Momentary Illusions
Chapter Nine
Percy Makes a Decision
2011.
"Dad, you're so embarrassing!" Molly shrieked at Percy when he tried to smooth over Molly's hair before she boarded onto the train. It had been a hellish twenty-four hours, with his daughter refusing to let him help pack her trunk, refusing to let him come into Ollivander's with her and her mum to buy her first wand and also refusing to let him kiss her goodbye before she was off to Hogwarts. "Ugh. I can't wait until you're old, and we can just stick you in a home."
Ten-year-old Lucy sneered. "Maybe we can take him to one now. Dad's hair's already gone all white from the stress at work."
"I am not embarrassing," Percy mumbled, but he could hear Audrey sniggering behind him. "And that was just the one white hair."
"I don't know," Audrey had a light tone to her voice. It was a tone that would normally help put him at ease. But today, it had the opposite effect. He thought he was about to have an aneurysm, seeing off his daughter to the train. He half-wanted to go there with her just to make sure that she didn't do anything inconspicuous in her first year of Hogwarts. He wanted to make sure that she actually ate her five-a-year (yes, that was correct) and that she went to bed before two am. "Found a second one in the shower today when I was having a bath." She pinched his arm, but he just stiffened. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do, love."
Molly beamed at her. "Of course, mum."
"That's not helpful," Percy told his wife, who he knew had more Hogwarts flings than he had papers to sign.
Audrey smirked at him. "Who said I wanted to be helpful?"
2018.
By two in the afternoon on Percy's second day of admission, he was sent into the procedure room and sent back with a tube in his abdomen. By three in the afternoon, Kingsley came to visit him during his lunch break—Kingsley that was, Percy supposed that all day was a lunch break in the hospital. Kingsley had wished him good luck and told him that he 'didn't have to worry about his job anymore' and that 'it was all sorted out.'
As Percy listened to Kingsley rattle on about replacements, interdepartmental fights and how his insurance would cover the costs of his chemotherapy, he closed his eyes and tried to block out the chatter.
Recently, his life had come to a grinding halt. He had lost his job. He and Audrey couldn't come to an agreement, and they felt farther apart than ever. He felt like he had no meaningful connections, despite having more family members than most departments had employees. He had no fulfilment, no substance, no reassurances. He knew that anyone else in his position would be thrilled that their finances were being sorted out at such a difficult time in their life. His family would be absolutely chuffed that Percy didn't have to go to work anymore. But all of this left a bitter taste in Percy's mouth, and it felt like he was the only one that knew that he was chugging down sweet syrupy poison.
Percy just stared at Kingsley with glassy eyes as he talked endlessly about everything and anything under the sun—the changes, the fact that his department had missed him, the impact that he had made onto the Ministry since he'd stepped foot in it (he didn't believe a single word of that. He bet everyone was happy to be rid of him, save his secretary probably.)
Over the last few days, he'd watched his room be filled with flowers and cards from everyone that he knew. He didn't know if it was alright for him to enjoy flowers as a bloke, but he did enjoy the fact that someone had chosen to think of him, to send him very peculiar and odd-looking flowers and write long-winded owls about how he was being missed at his job, about how Annalise-Helen-Gideon-Susan-Angelica-Michael-Katie-Oliver-Felix-Elora hoped that he would have a full recovery. It helped the dark moments where he felt like it was all for nothing. Where blood-thirsty animals were after his position whilst he lay, dying. Quite literally.
You're ill, he told himself. You're really, really ill. And your life isn't going to be the same anymore.
What did this new life of his entail? Percy was glad that he was alone in his room when Kingsley had left, after their heartfelt thirty-minute conversation. Percy had just managed to stutter about how he didn't want to leave, whilst Kingsley slapped his shoulder and laughed boisterously. After Kingsley had left, he felt so out of control in his own body. He desperately started asking every nurse and healer on the ward if he could just go home with the tube and come back for his outpatient appointments. But of course, they just stared at him like he was mental for even suggesting that.
