like i said, it's been a while and i've actually written and edited all these out today (well, i've had some written from before but i've not edited).

The Mother Who Cried Werewolf

Chapter Seventeen

Missing

The first time that Percy met with his mates after reading the letters was an awkward affair. They didn't talk and mostly stuck to drinking tea and eating biscuits. When they took him back to the Burrow, Percy asked them if they believed what he said, what he'd written in the letter. In response, Oliver hugged him so tightly that Percy felt his breath leaving his chest. Audrey followed soon, with a peck on his cheek and his lips. She told him he was a tosser, and they'd see him soon. That was when he knew that everything would be okay with his mates.

The months melted away. Spring had come, and Percy spent most of his time sleeping in the living room, going to tea and coffee shops to sit and read novels. He devoured them at lightning speed. He used most of his twenty-five Galleons at second-hand bookshops. He'd go to the book club once a week. And when his mind was too saturated with plotlines and stories, when he found it too hard to sleep, Percy picked up his paintbrush and those pots of paint that Audrey had bought for him. As spring melted into the summer months, Percy had managed to produce five paintings that he kept to himself.

They were not pretty landscapes or colourful strokes. His paintings were violent and bloody. The kind of canvases he'd imagine psychopaths in literature would paint, the kind with Inferi and Thestrals, rivers made from blood and funny floral designs that he'd imagine his mum would wear. Potions that looked like poison bottles, beds that looked like coffins. But it made him feel better on the nights when he could barely close his eyes, could barely breathe because of the memories.

This night was one of those nights. It was warm in his room, so much so that Percy was soaking through his shirt.

He couldn't bear to sleep downstairs. He was fixated on the idea of being in his room in a way that he hadn't been before. He stared at the blue paint and heard the beeps of the monitors that had been taken away from him. It was like living in this room was the only way to remember what had happened to him because he felt like he was the only one that could remember his truth. He was scared that he'd forget for good, and it would be like it didn't matter.

He cried often. The threat of his mum coming in and taking him overtook his every waking moment. He didn't feel safe in the Burrow, but he didn't feel safe anywhere else. He could feel her watching him everywhere.

That morning, sleep had come to him, and he was lying against the wall because he couldn't bring himself to sit anywhere else. It was that same morning that his father tried to shake him awake. He was dressed for work in his Ministry robes and smelled heavily of his cheap cologne. Percy opened his eyes, bleary-eyed. His limbs felt heavy, and he felt like he would pass out any second.

"That's enough of that. I can't do this, Percival," Arthur said, and there was an urgency in his voice that Percy had almost gotten used to. Arthur was always in a state of panic and resolve, so much so that when he was calm, it was unusual. He managed to lug Percy onto the wheelchair, which was a feat considering that Percy had three stones on his father.

As Percy fell asleep, his father wrapped a blanket around him. "Is this okay?" Arthur asked.

Percy nodded his head, his eyelids getting heavier by the second. He was too tired to ask his father why he was being taken to the hospital again when he'd promised he wouldn't. Within a few seconds, he was already asleep. He had no dreams.

When his father helped place him on the A&E hospital bed, Percy was still mostly asleep. He could feel the rush around him and hear the sounds of the monitors, but he was so exhausted that he couldn't open his eyes even if he wanted to. He didn't feel angry, upset or betrayed. He didn't feel ecstatic either. He could hear his father try to wake him up a few times, ask him questions, and tell him that things were just fine. Throughout their stay there, Percy only opened his eyes long enough for Arthur to tell him that they were going to take his blood, to which Percy nodded and then fell back asleep. He barely felt the needle pushing into his skin.

Hours later, his father managed to wake him up. As he rubbed his eyes, he saw his sister, Ginny, sitting by a chair with her legs crossed, reading a copy of a Quidditch magazine. She looked at him and smirked, strands of her straight hair falling in front of her face. "Good morning, sleepy head," she said. There was a bottle of pumpkin juice beside her and a half-eaten pasty.

"Hmm?" Percy scratched the back of his neck.

"There's a healer for you," Ginny said.

That was when Percy noticed the healer standing in front of him. Percy had known most of the healers by heart, but he'd never seen this woman before. She was middle-aged, with a tight-lipped smile and was staring at him in a way that made him feel like she could see straight through him. She asked Arthur and Ginny if they could leave.

"Oh," Percy's ears went pink, wondering how long this woman was standing there, waiting for him to wake up.

"Come on now," Arthur gestured for Ginny to walk out. She stared at him almost like she was begging him not to and then grabbed her pasty and pumpkin juice and left. Then it was just them in the room.

