A/N: This is the first time I've written anything about the twins or Angelina, so it should be fun. Gotta love plot bunnies, right? Rated M for potential action later. Enjoy the story, and leave me a little magic if you've something you want to share, constructive criticism or praise! If not, enjoy. ;)
Disclaimer: These are not my toys, and I don't own them, as much as I wish I did. All characters belong to J.K. Rowling, though the plot is mine completely.
The house sounds hollow, like the last dregs of water have drained out of a stream, and she thinks it is beautiful.
Silence is her constant companion, the best gift she will ever receive because it reminds her of him, of the moments when he let his all-too-human magic envelope her heart. It also keeps the pain still and slow, molasses in the frozen air, and lets her brokenly function around the memories that rise with the noise level, because the only noise she wants to hear now is him.
Her hands brush against the jagged, broken keys, fingers trying to coax a melody from the silky ivory and kissing battered, river-smooth ebony lovingly. His hands had touched these keys, had made them sing, and silence would fall as the muscles of his throat thickened and swelled with song. Even now, she can almost see him standing there with her, waiting for her to notice him, waiting for the first note, a chord shimmering as it hangs in the warming air...
But she is here, and he is not, and somehow she will have to find her own way to break the waiting silence.
It was almost golden, the stillness that hovered between the last notes of the piano and the exhalation of that first breath, like stage lights highlighting him in a darkened room. Somehow it made him golden too, her golden boy, though only in the summer when he played Quidditch in the old apple grove was he actually golden, laughing and hauling her up on the broom with him. She remembers the almost-kiss they shared, when she growled at him in mock fear and he laughed in delight, his breath warm on her lips, missing by only a second as he wrapped an arm tighter around her waist, holding her close…
Her hands sweep across the keys of the piano, fingernails tearing as she fights to rip them away, to end this agony. Quite probably the piano is screaming, but there is no sound, no air in this magic-forsaken room, nothing to hold her here.
Fred is gone, and she remains, and it will always be silent in her heart.
There will be no more kisses stolen on the Quidditch pitch in the rain, no more sparkling summer nights. There will be no more jokes, no more pranks; it is an intolerable loss, this vicious absence. She knows that the only one who could mourn him this much is the other half of his own soul, and she wonders how much longer George can last, bleeding out like this, like she is.
She doesn't acknowledge anyone but George anymore, and she wonders if they can keep on pretending in the silence that has broken both of their hearts.