Do you want something to calm you down, love? One of them had offered. Percy assumed that there would be a lot of calming draughts in the future if he kept talking about wanting to leave with pus discharging out of his abdomen.
At around eleven, he was surprised to see his first visitors of the day: George and little Fred—who, well, wasn't so little anymore. And Percy had to tell himself that all the time when he saw him. He remembered when he used to read him bedtime stories as a toddler. He always liked the ones that had the bigger words, the more complex plots, the more intricate details. He liked books with long-winded descriptions of houses and gardens that stretched beyond Percy's imagination that was for sure.
"Hey, uncle Perce," little Fred smiled, showing his bright blue braces, which cost George a fortune, or well… as George told him about several occasions in the past. Fred didn't look like George or Angelina. Both of them were athletically built and quite conventionally attractive people. He was shorter than George at only five-foot-five, with a wiry built from his nut-free dairy-free gluten-free-allergic-to-everything-in-the-universe diet. "Um… this is for you. Dad got it," he gestured towards the wonky-looking flowers in his hands. They were purple and massive and looked closer to a soul-sucking plant in his Herbology curriculum than a couple of nice flowers.
"Yeah," George nodded. "Picked it out myself." He smirked; his cheeks flushed with excitement. "Reminded me of you."
"Thank you for reminding me that I'm absolutely hideous," Percy said without skipping a beat.
George just grinned back at him. "Come on, Perce. It's an acquired taste."
"So is a Venomous Tentacula but nobody has bought me any."
"Is that you asking?"
"Merlin no."
They lapsed into silence. The conversation had naturally come to an end.
Fred put the flowers down beside the other bouquets, which was just as well because it looked like they might actually fall out of his hands at any moment. "I finished the new book you gave me," he finally said to Percy. "It was pretty bad. But the other one you gave me, the historical one, was really good. It seemed pretty accurate too—about the depictions of the…um… house-elf traditions and stuff. I don't know. I haven't really asked a house-elf about it."
Percy's lip twitched. "It wasn't, but…well, it was a valiant effort in trying to appear accurate. Yes, I'd give it that. But the dates are wrong and there is some misinformation about the ancestry behind the house-elves in general…"
Fred looked embarrassed right then, but George snorted.
"You know, Perce, in another life, you could've been a History of Magic professor," George said. "I mean—you'd still make everyone sleep at class to maintain Binns' legacy, but at least you're not a hundred-year-old ghost."
Fred cocked his head to one side and shyly mentioned, "I don't sleep in Professor Binns' class…"
"Binns is not a hundred-year-old ghost," Percy crossed his arms over his chest. "That's just incorrect."
"Did you ever think about it?" George's question was surprising to Percy. It was so clear and direct and nothing that he'd have thought that George would ask him.
"Err…no, not really," Percy answered back with a mild stutter. "I was happy where I was."
I was happy, Percy swished those words around in his mind for a bit. Was he happy? Was this what he wanted?
"I'm sorry about your job, Perce," George said, and he sounded like he really meant it. "I heard; you know. Kingsley came to the house last night and told dad about it. He seems happy, you know, that you wouldn't have to go back."
Percy felt a swell of appreciation that someone could see how much he was suffering over losing his job and wasn't thinking that he was mental about it. His job was his life, way before he'd even had a family, and now, it was gone.
"Well. You know how that's like. I suppose I can't carry on working forever. Unfortunately."
"Perce, I know that this is hard for you, but you'll do good later. After the chemotherapy, we can figure it out for you."
Why was he the last person to know about his own chemotherapy?
"After?" Percy echoed.
"It'll be almost two months from now, Perce. You'll have time to recover," said George, who didn't have to recover from anything at the current moment. Some people needed a week just to recover from a bad day, months for a horrific break-up, but he had a two-month time limit to accustom himself to something he didn't have a say in?
