The Percy prank began, as most of Fred and George’s ideas began, with a conversation that Felix was not supposed to hear.
It happened three nights after the Potions lesson, in the Gryffindor common room, while Felix was sitting by the fire with one of Andros’s notebooks open on his lap.
Fred and George were on the couch behind him, and they were talking in the low, quick voices they used when they were planning something and did not want anyone else to know what it was.
“—official-looking,” Fred was saying.
“That’s the important part. It has to look official.”
“It will,” George said.
“I’ll do the handwriting.”
“Your handwriting’s terrible.”
“Which is exactly why it’ll work. Nobody writes that badly on purpose. It’ll look real.”
Felix turned a page in his notebook and did not look up.
“We need the right seal,” Fred said.
“Not just any seal. It has to be one Percy won’t question.”
“I’ve got one.”
“From where?”
“Dad’s study. Over the summer.”
Fred went quiet for a moment, and then Felix heard the sound of a hand hitting a shoulder.
“You brilliant, brilliant idiot.”
“I know.”
Felix turned another page.
He had not read a single word of it in the last five minutes.
The next morning, Fred and George were gone before breakfast.
Felix noticed it when he woke up — the two beds nearest the window were empty, the blankets thrown back, the trunks still shut.
He checked the time.
It was early, earlier than the twins had been awake any morning since term started, and he lay there for a moment listening to the quiet of the dormitory before he got up and dressed.
He found them at breakfast, sitting together at the Gryffindor table with the satisfied expressions of people who had already done something and were waiting to see what happened next.
Fred was eating toast with the calm of someone who had no intention of explaining himself.
George was reading a piece of parchment that was not a piece of parchment Felix recognized.
Felix sat down across from them and helped himself to eggs.
“Where were you?” he asked.
Fred and George exchanged a look.
“Nowhere,” Fred said.
“Nowhere specific,” George said.
“Just somewhere.”
“Nowhere worth mentioning.”
Felix looked at them for a moment.
Then he looked at the parchment in George’s hand.
Then he looked back at Fred.
“Is that the letter?” he asked.
Fred’s expression flickered.
It was a small thing, barely visible, but Felix saw it — the moment of surprise that Fred had not managed to hide.
“What letter?”
“The letter you and George were talking about last night,” Felix said.
“In the common room. Behind me. While I was pretending to read.”
Fred and George exchanged another look.
This one lasted longer than the first.
“You heard that?” Fred asked.
“I hear most things.”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t ask me to.”
George folded the parchment and tucked it into his robes.
“How much did you hear?”
“Enough to know it’s for Percy.”
Fred leaned back in his seat, and something in his expression shifted — from surprise to something closer to respect.
“All right,” he said.
“Fine. You caught us. Yes, it’s for Percy. No, we’re not telling you what it says. Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“Because if it goes wrong, we want plausible deniability.”
“And if it goes right?”
“Then we’ll tell you everything.”
Felix took a bite of his eggs.
“What if I want in?”
Fred and George stared at him.
“You want in?” George asked.
“I didn’t say that. I said what if.”
Then Fred leaned forward, and his voice dropped into the same low, quick register he had used in the common room the night before.
“All right,” he said.
“Here’s the thing. Percy’s been insufferable since the day he got here. You’ve seen him. He walks around like he’s already been appointed Head Boy and the rest of us just haven’t been informed yet. He’s written Mum twice already about our behavior, and we’ve only been here a week.”
“Three letters,” George said.
“I counted.”
“Three letters,” Fred corrected.
“So we’re going to give him something to write about.”
Felix set down his fork.
“What’s the plan?”
Fred grinned.
“That’s the thing. We don’t have one yet. We have a letter. The letter’s the opening move. The rest depends on how he responds.”
“He’ll respond badly,” George said.
“He always does.”
“And that’s where we come in.”
Felix considered this.
The twins were watching him the way they watched everything — with the patient, expectant air of people who had already decided what they were going to do and were simply waiting to see if anyone was going to try to stop them.
“What does the letter say?” Felix asked.
Fred looked at George.
George looked at Fred.
“We’re not telling you that,” Fred said.
“Not yet.”
“But if it goes wrong, you want plausible deniability.”
“Exactly.”
“And if it goes right?”
Fred’s grin widened.
“Then we’ll need someone to help us with the second part.”
Felix picked up his fork and went back to his eggs.
“All right,” he said.
“Let me know when it goes right.”
The letter was sent that afternoon.
Felix did not see it leave, and he did not see Percy receive it, but he heard about it at dinner — because Percy Weasley, who was sitting three seats down from them at the Gryffindor table, had gone very quiet and very pale and was reading and rereading a piece of parchment that had clearly arrived by owl post.
Fred and George were watching him with the expressions of people who had set a trap and were now waiting to see if it would spring.
Felix watched too, but he did not say anything.
Percy read the letter three times.
