A/N: Percy lovers, please don't hate me. I needed him to be like this for this to work. But apart from that, I absolutely love the way this turned out!

A/N: IMPORTANT! Chapter titled: "Of Elephants and Silly String" was the one nominated for the IWSC Peeves Awards!


Title: Monochromatic

Summary: Lucy paints, draws, sculpts; every creation for her father. She also works, studies and writes; everything for her father. But he never seems to pay attention to her.

Word count: 3,492

Genres: Family, Hurt/Comfort

Characters: Lucy W., Percy W.


"Mummy, will daddy be home soon?" Lucy asks, her two venetian blonde pigtails bobbing behind her.

"Oh, I don't know darling. He said he had a lot of work at the moment," Audrey explains, brushing back a lock of hair fondly, caressing her daughter's cheek.

"I made him a drawing."

"Oh really? What of?"

Lucy carefully deposits the sticky piece of paper in front of her mother. It's monochromatic, and barely more than a few scribbles, but still distinctly recognisable, at least for a five-year-old.

"Is that him?"

Lucy nods. The pigtails bob. It's adorable and Audrey feels her eyes moisten, disappointing the perfect little girl is a regular occurrence.

"Why is it all purple?" It's genuine curiosity. Lucy offers regular only-one colour pieces, but she doesn't often show them to her mother. Audrey knows they're all for Percy, but he never takes the time to truly look at them. For her to mention them to her mother, Audrey knows she's getting desperate, but there is nothing she can do for the moment.

"Mummy, it's not purple. It's violet," Lucy states, as if this was obvious, and that calling it purple was offensive.

"Oh, of course, but why didn't you use any other colour?"

Lucy sighs, as if she's exasperated. It's so adult an expression that on her it's comic. Audrey wonders where she's learnt it. Her sister doesn't have these gestures. "Mummy, the only colour for daddy is violet."

Audrey wants to push it, find out more, but Lucy clearly doesn't feel like it. She's hopped away and gone back to her room, probably to make another one of the drawings.


"What's that you're making, Lucy?" Molly asks. Her little sister has always been a mystery to her, and even more so now that's she's started school and barely sees her anymore. She's come back to find her sister has plastered her walls with drawings, apparently because there was no more room in hers.

"It's a statue," Lucy states as she concentrates hard on the clay in front of her.

The clay was a gift for her birthday, Molly knows. Dad gave it to her, and Lucy was overjoyed, even though everyone except her knew that Mum had picked it out, wrapped it up and written the note in it. Dad only gave it to Lucy, per say. So now, instead of drawing, she's now spending endless days creating things out of her imagination with her hands.

"Are you going to paint it?"

"Of course." She frowns as she focuses harder to model the clay exactly the way she wants it to be. Molly has absolutely no idea what her sister is doing, but there's some genuine curiosity.

"What colour?"

Lucy waves over to a small table with tubes of paint on it, not bothering to vocalise her thoughts. Clear concentration is painted on her face.

"Red?" Molly guesses.

"Cherry red," Lucy corrects, still the frown on her face. Oh, so this is the new colour of the month. Lucy works in cycles, rotating around a couple of colours. She's gone to red a couple of times already, but of course, it's never simply 'red'.

"And is it for anyone?" Molly knows she's pushing it. Lucy doesn't want to be interrupted, and she's that awkward phase, the one where she doesn't quite know if she's a teenager or not, and if she should lash out.

"Yes, for Dad," she states, and it's clearly meant to be the end of the conversation. Molly nods and retreats. She knows she should tell Lucy that Dad will never take the statue to his work, like she would love him to. For the moment, she lets her hold on to that dream.


When Minerva walks into her Transfiguration classroom, what she sees there is not what she was expecting. Lucy Weasley is sprawled on one of the desks, fast asleep. She still has her quill in her hand, but she's knocked over the ink pot. Perfect blue drops pool in a small puddle on the floor.

Minerva sighs. Lucy is not quite like any of the other Weasley's she's had so far. She's a Ravenclaw, not the first to not be in her beloved Gryffindor, but still extremely hard to live for the girl. And she's not a particularly 'good' student. Her grades are always medium, getting that A or the exceptional EE but never the O Minerva knows she's working herself to death for, just as finding her here proves it.

Minerva sees how Lucy is straining to make her parent's proud. Especially Percy, she imagines. The girl is trying so hard to be like him, perfect grades, perfect behaviour. But Lucy is not Percy, and Minerva knows it. The work the girl was so diligently trying to finish is covered with small drawings in the margins. The possibility, the imagination, the creativity in her is probably what placed her in Ravenclaw, but the house is putting too much pressure for grades too, always just as competitive.

