Summary: He calls her sunshine. Babydoll.
Note: Sometimes when people are taken too young, you sit with your legs up against the wall and your back on the ground in your bathroom because things don't fit anymore. Then you pack a box and just go. Maybe that's just what grief is. So, here's George and Luna and Rolf and Angelina because that's just life; and so this came from Elbow's latest release. I got the vinyl a couple of months ago, and this is based on one of my favourite songs from it.
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.
Lippy Kids
stealing booze & hour long hungry kisses;
and nobody knew me at home anymore
Luna's smiles taste like the sunshine.
She shouldn't have come to a funeral dressed like that – he's been writing letters to Greg from Forge anyway so who's he to comment – it's so obscene. Wrong, like a grin. Razor sharp, like brandishing a knife. It's so vibrant it hurts just the same.
"I like your dress."
She laughs, like light pouring over his battered skin and it feels like forgiveness because he shouldn't have been the one to survive. He's not sure who it's coming from, him or his twin, but that doesn't matter; she's a breath of fresh air into a lungful of blood. She hitches up the orange hem to show her bruised knees. He touches the hole where an ear used to be. Sticks and stones, he gets it and knows that of all the people in all the world, Luna understands.
"I didn't know him, but he was nice to me anyway."
(When she was little she collected her mother's teeth and tried to put her back together.)
As a child unlike him she had learned that pain tastes like salt; and to kill it like this.
His existence becomes a confession.
But Greg is always gone by morning. With wicked hands he carves himself, a fake plastic boy reborn in flame and heat and rage. He is a pain bird, he is oil and feathers and a smashed face. This is his bonepulse, this is his heartsong and it is the beginning. Forge is reborn within the holes of his existence.
Luna fills the cracks with hope.
One day, she decides to rebuild.
They listen to some crappy muggle bands as she drafts their lives in chalk on blue squared paper, line of maths and physics and fitting everything into place. George tells her she's bloody amazing and she giggles it off. Without Fred or Greg or Forge life continues for a while, because basking in her happiness is like bathing in the sunlight. She makes the world beautiful. Then:
"Daddy's dead."
She announces, bathed in gold. Her eyes are dry and wide and so so empty and now he is the only thing between her and her endlessness. She is sitting and shaking and oh, oh God; it's like watching himself unfurl all over again.
"So's Greg."
She ignores his Freudian slip and runs her finger around the rim of her oversized coffee cup. Circles, she later tells him, are her favourite shape – they're just the right side of never ending and forever. They're beautiful.
"Aren't you scared?"
She says dreamily and he bites back a bitter cackle. It's supposed to hurt like this, like your palpitating heart is spewing over the rest of your insides and your ribcage aches ready for snapping with the pain of containment. Like you cannot continue without them in the morning. Family is all they've ever had.
"Of what?"
He asks, snide remarks turning to ash on his curled tongue. He swears even now that I this moment her eyes shine, something terrible and gorgeous and it stings to look at that expression. Her lips form a chewed out oh.
"Who's going to be there to hold your hand when you die?"
His hands clasp around the stray bricks on the table and his mouth is dry. Of course his Mother, and Percy the git, and Charlie and Bill and Ron and – her. Always her. He knows he should say this, tell her it's you and that she's too trusting to just let him in because he will only make her unhappy. It feels like the house is falling down all over again.
"No."
He cuts it short, lies, because she's only great when she's smiling and making up crumple horned snorcacks to keep everyone else compliant. She doesn't mention it again, but he knows that she understands why. Sometimes it's just a matter of what pulls you through the day.
For Forge, it's pretending he's still who he used to be.
Somewhere along the way, she relearns his name.
She doesn't ask why he asks her to call him Forge and it's probably because she doesn't need to. It's stopped making him uncomfortable, how her wide eyes search through you without ever really trying; and how when he wakes up screaming Greg, she's waiting. And how unlike his mother, she doesn't cry when he says he thinks he's two people over Christmas dinner; and how no matter what, Greg always wins against Forge hands down.
Sometimes in return, feeling generous, he calls her sunshine. Babydoll.
Mostly, he also thinks she knows when he begins to want her.
He's convinced that it's proximity. She is young and not conventionally beautiful with grass in her hair and mud covered bare feet, and she talks shit a lot of the time to keep them sane. But when she goes on her tiptoes to lift a book back into place or to add another brick in the walls, her skirts always lift indecently high and he can't help but stare. His mouth turns dry.
"I want George back."
