I wasn't actually tired when I went up to bed; I just wanted some space. Percy meant well, and he was a lot less cloying than Mum, but my tolerance for social interaction had just plummeted over the last few weeks. I still felt like hell, too - my stomach was flopping around in my belly like a suffocating fish unwilling and unable to just give up and surrender to the inevitable, and I couldn't remember the last time my head had ached so terribly.

At least my room was blessedly dark, and I could navigate it without needing to turn the light on. I still hadn't packed Fred's stuff up, and it was one thing to know it was there, to know where it was, hell, even to climb over it on my way to my own bed, but it was another thing entirely to have to see it. It was bad enough that the room still smelled like gunpowder and citrus fruit from the last experiment we'd done together before going on the run. I'd told him we should have worked on it downstairs, but he never did listen to much sense.

I stepped in spot of goop on the floor - a memento from the very same project - and swore under my breath. The stuff was stickier than treacle fudge and troll snot, and unsticking charms were completely ineffective against it. The experiment hadn't gone quite as expected, but Fred's joy at what it had produced had been unmatched except for the incident that led to Nosebleed Nougat. He never had told me what he had in mind for it, though, and I didn't feel much of an urge to experiment with it.

As it was, I didn't particularly care about all that at the moment, just that I was ill and wanted to lay down and pretend that everything was as it should be; not waste my time trying to carefully peel enough layers of skin off the bottom of my foot so that I could free myself without causing injury. At least I had my wand easily to hand; the last time I'd stepped in one of these foot-traps it had been clear across the room. You try attempting to retrieve a wand with a pillow and a broom handle.

I aimed a cutting spell at the goop - hoping that it might work to loosen it a bit, or maybe just slice off a couple layers of skin real fast so I could make a pitiful attempt at healing myself that would last long enough for me to deal with it when daylight came and hopefully brought me some more energy - but, true to my running score from the last couple months, Lady Luck was playing against me. The goop ignited, and yet still managed to retain all of its stick. Worse, none of the spells I tried to put it out worked.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I screamed like a little child when I realized that there was a very good chance I was going to end up with severe burns from this experience. As if "Poor One-Eared Georgie, losing Freddie" wasn't bad enough, now it was going to be "Poor Horrifically Scarred, One-Eared Georgie, Stuck Without Freddie to Make Him Feel Better About His Hideous Misfortune". Maybe I could hire myself out to the circus as a living example of Murphy's Law.

It sounds awful, but a dark corner of my mind almost hoped that I would come out of it gruesomely disfigured. Then everyone else would have some other disaster to talk about than Fred's death, and I wouldn't have to see his face every time I looked in a bloody mirror. I was getting dangerously tired of being the screen for everyone else's projections of angst. I knew, somehow, that the reason they kept talking to me about Fred's death even though I never said a word about it if I could help it was because they couldn't handle it on their own. They had to push it away, focus on me, to be able to handle it. The inevitable result, and this stays between you, me, and the flaming troll snot giving my foot second degree burns, is that I was hoping for another disaster to get everyone talking about something else - because as long as everyone kept reminding me of what happened, I was going to keep on wallowing, and they were going to keep reminding me in efforts to console me, and it was going to be a cruel, destructive spiral to psychological oblivion.

Somehow I managed to have all these complicated thoughts in the space of about three seconds flat before the door to my room slammed open. Angelina took one glance around the room and summoned a box of some white powder which she dumped on the fire. She opened a window while it fizzled out into choking smoke and then a filmy haze within moments. I blinked at her in the sudden darkness, trying to process this sequence of events. I was so confused that when I opened my mouth to thank her, all I could say was, "Thought you were at your gran's."

"I came back. She wants me to bring you over for tea at some point."

"Does she? That's nice," I mumbled as she turned on a lamp. This situation was too weird and raw for me to say something a normal person might. I mean, Fred's old girlfriend, my old friend, was standing here in my room while I was in singed pajamas with my foot stuck to the floor like a prat and I couldn't figure out when she had arrived. "Thanks for putting out the fire."

"Wasn't about to let you maim yourself," she said. "What was that stuff?"

"Fred's last laugh, apparently. How did you know water wouldn't work on it?"

"I figured you'd have tried aguamenti first. Do you want me to take a look at your foot? I'm not ace with healing, but I might be able to help a little."

"This stuff is damn near impossible to remove, I'm stuck to the spot until I can detach my foot from the floor. It was a cutting spell that started it on fire."

Angelina frowned. "Any idea what's in the stuff?"

I searched my brain, trying to remember all the things we had thrown in there. We were chaotic potioneers at best, taking shortcuts and making substitutions at random no matter how carefully we had planned beforehand. It just wasn't in our nature to follow set paths.

"Lacewing flies, sulfur, orange blossoms, daffodil petals, lemon peel, pixie dust, mandrake leaves, billywig stings, cranberries, mistletoe..."

