Pairing: George/Angelina,
Prompts: Without you, casualties, lonely, streaming tears
challenges: Drabble tag, 100 different pairings, pairing diversity boot camp, if you dare
It wasn't the same.
He wasn't him.
He looked like him;
He talked like him;
But it wasn't him.
Right now, she doesn't care. She sees her pain reflected in his hazlenut coloured eyes, her tears and his fell together creating a mirror of ice on the cold ground.
"I don't know if I can be me without him. He was my other half." His quiet confession brings a fresh wave of tears to her eyes, without thinking or even knowing why she pulls him close and she can feel his tears just like he can feel hers.
She says nothing, she doesn't know what to say, instead she just holds him and he clings to her.
The weeks go bye, the pain never eases. The weeks become months and soon everybody but them have moved on, it is only her and him who still cry themselves to sleep at night.
Those who died were not the only casualties in this war.
Soon those weeks and those months combine to be a year. A year has gone. She has learned to live with it, she doesn't cry herself to sleep anymore, but the pain, the hole, the tear and the rip and the chasm in her heart is still there. She was lonely.
What she doesn't know, is that he is slowly filling it, sewing her back together - not completely, no she could never forget him - but enough, so that when he says,
"I know I'm not him. I never could be and I don't claim to be, but I would be really honoured if you would accompany me to Harry and Ginny's wedding? Maybe, only if you want too, as my date?" He looks so shy, and so innocent that it tugs at her heart strings.
She realises, for all the facades he puts up for his friends and family, he is just as lonely as her.
So she smiles, and without hesitation, accepts.
She learns that George isn't Fred, and he can't fully fill the gap Fred left behind, but he does a damn good job of trying and she loves him for it. Because every damsel needs a knight to sweep her off her feet and make her feel whole again. Even if that knight is your dead boyfriends' twin brother.