Percy Take the Wheel

two

Of course someone was crying by mid-morning the next day, but this time it was Ron. When Percy found him on the back stoop instead of watering the vegetable garden, he'd been ready to scold, but the tear tracks down his face stopped him. Percy hit the relevant questions first, "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine," Ron snuffled, wiping his face on a sleeve as Percy lowered himself to the stoop with a grunt. He reached out to put an arm around Ron's shoulders, but got shrugged off. He knew he should take it as Ron getting back to his usual behaviour; he wasn't one to like being touched when he was upset. It still stung a little, though.

This seemed a little like a sulk, maybe an angry cry, rather than grief, so Percy prompted, "Did you fight with someone?"

"Can't fight someone who won't answer," Ron mumbled, and Percy leaned in, silently expectant. Soon, Ron filled the void, "Harry hasn't replied to any of my letters all summer. Even just to say sorry about… Well, he hasn't written."

Despite his lack of acquaintance with the other boy, he couldn't see the quiet child he'd occasionally directed one place or another and who had seemed so excited to be friends with Ron being that mean-spirited. With a quiet leading tone, "Could there be a reason he couldn't write back?"

When Ron immediately paled, Percy felt a sense of foreboding pass over him, and his next words were no better, "The Dursleys."

"The Dursleys?" Percy echoed, and Ron startled, glancing at him guiltily, as if he'd already let slip something he wasn't supposed to, and the ominous feeling settled in Percy's stomach, "His family? The ones who sent him some muggle money for Christmas?" Now that he thought of it, Harry had been rather taken with his Weasley sweater, which Percy had only noted at the time with annoyance for acting as a foil to his own displeasure at having his sweater forced over his head. While Percy valued his own sweaters to a degree, he wouldn't expect someone outside the family to place much weight on his mother's lumpy knitting unless that small token of acceptance meant something to him.

"Yes," Ron drew out reluctantly, "and they don't like magic much, and it might be that they're not letting Harry write us."

"Who is 'us?'" Percy prodded, and Ron conceded that he'd written their co-conspirator Hermione and she had had no word from the boy, either. Plus, a few of his dormmates had asked him similar questions. Sounds like Harry was liked well enough to ask after, at least. Percy, himself, found the boy to be likeable and quiet, if seemingly reckless when out from under his or another authority figure's eye.

Mixed feelings there, what with the whole Ron-knocked-out-by-a-chess-piece-thing. Ron insisted it had been his idea for Hermione and himself to tag along, that Harry had been ready to go it himself without dragging his friends into it, but… Percy shook the thoughts away; right now, he needed to keep Ron from crying again and see whether Ron's friend was alright.

"We'll try the telephone booth in town this evening, yeah?" Percy patted Ron's back bracingly, "Then we'll see."

"Do you know how to use one?" Ron asked, a dubious expression crossing his face, and Percy rolled his eyes.

"I did help Penny with her revising for Muggle Studies all last year," Percy pointed out proudly, "How hard can it be?"

Percy was very glad he'd convinced Ron to stay put and 'watch Ginny' – using similar arguments on the twins – because telephones were horrifying and terrible contraptions. It had taken him a while to figure out the cleaning charm that would trick the monstrosity into believing it had been paid, something about the movement toggling the gears inside as the spell cleaned out debris, and then longer to figure out how to get an operator. He was glad he'd had the foresight to ask about where Harry lived since evidently the muggle system needed that information to find a specific family. How many Dursleys could there be? And if it was the wrong branch of Dursleys, couldn't they direct him to the right branch easily enough? Did muggle families unrelated to one another run around with the same name or something?