A/N: The ten year.
It, uh, took me *over* ten years since starting this story to get around to it... whoops... and in rereading my chapters, wow, has my writing changed since 2007, though around chapter seven starts sounding more like my current-self. I've been writing an original novel the whole time since my latest update... whoops, again, it took me this long to finish that... and I'm now seeing what the heck I can do with that
...but as I bemusedly try to figure out, after so long on one thing, 'what do I write NEXT', in trying to stretch my writing muscles... and because my unfinished fic haunts me and a version of this chapter has been living in my head (and bits of it in some computer files), for years... here we go. An actual update.
If you're reading this, hello, friend, I hope with all my heart you enjoy this and all is well for you, and if you're looking for me or my writing, you can find me at Tumblr as thegirlwholied, any old time. Cheers and happy reading, ~lyin
The King's Head was a three-storey Muggle pub on Galway's Shop Street, which put George in mind of Diagon Alley with its cobblestones, bright colors, and winding bends. If a person sober enough to wield a little magic happened to step into the alcove under the ground floor staircase, he could head down to the wizarding pub hidden beneath.
The King's Wand was three storeys too, all below ground. It had become one of George's frequent stops.
He'd landed in Ireland almost a month ago, just about completing his loop around the world. He hadn't managed to bring himself a step further east, yet.
He wasn't ready to go home.
George sipped his steaming stout—never more than one pint, when he went out—and watched the harpist and fiddle player take a set break. They cast charms that left their instruments playing themselves midair, not with the same passion the musicians imbued into their tunes, but serviceably, for filler. Usually George had struck up a conversation with someone by now, and in his time in the region so far, he'd learned more than one new spell from wizened old bargoers with winking eyes, some of whom were likely more than human. Tonight, though, most of the crowd was in busy groups, and he was content to sit back and take it all in, to be at once among and apart from the throng.
There was never a shortage of hen and stag parties on the streets of Galway, and there were a few wizarding ones in the King's Wand tonight. The hen party by the bar were sporting hats and wrist corsages George recognized as party goods courtesy of Weasley's Wizard Wheezes, which George had first come up with around Ron's wedding. Harry had said, at more than one of their friends' stags since, he was relieved George had not come up with them in time for his own; Ginny, meanwhile, complained that the transforming hats and scavenger-hunt-inspired corsages, which delivered surprise tasks throughout the night, had not been around for her own.
This hen party's hats were currently in the process of changing from bunny ears to cowgirl hats, and George, in the process of admiring his own handiwork, also took a moment to appreciate a particularly fine pair of long legs, among the very fit bunch of women.
While watching, he made notes on a napkin, with a loud-colored quill he'd picked up in the Caribbean. Verity had of late taken to sending him an extremely large great horned owl, which refused to budge and eyed George with its threatening yellow eyes, until George handed over at least one new product design. Verity had also gotten very good at disguising Howlers, since George had a few years ago learned how to successfully rid himself of one without opening it. He'd gotten a nasty shock in Iceland when he opened a seemingly-normal letter and had it vocally explode on him. He'd almost responded asking whether Verity was trying to ruin his one good ear, but picturing her blanch and certain apology if he did so, refrained, instead sending her a bone-carved statue and some bottled northern lights, along with the blueprints they'd inspired.
George glanced up when he saw the long legs at the bar turn around, tipping up her still-white-and-fuzzy cowgirl hat. He dropped his quill, stricken with something like guilt as well as shock, and began to contemplate an escape plan. Nothing more genius than 'hide under the table', which he was far too adult for, mostly, occurred to him before Angelina Johnson made eye contact.
He'd have expected Angelina to stride toward him, a cool and collected lecture on her lips. Instead, her face broke open with delight, and while she did move towards him, there was something languid in her posture, and her feet swayed slightly, in her heels. The heels made her a good bit taller than him.
He stood up to greet her as Angelina approached. Her presence overthrew all his loose plans for a night out and alone, but he found, as his own smile broke out, he couldn't entirely mind.
