"The Lost Words" for "Delilah Dillwort" Title: The Lost Words Author: Valerian W. Volesnout (donnaimmaculata) Recipient: Delilah Dillwort (gmth) Character(s): George, the Weasleys Rating: PG Word count: 2,500 Warnings: Canonical character death Summary: After Fred’s death, George started to stammer. Author's notes: For Delilah Dillwort, who wanted to see something about George and how he copes post-war with Fred's death. I hope the ending is hopeful enough for your taste.
Even before the red-tinted dust over Hogwarts had finally settled, George started to stammer. It was, as he realised the moment his numb brain allowed for that kind of thought, a surprising development. George had never been lost for words, not ever, not since that long-gone days of early infancy when his tongue and lips had not yet been under his full control, when his mouth could not yet keep up with the whirlwind of his thoughts.
There had been that one moment of exasperation, George remembered it very clearly - it was, quite probably, his earliest memory - that one moment when he resented the lack of speech with a pain most acute. It had been a golden autumn day, the sun sent slanted rays of sun through the mismatched, pink, green and yellow-tinted panes of the stained-glass windows in the parlour. Fred and he were just above one year old, and they had been put into their playpen with a handful of toys thrown in of which they got bored very quickly. George didn’t remember what it was he desperately wanted to communicate to Fred, who was sitting opposite him and staring at him intently inbetween banging a plush Crumple-Horned Snorkack on the floor. What he did remember was the skin-tightening feeling of frustration at his own inability to share his thought with his twin. And years later, when they had already established multiple ways of communication, verbal and non-verbal, comprehensible to third parties as well as secret ones, he learned that Fred had felt exactly the same.
In the years to come, they had always found a way to share their thoughts.
~*~
It had been weeks since He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named had fallen, and Mum wouldn’t stop crying. George had moved back home, to be with his family and to not be in the flat he - they - had rented in Diagon Alley. Mum wouldn’t stop crying, and the air was moist and clammy with tears. George couldn’t remember what colour her eyes used to be before they became permanently puffy and red. He thought they were brown.
~*~
There was a lot to do about the house. Percy had moved back in, tentatively and not without reservations, and he did his best to fill the space that had been ripped into their lives, but he could not and would not. Never.
~*~
Mum kept crying, and even when she wasn’t, she was. She had never cried that much ever before. He was used to temper, to screaming and to scolding, but crying, in such copious amounts, was new. George hadn’t cried, but he could see why she was. Fred would never come back, and she had loved Fred.
She had loved them all.
~*~
Percy had moved back in and had been trying, tentatively at first, to make up for everything. Percy had always tried too hard. George would watch him at dinner, stiff-backed and stiff-lipped, his posture rigid and his left hand trembling a bit more than it used to, cutting his meat into tiny pieces and carrying them to his mouth on his fork, his arm moving in an accurate angle, up and down, and George felt his stomach turn at so much precision. He opened his mouth to comment, but his tongue got tangled mid-word, and he broke off, ashamed and terrified. There was no-one there to pick up his remark where he left off, to infuse the words with flavour and with just the right amount of sting. No-one had paid him any attention, either. Before, it had been unthinkable. Whenever they spoke up, Fred and George were the centre of attention, it was a law of nature, and it was always Fred and George, Fred & George, Fred’n’George.
There wasn’t, now.
No-one had paid him any attention but Ginny. His baby sister looked at him across the table, her eyes, so much like her mother’s, were not red but brown. Ginny didn’t cry. Ginny plotted.
Ginny plotted to get out of the house as soon as possible. George didn’t know anything (hadn’t asked), but he felt through his skin that Ginny was drifting away, moving further and further away from the family every day and that the day she’d leave was drawing nearer. It was ironic, really, the way he and Percy had moved back in, to be there and to help keep the family together after it had fallen apart, whilst Ginny – the youngest, the girl – couldn’t wait to get out. He could see it in her eyes.
