Part One

Denial

You're in denial, you never will believe it's you

Denial, you always hide behind the truth

You'll never believe it, you never believe it's you

Denial- Ozzy Osborne

The flat smells unbelievably foul, It's littered with empty Firewhiskey bottles, take away boxes, and empty potion bottles. The windows are painted back. Roaches scuttle over the counters, and climb up the walls. Mould hads grown furry on dishes left in the sink in the tiny kitchen. Dust thick enough to see covers everything. My feet stick to the grimy black film that covers the floors. Old stained dirty urine smelling mattresses line the walls. In the corner a rat is gnawing at something that's been left to rot in a carton.

I walk the rows of prone bodies until I get to the mattress George is lying on. I am looking directly into his face and I still cannot believe it's him. He doesn't look like himself at all. He's so thin, and his skin is paler than I've ever seen it. Dark circle ring his eyes. His eyes themselves are bloodshot and glassy. They stare unfocused at the ceiling. Drool is running down his chin, though some of it has dried on the front of his shirt,which is caked with mud, dirt, and God only knows what else. His hair looks as if it hasn't been washed or combed in ages. I bend down and slap his face. "George wake up!" I call loudly, but he doesn't stir. I point my wand into his face and cry "Sobrius!" George seem to become a little more cognizan,t but still not totally aware.

"Let's get out of here." Charlie says. "The smell is turning my stomach." I nod. I've never been to Knockturn Alley before, and never want to return.

"It's just as well." I say. "It's all I can do for him, he's stable at least." We apparate to St. Mungo's. George is taken to the 4th floor- Spell Damage. Never in a trillion years would I have thought George would be the type to start using psychoactive potions. The George Weasley I'd seen just now was not the one I have known for practically all of my life. Then again the George I've known practically all my life had always been with Fred. Fred and George were like Peanut butter and Jelly, Broomsticks and Quidditch, Christmas and Santa Claus. They just went together. When you thought of one you automatically thought of the other.

"How are you doing?" Lee Jordan asks as soon as we meet the rest of the search party in the lobby of the hospital. The Weasley Family, Myself, Lee, and the old Quidditch team have been looking for George for two weeks. Today we found him- five days before the anniversary of The Battle of Hogwarts.

"I don't know none of this seems real." I shake my head "I think it's still sinking in."

"I know, I feel like I've let him down, I mean I knew he was in a bad way, just not this bad."

"There is no way this is George." I say and start sobbing. Lee hugs me

"It will be all right, George is strong he's going to make it thought this." He leads me to the seats. I put my arms around myself to stop shaking. I cannot not get the image of how George looked out of my mind. So broken and hallow. His eyes had been void of any emotion at all.

"You didn't see him, he looked so gone, so dead." I clench my fist. "Why'd he do this to himself, is he trying to-" I stop unable to finish the sentence because my throat has closed up.

"I don't know." Lee says.

"I want to thank the both of you." Molly Weasley says coming into the lobby and hugging both of us.

"Don't think of it." Lee and I say together.

"How is he?" I ask standing up o give her a proper hug.

"He's a lot better then when you first saw him, but he's still got a long way to go." Molly gives a long quivery sigh. "He's still got to deal with what made him turn to those potions in the first place."

"I'm so sorry I is there any thing that I can do?" I ask

"You can get the hell out of here." Ginny shouts at me. She has appeared suddenly beside her mum. Ginny she glares hard at me.

"Ginny!" Molly snaps.

"Everyone knows it's her fault George ran off." She snarls.

"Ginny I didn't-

"Shut up!" Ginny screams at me. Her whole face has gone a bright shade of red. "What are you like Angelina?" Ginny asks shaking her head. "You know George is going through hell, but you still end things with him to be with Oliver."

"Ginny I swear I didn't want to end things, it's really complicated, I love George, but he needs help. Help I can't give him" My hands are shaking.

I should be on top of the world, this should be the time of my life. I play for the Montrose Magpie ( The team is the most successful in League history). I won the first ever World Cup I'd ever been in and patented the Johnson Juke. Now all of it's come crashing down round my head. My relationship with George, and my Quidditch career are over as quickly as they started.

During my career with the Magpies I have fallen off my broom many times it's a part of the game, but the last fall was a career ender for me. The fall wasn't even during a game, it was during drills. The fall that ended my career was because of The Battle of Hogwarts.

