06.25.2003

***

You saw a photograph of the Burrow once. You don't do much reading outside of your professional books and what you have to read to stay abreast in your field, but there was some sort of publication on wizarding houses that one of the other professors had left on the table in the faculty lunch room, and it was open to a page on the old Stapleton house. A black and white of the front lawn and the old oak trees underneath a hot June sun.

You do not have happy memories of your childhood. People like you don't: your life was a steady, grinding sort of misery from before you even set foot in Hogwarts, but you do remember visiting this Stapleton house on a blazing summer day like that. You remember staying in the shade of those oak trees because the sun was too hot on your robes, and you remember the sound the grass made underneath your shoes when you walked back inside. There hadn't been a drought that summer, but it was nevertheless dry, and the grass on that lawn was cropped very short, so it was very stiff underneath your shoes.

This entire Stapleton memory of yours is dry and deserted, much like this photograph. There are no faces looking out of the windows on the second floor of the house in that picture; there is no-one standing in the doorway, and there aren't even any open doors or uncurtained windows just as there is nobody else in the memory you have of this place besides you.

Years later, there is no-one else in the faculty room to see you, just as there was no-one there to watch you walk up that lawn during that summer, so you lift up the pages of this book to see if all of your other memories of other wizarding houses are correct.

***

There have been Weasleys at Hogwarts ever since there were Weasleys in England, but you did not teach the first of this Weasley batch. You have vague memories of the second since you only saw him for a year or two; he wasn't particularly distinguished at classes, and you don't even really remember Percy, although you most certainly have reason to remember him since you not only taught him for the full seven years that he was at Hogwarts, but he was also prefect and Head Boy, and you saw him give his reports to the faculty. You even vaguely remember reprimanding him will he was a Head Boy for the punishment that he gave to some student or the other, but Percy Weasley didn't much leave an impression on you otherwise. His primary quality towards teachers was enthusiasm, and enthusiasm doesn't leave much of a mark on you.

He doesn't seem particularly energetic or enthusiastic, though, when you meet him again some years later.

Very pale in the darkness of the cave, and probably looking about as sallow as you do in that sort of damp air. He's standing next to Voldemort up on his dais -- you'd heard of his defection from his family for Fudge, of course, but you hadn't realized how deep the treachery had gone until you saw Nagini pass from Voldemort's arms down the side of his throne to wrap around Percy Weasley's legs, her tongue touching his knees underneath his Ministry robes.

You didn't even recognize him immediately. There was an odd sort of green light in the cavern, and it washed out the red of his hair; the shadows made the features of his face indistinguishable, and what you were really looking at was Pettigrew whimpering and cowering and creeping around the sides of the room, skulking behind a stalagmite every once in a while and with the green lights glittering on his silver hand. He would sort of curl his shoulders forward every now and then and give Voldemort's new favorite contemptous sneering glances, but fearfully. When you notice that he has stains of old, dried running down his face -- from eye socket to jawbone -- you almost trip over a bump in the floor when you bent down to kiss the ground in front of Voldemort, though, and it's Percy Weasley's fingers on your chin raising you up to look at scale-smooth old face of evil.

"I am very fond of the Weasley family," the Dark Lord says to you as you feel Weasley's fingers so far under your jaw that they're not even touching bone anymore but rather, curling slightly into the bottom of your mouth so that if you swallow, he will feel it on his fingers.

You imagine you can feel the individual little bumps of his fingertips against your tongue from the underside, and Weasley gives your head another jerk, to the side, because you've been sort of pulling your head back down because you can't quite manage to keep your eyes on Voldemort so steady, and instead, what Percy does then, while Nagini is hissing around his ankles and reaching out for you even as she has her tail wrapped around Voldemort's wrist -- what Percy does then is pull up the sleeve of his left arm so that you can see the Dark Mark against the pale underside of his forearm.

You look at the mark with the white flesh of Percy's skin where the eyes ought to be, and you can hear Pettigrew whimpering and making fearful little noises behind you. You remember him making noises like that back when you were students together. You can feel the uneven cave floor underneath your feet, and Percy say something in a lazy tone of voice that you don't quite catch, but Voldemort says, in very clear, very distinct tones. "Percy is my most loyal servant."

Later, you find out that Voldemort transferred the Mark off his own arm onto Weasley's skin, and that he had Percy offer his Mark out for Pettigrew to kiss. Pettigrew was hesitant and had to be commanded to do it, though he pretended to be all enthusiasm in order to put it off.

When he finally did, the snake on the Mark rose up out of Percy's skin and sunk its fangs into Pettigrew's traitorous tongue. Voldemort forbade anyone from treating Pettigrew, and his tongue stayed swollen and black in his mouth, tongue swollen with the blood trapped in the dying blood vessels. You learn that those odd little whimpering noises were the only ones he could make, and you sit by Pettigrew's bed when he goes to his final, blood-swollen end later that night, when his whole boyd is puffed up with rotting corpsucles and he's trying to sob with that dead-weight tongue of his -- you don't know any of this, though, when you press your lips to Percy Weasley's forearm.

Then, at that point, you just hear Voldemort give a sort of pleased noise. He says something about his two favorite wizards being together again. You can't make out the words clearly, but what you do feel clearly is his hand come to rest on the back of your head as you move your lips to the back of Percy Weasley's hand, and the feel of Nagini across your skin as she winds around you, too.

