him a catheter, but he'd paled pulling up the blanket to look at Percy's… well, groin for lack of better words.
"We have to take him to the procedural room," the other bloke at the end of his bed said. "He needs an immediate wand procedure for that. Ten-fifteen minutes tops. Would he be stable enough?"
Lavender stared back at him. "What's wrong?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Very bad penile fracture. We have to do a wand procedure for that—no other way," the bloke explained. "He doesn't want pain potions for this?" he looked at Percy like he was inhuman for declining it. "We can take your…samples there, in the wand procedure room," he'd explained to her.
Arthur didn't know you could fracture that. It sounded grotesquely painful. "Sample?"
Lavender stared back at him. "We'll talk about it after, Mr Weasley," she said. "He's stable enough for shifting now." Arthur hadn't noticed, but his blood pressure was normal, his heart rate was alright, and he'd stopped breathing so hard. He looked better, but he wouldn't say that Percy was bloody stable.
When they'd whisked him away, Arthur was supposed to go but one of the healers told him that he wouldn't be allowed. Arthur just stiffened there, as he looked back at Lavender. "Samples for what?" he asked.
Lavender cleared her throat. "Sexual assault," she said, as if those words didn't have a meaning. "How else did you think a penile fracture happened, Mr Weasley? It's a sexual injury, and I can't imagine he was rubbing one off before Penelope stabbed him," she sounded furious at him.
"No," Arthur shook his head. His mind went back to Percy leaving the bathroom, flustered. She couldn't have…Merlin, she couldn't have done anything to him then, could she? When they were laughing about it? When she'd said that Percy had assaulted her? And he was just stood there, taking it in. Percy never said anything about any of this, not to anyone. "No, it's not…"
"Don't talk to him like that!" Ginny's voice was unsteady. "He didn't know. Merlin, you used to be a lot nicer when you were snogging Won-Won. Before you'd had your face mauled off." She flushed after she'd realised what she'd said, but Lavender's face was indifferent.
"Ginny," Arthur gave her a warning look, but he was just so tired. "Ginny, stop."
Lavender then turned to Arthur. "I suppose you have half an hour now before he comes back." Arthur then realised that he'd have to tell everyone else what happened, and he wasn't completely sure how.