Written for: Quidditch League Forum Competition (Round 10)
Team: Kenmare Kestrels
Position: Chaser 1
Main Prompt: 1990s Mariah Carey and Boys II Men ("One Sweet Day")
Optional Prompts: the words "blend" (#2), "arrow" (#7), and "luminous" (#10)
Word-count of 'Listening to Silence' (excluding title and these notes): 1,291
No time extension used
Listening to Silence
The room is quiet. There's a little har-ha!, far off. It's a laugh, but a derisive one, and it fades quickly, so he closes his eyes again and lets himself sink into the mattress. He ought to get up, he thinks.
Get up, he hisses into the recesses of his mind. It's morning and there's work to be done. He can't lie here all day.
It's too quiet in here, besides.
He starts by opening his eyes. He stares at the ceiling of his bedroom in Weasleys' Wizarding Wheezes. When he's used to the feeling of open eyes, he listens carefully.
He listens to the little laughs filtering in through his closed window, and the creaks of the building, and everything else that disturbs the silence. Listening is more difficult than seeing.
When he's used to the feeling of hearing, he stretches.
His spine clicks as he pulls his muscles. He points his toes and clenches his hands. When his body feels loose and warm, he sighs. Time to get up.
He rolls out of bed, his feet thumping against the floor. His hand drags through his hair.
Next task. A shower. He's not hungry yet. Nausea brews placidly in his stomach, a blend of disgusting comfort and strange ever-present unease.
He strips as he walks, carelessly dropping clothes onto the floor. When he reaches the small bathroom, he's naked. So he climbs into the shower, and turns the water on. Cold water splatters against his back and he flinches. He paws at the controls, turning up the heat a little, but not too much. He prefers the cold to the heat. It's more numbing. He washes quickly, scrubbing soap everywhere. Once he's rinsed, he rests his forehead against the shower tile. Just a moment. Then he turns off the tap and steps out.
He towels off. Pauses. Turns. The mirror above the sink is shiny and clear, and the light through a frosted window is annoyingly luminous, so he can see himself perfectly well. The shower wasn't hot enough to generate steam.
He regrets that, now. He wishes he'd taken a hot shower, and let the warmth soothe his muscles and hide the mirror. Maybe he should break it, and throw the shards away, but he can't, not now that he sees the face in that mirror.
He sees his freckles, and his wild mop of damp red hair, and his pale skin. He sees the bags under his eyes, and the wrinkles forming by his mouth where before they gathered only at the corners of his eyes, courtesy of hours of laughter.
He stills.
"Fred," he says wistfully, because that face in the mirror could almost be Fred's. Almost.
But for the ear. Fred had never lost an ear. Fred had died before being able to collect wrinkles by his mouth from frowning. Fred had never looked so grey and so tired and so lost, like he was in space, and didn't know it, like he was floating away, away, away.
He raises a hand to the mirror and presses down. He smiles strangely, the corner of his mouth lifting up while the other side turns down. He's smiling and frowning, all at once, because it's like he's touching his brother again, but his brother is dead, and he can't remember exactly how Fred smelled, or the geography of his freckles.
He stares at the side of his head. At his missing ear. How can he simultaneously hate and love a part of himself – a missing part, at that? Hate because it emphasizes that he is not his brother, that his brother is dead, that no-one will play jokes with him that border on sacrilege. No-one will say he's "hol(e)y", because everyone tiptoes around George, afraid, no doubt, of the look in his eyes. Love because he is physically missing a part of himself, and that proof is a comfortable blanket. He is physically missing Fred and Fred can never come back. He misses him in his hands, that want to hug his brother; he misses him in his eyes, that want to see him; in his ears, that want to hear him; in his throat, that longs to speak to him; in his feet, that want to foot-wrestle with him; in his wrinkles, that want to deepen at his jokes; and in his heart, that misses its twin's tandem beat. But it's more than that. He misses him at night, at day; when he's eating or working or running or anything else that requires being alive when his brother is dead. And sometimes he forgets Fred, too, and that's worst of all.
The man in the mirror smiles bitterly, and George turns away from him.
He regrets not taking a hot shower, so hot that the steam fills up the room, until he can't see the man in the mirror with his missing ear and that face with its splattering of freckles and wrinkles and the remnants of laughter at the corner of his eyes.
But then something swells in him, hot and furious and angry. So angry. "Bring him back," he moans, and picks up a soap bottle and slams it into the mirror. It shatters. Falls.
So does he, sinking to the floor because he wants Fred so badly and no amount of pleading or staring into mirrors can ever bring him back.
"Fred," he whines.
He closes his eyes and presses his hands to the side of his head. He allows himself to relax, slowly.
He starts over. First he opens his eyes. Stares at the shower.
Then he removes his hands. Listens carefully.
Then he flexes his hands and his feet and concentrates on the feeling of his fingertips on cold tile.
Next task. He swallows. Gets up. Goes to his room. Gets dressed. By now, his stomach is faintly grumbling, so he grabs some toast and tea from his little kitchenette. He eats downstairs, at the counter of Weasleys' Wizarding Wheezes, because he hates the empty kitchen.
People pass by the shop, looking in curiously, but he waves his toast at them and doesn't open the door. It's not eight o'clock yet. When he's polished off his toast, he moves onto the remainder of his tea. There's a knock on the door that has him looking up from the dregs swirling at the bottom of his cup.
It's his mother, shaking a box at him that no doubt has food.
Dusting his fingers off of crumbs, he slides off the stool, and goes to open the door. A woman's singing voice slides through from outside, loud and soulful:" … you're shining down on me from Heaven … Like so many friends we've lost along the way …"
"Fred, dearie, I've made you some –" his mother freezes as he stiffens and stares at her, the angry red curse scar of his ear clear as day.
It feels like an arrow has impaled him. "I'm not Fred, I'm George. And you call yourself our mother?" he jokes, but it falls so flat that he regrets opening his mouth.
"Sorry, George," she whispers.
He forces a grin. "S'alright." He forgets, too, when he looks into mirrors sometimes. "I forgive you. I'm a holey saint, remember?" he says, but she looks devastated, and he misses Fred more than ever.
Fred would laugh.
He misses that most of all.
Laughter.