Stir Thoroughly Until Mixed

by treacle ink

In his attempt to grow up and move out, Percy recalls a rather painful memory of his first year.

Title: Stir Until Thoroughly Mixed
Rating: PG
Archives: That'd be delightful. Just notify me.
Disclaimer: Not mine not mine not mine not mine. I just own the recipe.
Synopsis: In his attempt to grow up and move out, Percy recalls a rather painful memory of his first year. Very light slash.
Notes: This was supposed to be an Oliver/Percy story. I. Have. No. Idea. What. Happened. Plently of blatant symbolism.
Spoilers: Slightly GoF. Takes place in the summer of GoF, just after Harry's third year. (Well, it begins and ends that summer, but it also contains a flashback, so..)
Dedication: One hundred and two percent for Miss Toad.

Undervalued, unknown, not seen,
vicious-eyes men seek thy hand.
So hollow, so rancid, they cannot see
that the beauty without, is the beauty within.

For who would ever permit
the love for the maiden gold
by the dragon old.
--from "Alas," poem by Juliette.

Percival Weatherby—err, uh, Weasley—had a stiff neck. He tilted his head to the left. He tilted his head to the right. Staring up at the corner of the ceiling, he sighed in frustration and rolled his neck in a circle. There. That was slightly better.

Massaging the temples of his forehead, he leaned slightly back in his rickety wooden chair. It was a very odd chair indeed: it giggled when one leaned back in it, with a very falsetto wooden voice, as if you were tickling it. Percy kicked one of the chair's legs irritably. The chair coughed and fell silent as Percy stood up quickly, pacing back and forth in small, worry-knit circles along the ground. He followed the pattern in the braided rug on his floor, walking unconsciously in spirals until the threads in the rug stopped within each other.

This assignment was giving him hell. Absolute bloody hell. He'd only been working at the Ministry for a short while now, and this was one of his first reports. He wanted to—needed to—make a good impression. He was lucky to have found the job so soon after graduating Hogwarts, but he needed to start earning money, to find his "sea-legs" and work up enough savings to move out of the Burrow.

Bill and Charlie had moved out almost the second school had ended. How much longer would Percy stay? Where else would he go? Would the rest of the family even mind, even notice his absence around the house? He usually never thought like this unless he was anxious. This assignment was making him very, very anxious: he only had two more weeks to finish it, and he had at least five whole paragraphs to perfect. He was not confident enough to be sure he'd have it finished. It wasn't an important report, not ground-breaking, and therefore wouldn't be included in the paper for another few weeks. It was a filler.' However, each article paid money, and each bit of money brought him closer and closer to somewhere else, to the top.

He needed to get out of his room, air out his head and stretch his limbs. Rolling his neck once more, to get out any lingering kinks, the young man pried his quill from his fingers—he had involuntarily been clutching it, even while he paced the floor. Nervous habits will die hard. Wiping slightly ink-splattered hands on his trousers, Percy shouldered out of his bedroom door and descended the homey stairs that sometimes tilted a little more up or down or sideways.

As he neared the kitchen, pleasant smells accosted his dangerously freckled nose. His Mum was humming contentedly to herself behind the scrubbed table, a large white bowl in front of her. She was carefully adding delicious-looking ingredients into the bowl and stirring it anti-clockwise with a terrifyingly large wooden spoon. The entire process bore striking likeness to a Potions lesson. She smiled merrily up at her son and continued her motherly attack on the lumpy, sand-coloured batter in the porcelain. Cookies. She was baking cookies, lots of them.

A plate full of precariously stacked oatmeal cookies stood near the window sill, bathed in a halo of dancing steam. Spread across the sink was a very long baking-sheet of peanut butter cookies, fresh from the oven and cooling before they could be removed and put on a plate. The distinct smell of gingerbread came from the oven, each cookie baking perfectly and chatting to their baking-tray-mates as they basked in the heat, faceless now but not limbless. Occasionally, some of the more lively gingerbread men would attempt to stand up and waltz a bit, though this was very difficult as they were still in the primarily doughy larval stage.

Percy, however, was not daunted by the endless army of cookies his mother had prepared. These were nothing. He was sure she could bake more, and he was also relatively certain that she would be baking at least three more batches before the day wore out. That was Mrs. Weasley all over for you. And though no one in the household ever admitted to the heinous act, the cookies—no matter how many there were—would always be eaten within the week.