"You're so tanned!" said Angelina, looking him up and down.
"You're so sloshed," said George, grinning. "Who's the bride?" A hard notion then hit him sharply enough he looked quickly to Angelina's hand. He had been fairly out of touch, but surely, though, someone, she, would have mentioned, if that was the case. To his relief, she was already pointing to a woman in a radiant white sash and then kept pointing, to another member of the hen party, in a matching sash. Two of her teammates were getting married, and the whole team was out to celebrate.
George, looking closer, thought he recognized one or two of Ginny's old teammates. Angelina had been traded to the Harpies, last season, while he was away. He had kept up on Quidditch.
"How was—everywhere?" asked Angelina.
He pulled out a chair for her, warmly clapping her hand as they both sat down.
"Everywhere was swell, everywhere says hello," said George. He was about to ask after everyone at home, but Angelina nearly interrupted him to say, staring at his hand against hers in baffled amusement, "I didn't know you could get this tanned, not even the time you got so burned in Egypt—"
He had gotten more burned than Fred that summer visit in Egypt and was amused she remembered it.
"Suppose I saw more sun this year than in the rest of my life all together," said George.
"Nearly two years, George," said Angelina.
"Not two," protested George. But he then had to allow, "A year and a half. You should have seen me when I first got to Greenland, after my stretch in Central America and the Caribbean—and South America before that. My whole adventurer look is fading already."
Angelina's brows arched. She gestured with her sparkling drink at his dusty boots and motorcycle jacket, which, George would be quick to tell Charlie, was not dragonhide.
"You don't look like you're about to let it go," she said.
"Not until I show up and get to be cool Uncle George," he said, then, leaning in conspiratorially, asked if his hairline was still faring better than Ron's.
He knew it was. George had gotten his stockier, shorter build from his mother's side, and though her brothers had never grown old enough for their hairlines to lift with age, he and Charlie seemed to have lucked into not-balding from their maternal side. In some of the few pictures George took of himself traveling to send to the Burrow, he had noticed his forehead seemed a broader stretch lately… so he'd also taken to using every kind of product he'd found across multiple countries and all the ones he could invent, too. He was not ashamed to admit this to Angelina, getting more detailed on the product varieties the more it made her laugh. George proclaimed he was entitled to be a little vain about his hair, he'd already lost an ear, and made himself laugh too, at that.
Mid talking about New York City, the one place in the United States Angelina had once visited, too, George decided his glass had been empty long enough to warrant another pint, after all—and, blinking, realized there was no sign of Angelina's fellow Harpies.
When he pointed this out to her, she looked around too, startled. They headed down to the lower floors, to see if they could spot her friends around, but after the initial jolt of them being gone, Angelina did not seem surprised to have lost them.
"You think they'd notice you're gone," said George, offended on her behalf, and added, gesturing to her heels, "you're tall enough on those stilts."
"They likely did notice," said Angelina, her tone smack between amused and annoyed. "You must have looked charming enough for them to think they were doing me a favor."
"I'm very charming, from a distance," said George, and insisted on buying her drinks, then. It still gave him incredible pleasure to be able to pull Galleons out without counting them—even if he couldn't stop himself from carefully counting how much he'd spent, later on—and treat a friend. He got himself another steaming stout and Angelina switched to the same drink, saying she'd had enough sparkling beverages for the night, no, plenty for the summer, even though it was still spring.
At that, Angelina paused mid-sip of her stout.
"You're thirty," she said suddenly, the steam coming up from her drink to frame her face. "You'll have turned thirty two weeks ago."
"Wrong," said George. "I'm going to be twenty-nine for the next decade, thanks much."
Angelina scoffed. "I'll be thirty-one in the fall, I'm the oldest one at this hen party… or I was, when there was a party… and I don't make any bones about that."
That made her the oldest one on the team, too, George assumed, which struck him oddly.
"You still look twenty to me," he told her.
Angelina didn't smile at the compliment, and there was a snapping quality in her eyes, the glaze in them earlier washed away by the time they'd spent sitting, that made him hurriedly change the topic.
