07.07.2003

Sitting on top of Mr. Weasley's overflowing in-tray these days is an old toaster that hiccoughs in a disconsolate way and a pair of empty leather gloves that are twiddling their thumbs. A photograph of the Weasley family stands beside the in-tray, and these days, the photograph appears to be charmed in place next to the in-tray. No matter what Arthur does with it, no matter what dustbin in the Ministry he leaves it in, it always comes back to his in-tray through the departmental mail. If he moves it to another part of the office, it will migrate through locked cabinets and over air to be sitting back in its place by the next morning. If he turns it face-down, it flips back up with this little rattling of broken class from the front -- Arthur slammed a Hurling Hex into it so hard a few weeks ago that it flew up against the opposite wall, and the glass fell inwards down into the little space between the photograph and the glass covering. Now, whenever the picture shifts across the room or straightens itself back up, there's a soft little tinkling noise that's almost musical from the glass falls down across Percy's face.

***

Other photographs on the walls of Arthur Weasley's office:

Bill and Fleur, sitting together at a Gringott's formal event.

Ron, leaning on a shovel in the Weasley garden, a heap of gnomes at his feet and a sort of smirk on his face, and Ginny rolling her eyes at all of it.

Charlie, up to his elbows in dragonhide gloves, with an armful of new Ridgeback hatchlings that are wriggling like mad.

Mrs. Weasley sitting at the piano that they've moved down into the kitchen of the burrow. Her feet are on the pedals, and her hands are on the keys - she has her head turned at sort of a thirty-five degree angle, and you can see the lines of her cheekbones and how her smile crosses her entire face as she starts to soundlessly play a tune with a lot of head-bobbing and faltering from not having played or had lessons for thirty-five years, though she finally has time now that Ginny and Ron are both at school and none of her children are home regularly anymore.

***

Theoretical knowledge will be more than enough to get you through your education.

***

Percy has always been his mother's special pet. Even before his promise started to show in school, even before she found him going up to the attic as a nine year old and finding her old school notebooks so he could start studying for Hogwarts, Percy had always been her favorite out of her boys. First Percy, then Bill. The rest equally, but Percy and Bill above all - Bill because he was her first, and Percy for reasons that no-one else could entirely understand, particularly since she would probably have hated him if he hadn't been her son.

When he was eight, Percy went through a period of being mad about photography. His mother had played the piano when she was young. His father assembled Muggle spark plugs in the shed; his brothers went for Quidditch and dragons variously, and Percy went for books about photographs. Charts and for temperature charts of different lights that he had made himself, recreating them out of the books and having arguments with his father over whether photography was a Muggle hobby or not - completely theoretical. No camera, since there wasn't one at the house and Percy didn't have money to buy film. When he finally made a box with a pin-sized hole bored at one end and photographic paper on the inside of the other, the photographic paper was some that his mother had charmed out of old parchment so worn down it was smooth under the fingers, and there is this photograph of her at the piano, back when it was still broken because they didn't have money to have it re-strung.

They kept it in the cellar, and the only light in the photograph is from a little round lamp set on the top of the piano. Ginny is crawling around Mrs. Weasley's feet, though you can barely see her in the middle of all the shadow, and the main thing that you see is Mrs Weasley with her face turned to the camera and her hands poised over the keys, as if she were going to start playing. She's wearing a sleeveless dress because it's the middle of summer. The cellar is the coolest part of the house, and she has this little sly smile that almost convinces you she expects the piano to make noise when she slides her fingers down onto the keys. Her posture almost convinces you that she's about to slide her fingers onto the key, and you almost hear the first note of the song she's about to play.

The film in boxhole cameras doesn't get developed, though. The film that Molly makes for Percy just captures the image in black and white after a verbal invocation, so you never see her set the first finger down, and the blackroom that Percy builds in a curtained-off area next to the piano is just so he can look at his photographs in peace without the twins bothering him, not so that he can make the photographs move with the wizarding developing solutions that he can't afford.

The Weasleys can't afford to fix the piano then, either, and nor can they during the years that Percy is around, either all the time or just during the holidays or while he's visiting from the Ministry. Percy never hears his mother play the piano, and Molly never tells her husband that the photograph he has on his wall at work is taken by Percy. Arthur is barely at home during that period of time, and he doesn't learn that Percy's obsession with capturing things and simplifying them into two-dimensional photographs proceeds beyond the theoretical.