"What sort are we mixing now, Mum?" Percy asked with feigned interest. One couldn't pretend to be too very enticed by her cooking, or else she would never let the poor fellow go—not until she'd forced half of her food down the person's gullet.

"Chocolate chip, dear," came his mother's absorbed chirp.

Chocolate chip cookies. Percy shivered visibly and left the kitchen empty-handed and absent-minded. He meandered into the family room and sat down heavily in one of the soft, warm armchairs, caught up in a fog of memories. Chocolate chip.

------

He had been in his first year then. Small, scrawny, and with hair a paler shade of red. (Being left tied to a tree by your younger twin brothers for hours on end during the summer will do wonders with deepening your hair colour, no matter what anyone tells you differently.) He had been in attendance at Hogwarts for a whole of four months now, and couldn't remember a happier time.

He relished the freedom from his doting mother and jesting brothers. Hogwarts was a place where he could be taken seriously. Where he could set examples for, and follow the examples of, others who were not related to him. He diligently wrote to his family often—frequent letters mostly addressed to his mother, with occasional brotherly inquiries about his siblings and the Burrow. He liked the distance, though. He figured it would make the return home for Christmas that much more exciting. Not to mention, he'd have the upper hand with Fred and George for once. They had never been to Hogwarts. He would be leaving home for Christmastime very soon, incidentally.

Percy's favourite part of the Hogwarts Experience, however, was the seemingly endless array of people to look up to and admire: Prefects, Head Boys and Girls, Professors. It was enough to make one's head positively swim. He wanted to be one; wanted to be all of them. He vowed to himself that one day he would. After all, he earned the marks, earned the House points. He was a model student in every aspect of his being.

When Percy Weasley set eyes on the first Hogwarts Prefect, he knew that his destiny had been set. He was sold.

Unfortunately, there were those who were rather stubbornly and meanly bent on foiling him. Blocking his path to perfection. The nerve of such people. Namely, Marcus Flint, fellow first year.

The two were not friends, acquaintances, or even adversaries. Strangers. Their Houses had infrequent lessons together, but aside from that, there was no other contact. As such, it came as rather a surprise when Percy later discovered Marcus' apparent dislike for the redhead; whether the sudden animosity derived from the his family's fiscal issues, or his father's renowned affinity for Muggles, or his aspiration for in-school authority, Percy was never quite sure.

Lessons were over for the day, and Percy was spending the afternoon cooped up in the library, hunched over a very large and very dusty volume of history. Several tables over, near the back of the library, Marcus reclined in his chair, evidently not paying much greasy attention to anything. A severely battered copy of Quidditch Through the Ages lay splayed before him, and he seemed to be looking solely at the photographs, not reading the text at all.

As Percy took his quill in hand and officiously dipped it into his inkwell, smiling vaguely at the agreeable tinkling sound the metal bit made against the glass rim, he wrote his name and the date across the top of his sheaf of parchment. His writing was never sloppy or crooked, but not exactly femininely pretty. It simply looked professional, if not a bit too mature and incompliant for an eleven-year-old. It looked like the handwriting of a billion other despotic men. He had gracefully moved his ungracefully-freckled wrist down the parchment to write the title of his essay. He had completed the curve of the first letter when a resounding ball of crumpled paper hit him sharply between the eyes. He looked up snappishly, glared around, and, unable to find a culprit, returned to his work.

He finished the title and began to studiously write his essay, using exalted vocabulary and copious references to comments the professor had lectured on in class. He was somewhere along the third line, quill hovering above the paper as he strung together his thoughts. Then, like a viper, it came. Another wad of paper, this time larger and more painful. Percy jerked in his seat, and the quill tip stabbed his paper, leaving a large splotch of black ink with ripples of littler, feathered splotches fanning out from it. Wide-eyed, the boy stared around once more. It did not occur to him that it was needless to look all around, since the paper-thrower could naturally only be someone in front of him, and so he looked to each side of him and behind him regardless.