He asked about the Harpies' season. The lower floor the two of them had moved to didn't have any musicians or floating instruments, and with its rounded stone walls, had a more cavernous feel, dressed up by ornate paintings. One portrait seemed to be a king and right beside it was one of an executioner, which the king kept eyeing nervously. When the executioner sneezed, the king hurried himself out of the portrait frame, over to a hunting landscape behind the bar. It was quieter, down here, with only a cluster of wizards who George thought might be underage drinking in a corner.
Angelina had taken off her hat the moment it started turning into a unicorn horn headband. She left it on the table before them. Her Wheezes' wrist corsage had popped up a message, a task for the hen party by the bay, but Angelina hadn't seemed to notice. Nor did she seem too sorry to have lost them, so George decided not to point it out, as she might think he was trying to ditch her.
It turned out Angelina had met his new nephew, Hugo, though George had not yet. She also pointedly brought up that Katie Bell had been back from Assyria for nearly six months now.
"We've been in touch," George assured her, not pointing out that communication consisted entirely of few sparse owls and a couple fire calls they'd fallen off holding around the time he first reached France. Things had been good, dating Katie. It alarmed him, how little he felt her absence, but he didn't get the impression Katie was particularly pining for him, either.
"I like you with Katie," said Angelina, and George, feeling surprisingly sour at that, agreed that yes, she'd told him that before.
Avoiding her question on when he and Katie would be catching up, he asked Angelina if she'd been to Galway before. The nearest Quidditch team she'd have played was in Kenmare, in the south.
"Aidan Lynch," she said, by way of answer, confusing George at first. "Remember him? He's from here."
Angelina had been seeing Lynch for a while there, but he'd been out of the picture for some time. Lynch, with his professional Seeker's build, looked a little too scrawny for Angelina, anyway, in George's private opinion.
"You two are still friendly?" he asked, carefully.
"Sure we are," said Angelina. "I was back here for his wedding, just this St. Patrick's Day."
George bit back several unkind comments comparing Lynch to his team's leprechaun mascots, saying instead, "I must have just missed you. That's around when I got in."
Angelina blinked and set her stout down. She waved away some of the wafting steam above both their drinks.
"You've been here a month," she said, each word deliberate. "Since before your birthday. This close. Alone."
George held up his hands in protest. "I've been consulting at Scoil Draíocht," he said, naming the small school of magic hidden in the nearby Aran Islands. "Really. It couldn't sustain a store branch, but I've been looking into sort of a kiosk option, and got talking to their Charms professor—"
Angelina slid out of their booth and stood up, looking imperious. It would have been very impressive, except for that lingering sway to her movements.
"You're waiting it out," she said, with certainty.
"Waiting what out?" said George. The underage wizards were now staring at them, and in a peering way that made George think they recognized him as the absentee proprietor of Weasley's.
"The ten year," said Angelina.
"May second," said George promptly. "I hear it's going to be a big to-do, for the anniversary of our great victory. So, yeah, waiting it out's the idea." He craned his neck, the better to see Angelina's surprise at his ready admission. "Do you blame me?"
"Yes," said Angelina, but she sat back down and reclaimed her stout.
George pushed his own drink away, toward her. He didn't drink when he was maudlin, not anymore, and he could feel the pressure of it building, the way grief still could creep up on him in his throat, behind his eyes. Even after all this time.
Fred wasn't even with him in the mirror anymore. That had nothing to do with George's tan. A little, maybe, to do with his hairline.
George still thought of himself as twenty. But for the first time, he didn't feel twenty. And though he hadn't noticed his reflection changing, day by day, George did not look twenty to himself anymore. His missing ear no longer looked remotely like a hole, bringing a quiet close to all his holey jokes. It remained a divet in the flesh, but mostly, it was only empty air, where something should be, and more often than not, hidden under his hair.
Angelina hadn't said anything further. She was sipping quietly and watching him, thoughtfully.
