At first, he thought Harry would be back in a few weeks.
Then perhaps by the following Christmas.
And then, eventually, Harry became someone George had once known.
So when, in the autumn of 2007, Harry walks into Weasley's' Wizard Wheezes with Teddy's hand clasped in his own,
George spends one dreadful second genuinely convinced he's imagined it.
Harry explains it all with casual ease:
he lives in South London,
has "got rather into Muggle music",
and Teddy lives with him now.
George's brain shorts out at the words:
Because Harry has been living in the same city all this time.
Buying coffee a few streets away.
George loves the domesticity of the scene instantly and viciously:
Studies him for a long moment.
The following week, George loses his mind completely.
Or rather, he loses it in the most George-like fashion possible: by becoming utterly insufferable to everyone around him for precisely six days.
During Sunday dinner at the Burrow, George keeps staring into space, frozen with his fork halfway to his mouth while Mum's gravy congeals on his plate.
"You look like you've seen a ghost," Ron says around a mouthful of roast.
George doesn't even make a joke about Fred.
And that's when Ron starts to worry.
George tears through every box in the flat above the shop.
Anything with Harry's face on it.
He tells himself it's research.
It is definitely not pathetic.
He finds a photograph from 1998.
Harry is seventeen and exhausted, still wearing the same clothes he'd fought the war in.
George remembers that day.
Remembers thinking Harry looked like someone who had forgotten how to be human.
The Harry who walked into his shop last week doesn't look like that anymore.
George stuffs the photograph into his pocket and pretends his hands aren't shaking.
He starts with the obvious.
South London and record shop.
How many could there possibly be?
He Apparates to Charing Cross and immediately realises he has absolutely no idea how Muggle London works.
By noon he has already managed to get lost in:
a charity shop (very wrong),
an electronics store where a teenager attempted to sell him something called an iPod,
and a bookshop where, in a panic, he purchased a Muggle street atlas.
The atlas is completely incomprehensible.
George has never felt more like a wizard in his life.
By evening, he has visited four record shops.
None of them belong to Harry.
None of them smell of old paper, dust, tea, and Harry.
George returns home reeking of bus exhaust fumes and defeat.
He starts questioning Muggle shopkeepers.
"Small shop," he says, trying to sound casual. "Owned by a bloke about this tall. Dark hair. Glasses. Probably wears something tragically black."
"Scar?" George adds, vaguely gesturing towards his forehead. "Lightning-bolt shaped?"
One woman suggests he visit a hospital.
By lunchtime, George gives up.
He misses dinner at the Burrow.
George lets it scream itself hoarse in the kitchen sink while he stares at the Muggle atlas and draws increasingly deranged circles around South London with a self-inking quill.
They look like the divination project of a drunken wizard.
Which, if he's honest, is more or less what this is.
George is sitting in the stockroom surrounded by unsorted Skiving Snackboxes when he suddenly realises he has been catastrophically stupid.
Harry told him to find him.
Harry wanted to be found.
George stands up so abruptly he knocks over a crate of Fainting Fancies.
It means Harry left a trail.
He runs through every word Harry said during those four minutes in the shop.
And then George remembers.
Harry was wearing a jumper.
Harry had always worn dreadful jumpers.
George closes his eyes and tries to picture it.
A small emblem embroidered on the chest.
Black thread against grey wool.
The connection to the Evanses now seems almost painfully obvious.
George has heard that name before.
Late nights in the flat above the shop, when sleep felt impossible.
He would fiddle with the dial of an old wireless he'd enchanted to pick up Muggle stations.
Catching voices through the static.
And one voice in particular.
The one that introduced songs at two in the morning:
"You're listening to Dreamless Midnight. I'm James Evans."
George nearly laughs at himself.
For five years he'd occasionally listened to some anonymous Muggle radio presenter with a pleasant voice and never once made the connection.
Idiot, he thinks, though almost fondly.
Tracking down a pirate radio station turns out to be considerably harder than finding a shop.
For three consecutive nights, George sits cross-legged on his bedroom floor with the radio, a notebook, and an ever-growing collection of empty teacups.
He becomes intimately familiar with:
three different late-night jazz programmes (he now hates jazz),
one profoundly confused Muggle DJ who keeps talking about aliens,
and the precise frequency on which James Evans's voice comes through most clearly.
The broadcast range is small.
Definitely south of the river, that much George has worked out.
North of Westminster, the signal weakens.
On the third night, Harry's voice comes through clearer than ever.
"The next song is for everyone who's ever had to explain themselves to someone who already knew the answer."
George's quill snaps in his hand.
The following day, he returns to the Muggle record shops.
This time, instead of asking about Harry, he asks about the radio show.
"'The Night Broadcast'," he says to a bored-looking shop assistant with purple hair. "James Evans. Ring any bells?"
"You mean that collective of insomniacs?"
"The late-night station. Local. Nobody knows who runs it, but the music's brilliant. My flatmate's obsessed." The assistant shrugs. "Heard the bloke's got a shop somewhere round Peckham. Vintage vinyl, apparently."
George's heart does something extraordinarily complicated.
"Just a rumour, mind. Could be complete rubbish."
George knows that with the same certainty with which he once knew where a Bludger was going to come from.
He Apparates to Peckham on a Thursday afternoon in early November.
The sky is grey and heavy with the promise of rain.
Somewhere in the distance, Muggle children are shouting.
A bus rattles past, belching exhaust fumes that make George cough.
Past a pub called The Horse's Head that looks as though it predates the Statute of Secrecy itself.
And then, wedged between a boarded-up chemist's and a shop selling suspiciously cheap mobile phones:
The sign is hand-painted.
a record player that is almost certainly older than George himself,
several albums he doesn't recognise,
a sleeping grey cat curled up in a patch of sunlight,
George stands on the pavement outside the shop for so long it feels like several years.
Through the dusty glass, he can see movement.
Teddy is sitting on the counter, swinging his legs and enthusiastically explaining something to someone George can't quite make out. The boy looks different from the week before in the shop. Calmer. His hair is a quiet sandy blond now instead of the anxious grey George remembers from the funeral.
So familiar it makes George's chest ache.
Static After Midnight by ezolenta on ao3
pixelskylines
andulkaphoto
jacobvanloon
kianamaiart
kaledo-art
theartofmadeline
vaporwave
gummygunk