Death is but the Next Great Adventure

Departure

In the last chapter: Tom and Harry discover a greenhouse in the manor. Harry and Tom bond over sharing their magic with each other. Harry has a run in with two dementors someone sent after him. Sirius and Remus think Harry is secretly dating someone. Harry realizes, though is isn't dating anyone, he might want to. Tom is preciously oblivious.

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The remaining days of summer slipped away like sand through his fingers. The more he tried to grasp them, the quicker they spilled over. Each day, Harry met with Tom, neither of them bringing attention to his upcoming departure. Once Harry had realized his budding affection for Tom, he was much surer of himself around the other. His thoughts and actions made more sense and he wasn't stumbling around blindly anymore.

As much as he would have liked to only focus on his time with Tom with what little remained of his summer, his last few days became quite busy. After such a relaxing and relatively easy-going last month of holiday, Harry wasn't surprised when the last few days burst into pandemonium.

It started with a letter.

Ginny had been relatively quiet during the summer, sending only one letter at the beginning of holiday and then dropping off for the remainder. Harry was curious to see why she had sent him a letter when they would be seeing each other in only days. However, when Harry felt the hefty weight of the envelope, he realized the girl probably needed to ruminate on something. He hadn't been wrong in that assumption, either.

After knowing Ginny for so long, Harry was not surprised to find that her main source of ire was, one Percy Weasley. He had known that there were tensions between Percy and the rest of his family, but it seemed to have reached a breaking point. In her letter, Ginny detailed a loud and heated argument between Percy and Arthur after the younger man's visit home.

Percy had been promoted to Fudge's Junior Assistant and Arthur was convinced that Fudge was using his son, just another cobble under Fudge's expensive Romanian dragon-hide soles. Arthur believed that Percy was intelligent and talented and could easily climb the ladder of the Ministry on his own, but he was also greedy and impatient and with little to no sense of dignity when it came to his superiors, clinging to Fudge like a parasite and happily bending to the man's will. Percy argued that he wouldn't have to grovel if he wasn't born to such a poor and unrespectable family. Things escalated from there.

Ginny told Harry about how her mother had nearly fainted as Percy shouted himself red in the face at them, raving about how they were lead weights around his ankles and he must be cursed to have been stuck with such a wretched lot. In the end, Percy disowned his family and left, hissing at them that he hoped to never see any of them again. It had been an ugly and vicious fight.

It wasn't hard to see where the tensions had come from, though. Fudge was taking aim at Dumbledore before the school year even began. Fudge was not being coy in his hatred and distrust towards Dumbledore, and as a result, those that supported Dumbledore were also feeling the flames. And it just so happened that one of Dumbledore's most loyal supporters was the Weasley family.

Percy no doubt knew that the Weasleys would soon become rather loathed and an undesirable bunch to be associated with, so Harry concluded that the recent fight had not been purely an in-the-moment event. It had been a strategic play, though a rather useless one with little reward and devastating consequence. Disowning his family would only bring an inkling of favor from Fudge, but his bonds and trust of his family was likely permanently broken and damaged. Fudge's ignorance, impulsiveness, and bigotry were already chipping away at the public's approval by the day; he would not last, and Harry doubted Percy will be kept on with the next Minister.