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The air in the sitting room is sticky with the heat of the cackling fire, the smell of biscuits and the sound of Ron and Hermione snogging on the sofa. Ginny is perched on the arm of her father’s chair, and stares at the Christmas tree. In a fit of Christmas-y feels a few hours ago, she covered it in so much tinsel there’s hardly any green left to see.
After a while, when the sparkling reflections of the tinsel make her eyes water, it gets a little too much and Ginny flees into the kitchen. It’s easier to breathe, there. Harry is by the table, dutifully chopping vegetables for her mother. She steps up behind him and looks over his shoulder.
“Did they finally scare you away?” Harry asks quietly, and gently slaps her hand away when she tries to steal a piece of carrot.
Ginny shrugs. “I’m getting quite good at ignoring them. Just need to focus on something else. For example, did you and Ron put a garden gnome in a tutu on top of the tree again?”
“I didn’t think anyone would notice.”
“When you stare at it long enough, the proportions start to seem slightly off for an angel.”
Harry smirks a little. He glances at her mother, but she’s so preoccupied with four pots at the same time, she probably hasn’t noticed Ginny’s presence in her kitchen yet. Otherwise, Ginny’d surely already be peeling potatoes. When Harry turns around to face her, then, he’s not smiling any longer.
“George caught the gnome,” Harry says, “I don’t think I’ve seen him since.”
With a meaningful look, he goes back to his carrots.
Ginny climbs the stairs by memory.
Just after sunset, the burrow is filled with a blue, muted sort of darkness, the heaviness of heaps of snow pressing against the windows. Everyone is downstairs, where there is light and fire in the chimney, but up here it’s cool and calm, and Ginny doesn’t feel like turning on any lights. She could find her way up these stairs with her eyes closed, anyway.
The flickering, white-ish light of a Lumos charm seeps out from under the door of what used to be Fred and George’s room. It still kind of is, even though they moved out long before everything went to shit, and Ginny’s throat feels constricted when she knocks.
“It’s me,” she says quietly, and it sounds lost on the empty landing.
The door clicks and swings open on its own accord. George is sitting on the floor between a few leftover boxes that nobody dares to touch, leaning against his old bed. He’s lazily twirling his wand between his fingers, the ignited tip sending flashes of light over the walls. There’s a half-empty bottle of Firewhisky to his right.
“Can I have some of that?”
“Help yourself,” George says, voice raspy, and passes the bottle over when Ginny takes a seat on the floor next to him.
The Firewhisky burns through the tightness in her throat. After another sip, she feels ready to deal with this.
“Bill and Percy would give me so much shit if they knew I was giving you Firewhisky,” George says ruefully, and Ginny takes another sip out of spite.
“I’m of age.”
George shrugs like that doesn’t really matter to them, which is probably true.
“Ron and Hermione still blocking the sofa?”
“Uh-huh. Everyone‘s shunning the sitting room. Dad’s the only one still in there with them, I think he might start getting a little deaf… And I saw the gnome,” Ginny adds carefully. “Nice work. Mum won’t suspect a thing.”
In lieu of an answer, George takes the bottle back. The wand, hanging lax from his left hand, illuminates the bed across from them and Ginny bites the inside of her cheek, hard.
“I don’t think I can go back down there and look at it,” George says.
“I don’t think I can go back down there and look at all the stupid tinsel I put on the tree. It looks like a unicorn vomited all over it.”
“Doesn’t it every year?”
“Yeah. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? I made tinsel explode over the sitting room. You and Ron screwed up part of the decoration. Mum’s cooking and playing Celestina Warbeck. Everything is like it used to be, even though it’s just not.”
“I dunno, I’ve never spent Christmas Eve alone in my room getting drunk, so that’s different.”
“Point taken. But you are so not gonna spend Christmas Eve in here getting drunk all alone.”
“Aren’t I?” George makes a noise that sounds like he tried for a derisive snort and failed.
“No, of course not,” Ginny says quietly and takes the Firewhisky back, “Fred would never forgive me.”
The light on the tip of George’s wand goes out. As they sit on the floor, the room twilit by the glow of the snow reflecting the moonlight outside, Ginny reaches over and squeezes her brother’s hand. She puts the bottle on a box almost out of reach.
“I was chasing that gnome across the garden earlier. It was fast, so I threw myself on top of it without thinking, and when I had it, the first thing I wanted to do, the thing I was literally about to shout out loud, was ‘Got it, Fred!’” George clears his throat. “It’s stupid to freak out over something so small.”
“It’s always the small things,” Ginny says roughly. “When I got back here last week, one of your stupid fake wands was in my room and I picked it up on accident. Hermione found me crying over a rubber chicken.”
George chuckles wetly. “Classic.”
Ginny leans her head against her brother’s shoulder. „D’you think he can see us right now?”
„I hope not, he’d think we’re pathetic,” George deadpans thickly and Ginny grins.
“No, you know what he’d do?” she asks, resolutely getting to her feet. “He’d ask us why the hell we’re up here moping, when we could be downstairs, eating mum’s food and swapping Ron’s wand for one of your fakes while he’s busy snogging Hermione.”
She holds out her hand, and with the smallest of smiles, George takes it.