Again, no culprit. He scowled at the two offending balls of paper, crudely smashed together. His jaw fell slack. They were—someone had actually—the pure audacity of it! What Percy had assumed were bits of crumpled parchment were, in fact, pages torn from a book. That was a blasphemy above all other blasphemies. It was one thing for someone to throw parchment at him. It was annoying, but he could live with it. It was just parchment. And the throwers were generally just jealous slouches. But never in all his four months at school had someone thrown book pages at him. It was an insult to his existence.

Shocked, he resumed his essay once again, surreptitiously keeping look-out from the corner of his eye. No attack came. Right, well, the delinquent evildoer probably realised the error of his way, repented, and left the library post-haste. Still, let us not lose vigilance, lest it be a trap. Thus, Percy kept alert still. After half an hour, when no attack had been made, the boy eventually forgot and gradually became engrossed by his essay again. He began writing with a fervor, line after line. It was good, he knew he'd get an outstanding mark for it. He was finishing the concluding page up—

When it happened.

The pellet of book-paper that was hurled at him this time was enough to knock a lesser man unconscious. There was practically half of a whole book wadded up in that thing. It fell loudly on his head and bounced to the floor. It came as an absolute narcosis, and the boy trembled and paled. It was not even the collision which upset him so. It was the fact that when he'd jumped back in surprise, his elbow had knocked the entire inkwell to the table, and his just-completed essay absorbed all of the ink. He let out a strangled cry and muttered something about vengeance.

It was a desperately furious Percy who glared violently at the air. The sound of snickering made his flushed face snap to the right, where Marcus Flint met his glower squarely.

"Well, well, well," said the sneer-faced Slytherin boy. His voice was thick and almost slurred, and sounded disgustingly of someone who didn't know how to use proper grammar at all.

"How.. how dare you," was just about all Percy could manage in reply, his own voice clipped and refined, with the inevitably overwhelming squeak that came hand in hand with being eleven.

Marcus seemed to be having an epileptic grand mal. It can only be presumed that he was laughing whole-heartedly at Percy. Mortally offended, the red-haired boy stood up sharply and threw his things into his tattered satchel. He winced and began peeling his essay off of the table with as much speed and deference as he could muster—the bleeding thing was stuck to the table from the quick-drying ink.

Determined to pull the damnable papers up, Percy held onto the loosened edge of one and gave a mighty tug. The piece of parchment broke in half like brittle and Percy, bereft of any balance or dignity, went falling to the floor in a disgraceful heap, bringing down not only two chairs, his satchel, and the three books on his table, but also dislodging one of the smaller bookshelves lining the rows of tables. The bookshelf toppled forward, displaying its cluttered contents for all to see like a debauched maiden lifting her gowns.

Startled witless, several students cried out, thinking that Percy had been attacked by something or someone. This general tumult caused one or two other shelves to be upturned.

All Percy could do was blink.

The librarian came scurrying in with a bellow as powerful as any fog-horn and set things and students in order. Poor, poor Percy was sent directly to the librarian's office, which was never ever to be visited on account of the Dangers That Lurked, which could be found in any librarian's headquarters. Shifty places, those.

Shouldering his satchel humbly, he left for the office with the mocking sound of Marcus' outright laughter in his blushing ears.

The office was surrounded with walls of shelves, cased in glass. Each book looked as if it was hand-dusted every week. The spines were in perfect condition, and even the antique books still had their first paint in tact. The books were lined up masterfully, and in a very intimidating fashion. Even the ceiling was covered with a glass shelf, stretched from corner to corner and suspended by a spell. The books seemed to glisten with saliva, hungry for the student who was about to feel the wrath of a librarian. Beware, Percy. The overall ambience of the office was rather like a fortress.

Accordingly, the conquistador Viking Librarian more commonly known as Irma Pince came in with an imposing flourish.

"I would have expected better of you, Mister Weasley," said she, with a disapprovingly strained frown extended across her face. Percy had always seemed to be such a promising young lad. Was he to turn to a life of library-crime now?

"I— I can explain," faltered the young boy, looking utterly heart-wrenching. In all his fluster and pomp, he didn't even look like he could trip another student, let alone start a riot in the school library.

When Pince did not say anything further, Percy realised that she was actually waiting to have him explain. So, explain he did. He sounded so wronged and testy at the fact that someone would dare to defile a book that the librarian was rather touched. She told him as much.

