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Percy never thought of himself as particularly brave.
Unlike his fellow members of the Gryffindor Pride, Percy wasn't the sort that felt the urge to seek out trouble in some foolish attempt to prove something and, despite what is brothers would tell you, he had never truly thought he suffered from the ego that seemed to plague the rest of the House of Lions.
Percy was above such things.
No, Percy was self-aware enough to know the more fitting term to describe himself was hard-headed and stubborn. (He would only admit that maybe obstinate and dogmatic were more accurate on the nights he hid under his blankets, spelled to keep noisy brothers from hearing his sobbing. He refused to let them see how their and the rest of their classmates' words hurt him.)
The point was, Percy had always taken the rules and sticking to his morals to the point that, perhaps, it came at his own detriment. It was that near-obsessive refusal to break the rules or to let others rule-breaking side that had earned Percy many special privileges over the years. One of those privileges was the position of the only one out of the seven Weasley children to be allowed entry into their father's shed.
Not even his eldest brother, Bill, was allowed to step foot in there.
While as usual Percy was happy to have a another privilege that his other siblings lacked to hold over their heads (as any good brother should), his father's shed was also another thing about his family that infuriated him. While Percy would rather die than admit it, his father was a brilliant man when he wasn't in his head and far more powerful a wizard then Percy thought anyone truly realized.
Despite how easily the ministry had brushed off his father's flying car as another one of his father's eccentric toys, Percy knew that car wasn't something any other wizards could dream of replicating.
Most wizards spent years mastering broom-making; his father had enchanted what might as well have been a over 700 pound broom that could still reach the over 90 km/h speeds that the muggle machine could reach before his father had tampered with it simply for fun. That wasn't including all of the thousands of other charms on the car such as the ones that expanded its interior or allowed it to become invisible.
Despite what some may think, turning something invisible for anything longer than maybe a day or two was unthinkable. His father's invisibility enchantment on the car could be turned on and off and had remained ingrained in car's enchantments for what had now been two years!
Percy didn't understand how none of his siblings even questioned it! Sometimes they made him feel like he was going insane! Not even Ron had seemed that surprised! Percy didn't know why Ron thought it was normal for invisibility enchantments to last that long. (Percy suspected his brothers were too desensitized to their father's casual displays of ridiculous magic to realize they were out of the ordinary.)
A part of Percy shivered at the thought of what his father could do if he got serious. But that was exactly the problem, the thing that was so infuriating!!!
Percy's father never did! It was like he was allergic to it or Arthur Weasley taking anything serious would defy some untold, ancient law of magic that would break all of reality! (The twins dramatics were rubbing off on him.)
His father was the laughing stock of the ministry, his coworkers too busy giggling at his love of muggle inventions to consider how every single one of his father's "whacky inventions" seemed to defy what anyone could consider sane! Percy was genuinely worried about how a ministry that was supposed to be filled with the best and the brightest could so easily be fooled by their own preconceptions that his father was just a goofy, muggle-lover too zany for his own good.
Percy was perhaps the closest to his father out of the Weasley brood, and was the one who maybe knew their father the best. That was why Percy knew his father was full of shit when he told Fred and George that the reason he had yelped when they had whacked him on the back was because he had bruised his back when a project had exploded back on them.
His father was hiding something; with his father's track record that could only mean he was creating something that would be in breach of more laws than should be possible to break with a single object.
Percy knew of every project housed in his father's shed. Percy had spent many a summer day pulling his hair out as he questioned his own sense of reality at whatever reason defying amalgamation of magic his father was cobbling together at any moment.
So unlike his siblings, Percy would not be so easily fooled by their father's lies.
Percy knew his father was no where near incompetent enough with his spell-work to have it backfire on him; no matter what his siblings might delude themselves into thinking. Even if his father had made that mistake, it didn't make sense for his father to just leave bruises unhealed. He had seen his father practically stitch his own leg back together with a simple flick of his wrist once after he had knocked some kind of rapidly spinning, circular blade that Percy had been told was called a chain-saw onto himself once! Percy knew very well that his father was more than capable of healing some bruises.
There also just simply wasn't a current project of his fathers that should result in bruises on his back or him getting thrown backwards! The only conclusion Percy could come to was that his father was hiding it from him. Had known whatever invention he was working on would shatter what remained of Percy's sanity and was powerful enough to leave injuries that even his father couldn't fully erase.
For the good of all of magic society Percy needed to figure out what new invention his father was creating before it was too late for the world. Percy had always known that the end of the world was not going to come from a second-coming of Voldemort.
No.
Percy knew better.
The end of the world was going to be his father and the other adults willful ignorance of the inconceivable power that fueled his father's mad creations.|So it was with that purpose that late at night, when all in the Burrow was finally quiet, Percy snuck out of his room. His stubborn refusal to standby idly as his father destroyed the world pushed him forward despite how much the of many rules he was breaking made him want to throw up.
It was with a Lion's courage that he never thought he had in him that Percy cast a silencing charm on himself, the floorboards sending a chill up through the bare feet and stepped out of his room.
When he saw that nothing had blown up and he hadn't died from a heart attack yet from such an egregious breaking of the most sacred of the Weasley rules, stay in bed, that he forced his legs forward. His footsteps padded quietly against the floor, his spell easily deadening any sound he made as he carefully pushed open the door to the room of the only two people who could match their father in how much they made him feel like his mind was going to fray apart.
Percy Weasley was going to find out what his father was hiding before it killed them all, and he was going to need accomplices. Just because his family didn't have enough reason to recognize it anymore, that didn't make the Twin Terrors of House Weasley any less than the terrifying mirrors of their father then they were. If Percy was going to put a stop to their father's madness, he was going to need people who were just as crazy.