Caveats and acknowledgments: This story, like all of my Percy and Penelope tales, follows the first edition of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which unequivocally placed Penelope one year behind Percy at Hogwarts, rather than the 2004 British edition, which placed them in the same year.

"Almost There" will be best enjoyed by those who know their Austen. The quotations are from Pride and Prejudice, chapter 5, and Emma, chapter 49. The other Austen references are to Persuasion. For artistic reasons, most of this story is in the present tense, but the action shifts from the present (the winter after HBP) back to the year of PoA and then to the present again.

Almost There

In November it's dark at half-past four. At half-past nine, the fog is rolling in, heavy and wet and diaphanous in the fuzzy lamplight.

Percy Weasley stirs his espresso with a demitasse spoon. He stirs and stirs and gazes across the white-clothed table into Penny's taut and pensive face.

The discreet French waiter has cleared away the silverware, the plates of sole à la meunière and poulet de Bresse. He was cleared away the thick goblets of Muggle wine that was not, apparently, manufactured by elves, but cost as much as if it were. Penny's paying, which makes Percy a little uneasy, but Penny's the one who's got a Muggle bank account, in which she keeps the income from her Muggle stocks and bonds. Percy barely understands how Muggle currency works, though he is diligently reading the book on Muggle financial markets that Penny lent him last week.

Back home, there's a war on. The Ministry's on high alert, and Scrimgeour's sinking fast. In the lobby, before the ruined fountain, guards armed with Probity Probes are casting random Priori Incatatem spells on visitors'—and workers'—wands. But in Le Gans Sot, the tablecloths are white. The sole is tender, the espresso is strong, and the dark, dry Muggle wine is as expensive as if it were made by elves. Percy looks at Penny, who's been teaching him French from restaurant menus, and he thinks, I am the goose.

There have been a series of dinners like this, week after week through a drab and frightening autumn, hot, savory meals in chilly, anonymous restaurants, because they're not keen, either of them, on being seen by colleagues who might ask questions. There have been books lent and books returned; there have been the routine courtesies, first formal, then habitual, now cautiously affectionate; there have been a series of rather juvenile little arguments about the check. There have, increasingly, been sheepish presentations of flowers and chocolates to Penny, to make up for all those expensive French checks, service compris, that he can't pick up.

There has been, week by week, less and less conversation about work, because frankly, they don't want to talk about it. As one, so the other. A few years out of Hogwarts, they're both hitting brick walls of missed opportunity. Night after night, morning after morning, Percy looks around his lavishly appointed office, only ten yards from Rufus Scrimgeour's, and wonders if it's "bugged." (Penny has helpfully explained, over previous plates of sole à la meunière, what it means for an office to be bugged.) He wonders why he's working fourteen-hour days for a man he doesn't like. He wonders why he has made the future of his political career dependent on the fortunes of a man he neither likes nor trusts, a man who is sinking fast. At meetings—and there are many of them, hours upon hours of meetings—he looks up from his parchment, and he massages the aching wrist of his quill hand. He peers into Rufus Scrimgeour's leathery little soul and he thinks, so this is what it takes to succeed in politics.

He thinks, I'm doing my best, but my heart isn't made of dragonhide.

He thinks, I may not make it. I may not have what it takes.

He thinks, I may not care anymore.

He feels like the floor is dropping out from under him.

He tells this to Penny, who says that she went on a leisure park ride like that, when she was eight years old.

Percy cocks his head and plays with his cuff buttons and is silent. He has done a lot of private research, he has done a lot of private reading, in these years of loving a Muggle-born witch, but he still doesn't understand everything he hears Penny say.

