Author's note: we're back! I had writers' block with this story for quite a while and this chapter required several rewrites before I was satisfied.

Ignatius went to the Burrow the next day. He didn't let anyone know he was coming beforehand—to send a patronus or an owl would mean he couldn't back out. This way if he lost his nerve he could simply slip away.

He wasn't sure why he was coming back here. After all, he'd once declared he would never return here, never speak to any of them again. But that time was long ago, and it almost felt like someone else's life. He was more curious than anything else, nosy and eager to find out what had happened in his absence. He apparated into the back garden, then drifted toward the house. He thought he'd managed to cut all ties by moving away, changing his name, and cutting contact, but perhaps family ties were not so easily cut. There was an invisible cord wrapped around his ankle, and now it was yanking him back here.

He'd expected a flood of unpleasant memories to wash over him the minute he stepped through the door, but that didn't happen. The house had changed too in the intervening years. There was new wallpaper, the wooden floors had been refinished, and the pictures on the walls had been rearranged. The old couch was still there, but one of the blue armchairs now had a large green stain on it. The other one was gone, having been replaced with a yellow wingback chair. In short, the house was no longer his. It had shifted away, now apparently a place ruled by a new generation.

"Percy?" His mother appeared in the kitchen doorway. "Oh, Percy!" She ran toward him and hugged him. He made no move to hug her back, standing there stupefied while she sobbed into his shirt. "What are you doing here? We thought you'd never come back!"

He pulled away. "I don't know. I . . ." there were no easy words that could be conjured up to explain that his wife might be leaving him, that everything was crumbling, and that this was the only place he knew that would never crumble. He pulled away from her and sat down on the couch.

"What brings you here, seriously?" Molly asked. "Not that—not that you have to explain yourself, I'm just surprised you're here, is all."

"I ran into Ginny yesterday."

"Right, she told me about that. How did it go?"

Ignatius shrugged. "It went ok. She got a bit drunk and then got existential about whether a broken world can heal itself. Then she said I should talk to you. Then we went back and forth about whether I missed you lot."

"Well, we have missed you." Molly said. "So what exactly did you want to talk to me about?"

"I don't know, exactly. She encouraged me to talk to you, but she didn't say what about."

"Well, I would love to hear what you've been up to all this time. Of course you don't have to explain if you don't want to, but—"

"No, no, it's fine." He launched into his story, starting with the day he'd left the house in 1998. Those events were so long ago that they seemed foreign now, like events he'd borrowed from someone else's story. He continued into more familiar territory—how Martin had set him up with Audrey, their wedding, Lucy, little Molly. The girls' childhoods, the fact that Lucy's letter had snuck up on him. Then their decision to homeschool Lucy, how badly that had blown up in his face, then how they'd sent her off to Hogwarts. "And you know the rest." he finished. It felt good to get all of it off his chest. "But what I don't understand is how you lot found out. I thought it was Lucy who did the figuring out, but how could she know? I need answers."

"No, it was George who did the figuring out." Molly said. "He visited the kids after a quidditch match where he overheard Dominique making a crack about Lucy's dad—something about Ignatius Prewett being the Fun Police."

There were so many things he wanted to say—who was Dominique, since when was he Fun Police—but he settled on the most pressing. "My daughter's playing quidditch? I specifically told her no! It's too dangerous!"

"And I expressly forbade Ginny from playing quidditch on the same grounds—too dangerous—and look where she is now." Molly said. "Eight-year run with the Holyhead Harpies, two league championships, and now she's a quidditch reporter for the Daily Prophet. But I'm getting off track here. Anyway, George overheard that and went to Bill. They decided to send a letter to Bill's daughter Victoire, telling her to ask Lucy for a family photo under the guise of doing family history research. She was able to get a photo from Lucy and, well, the rest is history."

"So you all decided ganging up on me at Parents' Night was a good move instead of, you know, talking to me."