"Are you plotting to tie me up and drag me to Hogwarts?" asked George. "Or tell Ron and Ginny where I am, and let them do it?"
"I wouldn't tell on you," said Angelina, and George was pretty sure she'd said that exact thing to him and Fred, when they were first years. More than half their lives ago.
George waited. Angelina kept sipping.
"You're not going to try to talk me around?" he said, suspiciously.
Angelina studied him. "You'll go," she said. "You're this close. Close enough to change your mind at the last second and show up. You don't need nagging."
"My mother and my sister-in-law would disagree," said George, thinking of Hermione in particular. If he was honest with himself, he'd missed her nagging, though Hermione had been his most punctual correspondent, even the months he wasn't replying.
"I'm neither of those things," said Angelina, in a cool way that made George look at her sharply. He didn't see any hidden sorrow there, and she met his expression with something like exasperation.
"What?" she said.
"What?" he said right back.
Angelina's lips made a straight line. She stared at him, as if willing him to read her expression. Finally, she moved both glasses out of her way, her hand tapping on the bar.
"You need to stop treating me like I'm Fred's widow," she said, abruptly. "No, don't say—you don't know, you don't know, if I'd have been his wife, George. I don't know. I might have married Lee, or you—"
George, sans drink, managed to choke on the air.
"And no one knows what he would have done or said. Not even you. People forget that's part of the tragedy, that it's not just the things left undone, it's… the mystery of them. Especially with someone like Fred, who could make you think anything was possible and very often prove it."
George felt he ought to be countering this, somehow, but he couldn't. He'd thought a less coherent version of the same thing himself, more than once. Especially the times he was expected to fill Fred's blanks, finish the unfinished sentences, because he was the leftover half of Fred-and-George and—
He wasn't Fred. He never had been.
For one, he'd never been able to figure out why Fred didn't ask Angelina to Bill's wedding. Obviously, he'd understood the appeal of being single for the promised arrival of Fleur's veela cousins, but aside from occasionally flirting with Alicia and Katie both, George hadn't really had a Hogwarts sweetheart. Fred had. And while George's travels this year had been a refreshing reminder that a whole lot of the wizarding community didn't wind up with their school sweethearts… still, most people George knew did.
"You were always the girl in the back of his mind," George said. "I do know that. You must know that."
Angelina's exasperation turned to something more closed, and she shut her eyes too. "I do—"
George took a deep breath. "But you're right, I've been putting that on you for ten years, and I know I'm not the only one, and it's not fair to you, or to Fred, or to everything you weren't, and might, maybe, could've, but also could not, have been."
Angelina left her eyes closed, for a beat.
"Thank you," she said, almost an exhale. "I don't mean to make you think I don't, or, to—to—"
"Offend?" said George, letting his tone convey that she hadn't.
Angelina, no longer seeming tipsy at all, gave him a rueful look. The steam of their drinks had almost faded, though the last wisps up it wound up around her hair. "The part of me that'll always be seventeen's still, well, there'll always be, but—"
She faltered, as the changing hat on the table transformed into a swan-shaped hat that only Luna Lovegood would willingly wear. George lifted his wand to make the interruption gracefully disappear.
"But you're not seventeen anymore," George finished for her, putting his wand away.
Angelina looked from where the silly hat had been, to him, her lips lifting in a way that turned her ruefulness wry. "Almost half my life ago."
That couldn't be right, George thought, but running the numbers in his head, it came frighteningly close. Fred taking Angelina to the Yule Ball, and their funny little romance through the year after, had been even longer ago than Fred was.
"It doesn't feel like it," said George. "It's not about the time, so much, though. Why I don't want to go."
He'd brought them back to the anniversary. He wasn't sure why. Angelina wasn't going to make him talk about it.
She didn't ask. She didn't interrupt him, either.
"Sometimes," George said, very slowly. This was the sort of thing he could only say very fast or very slowly, and slowly gave him time to stop, if he thought better of it. This was Angelina, though. He wouldn't have to think better of it. "I look at people. Almost anyone. Strangers. Customers. Family. People I'll never know, people I'll always love. And I'll think, 'why aren't you dead instead?'"