"Lucy?" she calls out softly, not quite her usual manner for when she wakes up one of her students sleeping in class.

The girl wakes up in a startle. There is the mark of her clothes on her face, and her faintly red hair is all in a ruffle. "Partial Transfiguration!" she shrieks, as if finishing her sentence. Minerva watches as she takes in her surroundings and gasps in surprise. "Professor McGonagall? Oh, my Merlin, I'm so sorry! Where am I?"

Minerva laughs softly, but keeps it in. She has a reputation to uphold. She puts her stern teacher voice back on. "Miss Weasley, I hope you haven't made it a practice of sleeping in my classroom."

She blushes deeply. "Oh, not at all, madam. I was just working here, there were so many people in the library, and then I must have fallen asleep, you see there was so much homework-" she rambles on, while trying to collect her stuff. "Oh Lord, what time is it? I really didn't mean to fall asleep – " Lucy gets out her wand and mutters a poorly executed vanishing spell, trying to get rid of the ink she's just realised has spilled over.

Minerva wordlessly waves it away. "Don't worry, Miss Weasley. I can understand this happening sometimes, but I'd rather not have blue ink all over my floor."

"Navy blue," the girl corrects her immediately, then blushes when she realises she's just spoken back to a professor.

Minerva raises an eyebrow. "Navy blue?"

"It's my favourite colour." Suddenly, it seems like the girl's forgotten where she is again and already, she's taking drawings out of her bag. "Here, look. I always use this colour for drawing."

Minerva immediately opens her mouth to remind the girl to whom she's talking to, but when she lays her eyes on the girl's work, she feels genuine curiosity. It's a simple drawing of a Prefect's badge but drawn with real talent and tastes. It's clear the girl has potential, Minerva can tell, despite her lacking knowledge in the subject. The choice of the badge is obvious and only confirms her suspicions.

"Miss Weasley, I'm afraid that although I will not deduct points for this, I am afraid I must warn your parents."

Lucy is cut off in her rambling about the paintings and immediately blanks. "Oh no, Professor, please no. I swear it will never happen again. Daddy cannot know."

Minerva sighs. Warning them would be the right course of action, probably sparking some much-needed conversation between the girl and her parents, no, her father, but years of teaching tells her that she should let it slide. "Fine, but if this ever happens again, or I hear it from one of my colleagues, you know what will happen."

Lucy nods and rushes out of the room.


Penelope cringes as she sees the name on the letter. It's for Percy Weasley, again.

Penny knows it's from his daughter, Lucette, Lucy, Louise? Something like that. You can tell by the weight of the envelope, always heavier than if it just contained a single letter, and it smells of paint. Penny's seen the drawings inside, those little vessels of art and the girl is talented. She just finds it strange that the girl sends her father letters at work, rather than at home.

She wishes the girl wouldn't. She hasn't been long at the Ministry, and despite her impressive qualifications and experience, no one escapes the newbie's task of distributing the mail (at least on their floor, that's how it works). Stumbling into Percy Weasley was awkward, their past relationship still hanging in the air. Not a decision she regretted, but still. Even though they are grown adults, those lingering emotions from her teenage years still makes it bizarre.

Besides, she's constantly reminded of why she left him, always far too obsessed by his work. How his wife deals with it, she doesn't know. But she can tell the girl is craving attention.

"Weasley, you've got mail," she tells him as he throws the envelope on his desk.

He nods and seems to want her to go away, but Penny is genuinely curious. She wants to see whatever his daughter has sent him this time. The first time she glimpsed it, she was awe-struck, and now she always lingered to see, despite the awkwardness. She knows if she doesn't stay, she'll never see them. Percy Weasley never keeps any of them. Whether he just stacks them at home or bins them, he's never hung them up on the walls of the office.

"Thank you," he tells her, and finally takes the time to look up from his papers to open the letter. He pulls out a painting. A painting, the newest type of her creations. She's flickered in between carving, stencils and imprinting, always coming back to drawing in between.

And there's been a real evolution in her paintings, going from more realistic approaches to more and more abstract. Here, it's just a series of numbers and letters, over and over again.

"Yellow," he mutters before putting it aside and going back to work.

"Actually, it's cream," Penny interjects.

"Pardon?"

Penny blushes. "It's not yellow, it's cream."

He frowns: "How do you know?"

"It's written over and over again," she points out.

He looks back at it. Anybody who had even looked at it could've told it was cream, as it plainly stated. Clearly he wasn't paying attention.

"Oh."

"Maybe you should hang these up, they're really good," Penny offers.

"I don't have the time," he dismisses, and it's the end of the conversation.

Penny sighs and goes to the next desk, the next person who has received mail. She should've told him, the 's' was there too.