A new healer that needed to hear that story over again. Percy was not pleased.

Percy assumed that she'd start talking about his funny heart rhythms or abnormal lab results, but instead, she was asking him about the nights he couldn't sleep. She asked him about his mother, and Percy just stiffened, refusing to say much other than they didn't have a good relationship. She asked him about his eating habits, dramatic weight gain and what he thought about when he was alone. Percy didn't answer the questions. He gave one-note answers and kept staring at the walls now and then. He avoided any questions about his mother. His lips were pursed so tightly when she asked him about his childhood that he could feel the blood rushing out. It was like the less he said, the more the Quick-Quote Quill wrote. What was it writing about? That he looked like trouble and that she shouldn't bother with him?

All he could think about was the times he'd poured his heart out, to Child Protective Services, to the Aurors, and how they'd done nothing for him but stomp on the little glimmer of hope he'd ever had. It was gone now, and he didn't think this lady cared about him either.

She kept nudging him until he finally spilt the truth in a few sentences, summarised his life in a couple of words. His pain, his memories, the things that kept him awake at night.

After she left, he could hear his father say something to the ring of "post-traumatic what?" his voice sounded just as high as he did when he'd been to the healer in that clinic. He bet he could imagine his father throwing his arms around, confused as to what he was supposed to do with this new piece of information.

Arthur peeked into the curtains. Percy was yawning then, but his father looked at him like he might combust any minute. His father's eyes were wide, and he looked like he'd gone blue. Ginny was beside him, without any real discernible facial features. She looked like she was trying to think about that just about as much as Arthur was.

"Percy, they're going to…give you some potions," he said. "For your…so you could sleep."

His father didn't tell him anymore. Percy heard them talking outside about how they needed to put him on even more potions, about how he needed to go to therapy. There were some talks of admission, but it faded away from the conversation after a brief contemplation, much to Percy's relief. He just wanted to go home and sleep.

"I was sleeping before you dragged me here," Percy said, the corner of his lip twitching into a small smile.

"You…" Arthur said, biting his lower lip. Percy opened his mouth to speak, but he had nothing to say. It turned out Arthur didn't have anything to say either. "Let's just get you home then."

Although he loved his son, Arthur would be the first to admit that he'd rather have his toes extracted than try to bond with his middle son. They always fought. Every conversation between them felt scripted and trepid. Percy had the personality of wet cardboard, so Arthur had no idea how to read him.

They were in their sixth week of therapy—a milestone Arthur approached with trepidation.

As Arthur went to pick up Percy from the therapist's office, Arthur kept tossing his head back at Percy as if trying to gauge his mental health by staring through him, as if it was written on his skin.

"What are you looking at me for?" Percy asked, his shoulder squared. He'd put on a few more pounds, and it was starting to worry Arthur that he was starting to be a bit too roly-poly, enough that he felt like he had to say something.

"Nothing," Arthur lied.

It wasn't like gauging his heart condition, that was for sure—there were days when he knew that Percy wasn't doing well. The days Arthur would increase the dose of his diuretics because his legs were swollen, his cheeks were tinged pink, and he was wheezing like an asthmatic. But there was nothing to gauge Percy's mental health. His face was blank as ever, his eyes vacant, his lips pursed. It was the same every day.

Sometimes, Percy locked his room for privacy, the privacy of having nightmares by himself, the privacy of not being told what to do. Those days were the worst. Arthur imagined needing to kick the door down one day. He imagined finding Percy's bloated blue corpse stuffed under the mattress. Any day, his son might pass away in the middle of the night, unexpectedly, alone. Arthur didn't know what terrified him more—the thought of possibly finding his son dead one day or that Percy didn't care nearly as much about dying alone as he should.

Arthur felt like he'd betrayed Percy by going to his psychiatric healer a few days before, asking him if he thought that Percy was 'sound enough of mind' to be making life-binding decisions, such as the fact that he wanted to stop going to the hospital. Was this him exercising his autonomy after years of having that choice snatched away from him, or simply his depressed, traumatised son deciding to play out his sick suicidal fantasies?

When Arthur had been reassured that Percy did have the capacity to consent to his decisions, Arthur felt even more forlorn. How did everyone else know that Percy could consent? What if Percy was putting up a front? What was he saying to his therapist that left him coming out of the session even moodier and more unpredictable?

And why couldn't Arthur know about it as well?