"That's enough," Percy finally said. He was not going to let them do this to him too. He'd agreed to the gynaecology visit. He'd agreed to the procedure. He did not agree to this. "Absolutely not."
"What's 'absolutely not' exactly, Perce?" George's voice had an edge. He knew what he was going to talk about.
Percy felt like he might cry or laugh when George—the brother that had always made fun of him for how stuck-up he was and how much he needed to relax—looked genuinely distraught for him. "I'm not going to be doing any chemotherapy," he said, and he was certain of it. He was sick of people making the decisions for him. "And I'm not so much of an invalid that people can decide what they can do to me without my consent." He gripped tightly onto his sheets. He had laid his cards all out on the table, and he knew that he had lost even before the verdict was out.
George looked like he'd been slapped in the face. "Perce, you'd die if you don't."
"I'd rather die with my dignity," Percy muttered in annoyance.
"Dignity again?" George looked just as exasperated. "You've said that before."
"I meant it."
He hated the way that everyone was approaching this situation. And now, he wasn't going to be sat here with his family making decisions about what he should be doing when he was capable of thinking about it on his own.
"You're fucking joking." George looked furious, and Fred looked down at his feet so he wouldn't have to say anything.
"Do I look like I'm joking?"
"Your dignity?" he reiterated almost as if it were a laughable thing. "What about your life? What about your family?"
The same old cycle continued. Version three hundred.
"And you've said that before too," Percy said in a clipped tone. "It's my life. Not yours. Not anyone else's. And as my loving family, you should understand it." Maybe he would've considered chemotherapy if they'd given him the option. If they'd talked to him. If they made it obvious that it was still his choice instead of making it theirs.
"You have children, Perce," George stated, as if Percy had forgotten. "You can't be so bloody selfish."
"They're adults if I can remember correctly," Percy's eyes were fixated on his brother's face. "And don't start with me. I'm one minute away from signing against medical advice and leaving this Merlin forsaken death trap." He closed his eyes and leaned back against his pillow. His blanket was too thin. The air was too cool. The room was too big.
"Seriously? And where are you going to go with the massive drain in your stomach?" George urged.
"I wouldn't have this drain if I didn't do this procedure," Percy said thickly.
"I'm not losing another fucking brother," George's voice cracked at the end.
"Maybe you already have," Percy spat out rather coldly.
They lapsed into another silence again. Uncomfortable. Unnatural. There were things in the air left unsaid, the same argument.
"Dad, maybe…maybe Uncle Percy is right," Fred didn't dare look up to meet his eye.
"What?" George stared at his own son like he was just as mental for suggesting that.
"I read about it, dad." As Fred did with everything in his life. "He's really ill."
"Of course, he's really bloody ill. He has—"
"In the brochure they gave you and mum last time we were here, it said that his stage only had a forty-percent survival at best for the next five years." As Fred said that, Percy felt stunned himself. He hadn't read them, out of fear of the worst. Looked like he was right not to. "And I think it's way less after that. And that's with the surgery and chemotherapy and everything." Percy wanted to be ignorant so badly, but it didn't exactly brighten up his prospects.
Percy sunk into his pillows. He knew his odds were dire, but he didn't think it was that bad.
"That can't be right," George sounded like he were in denial. "What do these people know anyway?"
"Dad." Fred looked at his father with a pitying expression.
"What are you guys talking about?" as if they could tell that they'd been talked about, Molly and Lucy were stood by the door. Both of them were dressed in frocks of different colours and patterns. Lucy's vibrant patterned blue-yellow-and-orange frock was burning a hole into Percy's eyes and Molly's teeny-tiny black cut-out made him feel uncomfortable. Molly was holding a Primpernelle's flower basket. It was so pink that Percy felt like it belonged in a maternity ward.
"Your dad's chance of croaking it," George mumbled. He sounded just as tired as Percy felt, as if it were wearing on him, trying to make Percy see how bloody lucky he were. "Considering he thinks that you two are adults and you don't mind if he dies."
