Colourful II: Black and White

by temporex

COMPLETE » Every form is a base for colour, every colour is the attribute of a form. – Victor Vasarely. The second in a series of one shots about several couples, all linked by the theme of colour, all from the male point of view.

Title: Black and White
Series: Colourful (Part Two)
Author: Temporex
Rating: PG (I think - I've never been any good with ratings)
Pairing: Fred Weasley/Angelina Johnson
Length: 2,716 words, one-shot
Warnings: Slight alcohol intake.
Disclaimer: Unfortunately, it's not mine.
Summary: Every form is a base for colour, every colour is the attribute of a form. – Victor Vasarely. The second in a series of one shots about several couples, all linked by the theme of colour, all from the male point of view.
Author's Note: Written at approximately 3.49am, by someone who's never been in love and has no idea what she's talking about. Thus, rambling mess.

PART II: BLACK AND WHITE

Family and friends they were my life,
I wasn't one for butterflies,
But you gave me love that i can't disguise,
And there will be times when we're apart,
I want you to know you're in my heart
Growing into a beautiful garden.

Delta Goodrem, Out of the Blue

Once upon a time, I didn't believe in love. If anyone else looked at me now, they'd simply roll your eyes and discard the statement as a drunken story or a furtive lie; you wouldn't believe it to be true. Nobody would believe that I, Fred Weasley, could ever be anything but the lovesick fool I currently am – not unless they knew me then. Not unless they knew me when I was young and sceptical, when love was something that you made up so you didn't have to talk about real problems. Not unless they knew when I would watch couples and roll my eyes, before I could look at a girl and feel my heart melt.

The strangest thing is, the girl who made me the lovesick fool I am is the exact same girl I confessed my disbelief in the sentiment to.

When I was young – I say young now, but then it seemed like I was at the prime of life – I watched people play out their pretend scenes, their little plays as they tried not to bicker and argue. Even my parents seemed guilty of it to some degree; forever saying that they loved each other. The words that always followed were 'and I'd do anything for him, or her' and that I believed, because that wasn't love. That was caring, and caring did exist. But it wasn't love.

Even those emotions kept for little sisters and older brothers, and even the ones who were both brothers and little, they were not feelings of love. They were responsibility, they were desires to make everyone smile and therefore be happy, because nothing made me happier that to see joy lighting the faces of those I cared about (and I said cared then, not loved). And it was the same with my friends, because they liked to be happy and we liked to make them so. Me and George, it's how we live – you know that, I think. When people's faces are filled with glee, we are happy. It is a tear that throws us off, confuses us, it is a sob that makes us regret.

That's why I'm glad I found out the love did exist; I won't survive this war without her. Without you.

But then, it didn't matter. Why would it matter? Love, a fantasy concocted by besotted teenagers and desperate adults, a word and nothing more. I didn't realise then that one day my life would depend on it, and that without it ever tear that anyone shed would tear a piece of my heart away. No, then I was ignorant.

You called me that then. You did, and your friends did, and their friends did, but all of you befriended me anyway. After all, I was – I am - a Weasley twin, and we were the height of the social ladder in Gryffindor. Players on the Quidditch team, best beaters in the school, the most popular twins you'd come across – people wanted to meet us. We got more offers to the Yule Ball than Viktor bloody Krum did, and that's saying something. I was ignorant, but you never said it as an insult. Maybe you will after reading this, because it sounds like my head is huge, and that I really must be ignorant to think I was that popular (but you know I was). Then, it was always a wistful comment, whenever I spoke of my lack of belief, a comment that left me thinking that maybe one of my best friends was a fool like the rest of them, or that maybe I was missing something. In the end, it turned out that the latter was true, but that doesn't matter as much now.

Then, it did, because I didn't believe and therefore I didn't act on it. It affected my interactions with people – with girls – because they always looked for something more. It was about the relationship first, and then later (and too soon), the 'Don't you love me?'. I never lied to them, because there was no point in lying. No, I always told them the truth, that I didn't and never would believe in love.

I broke two hearts that way before I became known as a no strings guy.