As they headed out of the psychiatrist's office together, Arthur kept glancing back at Percy. His engorged face, his pink chubby cheeks, his disappearing features into a face full of fat. It felt like he'd gone from one extreme to the next. That did not help that he was so out of breath all the time. He knew that people looked at him. He had a good four stones on him, and because of how fat he was, he looked much older than his fifteen years.

"Percy, do you think you could make do with a diet?"

"A what?"

They stopped walking now. Percy looked at Arthur like he couldn't believe he'd come to that conclusion. Arthur had now learned to at least decipher the look on Percy's face when he felt like Arthur had said something extremely inappropriate.

"There's no need for you to be accelerating your death, is all I mean," Arthur said.

"You can't take me stuffing my face but would willingly watch me starve to death for a year," Percy said, deadpanned.

Arthur winced at the wording that Percy used. It wasn't like that, and Percy knew that.

"You know that's not what I mean," Arthur said. "You were breathless when you were thin. I don't think that—that the added weight is helping you right now." He knew he was right, but he didn't know how to say it more nicely. "And to be honest, with the way that you're putting on weight, I'm afraid that you'd be bedbound within a few months."

In the next week, every one of them would be back, and if they saw Percy the way he did, they'd be taking the piss out of him every time he opened the fridge. It would be hellish for everyone involved.

Arthur watched Percy's expressions go from fury to exhaustion in seconds. "Fine," he said.

It was not fine.

As they walked close, Arthur tried to think of something to remedy the situation, but he never got to that. They must've walked only a few blokes away from the office, still chatting when all the colour drained out of Percy's face, and he fell back.

"Percy?" Arthur whipped his head around, all his breath leaving his chest before he realised that Percy must've just tripped. He was on the ground, but he was fully awake and conscious. He did not black out in the middle of the road.

"Oh, you've just fallen," he laughed. "Get up then."

Percy looked back at him, the right side of his face was drooping, and his right arm lay by his side. Whatever words he said afterwards sounded like absolute gibberish. As Arthur remembered the campaigns plastered all over Britain to be FAST, he realised that he had witnessed his teenage son have a stroke.

The next few hours were some of the most hectic ones that Arthur had had in ages. He was in the hospital with Percy, who was indeed diagnosed with a stroke secondary to his heart condition. The son he'd been quibbling with a few hours ago now was finding it difficult to pronounce most of his words. After a few attempts of speech and realising that nobody understood what he was trying to say, Percy stopped trying to speak. Arthur didn't think it could get any worse until he went to get Percy a glass of water after he'd made gestures about needing to drink something. The healers had told them both that Percy shouldn't be drinking any water or eating anything because he might choke on it. The look that Percy gave him after he heard that news was so heart-breaking that Arthur replayed the way that his face paled and his shoulders dropped for ages afterwards. They gave him more blood-thinning potions through his IV line, which took them ages to insert because of how often Percy's veins were poked.

If he thought Percy was hard to talk to before, it was even more impossible now.

"Percy," Arthur said, reaching out to feel his son's face. His face was damp, his shoulders down, and Arthur wished he could take back what he'd said. Arthur had read the pamphlets before. He knew that stroke was always a possibility, amongst about a million other things but to see it happening to his son was so jarring.

He did not visit his son much that admission. Arthur could not bear to see him cry as they tried to help his son to the bed. His feeding tube was blocked and yellowed, and they needed another one, a process that Percy was vehemently against and had fought through every step of the way. Every feed was a nightmare for everyone involved, and he noticed that nurses fed him less than he should get because Percy refused it. Over time, his garbled speech became interspersed with words that Arthur could understand, and the first thing he'd heard Percy tell him after all this time was Go away.

Two weeks afterwards, his son could walk with assistance and only made a fuss sometimes when they were giving him his feeds. He'd regained most of his speaking ability, sounding drunk and hoarse with his tracheostomy tube. By then, Ron and the twins were back home, but Arthur had barely given them any real attention. He shuddered, feeling like he'd turned into another Molly. His children might not have told them anything, but he could imagine how they felt.

When Arthur took Percy back home, the atmosphere became even worse. It was like the twins, Ron and even Ginny, had forgotten that Percy had almost died earlier that year. Most of the time, Arthur had forgotten too. Percy made it too hard with his resistance to everything, his all-encompassing health issues and the fact that he was so miserable.

