round five: prompts (july 23-29)

[necessarian]

TOP LEVEL COMMENTS ONLY

DAY	PROMPT	PUNISHMENT
Sunday (July 23)	Something very odd was happening to Zacharias Smith.	not allowed to dm (one/both)
Monday (July 24)	Character A wants to buy something that Character B says no to	write 300w of kurotsukki
Tuesday (July 25)	Secret Dating	not allowed to dm (one/both)
Wednesday (July 26)	Kissing lessons: character A has never been kissed so character B teaches them how	write badfic (with epithets)
Thursday (July 27)	Takes place entirely in the space of an hour	not allowed to dm (one/both)
Friday (July 28)	High School AU Pining	not allowed to tweet in general (includes replies, does not include dms)
Saturday (July 29)	Fake dating with a twist	not allowed to dm (one/both)

* feel free to edit/add new comments if more is written on the day; comments are meant to encapsulate everything that is written, not just the part that fulfills the prompt
** clarification - "not allowed to dm" is a punishment for the day after, not a preexisting condition

Comments

p/o (currently untitled) (1/?)

[necessarian]

(only edits today but i'll post the whole thing here as i go. a bit more to edit. tired. i will also format this one properly, later.)

-

Here are the facts, as they stand: it has been over a year since the Battle of Hogwarts and Percy has been home only a few times since then. He has not so much made amends as made himself a home in the corner of the room and even though he has well and truly apologised for acting like a twat for a good four years, he still isn’t quite accepted by his family.
So for his twenty-third birthday, two weeks away but impending by Weasley definitions, he’s got to pick up his game. Quite literally—because there is a letter from his mother sitting on his desk which reads along the lines of, Dear Percy, We are throwing you a birthday party, come home for it or else. It’s not the only contact he’s had from his mother. She seems to have given up on Charlie—home for now and still disappointingly single, by Molly Weasley’s standards—and turned her sights on Percy.
“Bill is married, Ron is settling down with Hermione and Ginny is still going steady with Harry—even George is spending more time with Angelina lately, so it’s only a matter of—oh, Percy, don’t look at me like that!”
“I’m sorry, mother,” he says, “I came here to have tea with you, not to be lectured on my lack of significant other.”
Molly clicks her tongue. “You can clear the teacups, then. What about Penelope? She was such a nice girl.”
Therein lies the problem: Percy, having had several significant awakenings and life experiences in the four years he was acting like a twat, is no longer interested in nice girls. Lazily waving his wand and sending the teacups to the sink, he props his head up with his free hand and sighs.
“Penny and I are still friends,” Percy says, “but we’re not romantically involved anymore.”
“Such a pity,” Molly says. “She was so nice. Your birthday, Percy—you should bring someone.”
“And I told you, I’m not seeing anyone.”
That’s met with an artfully raised eyebrow. “Are you not seeing anyone, or are you just telling me you’re not seeing anyone? A good-looking twenty-something such as yourself ought to be spoiled for choice.”
Everyone’s pretty according to their mother. Percy decides not to tell her that he was teased at Hogwarts for being scrawny and once his growth spurt hit he was teased for being weedy. His social life wasn’t much better once he graduated—there was literally no way to be attractive while working in lower-level administration. Now that he’s Senior Assistant to the Minister, he’s too busy keeping everyone in line to notice if they’re attracted to him or not. He highly doubts that anyone is.
All he tells Molly is, “I think you have rather the wrong end of the stick in this matter.”
Molly rolls her eyes. “If you say so. But Percy, maybe this is a sign you should start looking. Seeing people.”
She pauses, and Percy wrings his fingers under the table. He knows that expression.
“And for Merlin’s sake, dear, bring someone to your birthday party.”
Most people stop having birthday parties when they break twenty-one. As far as Percy’s concerned, twenty-three is twenty-three years too old for such indulgences. He has better uses for his time, like staying late at work and clearing his out tray. Unfortunately, his birthday falls on a Sunday, and so there are no excuses. It’s to be a full day of partying, Weasley-style. Never mind that Percy is the most egregious case of black-sheep-itis to have ever graced the family and took to partying even worse than he took to Quidditch, which is already quite minimally.
And now he has this problem of needing to bring a date.