I didn't exactly ask for things to be that way. I cared for those girls, but I couldn't fathom what love was and looking back, I know I didn't feel it. But once it became known that Fred Weasley didn't want to fall in love, people – yes, girls again – began to put puzzle pieces that didn't exist together. Their first assumption was that I didn't want a relationship. Their second was that I was up for anything.

To be honest, I was. A teenage boy – who was I to complain when a girl a year older than me with a better body than most supermodels came onto me? I didn't mind the flings, because they were short, sweet and the exact thing most boys my age really wanted. I was too preoccupied with pranks and Quidditch to ever seriously think about a relationship. Even the two I had had were short lived and innocent, the sort that you experience when you're barely into Hogwarts and holding hands in public makes you blush. That's another curiosity to those two girls – why were they so infatuated with love? They were barely teenagers, yet already seeking out adult emotions.

That, and the fact that I had girls throwing at me left right and centre, is the reason that I'm glad girls don't run in the Weasley line. I'd be paranoid that they'd run into another version of me.

But that is against the point – if I even have one. I doubt that, come morning, these idle thoughts will make any sense, because my coherency is troubled by the firewhisky that Charlie forced upon me. I say forced, but mean handed after a request, of course. My excuse? Well, it is Bill's wedding party, and while he goes off and has a perfect wedding night in South Africa, we have to keep ourselves entertained. So we drink and learn new words (like coherency) from Hermione, who I also suspect has been drinking something. Or maybe Ron just slipped a little whisky into her juice, which, knowing Hermione, seems all the more likely. And as she sits and giggles and teaches Charlie new words, as Ron gapes at her, as George and Alicia twirl around the dance floor drunkenly and as Ginny and Harry try not to look at each other, I sit and write nonsense.

Why? Because you told me to. Because you asked me if I remembered the time when I didn't believe in love, and did I now? And with your breath laden with liquor, you took my twenty second silence as a no, and smiled at me and left. And that's why I'm sat here, writing this. So that tomorrow, I can get Alicia to send her owl to the little apartment block where you live, because that way you'll open it and not tear it up.

Did you know that the first time I ever considered love to be anything but fiction was the time I saw Alicia in our fifth year? It's all her fault, really, that my beliefs became as incoherent as this almost letter (maybe I should get Hermione to read over it when I'm done. She'll make it sound a hell of a lot better). And I know what you're thinking; that I fell in love with Alicia, and your eyes are thinning now and your hands clenching, because she's your best friend and she's in love with my brother. But your wrong, just like you were wrong last week when you claimed I'd forgotten to feed your stupid cat. I realised that maybe I was wrong, that maybe everything wasn't black and white like I'd though, because I saw her look at him. At my brother. And I saw him look back at her in a way I'd never dreamed possible.

It was then that I began to question my exact answers. If my own brother could be so obviously in love (even if he didn't realise himself at the time), maybe it wasn't just a figment of imagination. Maybe it did exist. Maybe he as falling in love with your best friend, and maybe she was falling in love with him, even though they were only team mates and friends who worked together in Potions and people who always got stuck together in the common room when we wondered off to torture first years. Maybe he was just as deluded as the rest of them. Maybe nobody was deluded at all.

Those maybes plagued me for the next year. I had absolutely no idea of what to say to him, and I had even less idea as to what was happening. I had three fears then: than I was wrong, that I was losing my brother to a girl over a silly emotion, and that maybe the silly emotion I was loosing him to only touched certain people. I'm not sure why that worried me exactly, because I still didn't truly believe at that point. No, that came later, with you.

In that year of confusion, I was lucky, I suppose, to have so much to keep me occupied. After all, we had the Quidditch cup to win, and Oliver would've skinned our hides if we lost, because it was his last chance. The Quidditch practises that year were brutal – even worse than the ones you forced upon us – but they gave me time when I didn't have to turn a corner and see a couple holding hands, or be caught in the gaze two starcrossed lovers were sending each other across the hall. It dazed me, sometimes, to be surrounded by all the puppy dog eyes of teenagers, and suddenly realise I couldn't really tell if they were fake or not. Before, they were, no questions asked. But that year, sometimes a certain pair would smile in a certain way, and I'd suddenly have to retreat into that pit of confusion once again.