She says conversationally then, as if it's possible; as if he could function as one being with his heart buried underground with his brother. Because she has noticed, and he clicks his teeth together and tries not to look at her again because really even glancing at her would be sinful.
"He's dead."
She looks down at him from the top of her ladder. Her face is washed over and soft and for a moment he feels guilty because she trusts him and it's been so long and she doesn't care for Forge; she just wants the silly Gryffindor boy a few years her senior that made silly jokes and never once mocked her because he was her sort-of-friend.
"Nobody ever really dies."
There is always a piece left behind, even if you can't see it. His mother still hasn't cleaned out Fred's old room at the burrow, the room they'd shared because he can't bring himself to go back over the hills and sort through the remains of their lives. So he screams, screams because she's silly and young like a startled rabbit and when she falls off the ladder all she gets is a scratch. He storms out because he can't be around pretty kids like her who don't really understand grief because they've always been sheltered by others.
It's the beginning of the end and she's still standing.
He goes back a week later.
Her forgiveness is a balm, and when he goes back there's still an extra breakfast set out as he lets himself in; and she's sitting at the breakfast table, one slice of toast with jam and the other with butter and his bacon sandwich made with happiness. He tells her that he put canary creams in with the normal biscuits so he ran away before anyone could find out, but they both know it's a lie, and to her credit she doesn't say anything.
The grasp of her hand on his says that she doesn't care, as long as he's where he belongs.
On the year anniversary of Forge's birthday, Luna throws a party.
He laughs because what one year old has seen everything he could ever love wiped out in one fell swoop, and what one year old would remember a birthday party in twenty years anyway? But when she cries at night thinking he can't hear because he tells her this only half-jokingly, any thoughts of mutiny are subdued.
"You know, I want to be George again."
He says when she hands him a suspicious looking cupcake with a number one candle stuck in it. Forge is an old hand at this now, and his mouth tastes like salt and misery until she smiles brighter than ever. Because she's been waiting for the boy with silly jokes and a cheeky smile to waltz back in all this time, and his tears are like pearls in their beauty.
"I was wondering when that would happen."
She says with a smile, and wipes the tears from his cheeks with her hands and he has never wanted to kiss anyone so much in his life. But misery is leaving his veins and now is not the time. When he's back, then it'll be ok because Fred and George are better together but as long as she's there waiting he knows he can learn to love himself.
"Happy George day."
He says, both to her and to himself, and to her credit she doesn't say anything about this. She learns forward, all blonde hair and endless grey eyes and kisses his forehead in the perfect image of beauty. He clings to the end of her hair and breathes in the smell of earth and vanilla shampoo and flour where she made him this peace offering. For the first time in a year he really smiles and he knows then that this isn't just a petty infatuation.
(You always return to where you belong.)
He's completely in love with her.
Then one day she tells him she's met a boy.
She tells him that his name is Rolf and he wonders how when they've been here this whole time, and suddenly he feels conscious whenever she goes into town because she's too good for a boy who wants to travel the world and he knows she'd go with him anyway. She sings when she makes their breakfast in what she says is the language of merfolk and says that Rolf's smile is like starlight and it's stunning.
It's then that he swears he will take her breath away.
George is reborn.
Luna has helped to pull him from his misery, and even now she still shines for him – only him – because she's so damn beautiful in his eyes. Each freckle on her milk white back is a star, he plays dot to dot with his eyes and makes constellations; and whenever her lips part to divulge some particularly nonsensical information he finds himself hanging on her every word.
"Luna, you're beautiful."
He tells her as she makes a daisy chain in the garden, mashing the stems with her nails endlessly. It's a burning summer and the house is nearly finished, and sitting in the garden with her in the scorching heat must be what's doing this. Every time a bead of sweat rolls down her chest into the top of her old sailor's wetsuit, he finds himself needing to reach out and touch her. Just once.
"That's nice of you to say."
She beams, and for the second time in his life he touches the tips of her dirty blonde hair and winds it around his fingers and her eyes are still perpetually huge and it's like she's known this whole time. In the heat he kisses her, and almost forgets to breathe because she's the one emptying his lungs and not the other way around. But her fingers are hungry and searching, and they clasp his copper hair and she tastes just like he expected – like sunshine.
"Rolf asked me to marry him."
She whispers onto his lips, and oh – girl with the messy hair who wears his sweaters as dresses – he'll start missing her the moment she walks out the door. She'll probably look back and not see him standing in the dark looking out of the window but she'll know he's there anyway. His mouth suddenly turns dry.
"And?"