"You'd said you didn't want contact." Molly dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. "George has a kid at Hogwarts, Bill has two at Hogwarts. They were going to be there, like it or not. Now, your father and I definitely overstepped at Parents' Night, I'll admit that. All we wanted was to know that you were ok."

"I'm fine." Percy snapped.

"There's a lot of gray area between 'not dead' and 'fine!' You're right, we shouldn't have come, but I couldn't pass up a chance to see you."

"You just can't leave well enough alone, can you? I spend most of my childhood with everyone making fun of me, everyone calling me Pompous Prefect Percy, no one thinks I got that promotion on my own merit and no one is willing to so much as hear me out, then after all is said and done with the war you lot decide you'd have been better off with me dead instead of Fred! Can you blame me for not wanting contact? And then after all of that you decide to come barging into Parents' Night! As if you haven't done enough"

He broke off. Molly was crying silently, tears streaming down her face. Softening his voice, he continued. "How could you forgive Dad? After he said something like that, how could you stand by him and forgive him?"

"I haven't forgiven him." Molly said in a low voice. "What makes you think I have? It's been seventeen years and I haven't forgiven him. I haven't forgiven him for the Ford Anglia incident either, since that almost killed Ron and Harry. I have simply learned to live with it."

"But why? How can you sleep next to him at night."

"I have lost a lot of people in my life." Molly folded her arms. "I lost two brothers in the first war and two sons in the second, along with countless friends. I've been married to your father for forty-six years. I couldn't lose him too." She dried her tears and continued talking. "I don't agree with what he said and will never forgive him for it. Yet I find that I still love him. I didn't forgive George or Charlie for how they spoke to you, and I still love them. You will perhaps never see eye-to-eye with me again, but I still love you."

"But how—never mind." Ignatius sighed. This was a sort of emotional complexity only women seemed capable of.

"That's where I stand." Molly said. "I will always love you, and you are always welcome to come here. Whether you choose to is up to you. Of course, I would love to reach out and drag you back, but I won't. Let me know if you'd like Christmas sweaters for the girls. I still have time before Christmas."

"So that's it?" Ignatius asked, slightly stunned. His mother was now speaking to him in the dry tone of a supermarket cashier! And the Molly Weasley he knew had never asked before making someone a Christmas sweater. "You're pushing me away? Just like that?"

"I'm not pushing you away. I'm letting you go."

"Ah, of course." Ignatius muttered. "It couldn't be that anyone actually wants me in their life, can it? My wife contemplating divorce, my daughter said she never wants to see me again, Bill made me his own personal punching bag, even Ginny held me at arms' length, and now you of all people are pushing me away! This is the one place in the world where I thought things made sense, and now even this place doesn't make sense!"

"I'm not pushing you away." Molly said, gently but firmly. "I'm giving you a choice. Dragging you back into the family won't help anyone. If you would like to start talking us again, bring the girls around, that's wonderful. If you don't, there's no hard feelings. You were upset when we ambushed you at Parents' Night. I'm trying not freak you out again."

"Really? You, of all people, are just letting me go?"

Molly nodded. "If you love something, you don't put it in a cage. Took me years—years and years and years—to learn that."

Ignatius looked down at his lap, trying to hide the anger in his eyes. "It would just be nice if someone in my life actively wanted me around."

Molly's eyes narrowed. "What's going on with your wife?"

He quickly explained the terrible three-way argument between the Smith siblings, then the talk he'd had with Audrey afterwards. "In short, she's mad at me and I have no idea if she wants to divorce me or not."

"Oh boy." Molly muttered. "I see where you were coming from, but I'm not going to lie, I might have done that if I were in her shoes."

"Ginny told me the same thing!" Ignatius said, exasperated. "She asked me to imagine Harry having six siblings she never knew about. Which I must admit, the idea of that is genuinely off-putting. Everything I did, I did to protect her, and she refuses to see that! And now she's on the fence about everything, and I don't know what to do. My entire life is coming apart!"

"Who else knows about the state of your marriage?" Molly asked.