"That's not what I said," Percy said tensely.
"Then what is it that you want to say, Perce?" George asked. "That you don't know what your life is about now that you don't have your job? That you have no idea what you want from your own life?"
"Yes, I don't," Percy admitted. "I don't know what I want from my life."
"But you don't want chemotherapy," George mentioned. "You're pretty strict about not wanting to live."
"Please stop twisting my words," Percy begged. He wanted to go back to sleep. He wanted not to think about these things. He wanted not to be confronted in the way that he was. But here he was, again. "It's my choice to decide."
George furrowed his eyebrows. "Just like it's your choice to be a bloke? How's that working out for you, Perce?"
Percy rolled his eyes. "I know you don't mean that," but his voice sounded tired, strained.
"Well, what if I do?" George didn't even sound convinced about it himself; his voice had started cracking again. "How am I supposed to forget that you've never said anything? Fred died thinking that…" that he was a bloke? Percy wanted to counteract. Well, he was. There wasn't a big secret here.
"Yes, George?"
George looked like he didn't want to go down that path. He looked like he'd given up trying to get a rise out of him. "You're the only person who doesn't care if you die."
"I care if I die," Percy didn't exactly ask to be ill with something like this now, did he?
Molly looked like she was going to cry but Lucy grabbed her wrist and said something into her ear. It seemed to have calmed her down enough that she put the flower basket down. She walked over to the chair next to his bed and sat down, right beside little Fred and his massive bright blue braces and even bigger glasses.
"Um…" Molly absentmindedly twisted a strand of hair. "They're advertising chocolate-coconut scrub now at work."
Lucy rolled her eyes because anyone in their right mind knew that Molly wasn't thinking about chocolate-coconut body scrubs.
"That's nice," replied George in an irritated tone.
"You could get it for mum," Fred suggested, which made George laugh. "Oh, yeah. I forgot how mum's like."
"Your mother would beat me with it," George mustered a small, sad smile.
Percy had never felt so absolutely livid in his whole life.
"Dad should be able to do what he wants," Lucy decided to say, very clearly and proudly, in her soft little voice. Molly just went white, looking like she didn't agree at all.
Molly's lip wobbled as she spoke. "But…I thought that everything was better."
Percy felt bad for her. He wondered how many mixed signals they were getting, from himself and from Audrey and the thought of trying to smooth it over was impossible because Audrey was so stubborn. He supposed that she could say the same thing about him too. "When I get home," he said, almost like he had a choice in that. "When I get home, we can talk about it… it's not like I have a job to be going to now, do I?"
"Yeah, I guess," Molly still sounded uncertain.
They were so similar sometimes, in their mannerisms, that he sometimes forgot that they were two different girls sometimes.
After that, George, Fred and his daughters quietly sat there, gesturing and whispering in between long lapses of awkward silences and even more unnatural pauses. Like they had nothing else to talk about. Percy found it funny, really. He'd suppose that spending more time with your dying loved one involved talking and reminiscing more than it did arguing and ignoring. After about an hour, his daughters had left with an uneasy goodbye. They kissed him hurriedly on the cheek. As if it was their first time doing so. And a couple of minutes after they did, George got up to leave too. After an acknowledging nod, George sauntered off, Fred following him with his pale, freckled limbs flying in all directions.
As the days went by, Percy only felt worse. Things were fine when he was about to sleep, but when he was awake, the day just stretched on forever. He could feel himself sinking into such hopelessness most days. His few moments of reprieve were when he had snuck away from the nurses to go downstairs to have a coffee and a pastry whilst other patients smoked cigarettes and complained about their papers. He had never felt more relieved than when he was alone. When his family came to visit him, Percy feigned being asleep, and then listened to them talk about plans that he had no intention of following through. They asked the nurses how he'd been like when they found him with the covers up. The nurses kept talking about how he was fine, and he was eating alright. He had even put on a little bit of weight and looked a lot more like himself. He finished his potions and had his drains removed. He said less and less, and barely engaged in his family's conversations when he was awake. But it didn't really feel like anyone had noticed. He bet that they thought that he was just tired and didn't feel like talking. The bouquets from work had stopped coming in and within a few days, it was like his job had forgotten all about him.
