Title: Vivisection
Chapter: The Promise
Author: Scruffyreader7
Word Count: 1951
Character Pairing: Angelina / George, references to Angelina / Fred (minimal)
Rating: T for language. And eventual mention of grown-up-y things. I'll warn ya.
Spoilers: Spoilers for Harry Potter and the Extended Camping Trip. Seriously people, if you haven't read book 7, you shouldn't be on fanfiction. You should be devouring the words of the canon. And then you should re-read it. I'm not going to apologize for spoilers, it's already 2012.
Timeline: Post Deathly Hallows, but pre-epilogue. Follows the escapades of George Weasley, and some seriously destructive behaviors as seen through Angelina Johnson's eyes.
Summary: 'Vivisection: the act of dissecting a living body.' As she stands at the back of the funeral, Angelina looks across to see George, and she cannot tell if his eyes are red from alcohol or crying, and the space around him seems curiously empty.
Author's Note: Experimenting with impressionism.
Vivisection ("the act of dissecting or cutting into a living body, often without anesthesia")
Part 1: Promise
Angelina attends funerals for weeks. Weeks. She cries particularly hard for little Colin Creevey, because she is hit by a sudden memory of a small, annoying first year taking pictures at Quidditch practice and pointing him out to Oliver (who thank God is still alive, because someone needs to take care of Katie), who yelled at him. And then he got struck by that basilisk. And then life went on for a while and then he died.
So many are dead. It is almost easier to create lists of the known-and-accounted-for. The dead and the missing make up so many people. She hasn't seen Alicia since before the battle, well, even before that but the battle is now everyone's time marker. 'x' number of hours since the battle. 'x' number of days. 'x' number of funerals.
And then there is Fred Gideon Weasley's funeral. She has been staying in one of the Arithmancy classrooms, as she has graduated and doesn't have a dorm of her own. The walk down to the great hall takes no time at all, aside from the whole hour she spends staring at a bench she remembers kissing him on, or the other hour she stands in front of the Gryffindor table, remembering how he'd asked her to the ball. Cheeky bugger.
She stands in the back of the ensemble, because the Weasley's have far too many extra relations for some ex-girlfriend/best friend to stand at the front of a memorial service. She is not surprised when George is plunked down by two menacing looking brothers, who must be Charlie and Bill, because Percy isn't badass. He is late; his clothes are bloodstained and wrinkled. George is red-eyed, and she cannot tell if it is from drink or from tears, but his shoulders are squared and he looks so much like a child pretending that he is not affected by catastrophe. He dumbly shakes everyone's hands as they leave, including his mother's. Angelina notices vaguely that this makes Molly cry. His mother is a maelstrom of tears, but her wand never leaves her hand and she looks around periodically as if checking for potential threats. (They are all scarred—Ron is wearing some old top he tore the sleeves off of, and the white crisscrosses on his arms make him look older. But then, it isn't those scars because she remembers seeing them at an end-of-year Quidditch party her final year, so it must be something about how Ron wears them, now.) At the front is Percy, crisp, clean, respectful and respectable. One wouldn't know from his wavy hair or clean shirt that he'd there for the battle at all, but there are moments when his fists spasm and then return to shaking. Next to Percy stands Ron, who fills up space like she's never seen him do, as opposed to George. But perhaps that is because there is a whole, person-sized space next to him that is not filled with an identical, mischievous grin. Hermione is holding the length of one of Ron's arms to her chest, standing at a T to him. Well, that's some good. And then there are Harry and Ginny, who are still acting like planets circling the same, invisible star, without acknowledging each other. Angelina tries her best not to look at Harry overly-long. It is surprisingly easy, perhaps a by-product of too many Quidditch sessions in the middle of the rain and quite a few arguments over his detention habit. And yet, there is also something about him.
She does not know why, but she finds that she is the last to leave. The truth is that Angelina was always more comfortable being their best friend, and once she and Fred broke up, things went back to normal. Well, she was slightly more comfortable with George than his twin, so perhaps she is looking at this death through the very monocular lens of George's tragedy rather than as the death of someone she loved. But she did love him. It's just that she can see past her own loss to the loss of a twin. And no matter what Bill says (and Bill had said a lot after everyone else left, chewed George out for acting like he was the only one who'd lost anyone), this is a very person-specific pain. George feels it in a way none of his brothers can.