"Ginny. And Audrey's siblings. Her sister Jane, whom I have never liked, tried to imply that I was some sort of dangerous weirdo for lying about my identity. Ginny says I should have just told her the truth from the beginning, but it's too late for that now, isn't it? I have no clear path forward."

"You can try apologizing." Molly said. "Explain that your intentions were good, but that you ultimately made the wrong choice. Help her understand that you weren't trying to cause a problem."

"What if she won't accept my apology? I'm a goner."

"I don't know what happens after you apologize." Molly admitted. "I don't know your wife well enough to guess at that. All I can say is that you need to explain your intentions, apologize for where you went wrong, and commit to never repeating that behavior."

"I was just trying to protect her."

Molly nodded. "When you were three years old our neighbors up the road, the Wallenbys, were murdered by death eaters."

"Ok."

"They were muggles. Their son was in his fifth year in Hogwarts at the time. He stayed with us the next two summers, I don't know if you remember—we still get Christmas cards from him every year. Anyway, I'm getting off track. Your dad didn't tell me, and I found out from the Daily Prophet. You know why he didn't tell me? Said he wanted to protect me. Said I had enough on my plate with five kids—the twins had just learned to walk, and they were getting into everything. You want to know how I reacted?"

"How did you react?"

"I was livid. I was incensed that your father had kept it from me. It was a murder just up the road and I would want to know! I told him that we were equal partners in this marriage, and that I need to know exactly what we were up against to help protect the children. I think I scared him a little, but he got the message. He never kept that sort of thing from me again."

"So what's the moral of the story?" Ignatius asked. "That my wife ought to scream at me for keeping things from her?"

"No, just that she probably didn't appreciate how you kept it from her." Molly said. "And I'm sorry, but I have no idea what comes next for you two."

"Great. So much for getting advice from someone with more life experience than me." Ignatius slumped back against the couch, disappointed. The Burrow held no more answers for him than his clean, orderly home in Surrey. Silence fell, broken when his mother asked, "What about your daughter?"

Ignatius leaned forward until his head was between his knees. "Oh no, no, no, no. I haven't even thought about her! I've been so consumed with my own problems, I didn't even think about her!" He remembered how she'd run from him at Parents' Night. "I've ruined her. I've ruined my little girl."

"You haven't ruined her." Molly said softly. "At least, I hope not. At times it can be quite difficult to ruin a child. At other times it's frighteningly easy."

"I don't even know how to talk to her. I have no idea what to say. Audrey says Lucy's like me—too stubborn for her own good."

He looked up just in time to see Molly's face twist into a half-smile. "Oh. Oh, I see. I see."

"What is it?"

"Oh, if I didn't love you as much, I'd have you go ask your father for advice. He has some experience in this area."

She continued talking, but he didn't hear a word she said. The realization that washed over him was powerful enough to drown out everything else. Was his mother right, had he accidentally mirrored his own father's life path?

He'd spent his entire adult life trying not to be like his father. The Weasleys had too many children, while the Prewetts had stopped after a reasonable two. The Weasley house was messy and cluttered and noisy, while the Prewett household was clean and tidy. Half the Weasleys had dropped out of school, while the Prewett girls were destined for twelve N.E.W.T.s each.

But the similarities were hard to ignore. The war had ruined everything, ruined him. He'd been so desperate to avoid repeating the past that in his fervor he'd pushed Lucy away. Like Oedipus, he'd circled back around to the fate he'd tried so hard to escape. Intentions be damned, the outcome was much the same: Lucy wanted nothing to do with him. He'd said and done things that had cut her to the core, and she might walk away and never return. Worse still, he couldn't blame her if she did.

Suddenly everything was clear, reflected before him in horrible symmetry:

I'm not going to lie, sometimes I think things would be easier if you had died instead.

Everything would be easier if you were more like your sister.

Well, Father, if it means that much to you—never fucking talk to me again.

Go away. I never want to see you again!

Not knowing what else to do, he curled into a ball on the couch and wept.