Percy was in the library on Tuesday of the second week.
He had a corner table --- one of the ones near the window, the seats with the high back that turned the table into something resembling a private office. He was working with the focused efficiency of someone who had established a method and was applying it: three books open at specific pages, a roll of parchment with notes in two columns, a quill moving at the steady pace of someone who was not drafting but transcribing. Reorganising. He had the quality of someone who had decided that the available material was inadequate and had taken matters into his own hands.
Ron had seen this quality before. Not in Percy --- he had known Percy for maybe a cumulative of couple weeks in this life, filtered through Ron's memories of a brother four years older who had always been better at the rules than the game --- but in a type he recognised. The person who worked harder than anyone else because the work was the only form of control available to them. The person for whom achievement was not ambition so much as armour.
He took a seat two tables away. Not to approach. To think.
Percy's head boy badge caught the afternoon light. The homework was NEWTs preparation --- Ron could read the spines from here, seventh-year Defence and Advanced Transfiguration. He was already working this hard in March and had been like this since October for examinations in June, which meant he was building a margin. The margin was what he needed. Without it, he was one bad examination, one wrong decision, one moment of not being good enough, away from the thing he was afraid of, which Ron did not know the exact shape of but could estimate from the available evidence.
He thought about Percy's future. The Ministry. Fudge. The specific path of someone who had put his faith in the institution and found, at the worst possible moment, that the institution was not what he had believed it to be. The Ministry, in two and a half years, would be wrong about Voldemort in the specific way that would require Percy to choose between what he had built and what was true. And Percy would choose the building. Because the building was all he had.
Ron watched him work for twenty minutes with the attention he gave things that made him feel the specific discomfort of understanding something without being able to do anything about it.
He could not fix Percy. He could not tell him what was coming. He could not rearrange the architecture of his brother's fears in the time available, even if he had known how, which he wasn't certain he did.
What he could do was be present. Not obviously. Not in a way that required Percy to acknowledge it or respond to it. Simply be someone in the room who saw what was there and did not find it lacking.
He opened his own book and worked.
After twenty minutes Percy looked up, noticed Ron across the tables, and did the small precise nod of an older brother who had registered a younger sibling's presence and found it neither welcome nor unwelcome. An acknowledgment. Nothing more.
Ron nodded back.
Percy returned to his parchment. Ron returned to his Arithmancy.
They worked in the same room for another forty minutes without speaking, and when Ron left he said, in passing, 'Good luck with the NEWTs,' and Percy said, 'Thank you, Ronald,' with the formal quality he used for things that had caught him slightly off-guard, and that was all.
It was not enough. He had known it would not be. The work he could do for Percy was long and slow and would require occasion he did not yet have, and in the meantime the best thing available was to be the kind of person Percy could, eventually, come back to. If the time came. If the cost turned out to be bearable.
He filed Percy under watch, and felt bad about it, and went to dinner.