Glass Half-Empty
He was empty.
Half of a whole - so he had always been, really. But it had made sense then. They had fit together like pieces of a puzzle, effortlessly, and when people thought of them they always strung their names together.
Fred and George.
He was half of a whole that was gone now. What was the point anymore? Like a key to nothing... useless, fit to be thrown away.
And it was almost as though they had. They'd given him sympathetic, almost pitying looks. They'd cried with him for a while. But now they'd all moved on, high off a new, fresh world that was theirs to explore. And they'd left him behind. Behind in his sorrow, and grief, in a secret garden where the key was dead.
He and Fred had pulled through every rough patch together. He'd always had someone there for him. Fred was there for him, his partner in mischief, the next generation of Marauders. Perhaps a life of counting on another person so unquestioningly had left him weak, weaker than the others. He'd grown complacent, taken too much for granted - and now here he was.
He'd laughed off the loss of an ear; what was an ear when you had life? Now he couldn't laugh anymore. What is a life when you'd lost a brother?
He had thought he had understood the idea: Drink half of a glass - was it a glass half-empty or a glass half-full? You were supposed to say half-full. You were supposed to be optimistic.
But the fact remained that a half was missing. What the other half did was irrelevant. It could dance or turn blue or become a dragon, it was still a half. Because you couldn't refill such a void by yourself.
The water in the glass knew that perfectly well, didn't it? It was aching for its other half, the very molecules composing it acutely aware of its not being there, never would be there. Now its only hope was to be swallowed as well.
George sighed. What was life when he'd lost himself?