That night, he didn’t sleep. He lay away long, long after all lights have been extinguished, when even the ghoul had gone quiet and dozed off, as he was wont to in the wee hours of the morning, just before dawn, but George couldn’t stop tossing and turning in his sweat-drenched sheets. It was too hot. It was too cold. His head was chock-full with thoughts, heavy and as swollen as Percy’s in his heydays. George snorted at that pathetic foetus of a joke, but there was no-one to pick it up, to bring it to its absurd, over-the-top conclusion. George groaned (a gravelly, guttural noise that tore through the pre-dawn darkness) and then flopped over and onto his belly to hide his face and his sighs in the pillow.
The door creaked.
The air stirred and footsteps padded, and then the bedsprings creaked and the mattress dipped, but only just so. Hesitantly. Apologetically.
“If you’re g-g-going to spook in m-m-my room-“ George said into the pillow. He screwed up his face and tried to think of something, anything witty, but instead, he simply reached out and patted the mattress. He thought he heard a ghostly exhale, not quite a sigh, and the figure scrambled into bed with him, kicking and elbowing him in the process. It was very, very corporeal, and George shifted to make space as well as he could. His brother put his arm around George, ignoring the sweat-soaked pyjamas, and pulled him close with the same angular precision that he had exhibited at dinner. He pressed his bony chin into George’s shoulder. “Ouch!” George gasped, wriggling in his brother’s embrace. He wriggled closer. “You’re skinnier than a M-M-Malfoy house-elf,” he said in one breath. “The M-M-Ministry not been feeding you enough?”
The arm around him tightened. “Sleep. It’s late.” Percy managed to produce business-like clipped tones even when his words were muffled in George’s drenched hair. “Yes, sir!” George said, equally muffled. “Your assistential Juniorship,” he added, wincing at that feeble attempt even as he spoke. But Percy smiled, George could feel his lips curve against the side of his neck, and so he elbowed him only lightly in the stomach. Then, they slept.
~*~
George dreamt of Fred for the first time that night. It was only half a dream. They were on the Hogwarts Express for the first time, getting to know everyone and everything, trying out spells for the first time that they had been forbidden to use when they were children. They were almost grown-up now, eleven years old and cleverer than any of the other first-years. They dodged Percy. They impressed girls who giggled and shrieked at their jokes and their wandwork. “Hey, Perce!” Fred had shouted, swashbuckling with his wand to the delight of a group of first-years and even two or three third-years. “Tumeraulicula!” he yelled suddenly, pointing his wand straight at Percy. Instantly, Percy’s ears started to swell, growing and growing in all their pink glory, until their brother resembled Olivius the Olid Oliphant from the picture-and-smell book they used to devour as children. Fred was thinking along the same lines. The moment George exclaimed: “Look, it’s Olid Ollie!”, Fred shouted. “Phew, he stinks!”
“Percy the Smelly!” shouted one of the onlookers.
“Percy the Poo-y!” shouted somebody else.
“Percy the Poo-y!” the chorus picked up. And it stuck. Poo is persistent like that.
Even as the dream unfolded, George was doing his best to reverse the course of action. He didn’t want his elder brother to go by the nickname Percy the Poo-y for weeks until Charlie had a word with his Quidditch team who, in turn, made it very clear that their Captain didn’t appreciate his brother being bullied and did Gryffindor want to win the Cup or not?
But you can’t change the past, George. Not unless you call a very powerful Time Turner your own, and even then, the repercussions are rarely worth the effort. You can make the present a better place, though.
In the unreal world between sleeping and waking, George shifted closer to his brother who muttered something into his hair. The memory still burned, but the pain was fading.
~*~
He was doing his best, he really was, but it wasn’t that easy. He had never been the model son, even though now he did try, he did. George tried to make himself useful. He wanted to be a grown-up for once, and so he sat down, all proper and focused, and made a list. He made a list of his weaknesses and his strengths. He already knew he couldn’t help his mother with household chores - he was useless at them, and anyway, she wanted to keep herself busy; the house had never before been so clean, even the old wellington boots and the rusty cauldrons had disappeared from the porch. The well-fed chickens proudly stalked across the yards and the lawn was almost entirely gnome-free.