I had not been by Fred's side when he died. Something for which I still feel eternally guilty about. In that split second I had to deiced which area of Hogwarts to defend- I'd gone on to the Astronomy Tower with Katie Bell, Alicia Spinnet and Oliver Wood. Once we got there curses were flying every which way. The others raced ahead of me up the stairs , but for some reason I looked out of the window, and I saw something that made my blood run cold, Colin Creevey. Somehow he'd managed to sneak back inside. He was valiantly battling two death eaters at once. Little Colin Creevey. I had to get to him.

I raced down the stairs as fast as I could. "Please please please let me make in time." I chanted. I couldn't believe he held off two death eaters for this long. He was a true Gryffindor all right. I was almost there. As soon as I touched the grass the Death Eater pointed his wand. Everything felt like it was going in slow motion, I was running but it felt like I wasn't getting any where.

"NO!" I screamed as a green jet of light shot out of the Death Eater's wand. "NO!"

"Avada Kadavra !" Colin's lifeless body crumpled to the ground and didn't move. He looked like a doll lying there.

"Murder!" I screamed. I pointed my wand and shouted "Impedimenta!" Colin's murder flew back and hit the ground with a hard thud. I was shaking with rage. He was just a child. Now he was dead. A dead child.

"Crucio !" Yelled a second Death Eater whom I hadn't seen sneak up behind me.

I had never felt pain like it before in my life. It was like being skinned alive. There was no getting away from the pain. It was everywhere, it consumed me, sharp like knifes ,searing like acid, and it burned like fire. I crawled up to my hands and keens, only to be kicked in the ribs.

"Crucio!" I was dragging myself across the lawn by arms, I felt to weak to walk, but I was trying to get away from him. The second Death Eater stepped closer to me, stepped over me and shouted Crucio again and again and again. I lie on my back sobbing. He stood over me laughing and breathing deeply. He straddled me pushing my hips down into the cold wet grass, his weight sent fresh waves of pain though me. I used the what strength I had left to try and prise his wand from his hands. I was going to go fighting untiil to the end.

He laughed as I wiggled beneath him , but his weight and the pain was too much I stopped struggling and just closed my eyes. I had absolutely no strength left.

"Was it as good for you?" He asked lasciviously.

I realised in that moment that he was getting off on this. He wanted to kill me slowly, he was going to torture me to death. I felt so weak, almost like I was dying, like something was pulling at me, it wanted to take me. I wanted to let it. The Death Eaters hands were plucking at my clothes. I closed my eyes. I could feel his hands sliding my shirt up and pulling my jeans down.

"Crucio!" He screamed, and blackness took me.

When I woke up I was in St. Mungo's still in pain. The memories of what happen were fuzzy if they were there at all. I'd been given Sedativus, a potion that is the Muggle equivalent of a medically induced coma. It puts the drinker a deep state of unconsciousness in order to heal. I'd been asleep for four weeks. I'd only just woke up three days ago.

George was asleep in the chair beside my bed, giving me the impression he'd been waiting there a long time, waiting for me to wake up. His lined face actually had stubble, and there were bags under his eyes. Still he looked so peaceful sleeping.

I sat up slowly and painfully and shook his shoulder gently. "Wake up Georgie porgie"

"Wot?" George said jumping up.

"Where's Fred." I asked smoothing down his rumpled hair.

George's eyes evasively turned from me to look out the window. There was a long pause.

"Where is Fred?" I repeated. I was starting to feel cold.

"Angelina, God I-" Really cold.

"Where is Fred ?" I asked cutting him off. The icy feeling was traveling straight up my spine. "Where's Fred!" "Where's Fred!"

George started crying. It was awful sound to hear. "Angelina please you're already hurt."

"Where's Fred! Where's Fred! Where's Fred!" I kept screaming. I started hurling objects off my bedside table. I knew that I was being hysterical, I knew I was acting mad, but, if I stopped screaming George was going to tell me, and then it would be real. "Where's Fred!" "Where's Fred." "Where's Fred." My voice was so loud it hurt my own ears, it hurt my throat, but I couldn't stop yelling.

"You know Angelina, he's dead." I was frozen.

I stopped screaming then. My mouth fell open into a perfect O. It was like someone had pulled the rug from under me and I was still waiting to fall. George just looked at me and blinked. The world seem to have slowed down and I could hear every mundane sound in the room. The clock ruthlessly ticking our life away. The birds outside tweeting their heads off, they had no clue. The commercial on the wireless for broom polish. It seemed obscene in it's cheerfulness.

"How?" I asked. My voice had gone hoarse from yelling. I felt the air leave my lungs.

"Rookwood." He said his voice full of shaking rage.

