when i started writing this, i really thought about what i wanted to do and what i wanted to do was have a really sad story. and the next thing is that i wanted it to be an older Percy (he's almost forty in this fanfiction). the reason being that most trans representation that's in fanfiction is in high school/in their twenties. plus, of course, it's more angsty this way, since he has daughters, a wife, etc. i want to let it go on record that whilst Percy is trans in this one, i am not really trans so i'm trying to keep the content as sensitive as possible. thank you.

the other thing is that this fanfic will probably have some flashbacks including Percy's younger years : in school , dating , getting married, etc along with the real time struggles.

warnings for transphobia, character death (yes, Percy will die in this one, but i'll try to keep it purely to the epilogue so that readers can skip it if they choose) and trigger warnings for whatever else i can think of as usually my characters have a depressing life in general. after this prologue, the next chapter will be in current time!

Momentary Illusions

Prologue

The clinic room was big, with two faded red plastic chairs that squeaked when you sat on them and an off-white table that was crowded with papers that had squiggly purple ink prescriptions on them. There were orange-and-blue posters on the wall, with statements such as IS YOUR TRANS CHILD GETTING WHAT THEY NEED? and ADOCATING FOR TRANS RIGHTS. Arthur Weasley felt like the child-sized chair that he was sitting on might break beneath his arse. He felt like the room smelled like wood and too-much-old-perfume. The toast he ate in the morning sat in his stomach like a brick.

He shouldn't be there. He shouldn't have made the appointment. He shouldn't have taken his daughter with him. He felt like they should whisk him away to Azkaban for doing this to his princess. He stared at the door, willing his wife to walk in. She was wearing her pink-and-purple floral frock and glossy red lippy that day. Arthur wanted to go in with the healer, but he wasn't allowed. He let his daughter be taken away by a white-haired woman with a lolly and a saccharine-sweet voice.

He could hear the clock ticking. Where was Molly with that sodding packet of crisps?

Arthur could barely breathe in that room. He didn't even know he was holding his breath in until he let it go. He felt a relief flood him when Molly had come into the room, rustling through a plastic bag of crisps, chocolate wafers, candy bars and yoghurt-covered raisins. Molly sat beside him, in another squeaky-small chair meant for a six-year-old. They watched the door together. At home, Bill was put in charge of his younger brothers and sister, probably filling them to the brim with icing sugar and raw cupcake mix and trying to dispose of the evidence in their overflowing rubbish bins.

Arthur couldn't think about them now. He listened, listened, listened to the door. His mind was filled with a thousand questions and nothing at all. What if this was the wrong thing to do? What if they were hurting her?

The thought of his child being in pain brought fresh tears to his eyes. "Do…do they have to take off her clothes?"

Molly smoothed over her dress, which was already tidy and pressed. "I think that they have to, love."

"She's five," Arthur exasperated. He waited for the sound of a whimper, a scream, a laugh, a sound, something. He was making up horrible scenarios in his head. He wanted her to run out of the white room and beg him to take her back home, where they didn't wave wands to turn five-year-old girls, who barely knew what they wanted for bloody breakfast much less make life-altering decisions, into five-year-old boys. "How can anyone be sure that she… she wants this?"

Molly stared at Arthur with softened brown eyes. "They check them all at birth. They told us before she even started crawling. They knew—everyone knew." She bit down her lower lip. "You just didn't want to believe it."

"Did you?" Arthur honestly asked, and Molly didn't answer.

They took his perfect five-year-old girl through a white door into a room Arthur hadn't been to before and they were going to bring out something else from the room. There were people celebrating a war and here he was, killing his beautiful daughter, his first daughter.

"What do you think of Percy?" Molly broke Arthur out of his thoughts. She had pulled out her birth certificate. It smelled like the Burrow. It was wrinkled and old and dreary, and on the top, PRISCILLA ISABELLA WEASLEY was proudly scribbled on. He could recall the first time that he'd held her, that fresh baby smell. He remembered how it felt like telling Charlie and Bill that they were going to have a sister, and how they proud he had been, how proud he still was.

Arthur didn't like the name Percy. It sounded so wrong. This was so wrong. "It's nice," he said stiffly.

"I think so too," Molly agreed. "Arthur," she looked at him, locking eyes with him for as long as possible. "When he comes out of there, the world is going to be so hard on him." Arthur nodded his head, blinking away a thousand memories at once. Her first dress. Her first haircut. Her first tooth. "You can't be hard on him either. You have to do everything that is necessary to make sure that…that he feels like he's at home."

"I know," Arthur said, but his chest hurt. He closed his eyes and waited. Then a couple of minutes later, the old healer emerged from the door and came trudging his new son, who had a harder looking set of eyes, and a thin, pressed lip. He had curly red hair and pale, gangly limbs. Arthur didn't know this boy. He was a stranger.

"His name is Percy," Molly announced to the world, as if everyone were listening. Arthur wondered if people would be staring at them as they walked out of the transgendered clinic, whispering things about her-him-them. Priscilla-Percy-someone-new stared back at Molly with big, blue eyes. He had never looked like that before. "And he's our son."