Home.

After the Battle of Hogwarts, the last battle of the Second War, nothing was the same. People had died. It hadn't occurred to me in school that there would be casualties, even on the good side. I hadn't realized what war really meant until we were in the middle of it. By then, it was too late. I was willing to sacrifice everything.

After, I went back to live with Gran. I kept my old room and I got a job in Diagon Alley helping George Weasley in his shop.

Most of the shops in Diagon Alley had been opened up again rather quickly. The Alley hadn't received much damage, since the fighting had been fought elsewhere around the country.

George's mum, Molly Weasley, wanted him to shut the shop down, board it up and move on. She didn't understand how he could stand it, seeing as she couldn't even pass the place as she walked down the street. She didn't understand how he could continue to live there, how it didn't hurt him. She didn't see what I saw everyday.

Georgewas hurt, even though he didn't want anyone to see it. There were some days when he couldn't even get out of bed because of the pain. On those days, Verity, the assistant the Weasleys' had hired from the very beginning, and I would run the shop. We wouldn't go up the stairs or open the door, even though we could hear the loud sobbing that came from the flat. We would wait until the next day and see George come down again. He would always come down again.

He told me, once, why he kept the place going. He told me it was because Fred had told him to, before they went into the Battle. They had made a deal, a kind of pact. No matter what happened, they would continue to invent and create and follow the dream they had shared growing up. George said he had never expected to be the one still there. At least, not the only one.

Mrs. Weasley was a wreck because of it. She wanted George to live at home. She wanted a full house again. She wanted to be happy and whole. She didn't really understand how hard it was for George. Sure, she had lost a son, and that was really hard, but George had lost part of his soul. Half of himself was gone. He felt lost.

George became my friend in the few months I had been working. He taught me how to make various joke products, saying that the only other person who knew the secrets was dead and now he needed to tell another person. He would always try to smile after he said that, trying to make a joke out of the situation, but he always failed. After, he would tell me the procedure, his voice emotionless and mechanical, and he would show me where their rule book was. That's what Fred had called it, The Rule Book, for lack of a better name. When George was done telling me, he would excuse himself from the shop and return to his flat. I would pretend I couldn't hear him throw his body onto his bed or the choked sounds he would make as he threw books and other heavy things at the walls.

I had to leave eventually. It took way too much inside of me to pretend, every single day, that one of my friends wasn't broken. I had to stop talking to him; I just couldn't see his face. It was sad and devastated and it cut me in a place I didn't even know I had. I took a job at Hogwarts, teaching Herbology. Three years later I heard he had married. A year after that I heard that he had had his first child and named him Fred. He wasn't better, not even close. But now he had a family; a wife and children he loved. Finally, he was home.