He tried not to. But over the years, every once in a while… the thought popped into his head. He'd thought it of his parents, who'd lived so much longer than Fred did. Of Percy, who'd been right there. Of Harry, who'd been the center of so much danger, and Ron and Hermione who'd been right beside that danger for so long, who'd all come out with just a few marks that could be seen and more that couldn't… not unscathed, but alive.
"I thought I was done, with thoughts like that," said George. "But I've had a fair share of them this year. Even from afar." Better off afar. He didn't like having thoughts like that standing beside the people he cared about. "I wouldn't like anyone knowing that."
"So why are you telling me?" asked Angelina.
George cocked his head at her. He waited, this time.
"Oh," said Angelina. "No, George. Not once. I never thought that of you."
Pointedly, he cocked his head further. If he'd still had that ear, it would have brushed his shoulder.
"Never," Angelina said, so sternly it surprised him. "Other people, yes. I have my share of mean-spirited secret wishes. But I never wished it was you instead. Have you been assuming I did, for a decade?"
It took George a moment of studying the lines of her face, her eyes, to believe her, and even then, he couldn't, quite.
"Why not, then?" he asked.
Angelina studied him back. "You won't like it."
"What is it?"
"Don't you know?"
A long-legged thought danced across George's mind; he stomped it out, right fast. It wasn't that.
"I'm baffled," admitted George. "Appearances to the contrary, that doesn't happen often."
"Well." Angelina sighed. "I'm going to use the excuse of being a few glasses in to say something, then, because I think you need to hear it, and it's true, you'll know that, but you have to promise not to hate me, for saying it."
George stared at her. She wound her finger in a circle, a go-on then motion.
"Oh, you actually want me to promise," said George. "In that case, I solemnly swear."
Angelina crossed her arms and leaned back, crossing her legs, too, under the table. Matter-of-factly, with only a hitch in her throat giving away her unease, she said, "Fred wouldn't have done so well, without you."
George didn't process that, entirely. He reached for his good ear, instinctively.
"Do not in any way take this to suggest he would have missed you more," said Angelina sternly. "He had something of a cruel bone in him that you held back." Seeing something in his expression, though George couldn't imagine what, as his face didn't seem to be in his control at the moment, she hastened to say, "Just a little, George."
She broke their gaze, tracing lines on the stone table with her fingers. He could see callouses on her hands, from years of Quidditch.
"He was, a little," said Angelina, affectionately, for accusing Fred of being cruel. "I can't say I loved him less for it – at seventeen, maybe I loved him the more for it. He was the big romance of my school years."
"But it's not just… it's not just that I don't know, will never know, what would have happened," she said, more in a rush now, more upset showing. George had so rarely seen Angelina let herself be upset, in public. "You've been lying to yourself a little, with this idea of Fred as a happy family man, with me of all people, in a world without you in it. In a world where we all came out unscathed? Maybe. If it was you, instead of him? No."
"It's all just maybe," said George, before she could say more. Her certainty shook him. "You're just guessing."
"I am," said Angelina. "And everyone lets you do all the guessing when it comes to Fred, because there's no question you knew him best, of course, he was part of you, George, which means you can't get any perspective on it. Do you want to know what I guess? If it went the other way around?"
He wasn't sure he did.
"Yes," said George, anyway.
Angelina gave him the smallest nod, her chin barely moving. "Fred would have shuttered your shop," she said.
He wouldn't've, George thought, but the back-of-his-head voice, the one that guessed like Fred, quietly said would too.
"He would have not let Ron help," said Angelina, "and he would not have been kind about Ron offering, even though he'd regret that, too-long later. He'd have treated me something like the way you treated Verity, for a while there—"
George, stung, as that struck one of his still-guilty points, said, "You'd never stand for that."