But the straw that broke the hippogriff's back happened on his discharge day. It was a warm sunny Monday morning. Percy had finally changed out of that dreaded dressing gown and was allowed to shower by himself.
As the nurse had started removing his cannula, there was a gleam in her eyes. She was excited for him, after seeing how low that he'd been acting the past few days. "I bet you must be absolutely chuffed about going home!" she laughed. "It's been a rough week, hasn't it?"
And when she had said that, it was like something in him had broken. Percy had realised how much he was dreading heading back into his house. How much he desperately wanted to run away. "Well—"
"Those girls of yours," she continued. "They seem so beautiful. It must be hard for them, isn't it?"
Percy nodded his head mutely. It was. "They've just left Hogwarts," he said plainly.
"Oh, that's quite nice," she was smiling so brightly that Percy couldn't help but feel like they were on two separate planets. "I've got a son that just left Hogwarts himself. Not really interested in doing much other than mooching off my money." He took in a sharp inhale as she'd said that. "The generation these days, really. Paying three Galleons for a punnet of strawberries when we used to grow them in the garden out at home. That's the real organic fruit nowadays. And it's not like they go off and do anything without you pushing them right into it! Like they need an incentive to work."
"I suppose."
"The divorce has been hard on him," she'd spello-taped a piece of gauze on his hand and pressed it gently so that he didn't bleed out. "You'd think that it's like someone's died instead of a separation." Died, separation, Percy reiterated the words in his mind. He thought of a lifetime of his daughters calling him heartless, insensitive and downright embarrassing. He thought of him and Audrey talking less and less. His father had been so sure they'd sort it out. But maybe they shouldn't be sorting it out. Maybe it was the end. Maybe him being ill was just delaying what would've been inevitable.
Maybe he couldn't spello-tape his marriage and his daughters' relationships at the same time as he was trying to go through his sickness.
"Will you be fine on your own?" she asked.
I am alone, he came to conclude. He didn't want to be picked up. He didn't want to go to his flat. He didn't want to see Audrey and have to pretend that everything was fine. He kept thinking about what started this all—the divorce papers before he'd even been into the healer's office. He thought that he was going mental, trying to figure out where everything had gone wrong. Surely, that wasn't the best frame of mind to be in when you were told that you had cancer.
"I suppose I will," Percy's voice felt a little weak.
He was supposed to wait for Audrey to come by. She said she'd be there within the hour, as she'd had to be into his devilish mother-in-law' house. That woman thought that he wasn't a proper man before because he didn't have bulging biceps, smelled of body odour, went to the pub every week and played Quidditch on the weekends. Percy didn't even want to know what she'd thought about the fact that he was a transgendered man now that it had come out.
Percy was supposed to be out for a quick walk whilst he waited for Audrey to come by, but the second he was out of the ward, he knew he couldn't come back.
Couldn't wait any longer.
He didn't have a clue about what he wanted in his life. All he knew was that despite how limited his time was with his family, he'd felt like the days were long and never-ending. He couldn't stand to be alone with them for more than a couple of minutes because they looked at him like there was something wrong with him. He felt less than himself. He felt the way that he'd always felt like in the boys' dormitories, when he was changing his uniform before they caught sight of him. When he didn't want to do the things that the other boys did, and he was persistently made fun of for being a right pansy. When he realised that he didn't feel like he belonged anywhere. It had all come back, excruciatingly.
As much as he hated alcohol, he wanted a drink so badly. Just to get drunk and forget.
