so this is the end. i promise i might have disappeared but i've been writing (a little). well, enough that i've actually finished this fanfic after 1-2 days after i've been to my trip to London (i've really enjoyed it). i'm going back to work tomorrow, so i'm hoping for a bit of nice feedback.
this is a bit of a depressing story. i had to re-write my last chapter at the last second before posting after i've made my decisions because it was more depressing than it currently is. you might find the ending a bit cliche and that's fine. i've actually tried to re-write it but this is the only way i can imagine it going so i hope that some people still like it.
The Mother Who Cried Werewolf
Epilogue
Arthur had not been inside Percy's room since his death. It was as if keeping it there, with all its secrets, was the only way to keep his son alive. When they had to bury him, Arthur had to buy him a new set of clothes because the pyjamas he'd been wearing when he died were too big for him after they tapped him. Percy had been dying for months—for months—and they had never talked about it. Percy had been abused for years—and they had never talked about it. So, it made sense that they didn't talk about Percy's death, but it was like a weighty ghost in the shadow. It was the tension in the air every time they had dinner and passed by his room on their way to their own. Why had he felt comfortable enough to talk to his therapist but never say anything to him? Why had his son never been comfortable around him?
It had been exactly two years since his son died, just a few weeks shy of his sixteenth birthday. The last twenty-four hours of his son's life were torturous and long, and he died without anything ever answering any of the questions that nobody had dared to ask.
The questions kept him awake most nights. The diagnoses, the abuse, the memories, the second chance they'd botched up after his near-death experience, Percy that had been reduced to just his sick son… and no entity could take away the fact that no matter how much he'd done, no matter how much he cared, he had not done enough. He had been at work when his son started to die.
Bill and Charlie were there on the second anniversary during the summer. They'd brought big boxes with him and dragged him to Percy's room to finish the task that Arthur had never started.
The room was just like it had been on the night they took Percy to the hospital. His wand was on the floor. Arthur took the pieces into his hand. Pinewood with a dragon heartstring, broken into two halves. He placed that on the table, feeling like he was invading a space in which he wasn't welcome. Percy's bed was messy because it hadn't been made since that night. He should've known now that when his son started eating less, when he'd had drier diapers and acted out of character, there was something deeply wrong with him. He should've known. He was his father.
The only hope he'd had was that when Percy had started to make strange requests and was walking around his siblings' rooms, he was so out of it that he couldn't remember any pain he'd been in when he'd died. That was the only thing that calmed him at night. That maybe he was too sick to be in genuine pain. The other thing was his other personal mission, which was to torture his ex-wife as much as possible after he'd somehow annihilated her life enough that she was in Azkaban. The fury he felt at himself he threw onto her for destroying their son so much in the first place. It was as if his life's purpose had become wiggling out bits of information from Molly, unfiltered, and then making her pay for every one. It was the only way he knew how to make sense of things, of punishing her, because he didn't know how to punish himself.
Bill and Charlie were the first to find Percy's paintings. They didn't look like the paintings of someone happy, but he didn't know if it was just an artistic preference or if his son was feeling that morbid. It was all blood and gore, and then he saw the letters. Percy wrote very long, very detailed letters, and he kept everything that he'd received. Percy's closet looked like it belonged to two people—someone too big to fit his wheelchair and someone so thin you could see his organs through the flimsy materials of his clothing. In the end, he was somehow both.
As Arthur placed more boxes on his desk, he caught sight of a small scribble close to Percy's bed. It was just two words, smudged with time. Arthur didn't know what it was for or when it had been written either.
I'm okay.