Penny loathes the Ministry, simply loathes it, an attitude that she is finding increasingly easy to articulate to Percy, under the influence of a couple of glasses of dark, dry, non-elfen wine. She is still wishing she could go home and be a Muggle. Her sister Samantha, the one she adores, is studying now at a place called Balliol, which Percy hasn't heard of before, in a place called Oxford, which he has, and Penny can scarcely keep the envy out of her voice. She speaks the place names with the same caressing longing with which, at seventeen, she spoke his name. If the war ends soon, she says, she'll still be young enough for Oxford. If the war ends soon, she can go while Samantha is still there and they can have the years of sisterly camaraderie that they didn't have at Roedean. Percy listens with a purposefully intelligent look on his face but behind the mask he is thinking frantically, how can I prevent this, how can I keep her here, how can I make her stop?

And if I really love her, do I let her go?

Because Penny's not just a witch. She would have made a pretty good Muggle. She would have made a pretty damn brilliant Muggle. When Percy read the first three chapters of Penny's book manuscript, the one she admits she almost tossed in the fireplace, he was overcome by gratitude to his father for telling her not to throw it away. He almost Flooed his father to tell him how grateful he was. He almost did, but he didn't, because telling him that would have meant telling him that he was seeing Penny, and even though he is, after a fashion, speaking to his father now, stiltedly and shamefacedly speaking to him, he is not speaking to him about Penny. He has not spoken to anyone about Penny.

For Percy, some things are beyond words.

In the cold and the dark and the rain, and the unspoken terror that now fills their lives, they've both been thinking a lot of things that they haven't been putting into words.

But tonight, when the silverware has been cleared away, the goblets of Muggle wine, the sole à la meunière and the poulet de Bresse, the conversation takes an unexpected turn. Penny looks up from her espresso. She looks into his eyes and she says what they've both been thinking, thinking and not saying, through this series of weekly meals at white-clothed tables that are climbing to a number they're starting to lose track of.

"Percy, why did we break up?"

He reaches out with two fingers and he strokes the back of her hand. He says, "Penny, I don't know." He says, "Penny, I don't remember." But he does.

He strokes her hand. He opens her fingers and he strokes the soft skin between her knuckles, and it twists him up inside. It twists him and twists him, until he's seventeen again, sprawled on the floor of the Charms classroom, amid the dust bunnies and the discarded robes and the cushions that haven't been washed in fifteen years, prising off her knickers, and abruptly she sits up and starts putting her clothes on and announces that dinner is almost over and people will notice if they don't put in at least a perfunctory appearance at dinner. She stands up and she walks out, leaving Percy sitting disconsolately in his underwear on the floor of the Charms classroom.

He wonders about the charms on the door. He checks them.

He tumbles down on the dirty cushions. He shuts his eyes and touches himself and imagines Penny, until he finds release, which doesn't take long, because he was touching Penny quite a lot before she sat up and started putting her clothes on, and he can't even look at her, sprawled in her underwear on the floor of the Charms classroom, and not get hard. The room is dim and shadowy, and he can almost see her, where she lay. If he reaches out, he can almost feel her, her breasts and her thighs and the soft skin under her knees. He can almost hear her breathing, warm and quick on his neck. She is almost, almost there.

This is probably not what his brothers think he's doing, the night before he takes his Potions NEWT.

Curse Penny. She is brilliant and beautiful and loving and good, and she's about to derail his whole life.

It isn't very dignified, this torrid little unconsummated affair that they've been having on the floor of the Charms classroom on certain prearranged nights of the week when they're supposed to be at dinner. It is not the way a Head Boy and a Ravenclaw prefect ought to behave. It does not fit Percy's image of himself. But it keeps happening all the same, and it's mostly his fault. Well, entirely his fault. Penny is always the one who remembers to stop. Penny is always the one who remembers the contract they made, more than a year ago, walking around and around the lake. Percy is always the one who ends up alone, bewildered, ashamed, surprised that she isn't mad at him, but she never is. He always finds her the next morning, and she never is. And Percy is always the one who, three or four nights later, is once again pushing her down on the dirty cushions, unbuttoning her blouse, unfastening her bra, not quite losing control, running his hands down her soft body, burying his face in her chest . . .

No, it isn't very dignified, and it's not very satisfying either. It's more shaming than exciting, more frustrating than fulfilling. And even if they had done what they almost did tonight, it still wouldn't be very satisfying, because the fact is, he doesn't really want to have her on the floor of the Charms classroom.