Then he folded it carefully, tucked it into his robes, and stood up from the table without a word.
He walked out of the Great Hall with his back straight and his chin up, and the moment he was gone, Fred leaned over toward Felix.
“Phase one,” he said.
“Complete,” George added.
Felix looked at them.
“What happens now?”
“Now we wait,” Fred said.
“He’ll write back. He always writes back.”
“And then?”
George smiled.
“And then we see what he says.”
Percy wrote back that night.
Felix knew because he was sitting by the fire in the common room when Percy came in, and he saw the older boy sit down at a table near the window and start writing on a fresh piece of parchment with the focused, furious energy of someone who had been personally offended and was determined to respond in kind.
Fred and George were nowhere in sight.
They had disappeared after dinner, and Felix had a strong suspicion they were somewhere nearby, waiting for exactly this moment.
He kept his eyes on his notebook and his ears open.
Percy wrote for twenty minutes.
Then he sealed the letter, stood up, and walked out of the common room toward the owlery, and Felix watched him go.
The next morning, the reply was already on its way.
The reply to the reply took a day.
The reply to that took another.
By the end of the week, Percy Weasley had sent and received four letters from someone he believed to be a high-ranking official in the Department of Magical Education, and Fred and George had acquired, through a combination of careful handwriting and a seal borrowed from their father’s study, a growing collection of responses that were becoming increasingly difficult to explain.
Felix learned all of this on Friday night, when Fred and George finally told him what the plan had been.
They were sitting in the common room, the fire burned down to embers, and Fred was holding a stack of parchment that had clearly been read more than once.
“So,” he said.
“You want to know what we did.”
“Then here it is.” Fred flipped through the stack and pulled out the first page.
“The letter we sent Percy was from the Department of Magical Education. It said, in very official language, that a routine audit of Hogwarts records had turned up a discrepancy in his academic file — specifically, that he had been credited with classes he may not have actually attended. And that if the discrepancy couldn’t be resolved, it could affect his O.W.L. eligibility.”
Felix looked at him.
“You told Percy his grades are being audited.”
“We did.”
“And he believed you?”
“He wrote back the same night,” George said.
“Asked for clarification on which classes were in question. We gave him a list. He wrote back to say he had attended all of them and had the notes to prove it. We asked him to submit the notes for review. He wrote back to ask what format the Ministry preferred.”
“What format did you tell him?”
“Three copies. Handwritten. In ink.”
Felix stared at them.
“He’s making three handwritten copies of his notes,” he said.
“He’s already made one,” Fred said.
“We saw him in the library. He was on his second.”
“His handwriting’s getting worse,” George added.
“He’s been at it for two days.”
Felix looked at the stack of parchment, then at Fred, then at George.
“That’s not a prank,” he said.
“That’s psychological warfare.”
Fred’s grin faded slightly.
“Is that bad?”
“No,” Felix said.
“It’s impressive.”
Fred and George exchanged a look — the kind of look that said they had just been given a compliment they were not expecting and were not entirely sure what to do with.
“We were going to stop,” George said.
“After the second letter. We were going to let him off.”
“But then he started making copies,” Fred said.
“So we kept going.”
Felix picked up one of the letters and read through it.
It was good.
It was very good.
The language was official, the tone was bureaucratic, and the handwriting — George’s handwriting, deliberately sloppy — was exactly what you would expect from a tired Ministry clerk who had been given one more thing to deal with before the end of a long week.
“You could sell these,” Felix said.
“We could,” Fred said.
“We won’t,” George said.
“But we could.”
Felix set the letter down.
“So what’s phase two?” he asked.
Fred looked at him.
“Phase two?”
“You said phase one was complete. That means there’s a phase two.”
Fred and George exchanged another look.
Then Fred leaned forward and dropped his voice.
“Phase two,” he said, “is where you come in.”
Felix did not get to hear the rest of phase two that night.
The common room had grown quiet around them, and Fred had only just started explaining when the bell in the corner chimed the hour and reminded them that they had a Transfiguration lesson in the morning — their first Transfiguration lesson, with Professor McGonagall, and Felix had been waiting for it since the day he first read Andros’s notebook.
He had read about the lesson.
He had read about the matchstick and the needle, and he had read about the woman who taught it, and he had spent the last week thinking about what he would do when he finally sat in that room and faced her.
Fred noticed him glancing at the clock.
“Transfiguration tomorrow,” he said.
“You’ve been quiet about that.”
“I’ve been thinking about it.”
“About what?”
Felix closed his notebook and stood up.
“About what I’m going to do when I get there,” he said.
Fred and George exchanged a look.
“That’s a strange thing to say,” George said.
Felix did not answer.
He walked up the stairs toward the dormitory, and behind him, he heard Fred’s voice, low and amused.
“He’s strange.”
“I know,” George said.
“I like him.”
“Me too.”