"Just one O?"

Audrey nods.

"And in Art?"

"Yes, you don't need to look so shocked darling."

"Of course, I need to look shocked. How is she ever going to get a good job if she doesn't have Os."

Percy Weasley is absolutely discombobulated as he holds the results of his second daughter's OWLs. Audrey, his wife, is in front of him, a tired look on her face.

"Not everything is about having a good job."

"Well, she could have made an effort."

"But she's made an effort! Have you even read the report cards the professors sent?" Audrey cries, indignantly.

"I'll do it some time, later." The report cards generally stay on his desk at home for two or three weeks, before Audrey puts them away. It's not like he often uses his desk at home anyway.

Audrey sighs and takes hold of his hand; "You know, if you want her to do better maybe you should just talk to her."

"Some time later."

More sighing. "Do you even want to look at what she did, that earned that O?"

"Not really, I have to go to bed now. I'm starting early tomorrow."

"Percy! You said we'd go to Diagon's Alley together tomorrow!"

"Something came in between." It's an enormous meeting. It covers all the Departments of the meeting. Only the Heads must come. It's not even recommended for lesser employees to come, but Percy is waiting for a promotion. Not going would be inexcusable.

"Then just look at the drawing. She's named it crimson."

Percy takes a glance at the drawing hung up on the wall, only slightly curious. It vaguely resembles two people hugging, limbs intricately mixed within one another, but mainly, he just sees a great splodge of red.

It's confusing, and he doesn't understand his daughter's need to give colours complicated names. She's constantly sending him rainbows of colours to his work. He doesn't quite know what she's expecting of him. But that's a worry for another time.


Lucy sighs in frustration. It's May. The professors have started to explain what the exams at the end of the year will consist of. Currently, the Alchemy teacher is going on about elements and their uses, but Lucy is completely lost, as usual. It'll take her two more hours tonight to understand whatever has been going on this lesson. For the moment, she's just stupidly copying down whatever he's writing on the board, hoping it will make more sense later one.

She had spent the last Summer holidays writing letter after letter to Headmistress McGonagall as to why they should accept her in Alchemy, an extremely demanding subject that required almost perfect Transfiguration and Potions techniques, but that brought a ridiculous amount of prestige. The professor had been very reluctant to let her try, but Lucy had begged and begged.

She didn't even particularly want to do Alchemy, but she knew her father would be proud if she managed. And manage, she barely did, scraping by with difficultly earned A and the far too recurring P.

Right now, she'd rather be in the Art Room again, finishing the watercolour she's started. It's peach. Not quite yellow, not quite orange. Just peach. Her mind is constantly alive with all the things she could include in it. Her imagination is wild as she comes up with all the different creatures and beings she could add to the already heavy menagerie in the paper.

"Miss Weasley, could you remind us of the Six Main properties of Earth?" the teacher calls, snapping her out of her daze.

She quickly scans the board and her paper. Nothing about Earth there. Lucy desperately searches her memory, but nothing comes.

"Umm…" she stammers.

The teacher gives her a disappointed look and Lucy shrinks and begins to fear. Hopefully, he wouldn't write it on her report, or her father would read it and he would be so disappointed.

"Mr Caretin, then."

Lucy bows her head down in shame. Getting fabulous grades in Alchemy would've gotten her father's attention, for sure. But she's failed again. She tries to concentrate on the lesson, but her thoughts are back to peaches and animals and watercolours.


Then, one day, Percy realises something. It's after an endless day at work. The years just seem to stretch one into another, each one just as bland as the one before it. And that's when it hits him, just as he steps out of the floo in his house.

Where did the years go? He realises he's an old man now, slightly over 50 and still at the same place as when he was just 20. Thirty years and he's never stopped to enjoy the time being. After finally managing to reconcile with his family, he turned to helping rebuild the Ministry. It had been, after all a job he loved. Then he started to build his own family, but only to let it down. Audrey knew what she was getting when she married him, and being absolutely independent, it had suited her just fine. Molly, his eldest took after her mother, but Lucy…

The realisation is absolutely crushing.

And all that because of the drawing lying on the table in the kitchen.

It's a drawing of him.

In yellow.

Yellow against white. You almost can't see it because of how faint it is, but clearly, it's him. At his desk, working and in such detail, it looks like a picture, but only yellow.

Unlike so many of her other creations, this one is of him. The rest are filled with figments of her imagination, random compositions that seem to make only sense to her, or crazy realism that represent things he couldn't possibly understand the point of. And yet, he still sees himself in all of them. Not quite as clean as in the masterpiece presented in front of him, but still.

The wave of guilt drowns him.