***

There are a number of pictures of the Burrow in the book on wizarding houses that you pick up. It's one of the classic examples, apparently, of a Muggle house being taken over and cleverly expanded upon and refitted to meet the needs of wizards, and it has wizarding space crammed into every board and closet and nook and cranny. To feed the family, the soil in the garden has so much magic dug into it that it serves like a lodestone, attracting wild fairies who come and sit in the tops of the trees during the summer nights.

The largest picture of the Burrow, though, is taken during the day. The material for the book was apparently collected all during the summer because all of the Weasley children are in it, along with Mrs. Weasley who looks a little harried and who keeps smoothing her hair down in the picture. There are a miscellany of house-hold animals running around her. A few fairies flitting around, three or four knee and hip-high children, including two boys that look absolutely alike. While Snape watches, the two identical looking boys pull the hair of a taller, slightly older-looking boy. The house is in the background, ridiculously top-heavy and with chickens flying around the roof; Mrs. Weasley belts each of the identical looking boys on the head with her hand, then freezes them in place with her wand. The taller, older boy then snuggles up tight next to her.

Mrs Weasleywraps an arm around his shoulders. Everybody holds still for a moment -- Mrs. Weasley in the middle. The twins off at the edge of the picture, faces stuck in identical grimaces of annoyance; one of them manages to get un-stuck long enough to stick his tongue out at you while you look at the photograph. A boy standing between them and Mrs. Weasley. A little girl who looks like she's just out of toddler-dom down in the grass by Mrs. Weasley's feet, and Percy Weasley with his arms around his mother and her beaming at the camera like there is no thing in the world happier to be than covered with flower and poverty, with your youngest child at your feet and with the arms of your third son around your waist.

Enthusiasm, you remember thinking as you looked at the picture.

Percy Weasley tells you, with a lazy sort of smile on his face, at some point later during your visit to the cave -- Weasley tells you that Dumbledore is under the impression that he is actually working as a triple-agent for the Order.

***

"I always hated you while you taught me, you know. I didn't like the way you applied the rules only some of the time and only to people that you didn't like," Percy says to you later, as you're down in the bottom cave working on a healing potion for one of the other Death Eaters staying in these caves that got bitten by one of the enormous poisonous spiders that live even farther in the depths.

Percy is sitting on a stool at the big stone slab that serves as your preparation table. He has the front of his robes unbuttoned so that the buttons turn and catch the firelight every time he moves, and you can see them moving out of the corner of your eye as you set down the stirring rod and wipe your hands on the front of your preparation smock to let the potion simmer for a good hour or so.

You come to the big stone where all the herbs are piled up. You reach behind you to untie the strings of the apron, and you look at the edge of Weasley's fingers on the table while you pull the apron off of you. "I thought you had defected from your family for the Ministry," you say to him, then, as you fold the stiff leather into quarters, careful to handle only the underside because the potion you've been working with is corrosive. You've had burned fingers more than once from touching a preparation apron on the work side, and you're not wearing any gloves right now. You didn't know that you'd be working with potions when Voldemort summoned you, and you didn't bring any of your equipment. Everything you're using has been scrounged and scraped together -- you had been summoned literally out of the faculty staff room, and you had dropped that book on wizarding houses into your pocket and were out the door before you realized what you were doing.

When you look up from putting the implements away, you realize that you've left the book out on the stone slab and that Percy Weasley is going throough it and slowly and methodically ripping out all the pages that mention the Burrow or his family. You look up just in time to see him utterly shred the big photograph, the one that has him and his mother and the whole family standing underneath an apple tree with the Burrow in the background. His father's face goes to the top of the table in a tiny little scrap of paper about the size of your fingernail, and when Weasley notices that you're staring at him he draws his lips back over his teeth at you, then goes back to shredding the book.

Weasley has the sleeves of his robes pulled up to the elbow. In the more normal light of the fire in this room, you can see that he's still as pale as he ever was. He still looks like a student, really, with the ink stains on his fingers and the little squint in his eyes from peering at parchments and poor handwriting.

You see the pulse twitch underneaneath the skin of his forearms. You watch Percy rip the book apart, and you watch the hatred in his eyes and fingers. You see that pulse continue to twitch underneath the skin of his fore, and now, you recognize it for the stirring of the viper underneath his skin it is.

It's the viper that must have been growing while you taught him the basics of how to make the venomous injected potion that killed Pettigrew. It was most probably growing in him even while he stood, wrapped around in his mother's arms and his family's love, in his mother's arms, with all of his siblings around him, standing in front of the Burrow in the photograph of that book you read. And now, now, standing by the fire with healing potion drying on your arms and the sound of ripping paper in the air, you realize that no matter how detailed the photographs, how carefully researched and scrupulously checked the text -- you realize that book was wrong about at least one thing: that book was wrong about the happiness and the sanity of Percy Weasley.

The book was honest about the Stapleton house where you spent your summers because your mother didn't want to be reminded of your existence, and it showed your misery and your hatred of your family and the selfishness that led you to join with Voldemort, but it was terribly misled, as both you and the world were, about him.