He tried to remedy it by taking them out for a quick local Quidditch tournament. When Arthur returned, he'd only realised then that he hadn't fed Percy since the morning, and he looked pale and weak. Within a few weeks of his stroke, the fat around Percy's face was starting to cave in. Percy kept asking him, in often aggressive tones, that he wanted water, that he wanted food, and Arthur had to deny him in case his son choked to death. Today was one of those days, and Arthur had lost it. He reached into his pocket and threw a partially melted chocolate bar at Percy. The chocolate bar accidentally smacked his right cheek, and he sat there with his eyes wide, twinkling in the light and his lips slightly parted. His massive pyjama top was too big even for him, a part of it sliding down his right shoulder to show his fleshy arm.

Percy stared at the chocolate bar that Arthur hadn't meant to slap him with. Arthur couldn't bear to see his reaction, so he just left. Just as the door, he heard the sound of the chocolate bar unwrapping. A part of him told him to go back because Percy could not be eating that. He shouldn't be eating that, but he was tired of playing the villain, tired of saying no and having to deal with the consequences.

Ron passed by him, staring at him with vacant eyes. "Oh right," he said. "Percy again."

Arthur opened his mouth to speak, but what would he say? "Your brother is ill."

"Yeah, we've never heard that before," Ron said.

Then the sounds came. At first, Arthur did not realise what they were. The way Ron's face scrunched up and ran to Percy's bedroom made him realise what it was: Percy was choking. He tried to eat that chocolate bar.

When Arthur ran into the room as well, he saw Percy looking visibly pale, his hand around his tracheostomy tube as he made sounds that alternated between choking and water bubbling in a tube. Ron ran into his side and practically shoved Percy forward as he slammed his hand into his back. Percy coughed, spluttering chocolate bits all over the light sheets and his mouth.

Arthur, the twins, Ron and Ginny, were out on a mildly hot summer day. He left Percy behind after a quick reminder of the house roles. He had changed his diaper, had him bathed and set him for bed, ready to sleep after he took his potions. He gave him his feed and was due to give him another feed in a few hours. He instructed Xenophilius and showed him how to and left only mildly frightened that Percy wouldn't be given his afternoon feed on time. Before he left, he gave Percy a wand in case of emergencies and told him they would only go away for a few hours.

They went to play Quidditch and then ate together, all of them proclaiming how nice it was. None of them stated the obvious—that it was nice because Percy wasn't being tended to constantly.

Arthur's mind kept going rampant with the possibility that he'd come home and find his son dead. The fear never really left him; the thoughts swirled into his mind even as he took photographs of the twins on the broomsticks. He marvelled at how tall Ron had gotten (he hadn't noticed) and how the twins seemed to have grown into sinewy bodies, legs muscular from the days they spent running around the Quidditch field. Ginny's hair was longer than it had been when she'd cut it, loose and flowing and beautiful. The fury that he felt, realising that his children were growing so fast that he had barely had a chance to look at them. Meanwhile, his other child was dying. How could he be a fair father to both?

After they ate their dinner, they had ice cream and stared at the sunset. They went home in high spirits. Upon their arrival, the twins immediately went into their room to continue their experiments and Ron and Ginny continued their boisterous argument on the best broomstick material. The highlights of which Arthur had heard a thousand times before.

He waited half an hour before he checked on Percy. As if trying to convince his children and himself that it wasn't a real priority. When he peered into his room, he had a mental checklist on Percy? Alive? Alright then, and then he'd go on downstairs to make himself a cup of tea because he was cream-crackered. But instead of being met with his sleeping son, he was met with an empty bed, the sight of which wouldn't be alarming if not for the fact that Percy needed help to get onto his wheelchair after his stroke.

"Dad, can you heat our sticky toffee puddings?" Ron asked, waving the plastic bag where they had bought individual pots of sticky toffee pudding. Suddenly, all Arthur could taste was burned cake and hot sticky toffee on the roof of his mouth.

"Yeah," Ginny said. As if two wanting sticky toffee puddings would get him downstairs faster.

"Percy's fine," Ron said the last bit with a roll of his eyes.

"He's gone," Arthur said. He felt numb, and his hands felt clammy. There was sweat on his hairline. "Someone took him."

Ron had never dropped something so fast. The pots were plastic and didn't shatter when they hit the floor. They thumped as his youngest children ran into Percy's room. Their faces mixed with confusion.

"Maybe he's gone for a walk or something," Ron said. That made Arthur remember that he'd not explained exactly what Percy's stroke meant. "It's not like he died."

"He can't walk, genius," Ginny said. Her face was pale, matching her white dress. "Dad's right. Someone must've…must've taken him."

They exchanged a glance that eerily reminded Arthur of Fred and George. Arthur could feel his stomach tying into knots.

"Mum," Ron said.