Mr. Percy Ignatius Weasley,
We at the Ministry of Magic thank you for your letter regarding the Cross-Continental Wizarding Schools Exchange Program set to take place in the upcoming year. Unfortunately, you have not been elected to receive a scholarship to take part in this event.
He didn't bother reading the rest of the letter, merely throwing it aside after reading those first few sentences. What was the point, anyway? It was just going to be a lot of pointless blathering, explaining how few positions were available, trying to console him for his failure.
As if anything they could add would make him feel better about it.
He could hear footsteps climbing the stairs; for a moment, he thought someone might be coming by to see him, to talk to him, to tell him that there was no point in worrying about it, that something else just as prestigious would come along soon. It might not make him feel better about the scholarship, but it would at least let him know that someone cared about him, about how he was feeling.
The footsteps kept pounding until they faded away. Whoever was climbing the stairs had gone right past his doorway. Had he really expected anything else? No one else knew that he'd just received a rejection letter. Even if they had known, they'd probably just whisper among themselves that they 'ought to let him be for a while'. They always just 'let him be'. Never thought that he might want some human contact once in a while.
'Well, that's how Percy is. Likes to deal with things by himself.'
He'd gotten used to dealing with things by himself. He didn't want to, but people just let him. He was, after all, a very solitary kind of person. Maybe everyone else just assumed that he liked to deal with things alone. Behind closed doors.
Delicately, he removed his glasses and placed them on his bedside table, right next to the Charms textbook he had been reading the previous night. He didn't want them damaged when he buried his face in his pillow.
Then, behindclosed doors, he wept. Grasping his pillow tightly to his face so no one could hear him, Percy wept until there were no more tears left in his body. After the first tear had fallen, it wasn't about the stupid scholarship anymore - though that had been a blow. He wept because of his isolation, from his family, from his peers, from everyone. He wept for being so pathetic, for being so deeply hurt by this isolation, for the stupid reason he was feeling so miserable to begin with. Who cared about that scholarship, anyway? Who cared that no one came to console him when they didn't know he had even applied, much less been rejected?
Who cared? No one. That wasn't what made him so miserable. Not really.
What hurt him the most was that he didn't have a true friend in the world, no one he could complain to about not having gotten the scholarship, no one he could laugh with about the other poor suckers who had been rejected.
How surprising was it, when he was going to crumble like this, behind closed doors? No one wanted a friend who was too rigid when under scrutiny, but too weak when alone.
No one wanted a friend like Percy. He had to be his own friend, his own foundation, his own fall-back. The only way to do that was to keep himself isolated, to keep his misery locked away as it had always been. Kept behind the closed doors.