Percy looked at the ward he'd left from and felt himself completely come apart. The events of the last few days-weeks-months just rushed into his mind, from his diagnosis, from his hospital appointment, from how his family had been treating him before that, after that, during all of this. Percy looked up from his sweaty hands. He'd just had a tube removed from his abdomen, a complication from a procedure he didn't even want to do. He looked back at the ward-hallway-other-doors, and then decided that he couldn't stay. He couldn't face another day of the same monotony that he'd been living in the past few months. With breakfasts that seemed to stretch on for ages, days that seemed blurred with long naps and accusatory wags. That was when he apparated away, in the middle of the hospital corridor into a deep dark alleyway in Diagon Alley. After the first few breaths of foul-smelling air, Percy stepped into a pile of muddy leaves. His shoes were dirty. He didn't have anything on him besides an old quill and his glasses. He wondered what he was going to do.
Very consciously, he apparated back to his flat in the middle of the day. He knew that nobody was in at the time. He changed into a loose pair of sweatpants ever, and an oversized hoodie that belonged to Charlie.
This is not working out, he wrote and taped in front of the fridge. I'm leaving.
He had no idea where he was going to go. He couldn't go back to the Burrow. He didn't have any workmates. He wasn't exactly on the best terms with anyone at the current moment. The only thing that he could think of was renting a room at the Three Broomsticks, and he didn't really fancy that. But the thought of not being held accountable and doing whatever he wanted enticed him so much that he found himself at Madam Rosmerta's as soon as he'd made up his mind.
He had a few payments issues with the room but had it sorted out within the hour. Percy didn't exactly do with spontaneous trips for that reason. He had gone down to a few shops for some essentials, buying his own toiletries, gathering snacks, ready meals and sweets, stacks of books that he hadn't read in years, and for the first time in ages, he'd bought himself some new clothes too since he didn't have anything on him. Then after that, he sat in his bed (needed to buy extra sheets because it was so cold) and then wrapped himself up in as much of the blanket as he possibly could. Underneath the covers with his lit-up wand, he read story after story, consuming them like he was starved for words, for the scenes, for the memories that came with them. In books, everything was so simple and uncomplicated, every problem with a solution, every ache with something to console it. He read until he fell asleep on the bed, with the book splayed out onto his chest. It had been the calmest that he had been in ages. He finally had no expectations. He was free.
The next morning, he dressed in a very un-Percy-like way, wearing a colourful pink striped button-down and a pair of dark pink trousers. He felt like he was doing something taboo almost, buying pink clothes, getting excited over flowers being delivered to his room. But he supposed that he was just sick of that too. If Bill or Ron wore a dress, it didn't make them into women. So why couldn't he do whatever he'd like too, without having to hold up to society's expectations of what was the correct way to do things? It hadn't stopped people from writing nasty things about him in letters and papers.
Speaking of papers, the news of his job going to another bloke had made the news.
A real bloke. Good thing they've corrected that, he'd heard some of the people say down at the pub when they were talking about the new Daily Prophet papers. You knew that the Daily Prophet was scraping the bottom of a barrel when the gender identity of a Ministry official qualified as juicy news. Percy had read every issue since he'd come out.
Percy sat down by the pub, eating oats for breakfast when he'd been reading the paper, slandering him for nothing to do with the general public. But then he could imagine Audrey's crushed face as she read the paper and he almost felt bitterly satisfied that someone else would be in pain too, for what he felt as well.
He spent a few days walking around Diagon Alley aimlessly. In the mornings, he'd sometimes find a new café in the middle of nowhere and sit down and eat things he'd never tried. He ate toast prepared in strange ways, deep-fried dough balls with sugar and omelettes with vermicelli noodles made sweet with cardamom, rose water and saffron. In the afternoons, he walked around long-winding parks whilst he watched people go about their day. Sometimes, he walked into the owleries to pet lonely-looking owls and feed them treats. He went into bookstores and bought risqué magazines and took them back to the pub so that he could look at them. He looked at all kinds of things and really explored what he liked and disliked, making paper notes and annotations. He stripped himself down into the mirror once at night and tried to convince himself that no matter how he looked, he was still a man. Even if he'd never had the first procedure, even if he looked like he did when he was two-three-four years old, it didn't change the fact that he was a man. He didn't have to prove himself. He didn't have to 'pass off' to anyone. He could walk around tomorrow in a frock, and nobody could dare tell him that he wasn't a man because he didn't completely fit into anyone's idea of the 'gender norms.'