"Oh, so you saw her drawing?" Audrey comes in and takes a sip of her mug of tea. The house is eerily quiet, and Percy can only hear the stream of his thoughts.

"Yes," he lets out as a shaky breath.

Audrey only looks him in the eyes and reads everything going on in his mind.

"You should probably go see her," she prompts softly, a small smile forming at the corner of her lips.

The creak in the stairs startles Lucy. She's still working on the stupid Alchemy. After all, if she's hoping to pass her NEWTs in June, there's still a lot to do. But the creak isn't normal. Mum only comes up later, she knows. So, who could it possibly be? Her father? No. She dismisses the thought.

But when there is a soft knock at her door and a greying red head peaks through, she immediately sits up a little straighter. What is he doing here? A bundle of emotions course through her. Fear, joy, nervousness, panic, excitement? She can't tell. Her father's never been in her room.

"Dad?" she asks tentatively.

"Lucy," he says. And it's like the first time he's ever said her name. And maybe it is.

"Yes?" Her voice is almost needy, pleading. Is this what she's hoping for, or just another disappointment? She's standing up now.

He scratches his neck sheepishly. This is clearly uncomfortable for him. "Umm… how do I say this?"

Confusion. Lucy doesn't understand what's going on.

"I think I have some explaining to do."

She still doesn't say anything, hanging on his every word.

"No," he gives little laugh, it's such an unnatural sound for Lucy to hear coming from him, she's not sure she's ever heard him laugh, "I couldn't possibly explain this."

"You can always try," she offers tentatively and offers him to sit on her bed.

"Merlin, this was easier in the middle of a battle," he tells her. Lucy knows what he's talking about, when he courageously raced into the battle of Hogwarts to help his family. She's heard the tale many times.

"Yes?" Needy. Too needy.

"I've let you down, Lucy. In so many ways I can't even being to list them."

"N- " she starts, but is cut.

"Don't try to dismiss it. It's true. Family and me, it's always been something difficult. I've done it once, and yet I'm doing it again. And while letting down your mother and father is expected, your child is inexcusable."

"Are you, are you, apologising?"

"For not being a good parent? Absolutely. I've been the worst parent ever."

"No you haven't!"

"Oh Lucy, darling." Darling. Lucy feels the tears come to her eyes. All her life she has hoped this. "I saw the drawing."

"The drawing?" She takes a moment to understand and then blushes. "Oh."

"It's magnificent. All of them; Every single thing you've ever made is absolutely marvellous. And I've only just realised it."

"You have?"

"Yes. I hope you can forgive me for how I've been to you all this time."

"Of c-"

"No, I need to earn your forgiveness, Lucy. I've abandoned you in all your childhood. And you made the most fabulous drawings and paintings for me, and I never realised."

"Oh."

"I love you, my darling child."

"I just… thank you." Lucy is overwhelmed with emotion. This is finally coming true. All her efforts to please her father finally making sense.

"It's what I'm here for, or at least what I'm supposed to be here for." He pauses. "And art, let that be you, don't do anything just because you feel I would want it."

"Art? Not, alchemy?"

"Give up on Alchemy.

"Really?"

"Yes. You don't need it."

Lucy reaches up to give him a hug. It's marvellous. Finally.

Percy agrees. How could he have left Lucy on her own all these years? But now he'll work on it, work for her forgiveness, to deserve the love he's seen in all her beautiful art, work on becoming a better person, not to waste his third chance at family.


"Wanna try to paint the world in a new way?" she suggests.

"Of course, darling," he smiles back.


It's called Ruby Red. It's a heart. Two hearts.

But it's also called Family.


FOR ILVERMORNY SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY

House: Wampus

For September Assignment: No-Maj Culture, Task #4 – write about someone creative

Bonus prompts: 10) [colour] violet


FOR HOGWARTS SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY

House: Ravenclaw

For assignment #4: Poetry – Task #2 – write about someone having a wild imagination

For gobstones club: Silver stone – creation – 20) Navy blue – 18) Cherry red – 2) Lucy Weasley

For writing club; character appreciation: 6) guilt

For writing club; showtime: 2) Ruby Red

For writing club; lizzy's loft: 11) Audrey Weasley

For writing club; angel's archives: 4) crimson

For writing club; scamander's case: 3) confused

For writing club; tv spree: 11) trying to become a better person

For writing club; forecast: 18th) explaining something

For writing club; lyric alley: 7) "Wanna paint the world in a new way?"

For like a skyscraper: Floor 2 – 10) Cream

For founder says: Helga says 4) "I just… Thank you." / "That's what I'm here for."

For pick a wick: 3) yellow

For build a better breakfast: 12) Peach