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"One, two, three…" Fred could hear Tammy counting something over on the other side of his bed. He was still half asleep and unable to make himself roll over to see what she was doing. Ever since they had come back to school, things had been hard and while Tammy had stopped drinking, Fred knew that she was still struggling with what had happened to Cedric and now with the fact that their new defence against the dark arts professor seemed to have no intentions of teaching any of the students how to defend themselves. Tammy's stress levels seemed to be climbing through the roof and so Fred had grown more than used to all of her weird quirks. "Where is the fourth one?"
Fred noted the sense of panic in Tammy's voice and he soon realised that he couldn't pretend to be asleep for much longer. She sounded as if she was close to breaking point and he wasn't at all ready for that.
"What have you lost?" He mumbled as he rolled over, seeing now that she was on the edge of a panic attack and if they wanted to continue sleeping in the same bed Fred had to make sure that Tammy didn't draw any attention to the fact that she was in here.
"My clip. The fourth one. I can't find it."
Fred wanted to pretend that he was imaging the hysteria in her voice, but as he got himself out of bed, he knew that wasn't the case. He walked over to where she was crouched at the end of his bed, using his trunk as a makeshift table. In front of her she had three hair clips with butterflies on, ones that he knew Hermione had bought her a couple of summers ago. They had seen better days, but it had never occurred to Tammy to buy new ones to replace them - and Fred had never been in a girl shop.
"It'll be here somewhere." He said soothingly as he stroked her wild her back behind her ear, keeping his voice low to try to calm her down so that she wouldn't wake George and Lee. They knew that Tammy was here to stay, but if she woke them too many times then Fred couldn't stop them from issuing her with her marching orders.
Fred moved to kneel on the floor so that he could look for the clip while Tammy shook out the bed sheets. He wanted to tell her that it was just a clip, that it could be replaced, but he also knew that these clips meant more to Tammy, that they were more than just material possessions to her. Material possessions weren't really something that the girl cared for after all.
Searching in a dimly lit room while trying not to wake your twin brother and your best friend was not easy but somehow Fred managed to do it eventually he found the clip, under one of the corners of his trunk. After Tammy had thanked him and silently put each one into her hair, he pulled her up onto his lap as he sat on the bed, pressing soft kisses to the top of her head and the back of her neck.
She was at breaking point but there was very little that Fred could do to help. As soon as he graduated, he planned to join the Order, but he wasn't even sure how much help he would be able to provide in that area. It wasn't as if he were a duellist after all, and it seemed that he wasn't really going to have an opportunity to learn now that their very lives depended on it. No, Fred's special skill was to make people laugh and he was all too aware that skill was going to be useless once they ended up in battle.
He was determined to continue to be there for Tammy in whatever shape of form she needed him to be there for her. He wouldn't be able to physically be there for her next year, but that was why he had a younger brother and sister, was it not? They could look after Tammy when he could not.
Tammy rested her head against his chest, a soft sigh escaping her and he could feel her deflate as the nervous energy that she had gathered when she had been unable to find the hair clip. Silently Fred cursed Dumbledore. The way that he was treating Tammy currently, ignoring her and shutting her out of Order business when she was the one person who deserved to know everything that was going on was not at all helping, but there was very little that Fred could do about it except for continue to be his girl's rock, whether she was losing it over a butterfly hair clip or battling He Who Must Not Be Named himself.