"No," said Angelina, very firmly, her eyes so dark and also so clear in the shadows and candlelight of the bar. "I wouldn't." She blew out a breath, staring down at her hands. "It's even more of a guess, past that, since I don't really know who Fred would be, ten years without you. He'd have said something very unkind to Harry, I think. He'd have taken it back, almost right away, but he'd always have said it and Harry would always have heard it, and still be hearing it, I think."
George knew then, she might be right. He'd thought some things. Some very unfair things, about Harry getting to not be dead, after all, not for more than five minutes or so, and Fred still being dead, these ten years on.
He hadn't said them. He'd never say them. Not to Harry.
Fred would have been very, deeply sorry, if he'd said anything like those thoughts aloud.
But he might've said them.
More than mights or maybes. Probably. Likely.
George could feel it. He didn't like that Angelina was right, more right than he'd let himself be on such thoughts. But for all he'd been fighting so hard not to let Fred become anything other than what he really was, in his head, not a saint, not a memory, just actual-Fred…
George reckoned he had become a little crueler, a little harder, without Fred. Maybe Fred would've too, just that edge more.
Or maybe he'd have gone the other way entirely, a little softer, a little sorrier, a little more what George had been, in their Fred-and-George.
George didn't get to know.
"It's late," said Angelina, and George realized he'd been sitting in silence with her, and she looked uncomfortable, all the sparkle and steam of her drinks faded with the looseness between them. "I should get back, to the house we're staying at—"
"I'll walk you," said George, jumping to his feet. He tried to smile—an I'd never hate you, not you—smile, and didn't quite manage it.
"I'm fine myself," said Angelina, very steady in her high heels when she stood.
"Of course you are," said George. "…But wouldn't you rather walk with me?"
She looked at him a moment. At once, she looked like Angelina from second year, sixth year, the mad days working with the Order and the radio, and the someone-else-entirely-and-yet-herself Angelina she'd become, these ten years, both the times he'd been paying attention and the times he hadn't.
"All right, then," she said, and really didn't say much more, during their whole companionable walk along the Galway cobblestones to where she was staying. They couldn't tell if her teammates were back or not, but Angelina knew the spell to get herself inside.
"You're right, about me at least," said George, right as she was about to close the door behind her.
Angelina looked puzzled, as to what she'd said about him. "That you should catch up with Katie?"
George rolled his eyes, though, come to think of it, he probably should.
"That I'll wind up going to the ten year," he said, a little grimly. "I'd rather not, but I'd feel too guilty, if I didn't. My mother would cry." He paused. "More than she's already going to. You might know me too well, Angelina Johnson."
Angelina stopped in the doorway. George wasn't sure, for a moment, what she was going to say, but finally, rather briskly, if with real warmth, she said, "You're worth knowing, George Weasley," and waved him on his way with a good night.
He kicked at the cobblestones on his own walk, to the flat he'd been renting.
The next morning he got up, packed his suitcase full of the items he'd collected everywhere, many of them explosive, and flew his borrowed motorbike to the Burrow.
It wasn't even May yet, but his mother cried in surprise, and to see him, and how dare he stay away longer than expected and not write her enough and had he seen this picture and that picture of Rose and Hugo yet and could he believe Ginny's third one was due this August (no, George couldn't; he really couldn't).
In the hopes it would make Mrs. Weasley stop crying, George brought out the enchanted knitting needles he'd picked up for her, from Spain and Denmark... and the extraordinarily expensive, ancient ones she'd once, one summer long ago, eyed in Egypt and walked too quickly past, because she wouldn't even dare wish for those. She cried harder, and George was not entirely unsure her hug hadn't dislodged a rib.
"Careful, my bones are old now," he joked.
He spent his night in his old room, where there were still, where there would always be, two beds. Over breakfast, he let Mr. Weasley show him how the mobile phone Audrey had gotten him worked, and didn't tell his father he had a mobile of his own in his back pocket, since he'd made a few Muggle friends along his way… and learned some very precise new lock-picking methods, from one in Las Vegas. Mr. Weasley also helped him take a look at the motorbike, in the garage. It was puttering, after all the miles, the motorbike being more his father's age than George's own, but it was nothing a few spells couldn't repair.