Neither the domestic nor the academic realms were his battlegrounds. He did have to make his mother smile again, however. Not necessarily at him (she had never smiled at him much in any case; the only time he could remember her beaming at him and Fred was when she learned how much their shop was making), but at someone, at something.
He would make Ginny stay.
She would be running away any day now, he could tell. She had one more year to go at Hogwarts, and she was impatient for the school year to begin.
She would not come back home.
Ginny never spoke of what hurt her inside. As a little girl, she used to, he remembered with a jolt. They couldn’t get her to shut up, and every single emotion that flitted across that little heart of hers, also flitted across her face. She had no control over the words her mouth spilled, either.
Then, the Chamber of Secrets happened, and Ginny learned all about secrets then. The other thing she learned was not to trust anyone. She pupated and emerged on the other side just as talkingsinginglaughing as she used to be as a child – and yet completely different. She never spoke of what hurt her inside.
None of them did.
He had to make Ginny stay.
~*~
It was surprisingly fun. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had so much fun. (No, he could: it was when he and Fred were in the laboratory off their kitchen in Diagon Alley and Fred had chucked in a handful of Ground Glibworm into the potion simmering in the cauldron with an offhand comment of how a little bit more couldn’t hurt, and a huge, luminous bubble rose up in the middle of the cauldron that burst open the moment Fred had finished his ingenious elaboration of performance-enhancing Glibworm properties - excellent comic timing on the potion’s part, George had always felt - and Fred ended up drenched in Bubblesnot Potion). George had decided to single-handedly redecorate Ginny’s room that had been used as a makeshift orphanage for the children of war in the days after the battle. Ginny had never changed anything after the last of the children had left to go living with his second cousin once removed. A battery of cots in one corner made it impossible to get to the dresser, a broken toy wand hung suspended in the air, pointing at the window like an arrow and a Muggle-style doll was doomed to staring at the ceiling with dead, wide-opened eyes.
Hardly anything here seemed to belong to Ginny. She kept all her stuff in her Hogwarts trunk. She had half-heartedly explained that there was no room to unpack as long as the children took up the entire space, but now they were gone. And so would be Ginny. Soon. (Perhaps this was why their mother always cried?)
George had to make her room a home again. Even as he was bringing order into the chaos (now there’s a first for you), George was aware that Ginny would be furious. (He did not, at any point, allow the thought to surface that he wasn’t doing it for her sake or for their mother’s sake or for the sake of the family. He was doing it, George was, so that she would stay. And then he could leave.)
It was fun. He was even looking forward to the inevitable row with Ginny, because a row would be the first step on a path that would lead them back into normal family life. First, he tidied away the haphazardly scattered toys. Then, he levitated the abandoned cots out of the window. There was a milk bottle in one of them that he likewise disposed of. He didn’t intend to rummage through Ginny’s things (he dreaded to think he might come across his little sister’s … girlie stuff), but he made room on the dresser and placed a family photograph on top of it, and he waved and flicked his wand, muttering a few well-chosen Charms to give the walls and the carpet their vibrant colours back. Tidying thus accomplished, he readied himself for the real fun: Summoning assorted odds and ends from his own supplies, including a brand-new Bluebottle Sting mark II that had been Fred’s for a couple of weeks.
The door creaked. “George!” He spun around, the word ringing and reverberating through his head. It was just like the old times: Mum stood in the door, hands on hips, eyes narrowed and blazing. And so, without even thinking, George fell back on the old joke.
“Mum! I’m Fred!”
She froze. They both froze, and then she started to scream at him like she hadn’t screamed in weeks. It was comforting, in a way, but he was sick of screaming. Even though he was glad to hear that she was alive and all would be well. George cast a last glance at Ginny’s room, picturing her furious face and the row she would have with Mum later, and then he quite calmly walked to the door, kissed his suddenly dumbfounded mother on the cheek, squeezed past her and walked away. The screaming hurt his ears. “Ear!” Fred’s voice interjected, quite clearly. And George smiled.