So here's another drabble. I don't know how you feel about my update speed, it may feel a bit slow, but I am really under a lot of pressure these days... Anyway, please give your opinions — grievances or shortcomings or anything. Read and review, guys! Hope you enjoy this.
Disclaimer : I don't own Harry Potter.
Title: Mess
Pairing: George and Angelina
The war was over; everyone across the country was celebrating. Except him. He didn't try to; he knew he couldn't. Not when he had lost Fred.
The war had taken away a lot, and every one of his family members was trying to regain the balance of life that it had cost them. Slowly, very slowly, things were going back to normal. Harry and Ginny had got back together, and so had Ron and Hermione; his father came back home tired every evening after the extensive work of rebuilding the crashed Ministry, and his mother had finally found solace and happiness in the household work and caring for others. But not him. He was anything but normal. The others had lost a lot in Fred — a brother, a son, a friend, but he had lost more; he had lost a part of himself.
He kept a brave face in front of others because he didn't want to give them any more pain; he smiled a forced smile, he laughed a little, he talked when being spoken to. He had to act normal, just for their sake, because Harry didn't deserve any more guilt, Hermione didn't deserve any more pain, his family didn't deserve any more sorrow.
But when alone, he was broken. He had started the Weasleys' Wizarding Wheezes just for the sake of doing something; the 'Weasleys' in the once brilliant signboard made him wince every time he looked at it, because there was no longer two, only one remained. He was afraid of looking into a mirror as it always showed him; only the gaping hole in the side of his head served as a fortunate reminder that he was staring at himself, and not at his dead twin. Alcohol was his only comfort; empty firewhiskey bottles littered the floor of his decrepit apartment above the shop which was now his home.
George Weasley was a mess, a walking, living mess that nobody could put together.
Until she came along. Her visit was an unexpected one; she had come to see how he was. And she met with only a shadow of the person she had lived and laughed with. She was still the same — the dark beauty, bold and confident. She offered him a friendly hand to bring him back to the life he had once lived, and with a drunken resignation, he took it. For days, it was just friendship, a close companionship which sometimes made him feel whole. She helped him forget, she helped him start again.
Slowly, gradually, he felt something different as he sat by her side. Something would stir in the depths of his heart as she laughed; a shiver would run down his neck when she let her warm breath fall on it as she talked.
When he talked to her, he felt unexpectedly light — an effect that nobody else in the world could create, not even his family — he felt as if he wasn't the young man who had seen the horrors of war, who had lost a ear, a twin, and all the relief and happiness of his life to it, but as if he was the same man, no, boy, he had once been — George Weasley, prankster extraordinaire and creator of Weasleys' Wildfire Whizbangs and so many other wonderful things. When she left, even for short intervals, it seemed that his whole world had, once more, been doused in darkness. He realised that now he liked Angelina Johnson in a way so very different from how he had liked her in his school years.
He had had countless strange and unique experiences to boast about, but he had never fallen in love before. And so, alien as he was to the feeling, he was afraid of admitting his feelings to Angelina, afraid he'd muck everything up, and she'd leave him. Because repressing his feelings was something he could manage, but living without her was beyond him. He was completely dependent on her now, the emotional support and cheer that she had brought with her the only thing that kept him from falling apart all over again. She held him together, like the super glue that they had used in the shop, which could fix about anything. And so, though his mind was a whirlwind of emotions, he kept quiet, and savoured her company, without speaking a word about love. The fact that Fred had danced with her in the Yule Ball, and would perhaps have been dating her had he lived, did not help in settling his qualms.
But it was her own brilliant personality that slowly egged him on — light touches, gentle caresses and conversations with no one to interrupt. And one day he could hold back no longer; he crashed his lips to hers, trying to convey all the emotions he had been afraid of putting into words. And when her fingers tangled themselves in his ginger hair with a reassuring quality that no one else could offer, he heard her silent promise — she would never, ever, let him go.
George Weasley was fixed; he was whole again.