George made sure to see all the family before the Hogwarts anniversary, so as not to have too much attention on him there. He showed up with presents galore, and let Hermione hand him Hugo so she could back to some pressing paperwork, took James and Albus off of Ginny's hands for a whole day so Ginny could get some sorely-needed sleep.
His shop was hardly baby-proofed, but he took the boys to an exhibit in a recently cleaned-up section of Knockturn, set up by some visiting magizoologist who had created something of a pop-up zoo, but only, he was quick to assure George, who hadn't asked, magical creatures who loved to show off.
The two toddlers were much heavier to tow around then they'd been when George left, and James managed to get his hands on everything. George narrowly stopped him from carrying off a baby fire crab.
Percy asked George over the morning of the anniversary, to help him and Audrey ready their girls for the ceremony by Hogwarts lake. It was not as if Percy and Audrey were outnumbered, George thought, bemusedly, but found Molly, who'd just turned five and was at the age where baby magic was escaping her, was, in fact, about as much a terror as Fred had been at that age. Lucy, a little older than James, was still sweet, but cried whenever her parents set her down, even though she was getting too heavy to be carried everywhere.
They'd all been babies a minute ago, to George, and suddenly his siblings' kids were toddlers, little people with their own personalities and loud voices, especially Molly and James, especially when they put the two of them together. It was stranger, seeing Bill's kids. Most of them had to be coached on remembering Uncle George or were still small enough to just grin gummily at him. Victoire, in daintily-decorated robes, hurled herself into his arms on sight. She kissed both George's cheeks when he lifted her high enough to reach, and told him her Auntie Gabri said hello.
This May second was her eighth birthday. Eight.
It couldn't be, and yet, it was.
The ceremony was about what George had expected. Ernie Macmillan said a few earnest, but officious words, on behalf of the Ministry; George suspected they'd asked Hermione, but she'd clearly declined, sitting between Harry and Ron instead. Chairs were lined up along the lake for the sunset ceremony and the attendees were meant to send candle upon candle out floating onto the lake, each representational of a loss.
George was expected to walk up to light the candle for Fred. He mostly counted the seconds until his turn came. A little woodenly, he got up from his seat near Percy and Bill's families, held out his wand as he was supposed to until the candle flared white-hot, and, as quickly as possible, went and sat back down.
George wondered what the giant squid thought was going on up there, with so many candles above it. Whatever its opinion, the squid didn't surface to share it.
Little Molly was kicking her heels in the seat beside George, while whispering something in her sister's ear. Percy's girls were tired and ready to go home, and George did not think it helped much, when Percy, solemnly, bent and tried to explain to them, but he did enjoy the way his brother tried talking to his girls as if they were grown adults.
Bill still tended to break into embarrassing baby-speak with his own kids, although it now made Victoire screw up her face in embarrassment and switch to speaking in French.
The current Hogwarts students had not been invited to the ceremony, as careful regulations were followed when this many people were allowed on school grounds. George could see them from the windows, though, watching the candles go up for each life gone out.
As the ceremony broke up, Harry helping McGonagall down from the podium where she'd gotten up to give a few words, George saw Angelina rise from the back. She was sitting with Alicia and Oliver, and the Woods' burgeoning Quidditch team's worth of kids, along with Katie Bell. Katie waved at him. George waved back, at all of them, ducking his head. He wasn't up for socializing, yet, and he saw Angelina nudge Alicia, stopping her right before any of them started for him.
George ducked away from the crowd surrounding Hermione and Ron, too, including, he was pretty sure, an undercover reporter.
Then casually, he started loping toward the castle. That had not been part of the ceremony invitation, though there'd been a few formal tours. He'd never been much for formality.
His hand was suddenly grabbed by a small, dainty one. Victoire had come running up behind him.
"I'm coming along," she said.
"I don't—" George turned back. Fleur waved him an airy go-ahead, and Bill shrugged at him.
George closed his own hand around Victoire's. "Have you ever been in a secret passageway before?" he asked her in a whisper.