"Cranberries and mistletoe? What, were you making something for Christmastime, to dissolve the tree after everything was done perhaps?"

"I don't know. It was Fred's idea. There may have been more added to it, but I either don't remember or I wasn't in the room."

Angelina laughed. "You two are properly mad, I swear. But I have an idea. Do you have any eggs in your fridge?"

I stared at her. Of all the daft questions she could be asking, she picked that one? "I don't know."

"Wait here, I'll go look."

"I have to wait here, I'm stuck to the floor!" I shouted after her. Oh, my dignity. At least she had a high level of discretion; if Percy or Ron ever heard about this, the twits, I'd never hear the end of it. My foot was really beginning to kick up a fuss, though, from being stuck in the same position, lit on fire, and covered in whatever that white powder had been.

(Haha, kicking, geddit Fred? a traitorous corner of my mind whispered. It had been doing this quite a lot lately. Of all the foot related humor in the world, I go for kick. I'm pathetic.)

I was debating between sitting on the ground to at least take my weight off it and remaining standing in fear that more of this troll snot from hell would stick to my butt and then Angie and I would really have ourselves in a state when she came back with a bowl of egg whites. She picked up the box and dumped the remaining white powder into it, then mixed it together into a sort of paste with a fork.

"What are you doing?" I demanded as she began to smear the stuff onto the floorboards around my foot.

"I figure, from what you said you'd put it in, that the stuff is probably pretty acidic. This will neutralize some of the acid, since egg whites and baking soda are both bases. And it's kind of like putting peanut butter on chewing gum to get it out; two sticky things tend to cancel each other out, I find."

I didn't say anything. Whenever anyone started talking in Muggle I kind of blanked out; I just didn't have dad's love for their weird ways of coping without magic. At least it seemed like a better guess than anything else that I could come up with, and, given that she was trying to help me get unstuck when she was under no obligation to even be nice to me, I didn't want to look ungrateful by arguing. I was still surprised when it succeeded, though.

"Blimey, Angie, you're brilliant. Where have you been all my life?"

"In the girls' dormitory across the hall at Hogwarts," she answered without missing a beat and winked. "You look a proper mess, George. Did the fire get you badly?"

"Just startled me. I was hoping for a set of wicked scars I could tell fanciful stories about to my future nieces and nephews - can't let Bill and Charlie have all the fun - but alas, no luck this time."

She gave me a stern look that told me she wasn't believing it for a moment, but she mercifully didn't press the issue. Good old Angie, always knowing where to draw the line. I was so relieved I wouldn't have to fight her on this that I could have kissed her.

"I guess I'll leave you to it then," she said, and turned away.

I'm not sure what came over me just then, but I was suddenly struck with a terrible fear that she was going to leave me and never come back. Before I had thought of an excuse or an explanation, I had grabbed her hand and whispered "You don't have to."

She swallowed hard and stared down at our clasped hands. I forced myself to let go and cursed myself silently ten ways from Tuesday. Her gaze flickered up to my face for a brief moment and then flitted back down to the floor. We had made eye contact for less than half a second, but it had been enough for me to see the worries in her eyes.

"Listen, George-" she began, shifting her balance from one foot to the other. She always did that when she was nervous about saying something that might be taken the wrong way.

"I just meant," I started quickly, trying to cut this off before it got to levels of awkward that would be sustained, even though I had no idea what I could say for myself. "I just meant it's good to see you again. Earlier. It's been a real relief to see your face. Letters aren't quite the same as talking. You know?"

The tension around her eyes broke and she smiled wide at me. There was still a shadow of something in the air around us, lurking, but it had fled out the open door and down the stairs, retreating to its dank cave along with most of the smoke from the fire. "Yeah, I know. I missed you a lot. After. Everything. Yeah." A pause, then words tumbling over each other in a rush to escape her lips before she swallowed them down again forever: "Let's not ever go that long without seeing each other again, please? I never thought I could miss a friend so much."

I nodded and she hugged me, squeezing tight. My stomach, still weak from all the puking I'd done earlier, gurgled a slight protest but, as it didn't seem urgent, I ignored it. I hugged her back, wanting to keep the warm, solid reality of her presence there for as long as I could.

"Get some sleep, George," she whispered after a moment, and kissed my cheek. "I think you need it."

Author's notes: Okay, I'm a terrible person/author/updater, take your pick. I was laid off from my job at the end of last summer and writing had to take a backseat to finding a new one. I still don't have a permanent position, but I've got some steady temp work going, so now that I don't have to worry about how I'm paying my bills and feeding myself, I can write again! So here is the first of my VERY overdue updates. My apologies for taking so bloody long, and thank you to any and all of you who have come back after my long absence. I hope you end up thinking that the wait was worth it!