I wanted to say something more, but I started crying huge wracking sobs. George took me into his arms. We both just cried, and it felt like we were breaking apart. Like when we got done crying there would be nothing left of us. It felt like it might actually be possible to die from crying. Our tears were noisy and loud, they filled my ears, the whole room the, whole floor. All of St. Mungo's. Crying at that moment was just purely a release of sorrow, there was nothing soothing or therapeutic about it. It was the kind of crying that seems to come from a deep endless well within you, the one that stores all your other bad memories as well.

"Ginny I'm sorry." I say pulling myself out of that memory , and coming back to the here and now. I look round at everyone. "I should go." I say hastily and apparate home. I no longer feel like a brave Gryffindor. Not as much as I've been running away from things lately. My home is no longer in Montrose, I left there after the team's sports healers told me that I'd never play Quidditch again. Prolong torture from the Cruciatus Curse has adverse side effects. I have fainting spells, I get nosebleeds and blinding and painful headaches now. I have bouts of insomnia now. I was having one of those massive headaches when I fell off my broom at Quidditch pratice. I Unable to break my fall I hit the ground hard. I was in hospital for two weeks. Between the massive headaches and fainting spells my career with the Magpies was over. There is nothing I can do to stop any these side effects, It's just something I have to learn to live with.

I felt so lonely and so useless in Scotland that I brought a tiny cottage in Ottery St. Catchpole with some of my Quidditch money. Since moving to Ottery St. Catchpole I started spending a lot of time with the Weasley family, well mostly Molly as she and Arthur are the only two at the burrow now. Mrs. Weasley and- I or Molly as she insist I call her now- talked while she taught me all she knew about cooking and cleaning. To my surprise I was a natural at cooking. I could see why Molly did it, it kept you busy and there was something therapeutic about it.

Having no job, and nothing else to do I spent my days cooking for my friends, and organising their flats. Until eventually I drove them all crazy. "Get out of my house you mad woman!" Katie Bell replied. "You rearrange anything else and I'll rearrange you molecules." The only one who didn't mind my always being around was George. Even with Ron and Verity helping him he still spent long hours at work. The shop was running so successfully that he hardly had anytime for himself.

So naturally He didn't mind me fussing about him like a hausfrau. He liked me organising his flat and making him weekly meals.

One day I went to his shop with him and saw the state of affairs his bookkeeping was in and almost fainted. "George you should be ashamed of yourself, this filing system is awful really awful"

"Think you can do better swotty knickers?" I sighed heavily. George knew I hated when he called me that, which is exactly why he called me that. I started doing all the bookkeeping as George was such a slob. I took care of the international owl orders too.

"I've been taking advantage of you." George said one day "I should be paying you, I can't have you keeping my books for free."

"Oh it's nothing really." I said. I was going crazy having nothing to do round my place. I've never been good at sitting and waiting. I was the typical A-type, just like George was.

"My male pride insist that you let me pay you." He said flicking his wand and making a paper airplane zoom above my head. "You can be my secretary, my sexy secretary whom I chase around my desk whilst twirling my mustache."

I rolled my eyes. "You've been watching too many of my Muggle movies." I agreed to help George on the condition that he call me assistant and not sexy secretary. We worked side by side everyday and we ate lunch and dinner together. I got more and more involved the goings on his shop. I helped George cut down on his over head, I reduced his shrink and condensed the stock room. I made displays in the shop window.

"You've been really good for the shop." George told me one day when we were around my place eating dinner. I had made broiled salmon with curried eggplant chutney and steamed haricots verts and potatoes. I hoped that George liked it, he usually loved what I cooked, but there had been a few misses.

"Thank you."

"I mean what you've done for the wonder witch line." He whistles. "We can't stock the shelves full enough of eyelash growing charms., or those perfect posture pastry, even Hermione was impressed with the skill it took to make those."

"Well Hermione only got two more O.W.L.S. than me, I didn't come by the name Swotty Knickers for being thick."

George laughed. "I loved how shirty you'd get when I called you that."

"I did not get shirty." I say.

"You did, I only did it cos you were so cute when you were angry.

"I still always managed to keep up with you and Fred."

"Speaking of Fred, I need you to do something for me Angie."

"Sure anything." I placed my hand on top of his.

"I-I need you t-to help me g-go though Fred's things." He sniffed. "You know, what to keep, what's rubbish and what I should keep."

It felt like all of the air had been squeezed from my lungs. All of Fred's personal belongings were just things now. Items without an owner. Once again the finality of never slapped me in my face. Never again would I see Fred, or hear him laugh. I wouldn't ever yell at him, or hug him or anything him.

"Of course I'll help." I said in a tight voice.

"Tomorrow then if you don't mind, I kept putting it off.

"I'll be there. I say.