***

We will not progress for progress's sake.

***

Regardless, though, Arthur Weasley realizes that the photograph was taken by Percy some years later. He's going through the things that Percy left in his room at the Burrow - systematically throwing away all the personal items, setting aside the things that belong to the family, and Arthur pulls the box camera out of the trunk that Percy has underneath his bed he looks at it for a moment, puzzled as to what exactly it is.

The ends are sealed up with tape, and when he shakes it, the contents rattle. The aluminum square that Percy taped behind the pinhole has worked loose over the years, but because the film inside the camera isn't really film, but rather the special capture paper that Mrs. Weasley conjured up for her favorite son after he explained how cameras are supposed to work for her, the picture doesn't blacken out the way normal film would, nor is it reversed at all.

Instead, it's a perfectly decent picture of Arthur and Percy standing together on the lawn where Ron is currently digging an expansion of the vegetable garden. In this picture, Percy comes up to Arthur's hip, and his mouth is frozen in the shape of the word it takes to set the camera off. The sky is overcast behind them because Percy learned that pictures are best taken on overcast days, and there's a dark sort of ring all around the perimeter the picture where the hole in the camera wasn't quite wide enough.

It's this ring that tips Arthur off. He puts Percy's things, including that photograph, in the rubbish bin for the goblins to collect in the morning, and he doesn't think then about the pictures that he has up in his office until the next morning when he walks in. At lunch, he happens to look over his shoulder at a noise out in the hallway, and Arthur realizes that the frame around the picture of Molly at the piano is unusually thick. He puts his sandwich down, then, and peels the wood frame back and feels this cold sense of dread settle around his stomach. The darkness is there, crowding in on the picture of Molly as clearly as the admiration on his eight year old son's face in the picture he put in the rubbish bin, as clearly as the smile on her face in the picture in front of him, and as the Mark on his son's arm that he saw on the secret photographs that Snape brought to the last Order meeting.

That night, Arthur Weasley goes home that night and tells Molly, without explanation, that he wants to have the piano in the cellar restrung and brought back into the kitchen.

"You need something to do now that all the children are out of the house and the headquarters are in order again," he says, smiling at her over dinner. "And we'll be able to pay for it by selling Percy's hands off the family clock."

Snape had brought out the photograph of Percy at the Death Eater meeting after Molly had left the Order meeting to see how lunch was coming along.

***

A little joy, a little music in the midst of war.

They find Percy three weeks later in his flat in London. Dead of Avada Kedavara a full day before anyone thinks to look for him at his flat, and when Arthur sees his son at the Ministry morgue, all the skin on the inside of Percy's left forearm has been neatly trimmed off.

***

The only photograph of Percy that Arthur has in his office now actually used to be a photograph of everyone in the family.

It used to have all of the children in it - Arthur and Molly in the middle. Ginny by her parent's knees. The twins next to their mother, Ron on the other side of them, and Bill behind his father with Charlie and Percy down on the end. Percy is at least a head taller than Charlie, who is built on a shorter, broader scale. In fact, Percy is the tallest Weasley in the picture, and in the photograph, which was taken by a Prophet photographer outside the Prophet building on the occasion of their return from Egypt, where they'd met Bill and Charlie to take a vacation together. Arthur remembers, vaguely, that Percy was terribly interested in the photographer's equipment and kept asking him about what speed he was using and what sort of lighting he thought would work under conditions like this. The photographer finally had to shoo Percy back to join the rest of his family.

Now, though, everybody appears to have walked out of it except for Percy who is standing in the middle of it now, alone, with his arms crossed over his chest and the proudest smile that Arthur has ever seen him wear, in any photograph, and while Mrs. Weasley may have nightmares about actually seeing her children dead and while Molly knows about the possessed photograph frame, Arthur has never told her that he started seeing Percy alone in the photograph long before he actually turned up dead, that he started to see Percy with his sleeves carefully pulled down to his wrist almost a year ago. Arthur never tells her that he has nightmares about seeing one of his children in that traitor's picture.

====== A/N: As point of clarification, the first sentence is taken almost directly and more or less word-for-word from the text of OotP and so are the little sentence bits that are set off in sections of their own. ======