The silence is what got to Hermione the most. George, this usually loving, funny, talkative individual now had nothing to say. He sat next to her, but she may as well have been alone. His elbows were rested on his knees, his hands clasped loosely together, and his head hung. His hair had begun to get a little long, and the red strands moved in the summer night breeze. She gazed at him and expected him to look up at her, but he was clearly too lost in his head. Everything about his demeanour screamed that he was broken. His shoulders were slumped, he was in the same outfit she swore he now wore for the third day in a row, and he just wouldn't look up. In her mind, she was screaming for him to look up, but nothing. It was like George was now a shell of the person that he was before, and Hermione couldn't bear it. Of all the family members and friends that she saw dazed and lost about Fred's death, George's quiet suffering stuck out the most. She could deal with Ron lashing out at her unexpectedly, she could deal with Mrs. Weasley pretending that everything was normal, and she could even deal with Harry's expressed guilt, but this was too much.
Hermione looked away from him and out at the fields that surrounded the house. The small amount of light that escaped the house only went so far and made it look like that everything just faded into oblivion. How she sometimes wished lately that she could just walk out to oblivion so that she could escape being everyone's rock, being the one that everyone turned to and lashed out at and needed. With a house so full and a house so incredibly full of emotion, what Hermione desired most was to be alone. However, sitting next to George almost felt like it was a step better. He didn't expect anything from her, yet she wasn't completely alone.
Hermione, however, couldn't just sit there. It was against everything that she was to just ignore the person hurting next to her, so even though all she wanted to do was continue their silence, she reached out and touched George's shoulder tenderly. She opened her mouth to speak, but he beat her to it.
"You don't need to," he mumbled.
He managed to get the words out so quickly it was like he had expected her to reach out to him. She wondered if he was disappointed that it had taken her so long.
"I just want to help," Hermione explained.
He turned to her and gave her a half-hearted smile. "Believe it or not, just sitting here with you is the most help I could get right now."
Hermione seemed caught off-guard by his sentiment, but then exhaled. She didn't realize that what he said was exactly what she needed. She let her shoulders ease and then rested her head on his shoulder as they stared out at nothingness together. After a while, George's composure slipped for a moment and his shoulders shook for a minute or two, but then he went back to the stoic silence again. It was well into the night before it began to get cold and they both returned into the house.
The two of them continued their escape at night time. It wasn't every night, and sometimes one would be outside without the other, but soon Hermione found that she had begun to look for him, or look for a sign during the day that he would want to be there. Her days were busy and in a way it helped her, but nothing eased the pain of one of them going to ask Fred for something or calling his name by accident. Nothing could fill the empty silence that followed. In those moments, everything was torn down all over again, no matter what they were doing, whether it was making cookies or cleaning a room. Who could have expected that the loss of one person in such a large family could leave the biggest hole? The Weasleys tried to be together, they tried to work at their grief together, but in the end they found that they tended to struggle. The worst part was that most of them were too stubborn to talk about their feelings or talk about the hurt that they were individually feeling. Hermione understood it, but at the same time she began to nag about it. She kept trying to persuade different family members that if they talked about Fred that maybe they would get used to his name again. However, in her efforts to make things better, many of the family members had begun to resent her efforts and shut themselves away even more.
Hermione wasn't completely ignorant to everyone's feelings toward her, and she tried to not let it bother her. At the same time, though, she had begun to feel sick of the Burrow feeling like an eternal Fred Weasley funeral service. All she wanted was some normalcy not only for herself but for everyone.
"I know you're doing the best you can," Harry said to her one day as they descended the many, many stairs of the building. "But don't you think you're coming off a little strong?"
Hermione tried to pretend that his words didn't sting. "If no one talks about him -"
"Oh, lay off Hermione," Ron said irritably as he came up the stairs past them with toast in his hand.
Ron had become one of the worst in this irritability towards Hermione's new determination for everyone to recognize that Fred was truly gone. Together with his mother, they both showed Hermione hostility that she had never experienced before. It had gotten to the point where their new relationship was almost on the rocks, and although Mrs. Weasley still showed compassion and that she cared for Hermione, there was clear annoyance which almost chased Hermione back home with her parents.
She turned to retort, but Harry grabbed her arm to turn her back around to the direction that they were going. Harry was the only one in the house who wasn't related to Fred, so his grief, like Hermione's, couldn't be as strong as everyone else's. Harry was Hermione's saving grace in the sense that someone else understood from the outside.
As she turned, she went to look back at Ron again only to realize that George had left his bedroom door open. The twins had always been notorious for shutting it, so the sight caught her off-guard and distracted her from her insistence to responding to Ron. George wasn't in the room, and without words, both Harry and Hermione took a step inside.
George's room was a complete mess, like it had always been, but this time it was different. Before, it had been a disaster due to all their inventions and gadgets and such. Now, it was a disaster in the sense that he just didn't feel the motivation to clean up behind himself. He was of age, so Hermione didn't understand why he didn't just clean it with a flick of his wand. She was admittedly disgusted by the half-eaten food and the dirty laundry just sitting about. She took out her wand to just do it quickly for him, but Harry caught her arm again and shook his head.
"It's not your place."
His words had an impact on her and she stowed it away again. It wasn't just this room that Harry had been referring to – Hermione had a feeling that he meant it in general to how she was treating everyone. It wasn't her place to clean George's room, even if it was just a flick of the wand, and it wasn't her place to try to be everyone's therapist. What Hermione needed to be was herself, even if she struggled to do so. Hermione had such a hard time just being that the idea that she didn't have some task or goal in this whole situation meant that she would no longer have a distraction, and in the long term, she supposed that's how she had been holding it together this whole time.