"Ahh, a perfect day for quidditch." George Weasley said to no one in particular as he spread his arms wide and leaned back in his seat. It was not, in fact, a good day for quidditch. The rain had been coming down in sheets all morning and the sky was resolutely grey.
It was just him at Hogwarts today—Bill and Fleur hadn't wanted to come out in the rain, Ginny and Harry were both busy with work, Angelina was going out to lunch with her sister, and Roxy hadn't wanted to come.
Sometimes he came to these matches with a tray of shop merchandise to sell, which was always a hit with students who were too young for Hogsmeade, but today he hadn't brought that. McGonagall was still mad at him for helping Lucy whack a bludger into the commentator's tower, and he didn't want to risk her ire again.
He leaned forward to watch the match, mostly interested in how Freddie was holding up against older and more experienced players. George himself had been quite lucky to make the house team as a second year alongside Fred, may he rest in peace. The whole thing had been due to unusual circumstances—one beater had been kicked off the team because his grades were poor and the other was moving to Brazil, resulting in Gryffindor suddenly being short two beaters. The Weasley twins tried out and the rest was history. Whether the stars would align for Freddie in a similar way remained to be seen.
Gryffindor house had two good beaters, both sixth years. Then they had two reserve beaters, Melissa Ferguson and Andrew Delp. Melissa was playing today, alongside that new girl, Lucy Prewett. Lucy was looking much improved from the last time he'd seen her. She looked more confident on a broom and her swings were more powerful. With her red ponytail streaming behind her, she reminded him just a little bit of Ginny. Yes, Dominique had found herself an excellent young friend.
The match ended when Team Red caught the snitch. George looked down at the pitch, wondering if he should go down and say hi to Freddie or if he should go straight home and change into dry clothes. No, he was already soaked. A few more minutes outside wouldn't hurt. He hurried down to the pitch.
"Uncle George!" Dominique was running toward him. "Uncle George, did you see all the goals I scored?"
"Dad!" Freddie was hot on Dominique's heels. "Did you see when I hit Dom with the bludger?"
"Yes and yes." George laughed.
"I'm gonna have such an awful bruise from that!" Dominique whined.
"Bruises are a part of the game." George said matter-of-factly. "As long as no one's bones are removed by an incompetent professor, all's well." They all laughed, remembering the story they'd been told about poor Uncle Harry.
"Uncle George!" James had arrived, clutching his broomstick and limping dramatically.
"What's happened to you?"
"Prewett whacked me in the ankle with a bludger."
"For Merlin's sake, Potter, I didn't hit you that hard!" Lucy Prewett was standing behind him.
"That's genuinely impressive, Miss Prewett." George said. "The ankle requires a very precise hit, much more so than a back or a shoulder. That means you're improving."
She beamed. "Thank you, Mr. Weasley! That's very kind of you to say. Though I'm afraid I only annoyed James. Freddie played well and he made Dominique drop the quaffle when he got her with that bludger."
George smiled ruefully and turned to clap Freddie on the back and congratulate him on a great match as Lucy made to put her gear away. But even as Freddie began hashing out the play-by-play of the match, George kept one eye on Lucy. There was something vaguely familiar about her, about the way she spoke, a frank manner that was overly formal for a kid her age. If George didn't know better he'd say he'd met her before, but that was impossible. He'd only talked to her once previously, about quidditch. Oh, this was going to drive him crazy until he figured it out.
He stood there and listened to Freddie for a good twenty minutes, listening as Dominique and James butted in to give their side of it. Eventually, though, they all grew tired of standing there in the rain and he informed Freddie that he had better be going. "Besides," he added, "I'm sure you have homework to do."
"Dad!" Freddie whined.
"School is important, son."
"You're a dropout, though!"
"Freddie, if I'd dropped out my first year, I wouldn't have been able to start a joke shop. Besides, I've got to get home so that your mum can fill me in on all the details of her lunch with your Aunt Candace. Bye Freddie. Bye James, bye Dom. I'll see you lot in a few weeks for Parents' Night."
Lucy had reappeared now, without her protective gear. "Dom, are you coming? Raagavi told me she was going to secure the good armchairs in the common room and we can all study together, but you've got to change quickly before the chairs get taken."
