George had good days and bad days, but they were hard to tell apart until you found yourself in the middle of a prank that had deadly, instead of inconvenient, ways to go wrong. Usually, he caught himself. Sometimes, he didn't. Mostly, he missed Fred.
He really did. He had a calender to prove it (worn and old with x's marking the days he'd been without him). He had the painful, headache inducing, gut wrenching, heart-hammering nights filled with sobs that pulled all the air from his lungs to drive that proof home. And just to rub salt in the guilt wounds he inflicted in others - he might've mentioned how everytime he looked in the mirror he felt sick. How the first day home he took one look at the flat and started tearing the mismatched and scattered bright wallpaper form the walls and threw it in the trash. How he flipped their pushed-together mattresses in a fit of agony. How he locked up his old wand and used Fred's; wore all of Fred's clothes and his jewlery and burned his own. How not a single picture frame in their - his, oh god, just his, just George's - flat was face down or simply taken down.
His family, he notices after awhile, treats him delicately. Every word uttered around him is on the wave of an anxious breath. It grates his nerves bloody. But he can understand, he supposes, since his good days are far and few between.
One day, his mother and father got into a row over something or other. With it tuned out, George had moved to help with the dishes, but with her patience as twisted as it was - Molly turned and barked, "Fred, off with you!" The silence came upon them as swift as a snare catching a rabbit. Molly's hand engulfed her mouth. Shock, just as their mothers', filtered on the rest of the family as they watched him carefully.
George had Apparated out, right there in the kitchen.
Charlie caught him in a bad act once. It started out simple; an attempt at fun. He'd recently opened the shop (though he knew members of the family thought it to be too soon) and had been showing Teddy Lupin a small trick. Luckily, Charlie anticipated the impending damage that it could cause - and barely yanked the youngin' away from George as the thing in his hand exploded it's sharp limbs out - right into the area where Teddy's face would have been.
George had never seen such a face like that on Charlie before.
Doing things as a half instead of a whole felt wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, like kittens drowning and puppies hanging. It sat beneath his skin; a throbbing reminder coiling round and round his bones. A deep, searing heat in his chest everytime he thought about what he'd been - Fred and George, Gred and Forge - and struggled to keep the memory alive without the person within them. He found breathing inconvenient at these times, and living all together tough.
George had good days and bad days, but they were hard to tell apart until you found yourself in the middle of a prank that had deadly, instead of inconvenient, ways to go wrong. Now, he's stopped caring.