"Is that where we are going?" she whispered back, delighted.
It wasn't a passageway he and Fred used much, as it didn't get them off school grounds, just right outside the castle. When they were trying to sneak out to the Forest, only, they'd used it a few times. At the Battle of Hogwarts, George had stopped to make sure it was firmly sealed up, after he and Fred split up.
He let Victoire have his wand, and showed her how to point it. Like a miniature, shiny-haired fairy godmother, she tapped where he showed her until a castle cornerstone budged itself out of the way, to let them up a spiral staircase.
The small patch of Portable Swamp remained right where Flitwick had left it, all these years later. It remained as damp and smelly as they left it, and George, eyeing it, thought it looked like some unfortunate student had tripped in it recently.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the miniature firework he'd brought with him.
"Can I light it?" Victoire asked, with unnerving confidence, and George decided it was high time to reclaim his wand from her. He did not think Bill and Fleur's trust in him went so far as to let their newly-eight-year old play with explosives.
"This one's my job," George said, and lit the firework. A small, stationary Catherine wheel flickered into bright orange-red life just above the swamp piece. It'd last all night. Maybe all month. Weasley's Wizard Wheezes did tend to outlast their promised expiration.
The halls were quiet at this hour, but some students in so-familiar robes paused on the stairs, watching him. They remained in place, solemnly, respectfully, and one of them started spontaneously clapping before her friends stopped her, hissing embarrassment.
"Let's go see the greenhouses," George said, reaching for Victoire's hand, and feeling a moment of absolute panic when she wasn't at his side.
He wheeled around and found her right behind him, staring up at a floating figure.
Peeves.
Peeves' wicked eyes looked watery, though it might have been a trick of the hallway light.
George's throat was suddenly thick. At a loss for words, remembering a much more glorious sunset, he lifted his hand up and saluted Peeves.
Peeves saluted him back, then floated himself downward, cross-legged, until he was face-to-face with wide-eyed Victoire.
He reached a hand out—and grabbed her nose. She shrieked in surprise, though George thought it a very gentle grab, for Peeves.
"Got your conk!" Peeves hollered, and zipped down the hallway air, cackling.
Victoire stared after him. "Rude," she pronounced, decidedly.
George smiled, surprised he was able to do so, today. He wiped at his own eyes and held out his hand again to Victoire. Neville, or rather, Professor Longbottom, had set up a little tea party in the greenhouses for her birthday, just for their closest friends and family, because today was a celebration, too.
They'd lost, but they'd won.
"I'm very sorry, Uncle George," Victoire said. Her bottom lip trembled. "About Uncle Fred. I'm very sorry I didn't meet him."
"It's okay, honey," he said, automatically, and then took in what he'd said. He almost said her Uncle Fred was sorry he didn't meet her too, because George didn't have to guess that, anyone who knew Fred knew that, and he almost said he had a present for her on Fred's behalf, and he almost joked Fred would have been her favorite, because wasn't he everyone's favorite, really… But Victoire was too near tears already, on her birthday, for the uncle she'd never met, just because the people she loved had loved him, and maybe because Uncle George looked, to her, as if he was about to cry. He was, maybe, about to cry, because after ten years, it was terrible, but true: he was okay. It would never be fair, that Fred was dead. But time had made him okay.
"'Après la pluie, le beau temps,'" said George. He didn't have to force his wink, and Victoire grabbed his hand again. Hers was little, but warm.
He gave an idle wave to the students still watching him, rather admiringly, from the stairs, and only belatedly noticed their ties were Slytherin green.
"Your French is terrible," said Victoire. He'd made her smile.
"And you," said George, leading her down the hall, "are le beau temps, little girl."
"Not so leetle," protested Victoire. "Eight!"
"Not so little," agreed George. The time gone by hurt his heart, a little, but it was the kind of soreness that made him glad to be alive.
Hand-in-hand with his oldest niece, with one glance back at a hallway he and Fred had blasted their way out of, ages ago and yesterday, George left his old school, one more time.