"Ok ok fine." Dominique muttered. James and Freddie had already scampered away toward the locker room. "Actually, what if I just failed this potions essay?"
"Dom, no!"
"Yeah yeah, your dad's gonna kill you if you get anything less than twelve O.W.L.s, blah blah blah, we have to study." Dominique guffawed and threw an arm around Lucy's shoulder. "Good thing you fell in with us and we can show you how to have fun. You had no chance of that while growing up with good ol' Ignatius Prewett, the Fun Police!" They laughed and teetered back towards the locker rooms.
George watched them go, frozen to the spot. Had Dominique really just given him the answer to a decades-old family mystery, here on the rain-soaked quidditch pitch? Red hair, freckles. A frank manner that felt familiar, yet George had been unable to place. Ignatius Prewett. Shit.
. . . . . . . . . . .
George did not go home. He sent a patronus to Angelina explaining that he'd been caught up with something at the shop, then headed straight to Bill's house. He needed to talk to someone, but not his parents. He couldn't get their hopes up like that if he turned out to be wrong, so he turned to his oldest brother instead.
He apparated there, appearing just outside the property line with a faint pop. It was raining here too, with not a hint of sun in the sky. The waves of the grey ocean crashed sullenly on the beach. Bill was wearing a rain coat and working on his hands and knees in the garden, pulling up weeds and muttering to himself. "Oi, Bill!" George yelled, coming closer.
"What?" Bill turned around. "Does nobody in this family bother with asking before they come over?"
"I need to talk to you." George said.
"Oh." Evidently George's tone had shaken up Bill. "Are you ok? Are Angelina and the kids ok?"
George nodded. "Everyone's fine—sorry to scare you. It's not that something bad has happened, it's that something very confusing has happened. Can—can we talk out here? I don't want anyone overhearing us right now."
Bill nodded. "Fleur's inside. She hates being out in the rain. Louis is at a friend's house. So what's going on?"
"It all started when I went to one of those pick-up quidditch matches our kids like to play in. You were at the first one of the year, right? Anyway, after that match I met one of Freddie's teammates, a girl named Lucy Prewett who's learning how to be a beater. Dominique made friends with this girl and wanted me to show her a few beater tips, so I showed her a couple things. She's not bad as a beater but she needs some more training. I think if she could just practice a Fenton drill—"
"You interrupted my gardening to tell me that your son has a friend who plays beater?"
"No!" George said. "Keep listening. Your daughter's friends with this girl too, you know. This is important. Anyway, I give her a few tips and then I leave, thinking nothing of it. I went again today and said hi to the kids after the match. Lucy comes over and asks Dominique if they can study together later. Dominique's complaining like Dominique does—"
"Believe me, I know how much she complains."
"But then she throws her arm around Lucy and makes a crack about Lucy's dad—her exact words were something like, 'Good ol' Ignatius Prewett, Fun Police.'"
Bill gasped, just like George hoped he would. Bill hadn't gotten twelve O.W.L.s for nothing. "Ignatius Prewett. Shit."
"That's exactly what I said!"
"Do you really think it's him?" Bill asked.
"I mean, who else could it be? The Prewetts were all but wiped out during the first war, so there aren't many of them. And Ignatius isn't exactly in the top one hundred baby names."
"It's not proof, though." Bill said. "It's not proof. There could be a bloke out there who's simply named Ignatius Prewett. We need to be absolutely sure that's him before we do anything rash. And proof's going to be hard to find."
George put his hands on his hips. "What do you suppose we do? We keep telling you, you're the idea guy. Charlie and Ginny are jocks, Ron and I are school dropouts."
"I don't know." Bill sighed. "I don't know. But what I do know is that we need to handle this carefully. Does anyone else know that you know?"
"No."
"Right. So there's the two of us. There's Mum and Dad to think about, there's Percy, there's Lucy . . . oh Merlin. George, there's an innocent child caught in the center of this whole mess. She doesn't even know that her last name isn't supposed to be Prewett! Do you think she has any inkling?"
George shook his head. "She was very polite. Addressed me as "Mr. Weasley" the entire time. I don't think she knows anything. Funny, it was her politeness that first got me thinking. She seemed so familiar, but I couldn't place it. It wasn't until Dominque name-dropped Ignatius Prewett that it made sense—Percy was the same damn way as a kid."