"I will, however, be forced to give you a detention. You have made quite a disturbance, whether it was intentional or not, my boy," she informed him. "I will be sure to notify Professors McGonagall and Snape of this, for punishment is in their hands, even though the racket was in my library."

Well, then. At least Pince was going to make sure that the meddlesome Flint would be forced to come to terms with justice, as well. This consoled Percy little however, and he left the library a very solemn child.

His first (and last) detention. For something he had not even done.

To add to the pain of this humiliation, he had lost his painstakingly perfect essay, to boot. Head held high, he strode on proudly, refusing to dwell on it, refusing to cry, and refusing to worry. He knew. He knew he would be able to convince Professor McGonagall of his innocence, and this would seem nothing more than a bad dream by tomorrow morning.

How very wrong he was.

Two nights later, Percy found himself standing stiffly in the absurdly large expanse of the Hogwarts Kitchens, emptied of all House Elves for the time being. As punishment, the unusually lenient Snape and McGonagall had decided to make Percy and Marcus bake cookies, which would be eaten with the Christmas feast only a few days away, by the professors and any students not going home for hols.

A long, tiled counter stood between Marcus and Percy, and on the counter were such necessary items as ingredients, artfully lines up and sorted, bowls, two copies of cookie recipes, and utensils.

Thankfully, the two professors had not required the boys to bake sugar cookies. They would have had to then make the dough, chill it, roll it, cookie-cutter it, bake it, frost it, and decorate it. Nightmarish.

Instead, they were to bake chocolate chip cookies.

Percy set to work on his batch immediately, hoping to finish and leave as soon as possible. Marcus, on the other hand, seemed in no hurry. He wouldn't be, the louse.

As Percy separated the ingredients on the counter and moved the ones he would need closer to his bowl, Marcus left his own ingredients scattered along the table. In his rude and slurring manner, the boy read off of the recipe, most probably just to annoy the trousers off of Percy.

"Specially-churned pure butter. All-purpose golden flour. Packed castle brown sugar. Sugar. Third-born hen eggs. Extract of vanilla bean. Carefully chopped Chocolate Frogs," intoned Marcus, pointedly delaying starting on his own batch of cookies.

All the while, Percy had been reading his own copy of the recipe to himself and preparing the ingredients so that once he began combining them in the bowl, he would not have to continually stop to measure this or mince that. After each ingredient had been cautiously readied, Percy shot one irate scowl in Marcus' direction.

"Carefully chopped walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts," Marcus continued in reply to the scowl.

Percy took his copy of the recipe in one hand, and fetched his wand with the other. He muttered a craftily handy little charm he'd picked up from his mother, which caused the spell to read aloud its instructions step by step, following the pace of the chef. This would allow Percy to concentrate exclusively and efficiently on the baking, without the hassle of repeatedly squinting at a grubby recipe parchment. Percy rolled up his sleeves, exposing orange-freckled wrists, and shook red bangs out of his eyes. This would be a cinch.

"Semi-soft toffee pieces. Lightly squeezed juice of dandelion root," finished Marcus with great scorn. This was a girl's thing. "This is a girl's thing," affirmed Marcus.

Percy was clearly ignoring the other boy as he focused on the large basin-like bowl in front of him. Clearing his throat, he activated the Recipe Reading charm.

Never let it be said that Marcus Flint was one to welsh on an opportunity to have someone else take care of something for him. He took advantage of Percy's charm to likewise avoid having to read his recipe. With a lazy and sloppy movement, he dragged his own bowl closer and started to prepare the ingredients haphazardly. This was simply to spite Percy, who had so carefully spent minutes on his own ingredients whereas Marcus finished measuring and cutting everything before the recipe parchment even sang out the first step.

In large bowl, blend butter and sugars smoothly.

"I hate your red hair," commented Marcus, seemingly out of nowhere. When Percy looked up, startled and confused, it was as if Marcus hadn't said a word.

"D-did you say something?" asked Percy, who was beginning to wonder if the circumstances of his present situation were starting to take a toll on his sanity.

Marcus raised a brow and stared at him ironically, which made Percy quite sure that he was losing his sanity, and that he was hearing things.