After a while though, even Quidditch practises didn't give the respite I needed. I'd never noticed it when we were in the air before, but that day when a bludger we'd somehow missed hit Alicia in the back and she fell forwards as she threw the quaffle toward the goalposts, I realised that even the game wasn't an escape. I've never seen George fly as fast as he did that day, and I've never seen him so worried, except for the day Ginny was taken into the Chamber. Can you remember how he paced outside the Hospital Wing for hours, demanding to be let in to see her every five minutes? And when Pomfrey finally let him in, how she glared at him for ages because he was leaving a muddy pool on the floor?

Of course you'll remember th4n – you realised that day, didn't you? That your best friend and my brother were in love, and you thought it was perfect. You weren't confused or afraid like me, because you could already see the situation with clarity. You could define the black from the white, without being stuck in the grey space like me. And from that day forward, you were determined to set them up, and somehow I ended up helping you.

I still can't believe your crazy plans worked, and I surprised they took so long. It took them forever to get their act together, didn't it? But it didn't take half as long as it took me, because over those months when you sole goal was to get them together and my goal was to understand, I ended up getting more and more confused. Not because of them, though, and not because of anyone else. Because of you.

I remember watching you all the time, and feeling my stomach turn whenever you sat next to me. I remember dreaming about you – and no, not in that way. Well, mostly not in that way – and I remember the look Alicia gave me a week before the Yule Ball, that knowing smirk that is so bloody annoying on her face. Just like I remember George pushing me into asking you, because I'd turned down the hundreds of desperate girls (as had he, something we somehow managed to keep secret from Alicia) and he knew why. It was Ron that forced me into it, really. He asked me who I was going with, because he was poor ickle Ronniekins and he was all dateless. I couldn't exactly lose face in front of my little brother, could I? He's meant to look up to me! So I asked you, and it was only as the words left my mouth that I found myself truly afraid of the answer.

Guess I got lucky, huh?

The next month is a blur to me, and it's not only the firewhisky. Although, that seems to be wearing off a bit now, so I'll go interrupt Hermione's lecture on house elves (because she's stopped teaching new words now, and Charlie just looks dazed, and Ron still staring at Hermione, and George and Alicia have disappeared to who knows where, and Harry and Ginny are still avoiding each other) and steal the bottle that's on the table in front of her when I've finished writing this letter.

The Yule Ball, I can barely remember. There was dancing, and snow, and the scent of your hair as we twirled, and the intoxicating party afterwards. And then everything seemed to become awkward conversations and silences when we were alone, until that day Professor Sprout made us clean Greenhouse One for blowing up her favourite plant. Well, I blew up her favourite plant, but for some reason she thought it was your fault. And you kissed me. Not the other way around. Well, it was the other way around, but only after I'd got over the initial shock and decided it would be a very good idea to kiss you back.

From that moment, everything became clear to me. I didn't realise it then, not properly, but suddenly I could see everything in black and white. I could pick the liars from the lovers, the lucky from the fools. And I was lucky then, because even when you cried when Diggory died, or when your sister owled you to say she was moving to France, the tears didn't hurt me in the same way. Because I… Because you're the only one who can get me through this war, just like you were the only one who could get me though your sorrow and my sorrow.

It's always been you, Ange. Always. Even with twenty second silences in which I realised, finally. It's taken me that long, believe it or not. It's taken three years to realised I'm in love with you. Three years since I fell in love with you, and three years to finally comprehend what that means.

Don't tear this letter up when you get it, and don't cry. And don't get too confused by my slightly tipsy babbling – no, be thankful that I wrote it now instead of in an hour, because then I'll be absolutely slaughtered and probably won't even be able to write my own name. So I'll go steal the bottle of firewhisky, and while I'm at it I'll tell Charlie he needs to get over his dragons and find a real girlfriend, and I'll tell Hermione to stop talking about house elves, and I'll tell Ron to stop staring and just dance with her. And while I'm at it, I'll even tell Harry and Ginny to stop being idiots, even though she is my little sister and if he lays a finger on her I'll kill him. And if Alicia and George ever get back from their tryst (I told you Hermione was teaching us new words), I'll force them to sit down with me so we can have a drunken discussion.

And do you know why I'm going to do that, Angelina? Because of you. Because you're my black and white. Because I love you.