Two letters arrived on the Thursday after Umbridge left.
They came with the morning owls, both landing in quick succession at his place at the Gryffindor table — first his father's owl, a steady brown barn owl who had the quality of a Ministry-adjacent animal that had delivered a great deal of important correspondence and had developed a certain gravitas about it, and then, unexpected enough to make him look twice, Percy's grey.
He opened his father's first.
The handwriting had the quality it always had when his father wrote quickly — the letters still precise (Arthur Weasley's handwriting was always precise, a Ministry man to the bone) but compressed, the lines running slightly closer together than they would have in a letter composed at leisure. This was not a letter composed at leisure.
Ron,
I've been trying to find the right way to write this since Tuesday and I've decided the right way is directly, which is how you tend to prefer things anyway.
Fudge is in serious trouble. The Umbridge situation — and it is being called that now, officially, at the Ministry: the Umbridge situation — has produced what I can only describe as a quiet collapse of confidence in the Minister's judgment. Not loud. Not the kind of thing that becomes a motion of no confidence overnight. The quiet kind, which is worse. The kind where people stop returning calls and start taking longer lunches with people from other offices.
Amelia handled it correctly and everyone knows it. The documentation she had when she made the arrest was the specific kind that doesn't leave space for the Ministry's preferred narrative — which was, as recently as Monday, that Professor Umbridge had been engaged in "firm but appropriate disciplinary methods" and that the situation had been "appropriately reviewed internally." That narrative lasted until the Quibbler published the photograph.
Fudge has spent four days trying to manage the story. He has issued three statements. They have each been worse than the one before, in the way of statements that are attempting to conceal more than they reveal and have been written by someone who believed the concealing was working. Amelia's statement was two paragraphs. Everyone read Amelia's two paragraphs.
The other thing — the thing I want you to know because you deserve to know the full picture — is that your name has come up. Not publicly, not yet. But Dawlish, who is a careful man and a professional one regardless of his current assignment, made a report to Amelia when he arrived that described the situation at Hogwarts accurately and included specific mention of the prefect who had intervened and the documentation that intervention had produced. Amelia knows it was you. She has not disclosed this. She is, I believe, keeping it in reserve, which is exactly what someone in Amelia's position does with useful information.
You were right to do what you did. I need you to know that clearly and without qualification. You were right, the method was correct, and the documentation was exactly what was needed. I have been telling your mother this, because she needed to hear it stated plainly rather than implied.
She is very proud of you. So am I, though I recognise those are not words I've said to you often enough in this body and I intend to say them more. You are doing something important and you're doing it right.
Your father
P.S. — The blood quill has been illegal under Clause 7 of the Restriction of Magical Artefacts Act since 1847. The fact that a Ministry-appointed educational inspector was using one on students means Fudge personally authorised an appointment without the background review that would have surfaced this. There are people in Legal who have been waiting for an occasion. They have found one.
He read it twice. He folded it carefully and put it in the dark-covered notebook, in the correspondence section at the back.
Percy's letter was shorter.
Ron,
I received your letter in September. I have been thinking about it since.
Regarding the Umbridge situation: I want you to know that I was not aware of the specific details of her methods before this became public. I want to be clear about this because I understand it matters to you whether the people around you knew what was happening and said nothing. I did not know. I would not have said nothing if I had known.
What I have been thinking about, since September and more since this week, is the specific point you made about the Ministry's position becoming untenable. You said the cost of sustaining it would increase. The Umbridge situation has increased it.
I am not prepared to say anything further than that in writing. I am asking you to understand that I received your letter and that it landed where you intended it to land.
— Percy
The timeline you suggested in September is looking less optimistic than I assessed it at the time.
He read Percy's letter once. He sat with it for a moment.
The last line was the one that mattered. Percy had revised his assessment. Percy had written it down, which was not the kind of thing Percy did carelessly — Percy's written words were commitments, the product of a mind that did not commit lightly and therefore meant the commitments fully when they arrived.
Less optimistic than I assessed it at the time.
Which was Percy's way of saying: you were right. And which was also Percy's way of beginning something, because Percy didn't revise assessments in writing unless he intended the revision to be the beginning of a change in position rather than a concession made in isolation.
He put both letters in the notebook.
He thought about Fudge in his office writing his fourth statement and thought about the specific quality of institutional collapse — not sudden, not dramatic, but the gradual withdrawal of confidence in someone who had confused managing the narrative with being right. He thought about Amelia Bones with two paragraphs and the photograph and the documentation from Madam Pomfrey, and thought about the specific usefulness of evidence when it was gathered correctly and held until the right moment.
He went to Transfiguration.