Shuddering visibly, he carefully poured the metered amounts of brown sugar and confectioner's sugar into the bowl, allowing a short moment to marvel at the way the grains contrasted and merged like rushing water over a cliff. He then dumped the somewhat soft room-temperature butter into the bowl, and laboured with mixing the ingredients together.

Across from him, Marcus tossed the butter in first, then poured the sugars over it. The grains stuck around the butter and fell off in clumps when he tried to stir them together. Furrowing his brows, he hunched closer over his bowl and put will-power into it, forcing the butter and sugar to melt into each other. After a time, both boys had relatively smooth and leveled, fluffy heaps of sugar and butter, though Marcus' tended to have more obvious lumps and clumps.

Next, add about half of flour, stir in.

"I hate your spots," said Marcus, as before.

Maybe he wasn't going insane. Maybe this was just his subconscious speaking to him. Since when did the subconscious insult its owner? Either way, Percy busied himself with pouring the flour, turning the ladle over and over in the thickening dry dough. When Marcus poured the flour into his own bowl, he sent most of it flying onto the table and into Percy's eyes.

Combine eggs, vanilla, dandelion, stir until thoroughly mixed.

"I hate your glasses," said Marcus.

This time, however, Percy had looked up in time to actually see Marcus' mouth move and speak the words. He looked as if he had been commenting on nothing but the weather. Percy straightened his dark-framed, horn-rimmed glasses with an awkward and self-conscious gesture. Marcus looked smug.

Percy detached himself from the countertop to find a small mixing bowl in one nearby cupboard. It took several moments of fumbling and searching until he found the bowl, with which he promptly returned, looking considerably more composed.

In this bowl, Percy cracked each hen egg and whipped them with a fork that had been considerately laid out among the other utensils. To the whipped egg mixture, he added the measured spoonful of vanilla and the measured spoonful of dandelion root, the former smelling sweet and suggestive while the latter smelled bitter and pungent. He used the fork to blend them, and emptied the smaller bowl into the larger one, scraping sticky liquid off of the bowl's ceiling to get the last of the blend into the dry ingredients. He took up his ladle again and began working the new ingredients in with the old.

Marcus simply cracked the eggs over the flour, heedless of the broken shells which fell to the floor. The egg yoke oozed within its translucent film. The vanilla and dandelion were dumped on top of the eggs. When Marcus began to try and blend the eggs with the flour, streaks of yellow-orange yolk would suddenly appear just when he was sure he'd blended it completely. He was at it for quite a while, wooden spoon hitting the edges of the bowl in angry disharmony. Eventually, with a slight sheen of sweat across his brow, he straightened himself from the bowl, properly mixed at last.

Beat in remaining flour.

"I hate your scrawniness," slurred Marcus derisively, as he emptied the remaining dregs of flour from the paper sack—he had used most of it the first time.

Percy faltered as he dusted the second half of his own paper sack into the bowl, noticing for the first time how the bones of his wrist stuck out like a skeleton's grin. The two boys worked the flour into their individual bowls in silence; Marcus' silence, gloating, and Percy's, brooding.

Stir in chopped pieces of Chocolate Frogs.

"I hate your voice," spoke Marcus, adding this time a sharp kick to Percy's shin.

Percy stared across the table in mute horror, feeling entirely violated, his ladle clutched motionless in the cookie dough. Unfair. He could feel the blood dancing around his ankle where he had been so wrongfully kicked. It would bruise; it probably already had.

Percy's eyes became stormy with threatening showers. He quickly threw in the chocolate bits, folding them into the thick dough until they looked to be evenly doled out. Marcus poured his own crookedly-chopped chocolates into the bowl and forced the ladle through the heavy river of dough, now embedded with shards of chocolate.

Stir in finely chopped walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts.

"I hate your brains," sneered Marcus with another kick, a precious few centimetres above the first kick.

Percy winced at the smarting pain and carefully scooped the three piles of perfectly cut nuts from the counter, emptying them into the bowl and wiping his hands against each other to make sure even the crumbs went in the dough. He folded this in, making certain that each valley, crevice, cave, and other hidden recess of the batter had some of the nuts blended into them. Marcus clutched large handfuls of his own piles of nuts and dropped them into his bowl. They were not finely chopped; they were not even chopped at all, as a matter of fact. They were whole and large and impossibly difficult to mix in with the batter, which served him right anyway.