“You don’t need to,” Penny says. She’s stopped by for lunch in the pub they all call the Ministry cafeteria, taking a break on a slow news day at the Prophet. “You’re nearly twenty-three, Percy. You need to stop doing whatever your mum tells you to.”
“You don’t understand,” he says. “My mother’s word is law. Oh, certainly, I can show up alone. But to her it’s just another nail in the coffin of my acceptance back into the fold. I’m still on thin ice. I need to—”
“Slow down,” Penny interrupts. “You’re talking in cliches. Go slowly. What’s the real problem?”
Percy debates whether to say what he really ought to say. He hasn’t had a meaningful conversation about himself since he reconciled with Penny, and he hasn’t had a meaningful relationship since they were snogging back at Hogwarts. If anyone deserves to know the finer details of his personal life, it’s her.
“Well, I worry that they’d all be expecting a girlfriend, and I’m—not that way inclined anymore.”
“You don’t need to make a song and dance of it,” Penny says.
Percy is so lucky that he has her; it’s still a meaningful relationship. “No, I suppose not, but I’m not sure the right way to tell them is to barge into my own birthday party with someone inevitably much more handsome than me on my arm and shout, Surprise!”
Penny shrugs. “I don’t know. I think that would work quite nicely. And if you’re with someone they like more than you, you’ll have a buffer zone. It might make things more peaceful, if anything.”
“You may have an argument there,” Percy says, “but I’d need to find someone handsome in the first place, and I barely have five friends to choose from.”
“I like that you’ve assumed this is going to be a case of playing pretend,” Penny says.
“Well, I’m hardly going to get myself a boyfriend in two weeks, am I?”
“Worth a shot,” she says. “Alright, so, of your five friends, who do you think is most likely to be up for a bit of kind-hearted deception? Who do you think your family will take to?”

Which is how Percy ends up on Oliver’s doorstep with a bottle of preemptive apology wine and a few glasses already in him, for courage.
Oliver is living in a sharehouse with some of his Puddlemere Reserve teammates. It’s the kind of country cottage that the Ministry used as safehouses during the war, and which are now going empty and getting sold off to the upper-middle-elderly looking for a quiet post-retirement lifestyle close to an establishment greengrocer and a bowling green. This one isn’t looking too good. It’s shared by four lads in their twenties, and what might have been a rose garden out front looks more like a Triwizard Tournament task. Percy winds his way through the overgrown shrubbery and, once he’s made it to the other side in one piece, knocks on the door.
“Oh, splendid, you brought wine!” It’s one of Oliver’s housemate-teammates, a man Percy knows only by his surname, Carruthers. “I’ll let the lads know it’s a party tonight.”
“Do let them know,” Percy says, “and tell them they aren’t invited.”
Carruthers gives Percy the most disdainful look he can manage, which is not very. He turns over his shoulder and calls out, “Wood!”
There’s the distinctive sound of footsteps thundering down wooden stairs. A moment later, Oliver appears at the door and shoves Carruthers out of the way.
“Perce. Hey.”
Percy momentarily forgets how to form words with his mouth—there is a reason he’d come to the conclusion that Oliver is his most handsome friend.
“You brought wine… ?”
“I’ll explain once we’re inside,” Percy says. He blinks and the world returns to normal.
“Can I join?” Carruthers asks.
“Fuck off, Carruthers,” Oliver says. He shoves his housemate aside to make way for Percy. “Sorry it’s such a mess.”
“That’s fine, I’m used to it,” Percy says, even though his own flat is always impeccable. It’s the Burrow that gets messy—and Oliver will hopefully be experiencing that firsthand, soon.
They head up to the back of the house, where the wooden staircase leads to the second floor with all the bedrooms. Oliver’s room is back towards the front of the house, smaller than some of the others Percy sees as they pass, but with a picture window that more than makes up for it.
“This is nice,” Percy says, sitting by the window seat.
Oliver hovers by him. “I forgot you’d never been in here.”
“No, only for parties,” Percy said. “The only time I’ve been in your room, it was dark and I was drunk.”
“Right.” Oliver keeps hovering. “So any special reason for this house call?”
Percy sighs and forces himself to make eye contact. “I’m in a bit of a pickle, Oliver.”
Oliver sits down, at last. “What can I do to help?”
“I haven’t even told you what it is yet,” Percy says. He sucks in a breath, then says it all at once: “My birthday’s coming up and my mother insists on throwing me a frankly excessive birthday party but she also insists that I bring a date and I was hoping you might—”
“Go with you?” Oliver’s eyes go wide. “Perce, this is—I didn’t think you—”
“It’s just one afternoon,” Percy says. “Maybe an evening. You get along with my brothers—I trust you to be the right kind of house guest.”
Oliver visibly relaxes. “Okay, yeah. I can do that.”
“Sorry,” Percy says. “I know it’s sudden. I brought you wine.”
“I can’t drink this all by myself,” Oliver says, taking the bottle from Percy.
“Carruthers will be pleased,” Percy says.
“What? Oh, no.” He holds the wine bottle in between their faces, at just the right angle to catch and scatter the afternoon light. “I meant, you should stay the night.”