No, what he wants is to pull her into a downy soft private goosefeather bed for an entire night, or maybe a lifetime.

The Burrow is out of the question. And the idea of Penny's parents' shabbily elegant Georgian rowhouse in Hampstead makes him sick with terror. Because even if one set aside her parents, and her sisters, and her brother, and the cook, and the part-time secretary who comes in to help with her mother's books, he would be ashamed to let the house see them. Ashamed beneath the high-pitched, molded ceilings, ashamed before the daintily leaded sash windows, ashamed under the stationary but expensive Muggle landscapes that dot the plastered walls. Percy has only seen pictures, but he knows it's the very best sort of Muggle dwelling, inhabited by generations of the very best sort of Muggles, and Muggles don't approve of premarital sex, any more than wizards do. He read all about it in Jane Austen. There is no wizarding hotel in Britain where the proprietor would not know his parents, and Muggle hotels are, in Percy's opinion, sketchy.

The whole situation is sketchy and, fundamentally, undignified.

Seventeen-year-old Percy sits up on the cold grimy floor of the Charms classroom. He thinks, not for the first time, of his parents, who started dating when Mum was a fourth-year and Dad was a fifth-year, and who ran off together about six weeks after Mum left school. He thinks, not for the first time, that there are uncanny similarities between his relationship with Penny and Dad's relationship with Mum, and this is not a good sign. He thinks, I want to be Minister of Magic, and I don't have time for this right now. He thinks, I'm not sure I want seven children. I don't want any children just now and neither, in all likelihood, does Penny, not with the career she's going to have. Penny probably doesn't even have time to plan a wedding, not with the career she's going to have. Penny is afraid she won't even pass her sixth-year exams, because her boyfriend keeps tumbling her on the floor of the Charms classroom on nights when she said she was going to study. He thinks, Penny already feels pretty rotten about not going to Oxford, as her father and her mother and her sister and her brother did before her, and she doesn't need me to make it worse.

The year Penny was born, her maternal grandfather, an Oxford don renowned even outside academe, was knighted for his services to the nation in producing a five-volume opus on international relations and the causes of the Franco-Prussian War. When Penny was twelve, her uncle, her father's older brother, was knighted for his groundbreaking research on diabetes. These two incidents have always reminded Percy of Sir William Lucas, a character in Penny's favorite novel, who "had risen to the honour of a knighthood through an address to the king during his mayoralty." This is—as Penny explained to him on their very first visit to Hogsmeade—quite different from being a baronet, like Sir Walter Elliot, in Penny's other favorite novel. All the Clearwaters earned their knighthoods. The Clearwater children and their Scottish cousins all have bets on with each other, about which Clearwater of their generation will get knighted first. Her brother Alan is the odds-on favorite. Alan can't bet on himself, of course (even Alan isn't conceited enough for that), so he is good-naturedly betting on Samantha.

Percy listens star-struck to these confidences. He still doesn't understand why a girl like this, from a family like that, is going out with him, but he's not going to try to talk her out of it.

He'll just have to try to deserve her.

Of course, Percy doesn't really know much about Muggles other than what he's read in Austen and Dickens, and what he's learned from Penny. He started reading Austen the summer Penny was in Rennes, because he was thinking by then that this might be serious, and he thought it would be wise to do some research on Penny. He read the novels shamefacedly, under his covers at night in his (thankfully) private bedroom at the Burrow, and afterwards in the not-so-private rooms he shared with Ron on the family jaunt to Egypt, and they knocked his socks off. A bit girly, okay, yes, but so balanced, so intelligent, so restrained. So, so much like Penny. Novels about Muggles so cultured, so well-bred, depressed sometimes, frustrated, alone, but so poised, so fundamentally secure. Novels about Muggle girls long on intelligence and short on cash (that wasn't Penny, surely?), novels about Muggle girls rich in intelligence and cash but short on freedom, short on parental understanding, short on opportunity. (That was Penny).