He is wishing to be anywhere but here because then he really would be closer to her. Under her fingertips his skin is turning cold, like she's become the moon she was named for; and now the freckles and grey eyes he found beautiful have a terrible quality because she can't just leave him. But he knows even now that one day she will, and whatever this is won't be here anymore. The thought makes him think of retching.
"I said no."
He breathes out and claims her lips again, if only for now. He's in love with a girl with a childish grin but he promises himself he won't be heartbroken again. The girl with the soft hands who makes him bagels with cream cheese and eggs sunny side up.
But even then he knows that she is already gone.
For a time they have a golden age.
She is young and it is her summer. Her skin is rubbed red by the sun kissing her shoulders and elbows and knees and cheeks, and somehow he thinks that it makes her less his because people like her better this way. They notice as she sheds pieces of her like old feathers, and the day he sits between her legs in bed she cries because it's not beautiful and he has convinced himself that only he will ever really love her. Then Rolf turns up on the doorstep.
Then there's the comedown.
Rolf really is like starlight.
He wants to think she's said it flippantly because she's the same person as before, the same agnostic girl who wears deep purple and matador maroon because she thinks that they're only pretty together. But she won't kiss him anymore, and in the silence of the first breakfast between him and them he swears he could hear his heart break.
"Last night we counted constellations and renamed them and he said he'd take every star out of the sky if only for me."
Luna still speaks in long airy sentences like she can't breathe but around him it's duller. It's lost the metallic tinkle it used to have, because that isn't reserved for him any longer. That's saved for the boy sleeping on her sofa with wild dark eyes and tangled brown hair that she laughs and says he's had since they met. At eighteen he already has silver streaks like a timber wolf and flecks covering his skin, and his smile is like a half moon. And even now, he's very aware that this traveller kid must know that George unconditionally loathes him.
"You're cruel."
He tells her, and her mouth opens like a guppy. Opens like she's expectant of something other than this. There are memories cupped inside both of their irises and it's like she's rewinding them in her mind over and over but feeling nothing.
"You knew I loved him before I did."
She answers quietly, because she isn't really – he's known it'd be like this all along and she hadn't turned him away and it's always been him who's in love and not her – and he can't hate her for what he wanted to believe. It's easier to hate the stranger who has shoulder length hair and crap sense of humour who stole her love before he could ever lay a finger on it.
"But I love you."
He tells her, anger and sadness seeping through his bones. He's needed her to get over his life, needed her to be anything but alone like he feels all over again. It's written in her eyes, in her heartbeat that she will never want him as much as he wants her; and part of her, of this he is certain, does love him. Yet he will never be the boy with the wolf patronus or the one who makes her smile stretch to be larger than life.
"I know."
There are a thousand moments he has loved her written in the creases of Rolf's smile as he sleeps in the next room, and when he walks in there he grabs his bag knowing that this will be the last time he ever leaves her; and the only time he will ever really mean it. She won't be here anymore if he comes back anyway. She'd never meant to stay anyway and he won't say goodbye. He just closes the door and breathes in the fresh autumn air and begins to walk back over the hills to his old broken down home, back to his family.
He's only ever cried for two people in his life; Fred and her. Always her.
He begins over again by himself.
The harsh grind of muscle and labour spurs him to remake the business he and Fred started, repairing the big windows of the joke shop like he'd done in Luna's home and carving the same double L pattern into the wooden frames because part of him thinks that forgetting would only make him feel sick to his stomach. He pours his time into new magic, new tricks and cheap giggles that she'd find hilarious and in a couple of months he reopens Weasley's Wizard Wheezes because bugger if he knows what else he'd do with his life if not this.
On the day of the grand reopening he decides to take the windows out.
After four months Angelina walks in.
She's still the way Fred had loved her, all dark toned skin and muscle with laughter in her black eyes. She looks tired, like she's being quietly unstitched at the seams but she laughs at the canary creams like an old hand anyway because it's nothing she hasn't seen in a while. It's like she's been lying among the shadows waiting for the brother that never returned. She's nothing like Luna, who can't wear grief; she makes tears look acceptable and human, she makes it normal for them not to be like sunlight sliding in sad drooping rays down her cheeks.
(For the first time since Luna, he smiles and it feels familiar.)
"Angel, you're beautiful."
His existence begins.
Life should have a happy ending, you know? It just should. Even though it never does.
But I don't think this fits. I don't know.
#3 Tracks:
1. Don't You Know You're Beautiful? - Seabird
2. Milk - Kings Of Leon
3. Golden Phone - Micachu & The Shapes
Constructive criticism & reviews are appreciated.