Part Two: The Next Morning

Someone was pounding on the door.

At first, George had been convinced that the pounding was some sort of giant-beaten drum, what with the way it made his head pound in sympathy. Then he'd made the mistake of cracking an eyelid open, only to have the previously protected eye seared by the blindingly bright winter sunshine pouring in through the windows. Turning his head away so fast he wrenched his neck, he'd become aware of the fact that he wasn't alone in the bed, and he went utterly still as he tried to piece together the hazy, alcohol-fogged memories of the night before.

He remembered fighting with Angelina, or rather Angelina hurling insults and abuse at him while he'd stood there and said nothing, both of them dressed to the nines for the party. Of the party, he remembered very little after the first couple of glasses of champagne. Fleur had looked radiant, as per usual, even when Gabrielle...

Oh, bloody hell.

George risked opening his eye again, as well as the other one, to confirm what he'd initially thought was a hangover-induced hallucination. Gabrielle lay stretched out alongside him in the bed, pale gold curls fanned across the pillow like a halo and gleaming in the indecently bright sunshine. The sheets were a tangled mess (dimly, George thought it a wonder the sheets were still on the bed after the previous night's activities), but somehow they managed to cover her body almost modestly while still revealing alluring little bits of bare skin here and there that bypassed his still-struggling-to-wake-up rational thought and went directly to his libido... the side-effect of which was not likely to be helpful in the least to his current situation.

The pounding got louder, which he wouldn't have thought was possible until it actually happened, and he could swear he heard someone calling his name from the other side of the suite's outer door. It sounded rather disturbingly like his eldest brother, though he couldn't think of any reason why Bill should be calling for him. Correction, he didn't want to think of any such reason, as he looked rather guiltily at the stunning creature still sleeping beside him.

"Tell zem to go away?" Her accent-laden voice, muzzy with sleep and afterglow, was the sexiest thing he'd ever heard, and it abruptly woke up parts of his body that were bound to get him into even more trouble.

"Yeah." George was agreeing with her on principle, but he wasn't at all confident in his ability to make whoever was causing such a racket actually go away. He overrode the objections of most of his body and slid out of bed, casting around for his clothes briefly before finally shrugging into one of the robes provided by the hotel, figuring he was better off appearing at the door in something that didn't show obvious signs of being removed in a hurry. "I'm coming!" he called, hoping the response would earn him a reprieve from the door-pounding as he headed out of the bedroom and toward the continuing racket.

"Not yet, you're not," purred the Frenchwoman in the bed. George turned around to find she'd rolled over onto her stomach, the gleaming curls tumbling over her shoulders in a way that wasn't remotely angelic, the sheet only barely preserving her modesty, and even then only in the most technical sense. She looked for all the world like the very goddess of lust, and when she crooked a finger in his direction he felt a wave of raw need wash over him that nearly brought him to his knees (all the better to crawl back to bed to worship at the altar of Gabrielle, or so the little voice of his libido was whispering in what was left of his brain).

Naturally, that was when the manager finally succumbed to the pleas of his loving family and unlocked the outer door to the suite so that they could see if 'poor, distraught George' was all right.

Bill was the first one through the door, followed closely by Fleur and then both Molly and Arthur Weasley. The hotel manager hovered in the doorway, his eyes wide as he stared at the tableau presented by Gabrielle the sex kitten and George with the sizable tent in his bathrobe. Nobody said a word for a full minute, then the manager made an appalled sort of squeaking sound and chaos erupted.

"How dare you?" Bill's roar was the loudest, echoed in various voices and turns of phrase by the others in the room, and it took George a moment to process that it wasn't him they were yelling at. He blinked rapidly as accusations were hurled at Gabrielle for, of all things, 'taking advantage' of him in his 'wounded, fragile state' (Mum's words, as Bill's contained a number of choice expletives).

"Hang on," he protested, slightly offended that they seemed fixated on blaming everything on Gabrielle. When they ignored him, he managed to get himself moving, and got between his family and the woman in the bed, raising his voice to shout over them. "Excuse me!"

It wasn't until they were all staring at him that he realized he had been shouting; he tried to remember the last time he'd shouted, about anything, and came up blank. He and Fred had had other ways of getting attention from the family, and in the years since his twin's untimely death George had neither needed nor wanted much in the way of attention. Until now.

He looked at the four of them, a dozen different things running through his head, trying to decide what he should say. Finally, he straightened his shoulders, lifted his chin and took a deep breath. The silence was deafening, unbroken while they waited for him to speak, and he made a mental note to reconsider the whole shouting thing later.

"Sod it," George huffed, backing into the bedroom.

"George!" his mother scolded, a sentiment echoed by his father and brother.

"I don't need to explain myself," he flung back at her. "I'm a grown-up, for Merlin's sake, I can make my own bloody decisions!"

She was starting to harangue him about his choice of language when he slammed the bedroom door, cutting off the renewed protests. He leaned against it, his head turning automatically toward Gabrielle as his brain remembered her presence (not that his body had forgotten about her).

Gabrielle was sitting up in the bed, the sheet pulled up in a token effort of preserving her modesty, which did nothing whatsoever to conceal her allure. "Zat was well done," she said, her voice holding a note of admiration in it as well as something he couldn't quite identify.

"Won't hold them long," he said, desperately trying to reassert control over his libido. He tore his gaze away from her and bent over to paw through the pile of clothes on the floor, locating his cast-off trousers and fumbling in the pockets. After a few moments of frantic searching, he found what he was looking for and straightened, holding his hand out to Gabrielle. "Come on, we need to get out of here."

"What - ?" she began, clutching the bedclothes around her with one hand even as she reached for him with the other.

"No time." George took his hand, spared a glance to make sure she was touching the highly illegal portkey he'd been carrying since his days on the run with Fred during the war, and breathed the command word to activate it.

By the time Bill broke the bedroom door down (much to the dismay of the hotel manager), a minute later, the room was empty.