He slept with Persuasion tucked under the sheet beside him, and he imagined it was Penny. In the darkness, he kissed the cardboard cover and he shut his eyes and he thought of Penny, stranded among crazy, cuisine-obsessed French-speaking Muggles in Rennes, and he imagined kissing her.

And other things.

In Emma, he read that "A man would always wish to give a woman a better home than the one he takes her from; and he who can do it, when there is no question of her regard, must, I think, be the happiest of mortals," and he thought, that's very true. That's very true.

That's exactly what he wants to do. But unfortunately, Head Boy though he is, he's just a Weasley. He's no Mr. Knightley. He's not even Frank Churchill.

If he's anyone, he's Captain Wentworth, eight years too young.

And he can't expect Penny to wait, the way Anne Elliott did, because it isn't fair to her, and Mrs. Musgrove doesn't approve of long engagements.

In the waning light of the cold stone classroom, Percy wipes his brow. He thinks, not for the first time, that it's time to let go. He thinks, not for the first time, I'm leaving school in two weeks, and it's now or never. He thinks, I love her madly, and this doesn't have to be forever. But if I really love her, if I want her to have a better home than the one from which she comes, if I want to avoid saddling her with a life like Mum's, the decent thing, the kindly thing, the responsible thing, is to cut and run. Not keeping trying to seduce her. Because there's one other thing he can see quite plainly from Penny's favorite novels, and that's that the better sort of Muggles do not engage in premarital sex. It's only for duffers like George Wickham.

It's only for duffers like his father.

He did the right thing. He knows he did. He did the right thing, though it was hard to do. He did the right thing, because he, unlike his father, was a man with vision, a man with discipline, a man with self-control. A man who planned for the future.

But not, alas, a man who could divine the future.

The years without Penny were not good years. They were years of headaches, insomnia, and bilious attacks. They were years of frustration and self-deception. Years riddled with dreams of failure and defeat, dreams of Ron and Ginny dead, of Penny tortured, of Voldemort succeeding Fudge as Minister of Magic, all shot through with frantic haunting visions of Penny naked on the floor of the Charms classroom. At long intervals, he had the consolation of a magnificent dream in which he tracked Voldemort down and killed him, and the Queen got to hear of it, and invited him to tea at Buckingham Palace with Cornelius Fudge and Albus Dumbledore and Jane Austen. She knighted him, and Alan Clearwater shook his hand and said "I'm glad you were first," and Penny came flying back to him, and at that point this dream tended to mutate into the dream about Penny naked on the floor of the Charms classroom.

That dream, however, came rarely. They were not good years, the years without Penny.

They were not good years, the years without his father.

They were years that he is, to his silent chagrin, starting to regret.

So many levels of regret.

In Le Gans Sot, Percy drops his demitasse spoon, sprinkling tiny coffee-colored bubbles of foam across the white tablecloth. Penny flinches, and he thinks, Mr. Knightley would not have done that. Nor, in all probability, would Uncle Sir David Clearwater.

He stutters out a half-hearted explanation about passion and temptation and parental poverty and Muggles' not engaging in premarital sex.

Penny asks him where he got his information.

He explains.

She laughs. She embarks on a lengthy explanation involving the Regency era and the early Victorians and the mid-Victorians and the late Victorians and the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Percy listens, fascinated. He sat through seven years of history lectures with Professor Binns, but he never learned any of this.

When he tells her this, when he asks if Professor Binns changed his lecture notes from his year to hers, she laughs. She says, "Percy, I learned this in the nursery. I learned this at the dinner table when I was six years old." She says, "My mother read history at Somerville, before she got interested in Third World democracies."

She didn't realize he was reading Austen obsessively. She finds it kind of charming. He tells her about Persuasion, and being Captain Wentworth, and not asking her to wait, and she gets a glazed look in her eyes. She kicks him gently in the shins, under the white-clothed table, and she says, "Percy, I would have waited. But do we really need to?"

He is almost, almost there.