Disclaimer - I own nothing you recognise.
Written for auction prompt - HermionePercy
Word Count - 308
Nice Is Not Always Needed
She felt for him.
No matter where the family met, he always looked isolated, apart from the rest even though he looked similar. He had the red hair and the freckles and yet if you didn't know the family you would wonder if he belonged to them.
She began to seek him out at functions, to draw him into conversation over, at first, Ministry Legislation, and later, books and food and the muggle world.
He asked her once, if she felt like an outside too, if breaking up with his youngest brother had given her cause to feel as if she didn't belong.
Hermione had smiled and shook her head. She'd told him clearly that though her and Ron had broken up, they were still the best of friends and always would be.
He wondered why, if she could feel that sense of belonging, why he couldn't.
She wondered later if there was a gentler way to break it to him that his isolation was one of his own making. That his guilt at the events leading up to the end of the war, and in being on the scene where his brother died were what was causing the split.
They'd all tried with him, and he'd obliviously knocked their outreached hands away, buried as he was in his own guilt and regret.
He'd reflected his feeling of self loathing onto them, and shunned them in a way to keep himself safe.
As she sat in her flat, a glass of wine in her hand and a book on her knee, she wondered if she could have been nicer.
A knock on her door, red hair and a sheepish smile, a thank you that held more than gratitude.
Those were the things that told her she hadn't need to be nicer. Percy had needed to hear the truth.