He doesn't frequent this part of town much, but it's a rainy night and he's cold and the pub half-hidden by the busy lights seems to draw him in.
He orders something with an unintelligible name and downs it in two large gulps, slamming it down on the table so hard it shatters.
When the bartender raises his eyebrow and tells him he'll have to pay for that, he just throws a bigger wad of Muggle cash on the counter and orders three more.
Sometimes, this is the only way to forget.
The clock is ticking and it isn't night any longer, but the early hours of morning where people are starting to stumble home and sleep, their arms woven in an interlocking pattern of drunken friendship as they carry themselves down the cobblestoned street.
He thinks he hates them a little.
So it is much past closing time and the barman is wiping down glasses, and he is only allowed to stay because it's obvious from his missing ear that he's missing a part of himself when she walks in.
She is drunk and she is loud and she is wobbling around in heels too high and a skirt too short and when she comes to a stop in front of him, he notices that her makeup is smudged and her eyes are glassy.
I don't believe it, she crows, her laugh echoing like broken glass. George Weasley, in a Muggle bar?
He doesn't invite her to sit down, but she does anyway, ordering a drink from the exasperated barman without blinking an eye.
The bar is empty, so it is silent, and the barman is muttering under his breath as he places a glass of straight vodka in front of her, watching with a mixture of annoyance and a little awe as she drains it.
When she turns her head, he catches the faintest scent of jasmine blossoms, but it pales in comparison to the stench of alcohol that rolls off her body in waves.
They stare at each other for a while, black meeting murky brown.
Then she laughs again and turns away, her mouth smiling but her eyes so sad it almost mirrors his.
You look too much like him, she says, her red-tinged mouth quirking at the side. I don't know if it makes me happy or even more depressed.
He doesn't reply.
What I do know, she continues, beckoning the barman with a long, long finger. Is that I haven't had enough to drink.
He sits and watches as the barman refuses, tells them that it is high time they leave and that he is about to close down, never mind that she isn't quite drunk enough yet to forget, never mind that sitting next to her is a living, breathing reminder of everything they have both lost.
He sighs a little internally when she starts to rage, thick black hair cascading angrily around her shoulders, and he picks her up, slinging her long, long, brown legs over his arm.
She is angry and she is violent, shouting curses both at him and at the happy-to-see-them-go bartender, and he cannot help but be grateful that she left her wand at home because he remembers what a hex from the end of her wand felt like, and damn, it hurts.
They are far away when he drops her unceremoniously to the ground- romanticism was never his style, he left that to- and she glares up at him from where she is sprawled on the pavement and he is unsurprised to find her eyes are filled with tears.
When she whispers to him, he can hear the echoes of long ago memories and it hurts his heart a little.
Nothing helps, she tells him as she slowly picks herself up from the ground. She gets drunk, she fights, she laughs, she cries, and nothing, nothing helps.
He doesn't tell her that he has tried too, because, after all, what good would that do?
But it seems that he doesn't need to, because after a long, silent moment, she throws an arm around his neck and kisses him.
It is fiery and it is hot, and yes, it has passion, but it is the passion of the lonely, of the damned, of those who have glimpsed light but have been thrust into deepest recesses of hell.
When he wakes up the next morning with a pounding headache and her still body next to him, he cries.
And when she wakes up, moments later, she cries too.
They are wrong, they both know. But they are both missing the person that makes them right, so what difference does it make if they try to fit the jagged puzzle pieces of themselves together?
They do not fit, and they never will.
But they keep trying.
Hello again :) My recent obsession has been George/Angelina- they seem like such a doomed couple that I can't resist.
Please, please review! They make my day :)
-FantaFaerie