Percy Jackson X Harry Potter

THREE: London, Ten Years Later

Harry's POV

HARRY POTTER WAS NOT FEELING IT. At all.

12 Grimmauld Place was a derelict building with creaky floorboards, leaking pipes and webs in every corner. Moss could be found in some places where moisture had seeped into cracks in the wall. There was new evidence every few days of it decaying right under Harry's feet.

The wallpaper was peeling off the walls, and reeked of age. Not to mention the choices of colour. The house had walls coated in black paper with sickly yellow swirls, ceilings decorated thick stripes in various shades of mouldy green; you name it, and as long as it was horrid – 12 Grimmauld Place had it. If every room was turned inside out, it would look like a stack of birthday presents.

However, this was not in such a way that Harry disliked it. Though the whole house was dank and rotten, it was comforting to him and actually felt like somewhere he's be happy to call home. Besides, it was the people inside that mattered, not the housing. (That sounded cringy.)

But the building owned by his godfather was not Harry's main issue.

The issue was the portrait of Walburga Black permanently stuck to the wall.

Meetings with the Order were awful when she was awake. If anyone was unfortunate enough to put down their butterbeer too hard, or shift their chair and cause an ear-splitting BRR, Walburga would rise from her slumber and shriek at them to shut up (along with everyone else). The thick rectangle of cloth draped over her face did nothing to dampen the noise.

Sirius and a few others were downstairs – Harry couldn't identify them by their voices – having a last-minute meeting about something in the daily prophet. Harry himself was in his room, which was in a rather disorderly state, on his bed with his face to the mossy ceiling.

His mind had strayed to Percy for the first time in a while. He had been in America for, what, a decade now? How different would he be when he returned? Harry considered the idea of Percy attending Ilvermorny in Massachusetts, but he stiffened in his bed.

Did Percy even remember he was a wizard in the first place? 

The thought of that troubled him. His brother was surrounded by magic up until he was five, before You-Know-Who attacked and forced them to separate. Percy had zipped over to somewhere in the United States, and there was no way of telling whether or not he had magical accommodation or if he was with a muggle carer. Harry would have a gargantuan amount of wizarding world terminology to explain if that were the case. 

He tried to imagine Percy living an easy life away from the wizarding world with nice people, going to a normal muggle school and making friends. 

Meh. He'd be fine.

From what he could recall from their early childhood, Percy was sarcastic, reckless, and ridiculously hyperactive. He loved the pancakes their mum used to make, along with her macaroni and cheese. (Harry could agree with him on that one.) He always begged her to make them blue, for some reason.

He vaguely remembered Percy having both ADHD and dyslexia, which was quite uncommon considering Harry came off with only mild dyslexia. Sometimes (but not often), he slipped on a word or two in a textbook, but it hadn't been diagnosed and wasn't affecting his exam results at all (only on spelling tests).

All of these branches of thought circled back to the elephant in his head. Percy had promised to return at sixteen years old. Harry turned sixteen a couple of days ago. But, come to think of it, Percy never specified if he would return when they turned sixteen, or some time when they were sixteen. If it was the second option, his brother would come some time very, very soon... in the next year. Or, he could be optimistic and decide he meant the former.

Then, theoretically, all he had to do was wait.

A couple of times, Harry had tried contacting Percy through their twin link, but he never answered. Either Percy was ignoring him (probably not), he passed it off as auditory hallucinations (unlikely), or he didn't receive his thoughts. He suspected it was the latter of those options.

In their years together, they had tested their limits and found their twin link wasn't effective long-distance, such as from the zoo all the way to their house. If it was weakened over a mile or two, they'd deduced that from England to America should have been completely silent – and they were right. 

He'd had no messages, or even a twinkle of emotion, from Percy, and hadn't been able to reach him once; for all he knew his brother could've been long dead and Harry wouldn't have known.

That was, until a spark of hope ignited in his mind.

Harry? Can you hear me?