Angelina walks up to him. She is tall, but he is taller, and his face is cast down. George's hand reaches out, robotic, automatic. There is a slim chance he has recognized anyone at all.
She pushes his hand away and he looks at her. Properly, so she can see the redness in his cheeks and his solid cheekbones and the new break in his nose that makes his left eye a shiner. So the roughness in his stare is from crying and not from drinking, but she knows better than to announce that. He needs every pretense of strength, she thinks, until his blue eyes meet her brown ones and she sees the bleakness there, something she cannot stand. He looks empty, a husk, a discarded shirt, the human version of what Hogwarts must look like to Muggles.
"Oh Georgie," she says, and although she is shorter and slimmer she reaches around his unyielding body and pulls it to her. He stiffens, and then, his arms wrap around her shoulders, and he is sobbing. She has never appreciated the breadth of his shoulders before, and it is a strange thing to start with now, as they are pulled hard against her chest and stooped around to curl around her body and racked, racked with chest-breaking sobs. She is amazed at that too. Angelina is fairly large for a woman, she certainly doesn't fall into that newly emerging category of models that are petit and dainty, and all her thinness comes from an unsteady food supply and previous Quidditch training. Which is good, because if she were she wouldn't be able to hold all of his pieces together.
"Goddamnit, Angie. Oh, Christ, he's dead. He's dead."
She does not tell him that she knows. She doesn't say anything, just rubs his back like should do to her brother. But her brother has been too old for mothering in a long while, and so she begins with an awkward pat that morphs into a steady dragging of her hand up and down the length of his jacket. "And I—and I—"
His chin is tucked into the curl of her neck, as though he must envelop her. His grief is all encompassing. She can feel the press of him holding out the damp, and she tightens her fingers in his shirt, hanging on for dear life. "Don't let me be alone, Angie. I can't be alone."
"No, I won't." she says, and finds that she means it. She won't let him do this alone.
Of course, alone has always mean a different word to Angelina. Alone is something comforting, something to find solace in away from the hubbub of Gryffindor tower and the loud shouting of the Quidditch pitch. She remembers, at Hogwarts, sometime before the war that feels now like some pause hanging on by a thread, that mornings were a time she was alone. The brothers never quite understood why she did it, but Angie had been used to living alone since her mother left, and in the mornings people were less likely to walk in on you being yourself anyhow. But George: how could somebody be alone from their own limbs, Fred and George were two different people, with different scars and different memories of how events took place, but they were more in sync than flocks of pigeons or sparrows or other birds that all seemed to think as one, taking flight and landing all together, as if of one consciousness…She used to wonder what it was like, looking in a mirror that didn't follow your motions. After all, when Angelina wanted her reflection to do something, she raised her hand and so did her double. But George never had been able to get Fred to do what he wanted, not initially.
That had been the other thing. George was the brain. George was the thinker, which you mostly only knew if you'd accompanied them along on several pranking operations when George would scowl at Filch and say sadly, "Well, this was not how I had planned it." Fred usually cracked jokes and took the mickey out of him.
And she wonders what it would feel like to lose half her self, without the pain implied in the tearing of flesh. And she wonders if in addition to the neural center that death might have, while vivisecting Gred and Forge, left George an arm or a leg or an eye or a spatter of freckles, a hand for someone to crush in the crater of their palm, this back to rub, or if all of those are pieces of Fred that with her embrace she might manage to press back into the membrane of his skin as memories.
Author's Note: (me, again)
So this was completely intended to be a one-shot. And it's probably going to be a one-shot, but unlike the last one which I posted and said, well, I'll continue if you beg, and then absolutely did not continue because I had no idea what I was doing, I have a tentative plot plan for this. That is not to say I will write it, because in the last fortnight I've been hit by a truck of lot bunnies, and exams. And I love Angelina/George (as well as the name Angelina, so rest assured I won't be calling her Angie all of the time), because they're just so damn…well, they're something. Probably unhealthy, and that's really what this is going to be, spattering's of unhealthy and quite a lot of healing. They're all going to need it.
And that's a wrap? Right, well then, you really ought to review. I'm a Slytherin on Pottermore (darnit) so you should probably do as I say.