Percy left the Wulfhall on the twenty-fourth.
He did not make an announcement of it — that was not how Percy did things. He came to find Ron in the library after dinner and stood in the doorway with the quality of someone who had been preparing a speech and had decided at the last moment to say it plainly instead.
'I'm going back to London,' he said. 'My flat. I need to be near the Ministry.'
Ron looked up from the text he had been working through. 'Alright,' he said.
Percy looked at him. The expression he had was the specific one he used when he was acknowledging something he had decided not to argue with. 'Fudge is wrong,' he said, which cost him something to say — Ron could hear the cost in it, the specific weight of a man whose institutional loyalty was encountering the limits of what loyalty could ask for. 'I know he's wrong. The evidence is substantial. Crouch Junior's testimony, before — before it was taken — was clear.'
'Yes,' Ron said.
'But the Ministry is not a single position,' Percy said, with the quality of someone explaining something he had been working through internally for several weeks. 'Not everyone agrees with Fudge. There are people in the administrative structure who are — cautious. Who are watching. Who have not committed to the denial but who need someone they trust to be present and visible and functioning within the institution rather than outside it.' He paused. 'I can be more useful there than here.'
Ron looked at him steadily. He thought about the original timeline — Percy's estrangement from the family, the years of silence, the specific damage of a loyalty misplaced until it was almost too late. He thought about what it meant that Percy was standing in the library doorway saying *Fudge is wrong* and *I can be more useful there* in the same breath.
'You're right,' Ron said. 'You can.'
Percy looked slightly surprised — not at the words, but at the quality of them. He had apparently been prepared for more resistance.
'The Ministry needs people who know what's true and are still inside the institution,' Ron said. 'That's not a small thing, Percy. That's exactly what the institution needs right now.' He held his brother's gaze. 'Write. When you see something that matters, write immediately. Not the formal correspondence — the personal letters. To me, not to Mum, because she'll worry.'
Percy straightened slightly. It was a small movement. It had the quality of someone receiving a thing they had needed and had not been sure they would receive. 'Yes,' he said. 'Alright.'
He left the next morning with two trunks and the contained quality of someone who had made a decision they were at peace with. His mother watched him go from the kitchen door with the expression she had for things that were difficult and correct simultaneously, which was one of the more specific expressions in the Molly Weasley repertoire.
Ron stood beside her.
'He's doing the right thing,' Ron said.
She was quiet for a moment. 'I know,' she said. 'That doesn't make watching it any easier.'
'No,' he said. 'But he'll come back. He knows where we are.'
She looked at Percy's car — Daniel's car, actually, which Daniel had offered since Percy did not drive a Muggle vehicle, and which Percy had accepted with the specific grace of someone encountering Muggle infrastructure and deciding that competence was more important than the performance of preference.
'He always comes back,' she said, which was both statement and prayer.