“So how did it go?” Penny asks.
It had been… weird. Percy and Oliver weren’t exactly close friends at Hogwarts, despite sleeping directly adjacent to each other almost every night for seven years. They moved in different circles. After Hogwarts, they’d kept in touch, but the war had changed things. Now, Oliver’s just one of the many people Percy has tried to reconnect with—the difference being that, in this case, it worked.
“Well, he said yes,” Percy says, “so that’s a start.”
Penny nods, confidently, like she knew it would happen, which Percy thinks is quite unfair because he was practically losing his mind over how many ways it could possibly go wrong. “I’m glad you got that sorted out,” she says. “Now you can rest easy.”
“Easy,” Percy echoes. “That’s a funny one.”
“Oh, no.” Penny puts down her drink. “Did something else happen?”
“It didn’t so much happen as I seem to have—” Percy paused, clearing his throat. “It appears that Oliver is rather too handsome for his own good. What I mean is—I find him attractive.”
Penny cocks an eyebrow. “And that’s a problem because… ?”
Percy rolls his eyes—isn’t it obvious? “It’s a problem because we’re only pretending to be in a relationship. And only for a couple of hours, at that.”
“If you want to convince your family you’re serious, it’ll have to last a little longer than that,” Penny says.
“What I get up to in my own time is my business,” Percy says. “We’re only doing this for the birthday party, because that’s the only time I’m expected to be the perfect son.”
“I’m sure they don’t expect that of you,” Penny says.
She doesn’t get it. Even after a year, he hasn’t fully reconciled with his family. These things take time—he knows that, rationally, but it still smarts that his family has this image of him as someone he just isn’t anymore. Their Percy was a pompous prat who had no friends and put his career ahead of the rest of his life. The real Percy risked his neck in the war to relay messages from Aberforth Dumbledore, fought in the Battle like the rest of them, watched his brother die right in front of him, and after all that, yes, he went back to his job. Because there was nowhere else he could go.
So much time apart has warped their perceptions of him—and, if Percy’s being honest, probably warped his perceptions of them too—and it takes more than one afternoon to bridge a gap that wide.
But Percy’s damned if he’s going to give up without a fight.
“Maybe they don’t,” he says, “but they expect something.”
“I just hope you know what you’re doing,” Penny says.
“This was your idea,” Percy reminds her.
Penny slaps her hands over her ears. “Suddenly I can’t hear a thing! Who said that?”
She laughs at herself until Percy starts laughing with her, and he figures he can bring himself to forgive her for suggesting he put himself in this position. From here on in, if there’s any damage done, then on his head be it.

Being twenty-three is a lot like being twenty-two, as it turns out. Percy wakes up with his sheets tossed aside in the heat of the night, his heels hanging off the end of the too-short bed. It’s early. He’s not an idiot, proficient enough in charms to keep the light out of his bedroom, but he can tell by the way his bones ache when he drags himself upright and his eyes refuse to fully open that he hasn’t slept enough.
His flat is small, easy to navigate. In a nice neighbourhood, too. It’s on a quiet road in Pimlico, walking distance from the Tate Britain, if the artistic mood takes him—which it often does. He can see the distinctive red brick of the neighbourhood out his bathroom window while he’s taking a piss.
Showered, shaved, a suitably healthy breakfast eaten, Percy slumps onto his couch and stares at the ceiling, just about ready to fall asleep again.
Some days he thinks about moving out. But other days… he loves this flat. He’s never lived anywhere else in London. Having the flat to come home to after a long day at work, he had a place where he could forget about the changing political climate, and then the war. It was always somewhere nobody else knew about.
In retrospect, giving his address to Oliver might’ve been a mistake on that front.
There’s a sturdy knocking at the door. A pause. Then another spurt of knocking. “Perce, you up?”
“I’m up,” Percy groans, rolling sideways off the couch and onto his feet. This is harder than it looks, because although he’s twenty-three and unambiguously an adult, Percy’s body has yet to get the message and is still convinced he’s an awkward, gangling teenager.
He opens the door to find Oliver with his face partially obscured by an overlarge bouquet of roses.
“Oliver,” Percy chides, “you shouldn’t have.”
“Happy birthday,” Oliver says. “Can I come in?”
Percy shrugs, stepping aside. He heads to the kitchen and transfigures a glass into a vase, filling it with water at the tap. “Do you want a drink while I’m here?”
“I’ll pass,” Oliver says. He holds the flowers over the vase. “I didn’t know what to get you.”
“The roses are lovely,” Percy says. “I wouldn’t have pegged you as one to give flowers, though.”
Oliver honest to Merlin winks at him. “I’m a man of many surprises. Hey—I like this place. It’s quiet.”
“Didn’t think you were the type to like quiet, either,” Percy says.
With a shrug, Oliver installs himself on the couch, the only comfortable seat in the house, and puts his legs up. Percy either has to get one of the stiff wooden chairs he keeps around the table, or stand. He elects to stand.
“Are you nervous?” Oliver asks.
“Why should I be?” No, standing is awkward. Percy perches on the arm of the couch. “I’m used to my family operating at peak Weasley. Are you nervous?”
“Not really,” Oliver says. “I think given that I’ve played Quidditch with the twins, I can—oh, er, sorry, Perce. I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s fine,” Percy says, too quickly.
It’s not fine. Oliver does not necessarily need to know that.
“Anyway, they’re not so bad,” Oliver says. He winces. “It’ll be fun.”
Percy’s not entirely keen on the way Oliver seems to be intent on treading carefully around him. It was over a year ago. He’s doing well. He wouldn’t bring it up on his own steam. And today needn’t be any different, even with the conspicuous absence.
“In that case,” Percy says, “let’s head off.”