"She doesn't know." Bill stroked his chin thoughtfully. "She doesn't know, and her whole world is going to come crashing down when she finds out. We can't let her find out what we're up to. And we certainly can't just walk up to this Lucy girl and be like, 'excuse me, is your dad's name really Percy Weasley?' We need to be careful."
"DNA test?" George supplied. "We get Dom to steal a hair out of this girl's comb, then Dad probably knows a muggle lab we could send it to—"
"George, be serious."
"I am being serious!"
"We could attend every pick-up quidditch match for the rest of the year." Bill said. "He's got to come to at least one of them."
"He doesn't know she plays quidditch. She said she's not even allowed a broom at home."
"Really?" Bill's brow wrinkled. "Not even a broom?"
"Not even a broom. We could ask for a picture of her dad." George said. "Or we could wait until Christmas break, then try to catch her family on the platform."
"Wait, that could work."
"What, stalking people at the platform? Because I was kind of joking with that one."
"Not that, the picture idea." Bill said. "We could get a picture of her dad. That would be pretty solid proof."
"What if he changed his appearance by magic?"
"There's a spell for that." Bill said. "Hermione was telling me about a spell someone's developed where you cast it on a photograph and it can show you if anyone in the photograph is using magic to alter their appearance. She tested it on a photo of Teddy and it turned his hair from pink to brown. This could work."
"How do we get a photo, though?" George mused. "We can't just walk in like, 'hello child, we are these two random adult men you don't know and we want a photo of your dad for perfectly normal and benign reasons.'"
"We could lie." Bill suggested.
"Ooh!" George rubbed his palms together. "My straight-laced big brother, lying? I like this new development!"
Bill sighed. "I'm ok with lying if it's for a good reason! Look, Mum's maiden name is Prewett. We could lie and say we're doing some family history research. Maybe . . . maybe we can lie and say that Mum had a third cousin twice removed named Ignatius Prewett, and we're just curious whether Lucy's dad is that same bloke! Plus we could send a letter to Victoire or Dominique and ask them to get a photo for us. It sounds like Lucy is friends with my girls, and she would probably trust them more than she would trust us. Oh, George, this could work! I'll start working on a letter to the girls."
"Ok." George said. "You know, I think this idea really does have potential!"
"Don't say a word to anyone, until we get that photo." Bill said. "You can't tell Mum. If we're wrong, and we've gotten her hopes up for nothing . . ."
"I know that." George said. "Why do you think I came here, instead of to Mum and Dad?"
Bill nodded. "We'll cross that bridge when we get to it. First we need to figure out if it's really him, then we think about what to say to Mum and Dad." He leaned back against the fence. "I never thought we'd actually find him. Did you?"
"I'd always dreamed about it, but never thought it would happen. I think Mum is the only one who seriously held out hope that we'd find him. And now that it's actually happened, I have no idea what we're supposed to do. Do we try to talk to him? Do we tell Mum and Dad? Do we drag him back kicking and screaming? Do we try to get to know his daughter, and also the woman he presumably knocked up? Dear Merlin, that mental image. Do we—"
"Hey." Bill put a hand on George's shoulder. "You're thinking quite big-picture. Let's take it one step at a time. First, let's just focus on writing to the girls, then we go from there, ok?"
"While you write to the girls, what should I do?"
"Do whatever it is you need to do to blow off some steam. I don't know, make some sort of evil concoction or . . . actually, I don't want to know whatever it is you do to blow off steam."
"I'll probably ask Ron if he's available to play quidditch with me." George said. "Whacking bludgers at one's little brother does wonders for stress."
"Right." Bill muttered. "I'll write to . . . I'll write to Victoire. I love Dominique, but Victoire is going to handle this more responsibly. I'll let you know when I get that letter sent off."
George nodded. "Were you aware, by the way, that she is dating Teddy? Because I was not, until the first Hogsmeade weekend when I overheard Dominique teasing her about snogging him in the library."
"I was aware." Bill smiled. "Spotted them holding hands on the platform before the train left. I know I always said I planned to scare off any potential suitors for my daughters, but I like Teddy. Fleur says they are—what was it? Tres mignon."
Author's note: the plot thickens!