Stir in toffee pieces. Make certain dough is even.

"I hate your uniform," said Marcus as he picked up the sticky toffee pieces that had started to melt into each other.

"But y—," Percy began indignantly, intending to remind Marcus that they both had the exact same uniform. He was quickly cut off with the delayed kick to the shin, somewhere right in between the first and the second, which had each started to welt with feeling.

"Stow it," warned Marcus, looking rather too menacing for such an eleven-year-old twit baking cookies. Percy decided to follow that edict and resumed carefully peeling small cubes of toffee away from each other and scraping them off his fingers into the bowl. The toffees proved to be one of the more difficult ingredients to blend, as they sporadically went from melty and loose-limbed to stiff and immobile. Where they stood like gravestones in some areas of the bowl, they formed slippery streams in others, very rarely staying in the normal toffee shape.

Spoon dough and drop on unbuttered cookie tray. Bake in oven till lightly browned, let cool.

Marcus made a loud clatter as he pulled out the cookie tray, slamming it down on the counter and causing some leftover egg shell slivers to be crushed into powder. He began to scoop the dough onto the tray, in large uneven piles. Some of the cookies were teeming with chocolate and nuts and toffee, like some soft of baker's primordial sea; others were simply sandy dough, without even one quintessential chocolate chip. At such a rate, he finished well before Percy.

As he strained over making sure each cookie was the same relative amount of dough, and the same relative shape, with the same relative amount of chocolate and similar additives, Percy waited for the inevitable comment and accompanying kick.

When both boys had placed all their dough on the trays, and shoved their trays in the ovens, and neither comment nor kick had been delivered, Percy didn't know whether he should be relieved, or terrified at what would come in their place.

Their detention now officially over, the two waited for the heads of their Houses. In only a few seconds' time, two sets of footsteps could be heard casually behind the heavy closed pantry doors and down the hall. Percy began wiping his hands on his trousers, cleaning off clinging flour and sugar. Finally, just as Percy had thought all was safe, it came.

"I love your smile," said Marcus, catching Percy entirely by surprise. To further add to the redhead's turmoil, Marcus delivered not a kick, but a kiss, right to the corner of Percy's mouth, and stepped back, looking as if he'd done no such thing.

Momentarily, Professors McGonagall and Snape entered the kitchens and dismissed their respective students, who went their separate ways, one spluttering occasionally to himself, the other smiling distantly as if no detention had ever been served.

Several nights later, the Christmas banquette was held. The chocolate chip cookies—of which over two hundred had been baked—were a popular topic of conversation among the cheerful professors and ravenous students, though both of the bakers were at their own homes with their families. Half of the cookies had been burnt badly, and tasted either too bitter or two sweet, with bits of things that looked and tasted like scrambled egg stuck in some of them, and bits of dry flower or sugar in the centres of others. The other half of the batch had been perfectly golden, delicious and comforting to eat. No one had spoken much of those cookies, for as anyone will say, it is always the best that is overlooked and under appreciated, while the rotten receives the attention.

After a while, and surely after seven years, the incident had begun to fade for each boy as if nothing really had happened.

------

As Percy recalled that one and only detention, he ruefully thought that the happenings of that evening would have been enough to keep even Fred and George in fear of detentions for the rest of their trouble-making lives.

He pulled himself out of the chair and wandered back toward the kitchen, where his mother's chocolate chip cookies were just being put on a plate with red and pink designs. They smelled heavenly, and his Mum held one out to him for tasting.

"Thanks, but I'll try one of these instead," he said, grabbing a warm oatmeal cookie and taking a bite, if not simply to avoid Mother Weasley ranting about wasted effort and time and food. He hasn't been fond of chocolate chip cookies in years—seven years, to be precise.

Stuffing the rest of the oatmeal cookie into his mouth, Percy lumbered delicately up the stairs and back into his bedroom, closing the door with a muffled snapping noise. He resumed his seat at the giggle-prone wooden chair and stared at the report in front of him.

He could still feel the bruises on his leg from the kick. He could still feel the bruise on his mouth from the kiss.

Rather, he could still feel the bruise on his heart.