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When he saw Fred, George couldn’t take it in. It was like everything was happening in front of him, but he wasn’t part of it. He was numb. He couldn’t understand his mother’s tears, the way Fred’s eyes didn’t move to look at him. He couldn’t understand why his fingers were so cold. It was like the beginning of a cruel joke he hadn’t got yet. He felt like a bad punchline.
When the emotions came, they tore him apart. Sometimes the pain was so sharp he couldn’t breathe. Sometimes it was like mist, surrounding him. He inhaled and exhaled it. Most of the time it was so real, so tangible, it became a part of him. He felt guilt washing over him. He felt the world crumbling and tried to keep it together while it slipped through his fingers. He felt rage, boiling in his veins, at the injustice of it, at himself. He felt alone for the first time in his life, and the certainty of it crushed him.
He shattered the mirror in his room. The cracks spread out like spiderwebs, and he hit the glass until they hid his face, until there was blood on his knuckles and he was blind with tears.
He could hear people lowering their voices when he passed by. He could feel their sympathetic looks burning the back of his neck. He could see her mother’s eyes looking at everything except his face, his family trying too hard to be careful. He heard all the things they left unsaid.
It had been a year when he managed to tell a joke again, and the words tasted strange on his tongue. They tasted like lost things. They tasted like new beginnings. Ron laughed, startled, and Percy gave this wary smile. Molly started sobbing and hugged him, her head resting on his shoulder, and he felt like he had returned home.
Ron helped him with the shop, that boy who had been called blood traitor and useless and hero and king. Ron was good at strategising, ordering pieces to move like he had the whole world at his feet, but he wasn’t good at inventing. So George left him to talk to clients and crack jokes, and started experimenting again. He nearly burned the workshop once, but he was creating things and he saw Fred’s smirk, and caught himself grinning.
When Ginny was about to finish her seventh year, she asked for his help. I want to leave in a blaze of glory, she said, her smile wicked. George breathed, sharp, and then he asked, what do you have in mind?
On Ginny’s last day, while they were turning it into a legend, he looked at McGonnagall over the crowd. He’d expected a severe frown, a One would have thought you’d have matured, Mister Weasley, an I thought you’d left the school, I didn’t see you in my class. He’d expected something to make him feel steady. But she was smiling, and he thought she must have an allergy, because he couldn’t believe Minerva McGonnagall was crying. He felt like crying too. He felt like bursting into laughter.
Alicia Spinnet and Angelina, and Katie Bell, and Harry and Oliver. He met them to play quidditch sometimes, whenever he felt like kicking things (or, otherwise, bludgers). He stopped looking for another beater with fiery hair after a while.
He stopped waiting for someone else to finish his sentences.
He made plans with Lee Jordan, and was invited as a guest to his radio show. He was witty and funny and loud. He was almost like he’d used to be. When the show finished, Lee was staring at him with something like pride in his eyes, and George smiled because he felt like it.
He became friends with Parvati Patil, who had a thing for sarcastic comments whispered under her breath. Sometimes he wondered how could he ever have thought she shouldn’t be in Gryffindor, this girl who thought she owed bravery to the world. I don’t like mirrors, she said to him once, her eyes lost in the shadows of the clouds. They remind me of all the things I have become. And all the things that are not here anymore. He said he understood. He didn’t say he had broken all the mirrors in his house.
Some nights the world spun. Some nights it was so quiet he thought he’d drown in the loneliness. He had learned to breathe deep. He had learned to stare at the ceiling for hours, filling his lungs and emptying them and stopping the memories from taking over. He had got used to excuse himself from family meetings and close the bathroom’s door, sit against the wall, hug his knees and cry until his throat was sore. He had learned to fake little smiles in front of his mother, and then he had learned to give real ones.
He didn’t propose to Angelina like Fred would have, with a wink and a mischievous grin. He stumbled and ate his words and pulled a flower out of his sleeve, and Angelina rolled her eyes and said about time.
Are you sure about this? Parvati asked him a few days later over a butterbeer.
Yeah, he said, and he meant it.
(When they had started dating, Ginny had gone to Angelina, fire in her eyes. She had said, he’s not Fred. He deserves better than being the one to fill the hole he left.
Angelina had frowned. I know he’s not. I don’t want him to be.
She had loved a redheaded end boy once upon a time, but there was another one now, and they weren’t the same, but neither was she. And this boy, this boy who was so similar and yet so different to the other one, had seen her through the worst time in her life, he had seen her being lonely and scared and crying herself to sleep. He had seen her breaking, and he had seen her building herself anew.)
When they had a son, his name wasn’t even a question. When they had a daughter, Angelina named her Roxanne, the dawn, she said, and George kissed her.
After a long time, his patronus came back. It was Percy and Arthur hugging, it was Ginny taking to the skies. It was a jumper with his initial sewn into it. It was Ron’s loyalty, and it was Hogwarts growing smaller, cheers ringing in his ears. It was Angelina on their wedding’s day, it was his son laughing with a missing teeth and Roxanne trying to keep balance on a broom. It was Fred and all the things he had become without him.
Sometimes George still had to lock himself in the bathroom and try to get enough air into his lungs. Sometimes he still felt his eyes burning, and sometimes he woke at four in the morning, the quietness crushing him. But he mourned. He wept. He survived. He remembered.
He lived.