He received a letter within a day of him disappearing, but when Hermes had come to deliver his letter, he didn't return back to the flat. Audrey's owl, Aphrodite, was just as easily persuaded with a few strokes and owl treats.
The first few prints of the Daily Prophet had been practically boasting about the new bloke taking over his job; Archie St Claire.
A week after his disappearance from the hospital, Percy had made up his mind about what he wanted. He apparated to the Ministry and headed straight to Kingsley's office. His assistant, a straight-out-of-Hogwarts bloke with more muscles than Kingsley himself, stood up and told him off for not having an appointment. Fortunately for him, the commotion outside was enough to cause Kingsley to poke his head out of the office, break into a grin and invite Percy in for a cup of tea anyway—which he then asked his assistant for. The muscle-bound chiselled specimen before him snorted and let him through with a warning glance, something that reminded him quite a lot of Elora Dunn actually.
Percy had been to Kingsley's office a few times, but he was still surprised at how beautiful it was. Long gone were the dusty, paper-filled desks of Fudge's era, or the meticulous clean minimalistic Scrimgeour, but instead in its place, was something that could be out of a house catalogue. The room was covered in maroon carpeting, with curtains that looked like they belonged in someone's home instead of their office. There were chairs that were so comfortable that Percy could probably accidentally fall asleep in, with flying memos arranging themselves perfectly behind Kingsley. His robes looked so much nicer on him than they ever did on any other employee, almost as if they were made for him.
Kingsley nodded towards him and gestured for him to have a seat. Percy cautiously sat down, realising how out of place he looked like in his white sweatpants and horrific white-red-and-green Christmas jumper too. But his hair was behaving well, and his face was neatly shaven. And most importantly, he no longer had a drain out of his abdomen.
"Percy!" Kingsley enthusiastically called out. There was something so warm and inviting about him. "Look at you, straight out of the hospital." H smiled. "Look better than half of the Great British public if I do say so myself."
"I think most of the Great British population would disagree would you."
"Well, what do they know?" then Kingsley's eyebrows furrowed. "I've heard from your father that you haven't been home in ages. He wanted me to send a search party for you. Thought you might've been abducted."
"Who'd want to abduct a forty-year-old man?"
"A young man like yourself? I can write you a list."
"That's…that's not what I meant." Percy's ears went red. "I left a note. Why would they think I was abducted?"
"Yes, yes, I remember. You said you were leaving. Hence the lack of search parties."
"I can't believe this."
"They thought that you wanted to end your life."
"Ending my…" Percy was tired of this 'you obviously want to die' debacle they spun for him. "Absolutely not."
"That's what I've said," Kingsley raised an eyebrow at him. "But I also didn't think you'd disappear off the radar."
"I needed time to think." Percy pulled out the newest edition of the Daily Prophet and pushed it towards Kingsley. He didn't seem like he had to read it, because he knew what that was all about. Percy had been reading about the disasters that had happened in his department after Archie had stepped in. Operations were halted. Reports were misfiled. Requests that Percy would reject that had been approved. "But then I happened across this."
"I see."
"Is there a problem here, Mr Minister?"
Kingsley's lip twitched a little. "Archie is a little…more conservative." He was an arsehole, Percy could tell, just from reading the papers. A transphobic elitist with a proper arrogance about him. Percy knew how to deal with those. He'd spent his whole life dealing with them. "Percy, I can't give you your job back. I need someone to take over from under you after…"
"Yes, I know," Percy cut him off. He didn't want to think about that now. "But what if I decide to train him?"